INCEPTION

Dir. Christopher Nolan US 2010

"You mustn't be afraid to dream bigger, darling."

I saw this movie twice in three days, and it's been kicking around my head (not specificially in my dreams, but who knows) since then. I've been putting off writing this review because a) it would be incredibly hard to have any kind of meaningful discussion given the usual length of my reviews and b) because I've already read so much material and analysis on the movie that I'm worried I'll just parrot back things I've read without coming up with my own ideas. Blogging is stressful, guys.

Additionally, it's difficult to do an in-depth discussion of this film without giving things away, and like Memento and The Dark Knight, Inception takes some pretty weird turns that should only be experienced firsthand. I'll keep my plot summary short and my comments kind of broad, but it all boils down to the fact that you should just see this movie as soon as you can.

Summary: In a vaguely defined but extremely near future, military technology developed to allow soldiers to train within each others dreams has spread to a high-end black market where it is utilized for corporate espionage. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, an 'extractor' who makes his living stealing information and ideas from peoples dreams. Unable to return to his family in the United States for unspecified but dire reasons, Cobb and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) accept a classic "one last job" in order to acquire the means to return home. They assemble a team of badasses in order to perform what is considered an impossible task: Inception.

Everything I just discussed makes up the first half hour of the movie, including the reveal of what Inception actually is. You may already know, and it's not a major spoiler if you do, but like I said, it's more fun to have the movie unfold before you.

One of the more obvious aspects of a Christopher Nolan movie is the way in which the numerous complex pieces and plots all neatly assemble at the end, like a perfectly assembled timepiece. Inception takes this to the extreme, building a world full of complex rules, murky motivations and a system of traveling though dreams which requires the viewer to keep track of no less than five different....plot lines, for lack of a better word, happening in different places, concurrently, yet in different spans of time and involving overlapping characters. Despite how horrifyingly confusing that must sound, this movie is actually deceptively straightforward. As I said during the summary, the film follows the very basic structure of the 'one last heist' plot, and the characters are constantly reiterating their objectives and what needs to be done next. Additionally, the script does a masterful job doling out little bits of exposition over the course of the film, so as long as you're paying close attention, you should have all the information you need to get through the movie with little to no confusion.

There's so much to unpack in this movie, I'm kind of afraid of overwhelming myself and not really saying anything at all. I don't think I'm up to saying anything super deep about this movie while not giving anything away, and I'll probably have a one on one with everyone reading this at some point in the future, so here are some little, non-spoilery bullet points that may be of interest:

- Did this movie have an hot cast or what? In addition to the two extremes of what I find attractive in women (quirky little pixie chicks in the form of Ellen Page and sultry European goddess in the form of Marion Cotillard), Joseph Gordon Levitt made me wonder about myself for a second there. Dude knows how to rock the wardrobe. Plus Leo. Who doesn't love that guy? He doesn't even need a hyperlink to prove it.

- While we're on the subject of questionable sexuality, did anyone else think Eames was gay? After my second viewing, his extremely loud shirts, constant ribbing of Joseph Gordon Levitt's character and the zest with which he 'used the blonde' made it seem fairly obvious.

- I read this in another review, but I thought I'd reiterate it here since it's pretty interesting: Christopher Nolan's movies impose their plots and structures upon the viewing experiences of the audience. Check it: Memento unfolds backwards so the audience, like the main character, has no idea what happened five minutes earlier. The Prestige utilizes a flashy twist ending to distract you from another, more unexpected twist ending, much like a magic trick. Inception...in a way performs inception on the audience with its ending. Think about it.

- With regards to the ending, for those of you who've already seen it: I don't think it matters either way.

- Just found this today. It's pretty neat. God, I loved the score for this movie. Also, Marion Cotillard won an Oscar for playing Edith Piaf. CRAZY.

Anyway, I will conclude by saying that it is such a pleasure to actually have a movie live up to its hype in this day and age, especially during what has been an extremely disappointing summer. Christopher Nolan did it two years ago with The Dark Knight and he did it this year with Inception. The third Batman film comes out 5/4/12. Here's hoping he can pull it off again.

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS

Dir. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller US 2009

"Alright, this...probably won't explode."

While Inception is still percolating in my brain (I saw it twice), I thought I'd throw this out there as a quickie. Jenn and I watched this on impulse last weekend and it turned out to be a lot better than either of us were expecting.

I have pretty fond childhood memories of the book this was based on, but I definitely don't remember any distinct characters or a plot that could fill up ninety minutes. The filmmakers (the guys behind the criminally unknown Canadian MTV cartoon Clone High from about ten years ago, which you should go download because there hasn't been a US DVD release of it yet) took the charming premise of the book, set in a town where it rains food, and grafted on a witty, well-voiced family comedy.

Bill Hader voices Flint Lockwood, a well-meaning, borderline-mad scientist who's inventions (or rather, their total failures) are the bane of his small island town. When he invents a machine that turns water into food and accidentally launches it into the sky above town, the weather patterns begin producing food of all shapes and sizes. Revitalizing his failing town as a tourist hot spot, Flint's glorious success is cut short by the increasingly unpredictable and destructive nature of his invention. He has to save his town, win his father's approval and get the hot, snarky weather girl to like him, all in a snappy ninety minutes.

So this movie got released to what seemed like little fanfare last year, and I completely forgot about it until I saw it on InstantWatch. If anyone's watched Clone High, the same awkward, absurd humor from that show translates fairly seamlessly to this movie, if only toned down a little. Flint is a portrayed as an extremely off-beat, border-line insane weirdo who's never had any real friends. Although it's all pretty much played for laughs, I can't remember the last children's film I saw that had a protagonist this emotionally disturbed. Most of this comes from Bill Hader's performance. Lots of awkward stops and starts and creepy asides. Anna Faris plays his love interest, a peppy TV weather girl who masks her genius on camera because she thinks only ditzy girls have successful careers. It's a nice role for Faris, letting her play with her bread-and-butter stupid blonde role while also playing a character with a bit more depth and intelligence. It'd be nice to see that from her in her live-action roles.

The supporting cast features James Caan as Flint's dad, Mr. T as an overzealous, ludicrously acrobatic local cop and, bizarrely, Neil Patrick Harris as Flint's pet monkey, Steve, who speaks through a helmet similar to the one Dug has in Up.

Yeah. I didn't have much to say about this, but I thought it was worth recommending if you're in the mood for something like this. Now, ::cracks neck:: Inception.

BORN TO KILL / THE BLUE GARDENIA

Dir. Robert Wise US 1947

Dir. Fritz Lang US 1953

"If a girl killed every guy who got fresh with her, how much of the male population do you think would be left?"

It's been a while since I watched anything old, so I poked around in the film noir section of Netflix and found these two gems, the first of which I got on the strength of the title and the second of which because I'd seen a scene from it in a Fritz Lang class I took and wanted to check out the whole thing. They're both great entry points for anyone who's never seen a noir or has only seen some of the major ones and wants to branch out a bit more.

Born To Kill is far and away the darker of the two films, starring a jarringly young Lawrence Tierney (who most people in my age demographic know as Joe Cabot from Reservoir Dogs) and the lovely Claire Trevor (who is pretty much the quintessential femme fatale, although I remember her best as the tragic, drunken moll from Key Largo). Trevor stars as Helen Brent, a newly minted divorcee who is preparing to move from Reno to San Francisco. On the night she is to leave, she returns home to find her promiscuous roommate and her one-night stand murdered. She flees without informing the police and meets Lawrence Tierney's character, Sam Wilde, on the train to San Francisco. Helen finds herself attracted to Sam's blunt manner and air of danger, unaware that he is not only a violently psychotic career criminal, but the perpetrator of the murder she discovered earlier. On his way to lay low in San Francisco, Sam develops a fixation on Helen and ingratiates himself into the lives of her, her fiance and her beautiful step-sister, an heiress to a newspaper fortune. Despite the increasing havoc Sam wreaks on her life, Helen finds herself further unable to stay away.

So people are rarely nice in film noirs, but in 1947, there must have been a collective decision to take it to another level. Tierney's Sam Wilde is cut from the same cloth as Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo, who famously pushed an wheelchair-bound elderly woman down a flight of stairs in his film debut, Kiss Of Death, released a few short months after Born To Kill. With no discernible virtues, Sam makes for a challenging protagonist, a paranoid, chauvinistic brute who takes what he wants and lays waste to anything that gets in his way. You could draw a pretty clear line from Tierney's Sam to Robert DeNiro's portrayal of Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. One could certainly argue that Helen is the protagonist, but in many ways she proves to be no better than Sam. At the beginning of the film she exhibits morally grey indifference, not wanting to get involved in a murder investigation. By the end, her twisted relationship with Sam uncovers her dark side; manipulative and viciously jealous of her sister's wealth and kindness. Many would say that the two deserve each other, but I found myself sympathizing with Helen, even at the end of the film when everything comes crashing down around her.

With some strong supporting performances by Elisha Cook Jr. as Sam's long suffering partner and Walter Slezak as a sleazy, philosophy-spouting private eye, the film makes the most of what ends up being a fairly straightforward story. I didn't recognize Robert Wise's name initially, but imdb revealed him to be the director of West Side Story, The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Sound Of Music. Apparently he was quite the studio workhorse when compared with other more focused, auteur directors, but there's no arguing with results.

The Blue Gardenia was the first new Fritz Lang film I've watched since I took a Fritz Lang/Luis Bunuel comparison seminar in my senior year of college (so many weird sexual quirks in those two filmographies, let me tell you). Fritz Lang cemented his status as one of the cinema greats during Weimar-era Germany with Expressionist classics like M, Metropolis and the Dr. Mabuse films. Fleeing Germany in the 1930's (goddamn dirty Nazis) Lang emigrated to America and became a cog in the Hollywood system, averaging one film a year between the years 1936 and 1957. His work ranged from westerns to socially aware dramas to film noirs. Perhaps his most famous American film is The Big Heat, the 1953 classic that was immediately preceded by The Blue Gardenia.

The Blue Gardenia brings many of Lang's tropes to the table, most notably the wrongly accused (or is she?) protagonist. The film stars the uber-cute Anne Baxter as Nora Larkin, a young woman who spends her days working as an operater at a phone company and her nights pining for her boyfriend, serving overseas in Korea. When she gets an inverse Dear John letter, Nora becomes distraught and impulsively accepts a date from a playboy newspaper cartoonist Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr, rocking the same creep factor he displayed in Rear Window). She proceeds to get adorably drunk and accompanies him back to his apartment where he tries to take things a little to far. She struggles, blacks out and wakes up later that night, fleeing the apartment in a panic. That morning the newspapers announce that Harry Prebble was beaten to death with a fire poker and a woman matching Nora's description was seen fleeing the scene. Oh. Snap.

The Blue Gardenia is very much the kind of movie Alfred Hitchcock would have made (hot blonde protagonist, someone wrongfully accused of murder, etc.). But where Hitchcock would have gone for action and cheeky humor (and probably Anne Baxter hanging off the edge of some national landmark at the climax), Lang goes for a more low-bubbling tension as Nora tries to duck the police (and a tenacious reporter played by Richard Conte, aka Don Barzini from The Godfather) while trying to come to grips with the fact that she may have actually killed a man. Baxter plays Nora with refreshing realism, especially for a film from this era. She's sweet without being too sappy, frightened without being pathetic (although people did not know how to mask their guilt in old movies; every time someone brings up the murders in front of Nora, she proceeds to completely freak out). On the subject of naturalism, Nora acts as the straight man to her two roommates, the bookish, mystery novel-obssessed Sally (played by the unfortunately named Jeff Donnell) and the brassy, motherly Crystal (played by the always badass Ann Sothern). The interaction between the three women always felt genuine and smart, to the point that I found myself wishing that this was a comedy during there scenes together.

It's nice to be reviewing older stuff again. If anyone's ever interested in checking out some old film noir, both of these would be good places to start. Coming soon I'll have reviews of Inception (holy shit it ruled) and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (surprisingly hilarious).

PREDATORS

Dir. Nimrod Antal USA 2010

"This was a last stand. They were shooting in all directions."

As you may have guessed from some of my previous reviews, I am a huge goddamn fan of the original Predator in basically every way one can be. I also dig Predator 2, despite it's middling to poor legacy. I consider the Alien vs. Predator flicks to be dogshit, besmirching not one, but two franchises I greatly enjoy. What can be agreed on by all fans of the series is the fact that the first film is far and away the best. I saw it when I was (almost certainly) way too young to see it and have been extremely eager for them to make another genuine Predator movie for well over a decade. Robert Rodriguez had been commissioned to write a script for a third Predator movie in the mid-90's in the wake of his success with Desperado. It was shelved as being too expensive in favor of the cinematic eye-rape that was AvP. Good job, Hollywood. Knowing all this, you can imagine my excitement when I found out that the current wave of gritty rebooting had made its way to one of my favorite franchises, with Robert Rodriguez acting as co-writer and producer. I learned long ago not to get my hopes up when it comes to things like this, so I walked into the theatre last Saturday with what I would describe as cautious optimism.

Imagine my surprise at finding that the film was...just ok. Using the ol' Superman Returns loophole, Predators advertises itself as the third film in the franchise, ignoring the AvP films (although really, it essentially ignores the second film as well). Beginning with a fairly thrilling cold opening of Adrian Brody's character in freefall over a vast jungle, the film establishes that a group of extremely deadly people have been heavily armed and dropped into an unknown environment where they are being hunted by badass alien warriors. Nice and simple, right? Sort of.

It's very obvious that the makers of this film were seeking to evoke the first film in the series, and with good reason. The set up is very similar, the little call backs numerous (the line quoted at the top of the review was one of the more subtle references) and certain scenes almost qualify as a blow-for-blow remake. Where the film suffers however, is where it tries to improve. Which is admirable in a tragic sort of way. Do I hear you asking for an example? I thought so.

Ok, so one of the big hooks for this movie is the fact that all the human characters are uber-badasses from all over the world (always a neat trope). You've got Adrien Brody as a former US Special Ops soldier turned mercenary, Alice Braga as an IDF sniper (don't know how a Brazilian chick ended up playing an Israeli, but whatever), the always awesome Danny Trejo as a Mexican drug cartel enforcer, a Spetsnaz commando, an RUF death squad member, a Yakuza assassin, and a San Quentin death row inmate. The wild card comes in the form of Topher Grace, a mild-mannered doctor who is ostensibly there to serve as the team medic. Sounds pretty goddamn awesome right? Well yeah, but the major difference between this group of badasses and the badasses from the first film is that in the first film they all knew each other going in. They were old war buddies, comrades in arms, a well-oiled killing machine that takes out an entire goddamn guerrilla camp before the Predator even shows up. In the new film, no one knows anyone going in and there's the usual jockeying for leadership (although less than you'd expect) and all the mistrust and arguing that you'd expect from a situation like this. And of course, with everyone posturing and acting like hardasses, they kind of come off as...well a bunch of generic hardasses. With different accents.

In fairness to the filmmakers, they assembled a hell of a cast to inhabit these somewhat generic characters. Adrien Brody, who proved he could admirably handle action in King Kong, is surprisingly well cast as a cold-hearted mercenary who has no interest in his fellows beyond using them to survive. Other stand-outs include Walton Goggins (easily the best part of FX's Justified, and that's saying something) as the death row inmate and Louis Ozawa Changchien as the silent, but surprisingly expressive Yakuza. Alice Braga does fine as the lone female cast member, nicely averting the obvious romance angle, but awkwardly noble for the sole purpose of being a foil to Brody's fuck-everyone-but-me attitude. And something in me really wants to like Topher Grace, but he just...seems like such a bitch in everything he's in. Even more so than he's supposed to.

But fuck characterization, Steve! What about the Predators and all the action and shit! Is it awesome? Well. I will say that the designs for the new Predators are pretty snazzy. The leader sports a badass black outfit and some redesigned mandibles that are vicious to say the least. They mostly eschew the fancy new tech introduced in Predator 2 for the classic plasma cannon/wrist blade combo, and also introduce some kind of hunting dog creatures that, despite what many people on the internet seem to think (what a shock! people on the internet hate something!), were interestingly designed and effectively used. They probably should have stopped there.

So the human characters don't really figure out the situation there in/encounter the Predators for like, the first third of the movie. This sort of mirrors the pacing of the first film, but ends up dragging a bit since we know exactly whats going on and are just waiting for the movie to catch up. Whatever. Good time for characterization and all. The movie awkwardly brings the characters up to speed by revealing that the IDF woman knows all about the events of the first film, which she relays to the others once they encounter the Predators. That an IDF soldier would know about an extremely covert CIA operation that occured 20 years earlier in Central America doesn't make a ton of sense, and is especially silly given the introduction of a character in the second act who would be much more likely to have this information, but whatever, I digress. In an effort to make the Predators more interesting, the film introduces a sub-plot which reveals that there are (at least) two races of Predator which are currently at war with each other, amidst the backdrop of their usual hunting. This sounds interesting in theory, but ultimately it ends up being a little half baked and really only contributes to one fight scene toward the end that, frankly, isn't as cool as it should be.

Ultimately, what this film suffers from is mistaking streamlined for simple. The first Predator was streamlined, allowing for a slow-burn lead up to the action, great characterization (by action movie standards) and a genuine sense of awe and fear for this invisible, seemingly unstoppable hunter. Predators, on the other hand, seeks to recapture that streamlined premise, but clutters it up with a bunch of shit that should have a) been further developed or b) left out entirely. Nonetheless, it was nice to see a new Predator flick that was actually enjoyable for a majority of the running time, and will hopefully lead to something better in the future.

APT PUPIL / VIDEODROME

Dir. Bryan Singer US 1998

Dir. David Cronenberg CANADA 1983

"Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!"

Both of these were movies I'd been meaning to see for a long time and fortunately they both shared creepy themes about voyeurism and sexuality. So here we go.

Apt Pupil is based on a Stephen King short story and was Bryan Singer's sole directorial effort between The Usual Suspects and X-Men. Set in 1984 Southern California, the film stars Brad Renfro as Todd Bowden, a straight-A high school student who develops a disturbing interest in Nazis after studying them in history class. Eventually he recognizes a elderly local shut-in named Arthur Denker (Ian McKellen) from a concentration camp photo he discovered. Threatening to expose Denker, who's real name is Kurt Dussander, unless he tells him stories of his time as a concentration camp officer, the two develop a disturbing friendship that eventually devolves into blackmail and worse as Todd, revealing himself to be a budding sociopath, causes Dussander's old murderous impulses to resurface.

I'd been interested in seeing this movie since high school, mostly because I dig Bryan Singer (X-Men and X2 allow me to forgive him for Superman Returns) and Ian McKellan (who is just fucking awesome). Apt Pupil brings a lot to the table, including Singer's preoccupation with homosexual issues as well as his apparent interest in Nazism (which is odd coming from a gay Jewish guy, but whatever). The film takes its broad strokes from Silence Of The Lambs, tracing a love/hate (or I guess 0bssession/loathing) relationship between a deeply disturbed mentor and his equally disturbed protege. Singer does a good job of keeping the tension crackling throughout the film and the relationship between Todd and Kurt fluctuates enough to keep the audience on their toes. Some of the scenes are a bit clunky (I'm thinking of the sequence early on when Todd is showering in the school locker room and imagines it as concentration camp and his classmates as starved prisoners) but several others are terrifically creepy. I don't want to spoil anything, but there's a scene toward the end of the first act where Todd orders an SS uniform from a costume shop and forces Kurt to wear it and goosestep around the house. Kurt resists at first but eventually falls into a furious trance as it all comes back to him, while Todd looks on in rapturous wonder/fear. It's...about as fucked up as it sounds.

