The Problem With Inception

[You need not visit "Inception," "2001," A.O. Scott and the Problem of the Blockbuster but it is a kind of precursor to this.]

Spoiler alert - nothing major given away but a warning nonetheless that this piece is mostly intended for those who've already seen the movie or who have no real plans of seeing it.

OK, you want me to say it. I'll say it. I did not love Christopher Nolan's Inception. Why? Because I didn't buy it. I didn't buy the premise on which the whole movie stands. I'm not talking about the dream extraction stuff either. As Kafka so perfectly illustrated, you can have a character wake up and discover that they are a bug and we'll believe, we'll follow; it's what you do with that make-believe world and what it has to say that's gonna tell us whether we remember your story or not.

The attempt at an emotional core in Inception is the story about DiCaprio dealing with the loss of his wife. An attempt? Already readers are angry. Comments coming in about how you cried during certain scenes, and how you felt their love so strongly, or felt DiCaprio's pain as real. I too felt the tugs on my heart strings at times, most notably during the windowsill scene. It was, however, in hindsight, as I walked out the theatre so underwhelmed and disappointed that I hadn't loved loved loved the movie that I began to put the pieces together and came to find there was an emptiness to that whole central conceit (but more on that in a momento).


What made Memento (Nolan's first film) so brilliant was that beyond the fiercely clever craftsmanship of the story and how it unfolded, there was a genuine anxiety that pervaded the film. It wasn't just cool photography and a clever use of tattoos and editing that

made the world take notice of this new and obviously hugely talented director. We, the viewers, felt stuck in that hotel room with the main character, Leonard. We were as lost and confused and claustrophobic as he was and the experience was riveting, worrying and so satisfyingly gripping. But a key example of what for me, especially on multiple viewings, took Memento into a whole other realm of achievement was actually a subplot. Granted, it was the key to the whole understanding of the movie, but it wasn't the central action.

It was the flashbacks to the story of Sammy, the middle-aged man who needed to give his wife insulin shots for her Diabetes. Like the story's main character, Sammy suffers from a kind of short-term amnesia - he cannot form new memories. What this does to Sammy's relationship with his wife, and her ultimate decision in how to deal with it, is harrowing in the extreme. What makes the movies so powerful is both the intricacy of a complicated and wonderful puzzle of a plot, but just as crucially of how much we have invested in the characters who are not just rats running through the maze but that actually seem like real people whom we hope will not hurt, despair or god forbid die

AMC, the TV channel that produces Mad Men uses the tag line: "Story Lives Here." I read it somewhere (an issue of Esquire perhaps?) that they are using this brilliant slogan as a counterpoint to the moronification of the Hollywood blockbuster; so that high quality TV shows like The Sopranos and In Treatment are where adults who actually like stories can go when $12.50 ($18 in Japan) just might not seem worth it for The Prince of Persia.

For story to work we have to care about character. Star Wars had light sabres and special effects but no one would talk about it ever again if not for Luke and Leia and Hans Solo and of course Darth Vader. Even 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie so cold and seemingly devoid of speaking human characters you would think it impossible to relate that film to character, has alongside its space visuals and groundbreaking use of music the character of Hal, the computer that is possibly the most memorable and chilling aspect to the whole grand movie.

But back to Inception. DiCaprio is becoming a world-class movie star. He has the intensity and the ability to share vulnerability that Tom Cruise had before he became a Scientologist (see Cruise in the 80s, some 90s), when he decided to replace actual acting with, as my wife so aptly put it, running ("That's all he does now in his movies," Ai says of Cruise. "He just runs.") I don't blame DiCaprio for Inception's disappointments, far from. Like with The Departed he's proven here again that he's no longer a boy; he's finally figured out how to get his poster off pre-teen girls' bedroom walls. Ie. men now have respect for the guy. No, DiCaprio is not the issue. The fault here lies squarely with the director, with Nolan.

Inception looks amazing and may possibly give viewers the kind of thrill I remember getting seeing Terminator 2 for the first time in theatres, or, slightly more recently, The Matrix (whose dating himself now?). The problem with Inception is I felt no real sense of danger. I was not nearly as anxious or curious as to what the hell was going on watching Inception as I had been with Memento, was not nearly as gut-twistingly terrified at the same time as I was thrilled experiencing The Dark Knight. With Nolan's latest I just didn't care enough.

