YOU'RE ASKING ME FOR INCEPTION

A while back, I posed the question: Can Christopher Nolan direct? It was semi-rhetorical; he's made a handful of fairly interesting pictures, which have a distinct tone (dark and brooding with moments of pretty sharp humor), the specifics of which mark a picture as his. The open-ended nature of that post, though was attributable both to sleeplessness—I passed out for about a day and a half right after clicking “Publish Post” and fixed the typos later—and to the fact that Chris' latest joint hadn't dropped yet. But now it has, so pull up a computer and let's shoot the breeze.

This afternoon I saw Inception in a packed house at BAM, with friend of the blog YarnGuy and his brother and sister-in-law. It's been a long time since I got as stoked about a new picture as this one. I'd heard it was great. I'd heard it was awesome (there's a difference). I'd heard it was disappointing. I'd heard it was a masterpiece that would save us all. One of my pet theories about pop culture is that if people are arguing, it's worth seeing. Another one is, if people aren't giving away whatever secrets a movie may have, it's really worth seeing. Brief digression: 'member when The Crying Game came out back in '92, and you sorta kinda knew what the twist was, but cats wouldn't tell you about Jaye Davidson's dick at first and told you “Ya gotta see it for yourself?” The Crying Game was fucking awesome. Now, recall The Sixth Sense. People didn't start openly talking about Bruce Willis being dead the whole time for about six months. Now, sticking with M. Night, check the flipside of that shit: everyone walked out of The Village loudly moaning their fucking balls off about how it all took place in the present day and saying “what were those assholes supposed to do when a plane flew overhead?” The less willing people are to blab a picture's surprises, the better it probably is, and the more people are like “GAH RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! THE ALIENS MELT WHEN YOU THROW WATER ON THEM! DO NOT WANT!” you can infer that the movie sucks.

The thing that's been funny to me about Inception is that in this modern age, with leaks and spoilers lurking around every tree in the forest that is the Interwebs, no one has been talking about what actually happens in Inception. We saw the trailers (not to put too fine a point on it, but I haven't needed porn for weeks), we read little teases like “Leo DiCaprio plays a guy who can break into people's minds while they're dreaming,” we saw the cast and went “Holy fucking shit, is everybody in this?” But very little actual “this happens and then this happens and then it ends like this” type of stuff came out. Since it opened, sure, the plot synopsis has been posted. The above mentioned obligatory swipe at M. Night isn't really applicable, as Inception doesn't really have his lame-o type of twist. But it still is the sort of picture that spoilers would fuck up, so if you haven't seen the picture yet, bookmark this post until you have, then scroll down past this picture of Marion Cotillard and continue.

Inception opens with an arresting visual image (woo hoo! Chris is learning!) and some intriguing non sequiturs, like a Japanese guy with a machine gun poking an ocean-bedraggled (and armed) Leo DiCaprio in the back and hollering at him. He drags Leo in to talk to Ken Watanabe, who's under about eighty-five layers of age makeup that make him look like Andy Garcia in Dead Again. Ken Watanabe asks Leo, “Are you here to kill me?”

Then we flash back to how Leo and Ken Watanabe met. There's Joseph Gordon-Levitt with slicked-down hair and some fucking bangin' threads. There's Leo lookin sharp. Hmm, there's Marion Cotillard. Oh, Marion Cotillard, you know how to make oblique, ambiguous dialogue sing, baby. (In what might be a funny deliberate touch, “Non, je ne regrette rien” repeats over and over in the movie.) Leo and Joe pull some James Bond shit, and Leo gains entry to Ken Watanabe's safe . . . but they're all dreaming. Joe wakes up in an apartment somewhere in the Middle East with an angry mob fucking shit up outside and tells Lukas Haas they might have a problem.

Leo is vexed by Ken Watanabe and Marion Cotillard before he can get the document he needs. Bullets fly, shit starts exploding because they're in the Middle East, and eventually they have to wake Leo up, so they toss him in a bathtub (in a fucking hot slow-mo shot), which causes water to come in all over the place in the dream.