I'd never really seen Brad Renfro in anything prior to this, other than Sleepers and...that's about it, I guess. He really had the chops, even at a young age. As Todd, he does a great job of keeping you firmly on his side despite the characters increasingly grotesque actions and the competing charisma of McKellan's Dussander. His career dropped off pretty sharply toward the end of his life thanks to a drug addiction and he even ended up being overshadowed postmortem, dying exactly one week before Heath Ledger. McKellan is equally and unsurprisingly excellent as Dussander, never once letting his age mask the fact that he is an evil, evil bastard. Keep an eye out for pre-Dawson's Creek Joshua Jackson as Todd's friend at school and the always pathetic David Schwimmer as Todd's dipshit guidence counselor.

As much as I liked Apt Pupil, Videodrome is the film I was more eager to discuss in this review. I seem to be working my way through David Cronenberg's career backwards, beginning with his recent collaborations with Viggo Mortensen (2005's interesting A History Of Violence and 2007's utterly fantastic Eastern Promises) before delving back into his earlier work, which is way more fucked up to say the least. And if you've seen his newer stuff, you'll realize what a strong statement that is.

Videodrome is set in Tornoto during what may or may not be an early 80s version of the near future, shortly before VHS became the dominant/common format for home video. James Woods plays Max Renn, the sleazy executive of a private, small scale cable TV station that specializes in sensational/trashy programming. Growing bored with their regular schedule of softcore porn and the like, Max seeks edgier programming via a pirate satellite dish that is able to pull video from around the world. He finds what he's looking for in Videodrome, a bizarre, plotless show which depicts anonymous men and women being raped, tortured and killed. Convinced that (what he believes to be staged) snuff shows are the future of television, Max attempts to track down the source of Videodrome, only to discover the horrifying reality behind it in a series of increasingly surreal and disturbing events.

So this is one of those movies where you watch it stone sober and by the end you feel like you've been smoking weed all night. It's really goddamn strange. The film begins with a off-beat, but grounded premise, and by the end has veered into sci-fi/horror/exploitation. And of course no David Cronenberg film would be complete without disgusting bodily transformations/mutilations. Plus, Deborah Harry's in it. Like I said, strange.

The aspect of the film that I recall with the most clarity, however, is how bizarrely prescient it is. Of course, it seems silly now to describe anything like VHS as advanced, given that we're two formats past it, but in a weird way this film more or less predicts the rise of the internet. Allow me to explain. Part of the plot hinges on a character called Bryan O'Blivion, a sort of television guru/philosopher who only appears via pre-recorded video broadcasts and advocates a soon-to-be realized world where the majority of human experience and interaction occurs through television. He even refers to his pseudonym 'Bryan O'Blivion' as his 'television name'. The parallels between this and screennames/message board handles are obvious, as is the broader idea of people living their lives through the internet. Cronenberg managed to pull off a similar feat with 1997's Existenz, predicting MMORPGs and highly interactive videogames through (surprise!) invasive bodily horror. Even Videodrome itself invokes thoughts of all the nasty, fucked up porn that's only a few clicks away everytime you go on the internet. None of this is anything Cronenberg could have predicted, but it is kind of eerie how clear the parallels are.

So that about wraps this one up. I watched an old noir the other night called Born To Kill, which I enjoyed immensely. I'll most likely be pairing that with Fritz Lang's Blue Gardinia, which I plan on watching sometime in the next few days. Also, I'll be seeing Predators tomorrow, so expect some strong opinions about that as well.