The film pivots on the importance of DiCaprio's character getting back home (to America) to symbolically let his dead wife go and see his kids. The problem, as David Denby in his New Yorker review of Inception so aptly put it, is that we never get to know these children in the slightest (only the image of the backs of their heads) so that we don't care about the kids, nor did I get any sense of DiCaprio as father. If a two and a half hour movie revolves around someone getting back to something the audience needs to have some semblance of reason why we should care for that something other than just a Kodak commercial's picture of it (or the back of the heads of it). Perhaps if Nolan had had the courage to cut fifteen minutes from his James Bond guns-on-ski-slopes action sequence to actually let us see DiCaprio as father... maybe then something might have resonated. Somehow, though, even that kind of quick fix flashback would have rang false, and I think I know why.

In The Dark Knight we had characters to terrify and beguile and trouble the mental stability out of us (Heath Ledger's Joker), and we also had characters to truly love for their integrity (Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon). What, on the other hand, do your remember about DiCaprio's wife in Inception other than that she was French and beautiful and had an unusual first name (Mal)? What of DiCaprio's character himself? He was intense and focused and driven, but I can't even remember his character's name let alone care about his pain.

What rang so hollow with Inception? Why did I walk away not caring about any of these people? Because I think that the entire premise, I think that the letting go of a dead wife and the getting back to see his children were merely devices to drive a plot about an idea (something to do with memory and dreams and dreams within dreams) that was never nearly as interesting as Nolan may have thought.

There are, to be sure, ideas movies where the premise is so astonishing that we can get over the ever-wooden ways of one Keanu Reeves, but as it turns out The Matrix Christopher Nolan's Inception is not.

Peter Sarsgaard: Chameleon

Peter Sarsgaard, the actor in An Education, is the also the guy from Boys Don't Cry. Need I say more?

I do; his performance in the latter was so pitch-perfect I was sure the director, Kimberly Peirce, had simply picked a piece of white trash off the road and dumped it in her movie, convinced the guy to read some lines and be ultra violent and asshole to women, as I was sure he must have been in real life. John Lotter, the character in Boys Don't Cry was so real, so raw, so disgusting it couldn't possibly be that he was portrayed by some kind of polished actor. What did I know? Turns out that actor picks some pretty perfect movies to be in. I highly recommend both.

STORY: Lone Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

In my early twenties Saturday summer evenings were the best. I still lived with my folks then, my sisters had long since moved out, and Saturday nights my parents - ever the socialites - would be out on the town (typically an early movie with friends followed by dinner, usually Chinese, sometimes Thai - then and now I've always envied my parents' social life). But glory be to the boy who gets to have the house to himself in the dusky hours before he too will go out on the town.

The requisite phone calls would be made, the usual back and forth with friends. What to do? Where to go? Same old, same old. Like we'd be twenty-two forever, which was a very boring and difficult thought considering how much time we had and how little we knew what to do with it. 

Typically no one wanted to plan anything, so all involved in these circuitous phone calls (Did you talk to X? What are they up to?) would put off whatever we might do, continually getting off the phone with one another having not made anything concrete, hanging up our land line old telephones as if in states of perpetual shrug. This, of course, was because we knew exactly what we would do once we admitted it. Nailed it down. Cause it was a rare Saturday night that we didn't wind up at the same dingy coffee shop we ended up most every other night of the week, in the same industrial-awful north west part of the city where we'd play cards and smoke our brains out and eat day-old donuts for next to nothing.

Before committing to the near-certainty that we'd go where we always went and meet when we always did (around 10pm), a good three hours prior I'd take my parents second car to rent a DVD and then fetch me some McDonalds or awful takeout Chinese or a Harvey's hamburger combo, brought back to the house to be eaten in front of said movie. Course, by the time I had gone and gotten the food and by the time I had eaten it and finally finished flipping through what lack of TV there always wasn't on a Saturday night (is there a worse night for television?), only then, 10pm fast approaching, last slurps fighting to get the remaining Coke from between and beneath the small cubes of ice finished, only then would I finally turn on the DVD I'd rented, not fast forwarding through the previews no matter how bad. It was typically just as the 20th Century Fox insignia lit up the screen with its triumphant music, or maybe I was already old enough for the pleasure at flying over the bridge and into the city to see the Miramax sign come out bright white from the lit night buildings, in any case it was right about then and carefully before even that first credit from the movie proper had started that I'd pause the DVD and make the inevitable phone call to say that I was sorry, I thought I might just be lazy and stay in tonight.

This exact pattern did not play itself out every Saturday night when my parents went out. Sometimes I did go and play cards Saturday night, as I did so many other nights through my undergrad degree, but it happened a hell of a lot that I'd just wind up staying in.

It took me years, a whole decade really, to look back and realize that the Saturday night joy I was experiencing  was the joy of being alone, that I had much of the lone wolf in me and that so long as I had the possibility (in my mind it was even the probability) of a social plan in the near distance, like the comfort of a lit gas station up ahead on a dark highway, I felt safe enough to lounge in my solitude up until it was too late to go out. By then I'd be so immersed in it that the fear of not being as social as my parents or sisters would have long passed. I'd be downright happy passing the night away by myself, invariably watching embarrassing numbers of television hours and gorging on copious amounts of fast food, cola and then of course dessert. Oh I was a fat man about the whole thing, you bet, but fuck it, I enjoyed it. And I needed the crutches (of fat, salt, sugar and movie) to help be who I liked to be. Years and years and still I kind of flip out to realize how much I like to be by myself. This a revelation when you come from as extroverted a family as I do.

It goes without saying, I suppose, that the writerly habits in me were only then just beginning to form. Though today I'm nearly as prone to coupling a night alone with burger, fry and coke, it won't as often be in front of the TV. Now if you want to find me some perfect summer eve, I'll often be in whatever cafe I've superstitiously connected myself (and whatever story I'm working on) with that week. I won't be at the party or at dinner with friends; I'll be seated alone, hunched over a table, fast scribbling or perhaps momentarily not scribbling a thing, looking out, looking dazed, aka thinking. Whatever the case, I'll look serious and what you may call lonely, and I will be loving it*.

Stanley Kubrick Week - His Music

Having a bit of a Kubrick-love in at the old Probably Because I Have To so thought I'd give you a taste of some of his great music choices from, in order:

2001
Barry Lyndon
Eyes Wide Shut
A Clockwork Orange
The Shining

MOVIE STUFF: "Inception," "2001," A.O. Scott and the Problem of the Blockbuster

My timing is terrible. I shouldn't have gone with Ai to see Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" on the big screen last night. Why? Cause Chris Nolan's (of the Dark Knight franchise) "Inception" comes out today and chances are I'll have seen it before I next post. Fact is I've been waiting months for a decent big budget flick to come to theatres and I am sure Inception will look great and feel great and make money in the bagazillions, and that better "Inception" than another Transformers sequel. Ie. it'll fit the bill perfectly. But what NY Times movie critic A.O. Scott (is there a better critic out there now?) has already confirmed in his review- what we all probably knew anyway - is that, really, it's just gonna be a very cool, super slick, tale-twisting piece of fluff. Scott's piece suggests many critics out there are going a little overboard with their praise. Before continuing, let me remind you that I posted the trailer for "Inception" here not long ago - that's how excited I was and still basically am to see it.

Maybe right now you're saying, C'mon Jon, isn't that all we want from a summer movie? Fuck, would be my slightly irate reply. Is that all? Really? Ai has recommended I be less judgmental on my blog and usually I endeavour to follow her advice cause she's much brighter than I am. Perhaps this time, though, we need a little judgment. (Shit, where would morality come from if not for judgment?) Does every single Saturday night movie we go to have to be pure escape, total dumbed-down "Get Me To the Greek" dick and fart comedy? Does everything have to be "Sex and the City" fluffy? Should they just ship me off to France now to read long Russian 19th century novels? Maybe they should, though my Japanese, crap as it is, is still better than my pathetic French.

I'm beginning to feel progressively more unusual in this art-wanting obsession of mine, though the twenty-five or so other folks at the old Bloor cinema watching "2001" alongside my wife and I, folks who had the zitsfleisch to sit for two and a half hours and manage neither to talk or even once open their cell phones - they give me hope. A.O. Scott gives me hope. He longs for better pictures, wishing as he so gloriously does for a movie that could entertain and have the brains for more than just clever puzzles and beautiful set pieces. Maybe it could also have something to say?

Last night I watched a masterpiece, invited no one but my wife (that's not true; I invited one friend; he said no), secure in the knowledge that most people would rather not spend 141 minutes in an old theatre watching an at times preposterously slow and difficult movie. 

Like a challenging novel, "2001" had me drifting off, which our educational and business minded system so chastises, and yet to me is the very fertile ground upon which original thought and creativity are born. My mind raced, I travelled back through memories, good and bad, thought of all the movies that could never have been without Kubrick's film. I thought of the rather indisputable theory that the summer blockbuster was born of two movies: Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" and George Lucas' "Star Wars." You need only watch the long middle third of "2001" to recognize that without Kubrick's 9th film there could have been no Millennium Falcon, no Luke Skywalker, no Death Star. "Star Wars" is "2001" for kids (of all ages), is all I kept thinking, Srauss' gorgeous music (both Richard and Johann's) booming out the old Bloor cinema's speakers. Lucas' conceit was unquestionably brilliant. Take the space show Kubrick constructed and so famously set to classic music in a way that had never been done before, dumb it down, make it easier, faster, more violent. In other words, more light sabers, less contemplation.

Thus, the first summer blockbusters: the big screen roller coasters we love.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with roller coasters. I buy my tickets, believe me (hell, I even saw the new "Karate Kid" - and actually enjoyed it!), I wait in line with the rest and love how the wind ruffles my remaining hair, how my stomach will drop at the big dip, all that fast turning caramel corn fun stuff. Who doesn't like that? I just wonder why we don't occasionally ask for more?

"2001" makes you wonder about the meaning of the universe, of man [sic], and much, much more. "Inception," I fear (and A.O. Scott has all but already confirmed), will just be another thrill ride.

Movies are so much fun; it's just sometimes I wish they could be films. 
Rant over and out.

[Click here for my review: The Problem With "Inception"  ]

www.twitter.com/mendelsohnjon

A Note About This Month's Photographer

A Post Production Supervisor, my friend Ajeeth Parkal took the beautiful picture this month. It's called "Sunset On Georgian Bay."

The photographer writes:

Ajeeth takes pictures of anything and everything. This picture was taken on an iPhone 3Gs at Georgian Bay on a private beach in Collingwood. It was edited using Photoshop Mobile on the iPhone as well. Photography is one of Ajeeth's many hobbies. While not taking pictures of random things you can find him watching TV, cooking, mountain biking, swimming or beating the author at Table Tennis [I wanted to write sic here but can't as he does beat the author, regularly] , but mostly just watching TV.

Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm, but artisans, like dumpling-makers, if somewhat slower.
-David Mitchell, from his latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Being the Brother of John (McEnroe) - ON GREATNESS: PT II

The Story (of the Difference Between the Merely Good and The Greatest of Great)
[continued from here]

It's the 1970s, Patrick and John McEnroe are playing a doubles tournament together in Paris, France. You can just picture them, John really, skinny and not so pretty (some of us can even remember how terribly bratty) in those laughably short white shorts and with that red sweat band round his head, it doing nothing to tame his unruly, poofy, curly brown hair.

It's 5-5 in the 3rd and final set. The McEnroes are up against a French team. In France. John is serving and a bad call goes his way. The crowd goes nuts. The bad call has brought the McEnroes to game point, John serving for it, or trying to, bouncing the ball at the base line, waiting, waiting for a stadium of French fans jeering and whistling and freaking out over the chair umpire's bad call. It's literally 10 minutes that John and Patrick wait while the crowd refuses to quiet down. Patrick, up at net, feels himself getting tighter, getting progressively more nervous with each moment. John calls his brother back to him. "Don't worry about it," he says to Pat, cool as a cucumber amidst the cheers and jeers and madness. "I got it covered." Crowd finally settles, John bounces the ball one last time, tosses it in the air and serves up an ace. Game. They go on to win the set and the match.