Once everyone wakes up in the Middle East, Ken Watanabe pulls some heat, but Leo pins him to the ground, whereupon Ken Watanabe's face is mashed into the carpet, and he calls out Lukas Haas. The carpet is supposed to be wool, which makes Ken Watanabe realize he's in a dream (the whole thing with the safe was a dream within a dream), which means Lukas Haas fucked up. So, Leo and company have to get themselves out of that dream, which they do, and find themselves on a train in Japan with a still-asleep Ken Watanabe. They make their exit.

Leo, in his hotel room, talks to his kids on the phone, revealing his kids as a random pair of kids he saw in the opening scene, and when they ask when mommy's coming home, he has to tell them she's not. Because mommy is Marion Cotillard, the mysterious broad from Leo's dreams. And she's dead.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt shows up looking awesome (this is the biggest surprise in this movie: when in the sweet living fuck did Joseph Gordon-Levitt turn into the coolest motherfucker in the universe? I mean, Brick and The Lookout were both great, but wow this sonofabitch is wearing tailored suits and firing guns and all kinds of crap now . . . they grow up so fast!) and there's a bit of terse dialogue about how the Cobalt (sp?) Corporation is going to want them dead now and about how Leo can't go back to the States for Unspoken Mysterious Reasons. They go up to the roof to find their chopper . . . where Ken Watanabe is sitting there chilling with an ass-kicked Lukas Haas, who has given Leo up to the Cobalt Corporation (who we're left to safely assume are evil white guys in suits), so Ken Watanabe does the whole Kyle Reese-as-a-Japanese-plutocrat “come with me if you want to live” routine, so Leo and Joe say, hey, sure.

On the chopper ride, Ken Watanabe pitches an idea to them. Usually, what Leo and team do is “extraction,” breaking into people's minds to steal information (somewhere William Gibson is watching with his lawyers saying, “Wait, let's watch the rest of the movie . . . if it's good, I won't sue.”) But what Ken Watanabe wants to do is called “inception,” which is to say, breaking into someone's mind to plant an idea. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, being the pragmatic dude who gets Leo's haunted, unstable ass out of trouble, scoffs, says inception is impossible. Ken Watanabe ignores him, turns to Leo, and says, “If you can pull this off, I can make one phone call and all your problems are gone and you can go home to your kids.” Leo replies, “You know, now that you mention it, it is possible but it's going to be really fucking difficult and we might not make it out alive, but what the hell? We're only twenty minutes into the movie and we've got two-plus hours to go, we got some time to kill, let's give it a try.”

Because this is for all practical purposes, all the SF shit about dreams vs. reality and the dangerous power of the subconscious aside, a heist movie (I could seriously hug Chris Nolan) they need to assemble a team. They need a slick-talking English con man/forger/thief, so they get Tom Hardy, who was in Layer Cake and Rocknrolla and a bunch of other stuff (who broke my fucking Geiger counter he's so radioactively fucking cool in this). Lukas Haas flaked on them (Ken Watanabe, when Leo asks what's going to happen to him, says ominously “Nothing”) so they need a new “architect,” someone to physically construct the world of the dream. Leo drops in on his dad (Michael Caine, bow yer 'eads in rev'rence) who's a professor of some non-specified but relevant subject and asks him if he has any promising students. Michael Caine busts Leo's balls a bit and then introduces him to Ellen Page, which by the way, it's really good to see Ellen Page in something watchable again, that two-thirds of Juno that didn't suck was a long time ago now. She gets very excited at the possibilities when Leo tells her about building dreamscapes, and wary when Leo warns her about not changing too much (all the extras in the dream turn and glare at you in this really creepy way when you do; another really fuckin cool visual idea for our Chris . . . again, they grow up so fast). Ellen Page immediately realizes that there's something not all right about Leo, that his fixation on Marion Cotillard and their kids—and the inherent instability of his mind being haunted by guilt—is going to fuck everything up.

But, because what they're trying to do is making Joseph Gordon-Levitt's blood pressure go up and might make him shvitz up one of the fucking jaw-dropping suits he wears in this (and we can not have that) