Category: movies

Everybody looks and sounds bored but I found every scene pleasantly engaging. The smoke, the colors, the psychedelic pace – works for me. She has haters but I liked Kristen Stewart here. And Dakota Fanning, all grown up and oh lord, of course. “Jail-fucking-bait! Jack-fucking-pot!” Michael Shannon’s performance is a standout.

I feel bad for Peter Jackson. His film was generally panned by critics after its release, but I’m sure beneath the overwrought CGI effects, the slightly annoying narration, and the errors in characterization lies a beautiful film. If only it were edited more thoroughly, or if it were written better. I read the book years ago and I don’t remember ever cringing when Susie Salmon begins yearning for a kiss from her crush in the afterlife. Really: you get brutally raped and murdered at the age of 14, and you can only think of a kiss? Really. Maybe Alice Sebold’s engaged writing just made this fervent wish believable, and human. In the film, Susie just appears stupid and shallow.

I wouldn’t say this was a bad film. I did finish it, all two hours of it, and there were scenes that I genuinely loved. I loved the cinematography. The musical score. And there’s good acting all around. The pace felt slow at first, even lazy, but I got the hang of it easily enough.(I just really hated that part where Ray and Susie talk by the lockers, and almost kiss – that was too fast, Mr. Jackson. Remember build-up? It’s a good thing. And between Susie and Ray, I didn’t feel the chemistry at all.)

The fact is: no matter how many the errors, this film will still be heartbreaking due to its subject matter.

But yes, this could have been a much, much better film.

(Contains spoilers.)

The use of dreams – of the subconscious – as narrative setting, is not an entirely novel idea. Consider Kaufman’s elegant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Lynch’s mind-bending Mulholland Drive. Even Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come. The Matrix can be considered a dreamscape, and let’s not forget the entryway to Malkovich’s mind in Being John Malkovich. Synecdoche, New York, with all its beauty and nightmare, can be read as an extended dream, and The Cell features a psychologist entering a serial killer’s mind to solve a crime.

And so on and so forth.

Lucky for us, Christopher Nolan doesn’t do a rehash, and steers away from surreal imagery and symbolism and focuses on the action. After directing the wildly successful The Dark Knight, we know – and he knows – that this is what he does best.

In fact, for a film dealing with dreams and the dark monsters that lurk in troubled minds, Inception is quite literal: important information that we dare not share are found in safes protected with codes (obvious, really), the subconscious are shown as people who stare and attack an intruding consciousness, painful/dangerous memories are kept in “jails” or static environments, etc. In order to wake up, one only has to die, or to fall.

Anyone who wishes to enter a shared dream has to carry a Totem, which can be anything at all. A die, a pawn, a top. It is used to check if you are in someone else’s dream. A top, for example, will continue spinning in dreams; in reality, it will eventually stop and fall over.

The plot is simple enough, as simple as any heist film: Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is hired by a big bad businessman (Ken Watanabe) to infiltrate the mind of a rival business’s heir. Cobb usually does Extractions, or the removal of important/confidential information (from safes, inside the mark’s subconscious). But what the big bad businessman wants is an Inception, an operation wherein Cobb has to plant the seed of an idea in the mark’s mind – in this case, “I will break up my father’s empire”.

(I actually wondered if Nolan intended to show Cobb planting an actual seed in some field while in dreamscape. I mean, there are safes, so why not go that extra mile in literal storytelling?)

So Cobb, like Danny Ocean, assembles his team: he hires a Forger, an Architect, and a Chemist. They devise three levels of dreams to do their job: the first level will last for a week, the second level for six months, and the last level for ten years. In dream-time that is, which as we all know is slower than real-time. While Cobb’s team navigates through several dreams for years and years, they are in fact just on a plane, asleep, waiting for touchdown on LA soil.

Or are they? What if everything that has been presented to us is a dream? What if Cobb is the mark of the Inception? What if there has not been an Inception at all?

Cobb’s team emerges from the job successful. He comes home from exile, hugs his kids. On the table the top spins, and keeps on spinning, until the screen fades to black. When I saw the film I believed the top fell, and that Mr. Nolan was just messing with us with that fadeout. Cobb is a tortured character (played beautifully by DiCaprio), and I want him to be happy. Like in that scene where the Architect folds the dream-city unto itself, we can wish to see what we want to see.

(Not satisfied? Check out the links here, with articles featuring discussions about the ending.)

(First off, Spoiler Warning applies, but if you’ve seen the film, read on and let’s talk in the Comments section!)

Andy is now 17 and is packing up his stuff for college. The toys – Woody, Buzz, and co. – are losing hope: they have not been played with for several years, and now they are in danger of  ending up in the attic, or in a garbage bag to be thrown away.

I have always admired Pixar’s handling of drama and wonder in its animated films, but even then Toy Story 3 blew me away. As in the other two films, simple travels are blown into epic proportions: Woody’s travel from Andy’s to a house “just around the corner”, the toys fighting their way away from the curb to the garage, a tour of a daycare center, etc. The film evokes horror and film noir in some scenes, most notably in the flashback narration of clown toy, Chuckles (whose voice just killed me, killed me). I found two toys genuinely scary. I’ll give you three guesses.

There is an entire sequence that strongly reminded me of The Brave Little Toaster (a childhood favorite). How can a scene showing toys holding hands and readying themselves for a tragedy touch me so much? And yet it did.

Every Pixar film is an ode to childhood, but this one shows us a definitive goodbye to it. Andy’s mom enters his stripped room and starts to cry, and I wonder: did she feel like a toy discarded? Andy, in one of the final scenes, through a simple gesture, shows us how badly he wants to hold on to a more innocent time now slipping away. College looms large; one cannot possibly continue to pretend to destroy an evil pig with a space ranger and a cowboy.

Growing up is exciting, but oh, how painful it is.

This film is highly recommended.

It’s 1954. A woman who drowned her own children has escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane located on remote Shutter Island. US Marshal Edward “Teddy” Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), accompanied by partner Chuck, takes the ferry to the hospital, and searches for clues as he battles his own dreams and demons.

I love the darkness and the storm, I love the stark color contrasts, the cigarette smoke and the swelling music. Mood, mood, mood. It’s one of those films you just have to watch under the covers on a dark, rainy day.

Should I begin reading Dennis Lehane now, or are the directors handling the film versions of his books just exceptionally good?