That, Patrick McEnroe tells Charlie Rose, is what make the greatest of great - those that can stay utterly calm in the midst of that kind of storm.

In a word: self-belief.

STORY TIME: Being the Brother of John (McEnroe) - ON GREATNESS

Patrick McEnroe, brother to John, is on Charlie Rose. He's plugging a new book and talking about Wimbledon. Patrick McEnroe, who like his big brother played tennis professionally, has since had a very successful career, also like John, as a tennis commentator. He's been doing it for more than 10 years. On top of that, he (and he alone) is captain of the US Davis Cup team and is a leader in the USTA organization.

But still.

5 minutes into the interview Charlie Rose, being Charlie Rose, asks the question we all want the answer to:

Charlie: Tell me what it is that takes two young men of athletic ability, you and your brother, and one has the kind of extraordinary record that John did, one of the great players - as good a touch as anybody's ever had -  and you who had a ... very good ... [long awkward pause]


Patrick: Say it Charlie [breaks into a smile] - I was mediocre. 


Charlie: No I wasn't gonna say ... no, no, no! Wasn't mediocre ... I mean, uh, people would ... didn't reach it ... But you know what I'm saying. What's the difference?

With utter professionalism and impressive composure considering the question he's been put to answer, Patrick McEnroe, grown into himself in his greying middle age, looking comfortable - handsome even - in a suit, goes on to tell this wonderful, self-effacing story about the difference between the merely good and the greatest of great, a story that I will share with you  ...

Here.

The 6th of Salinger's Nine Stories: "For Esme--With Love and Squalor"

[Click "A Perfect Day for Bananafish,"for the first and most famous of the nine short stories;
Select "The Laughing Man" for the fourth, one of my all-time favourites. ]

Sometimes even with blogging the words don't come, or they don't come right, or at least not with any vim, vigor or vitality. So instead of a rather flaccid attempt at an overlong, uncharismatic podium lecture on the merits of the world-class short story that is "For Esme--With Love and Squalor," I thought, on this steamy July eve in Toe-ronto with the windows open wide and the breeze not forthcoming, I'd instead permit J.D., in 3 quoted excerpts, to speak for himself. I'll note only that the 2nd passage occurs in a church and that the 3rd unfolds in a "civilian" tearoom.  

i.
In April of 1944, I was among some sixty American enlisted men who took a rather specialized pre-Invasion training course, directed by British Intelligence, in Devon, England. And as I look back, it seems to me that we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there wasn't one good mixer in the bunch. We were all essentially letter-writing types, and when we spoke to each other out of the line of duty, it was usually to ask somebody if he had any ink he wasn't using. When we weren't writing letters or attending classes, each of us went pretty much his own way. Mine usually led me, on clear days, in scenic circles around the countryside. Rainy days, I generally sat in a dry place and read a book, often just an axe length away from a ping-pong table. 

ii.
She was about thirteen, with straight ash-blond hair of ear-lobe length, an exquisite forehead, and blase eyes that, I thought, might very possibly have counted the house. Her voice was distinctly separate from the other children's voices, and not just because she was seated nearest me. It had the best upper register, the sweetest-sounding, the surest, and it automatically led the way. The young lady, however, seemed slightly bored with her own singing ability, or perhaps just with the time and place; twice, between verses, I saw her yawn. It was a ladylike yawn, a closed-mouth yawn, but you couldn't miss it; her nostril wings gave her away.

iii.
"You were at choir practice," she said matter-of-factly. "I saw you."
I said I certainly had been, and that I had heard her voice singing separately from the others. I said I thought she had a very fine voice. 
She nodded. "I know. I'm going to be a professional singer."
"Really? Opera?"
"Heavens, no. I'm going to sing jazz on the radio and make heaps of money. Then, when I'm thirty, I shall retire and live on a ranch in Ohio."

Call for Photo Submissions

Like the photo above, by my friend Yaniv, I'm looking for cool photos to put on my site. Perhaps one cool photo every two weeks (has to be able to stretch wide, and not be too boxey - again see pic above) Interested photographers please contact me.

It's like almost better than 3-D

Coming out of the Festival Theatre after a performance of The Tempest last Thursday night, I overhear a girl of about 15 turn to her father and say, "Wow. The special effects were awesome!"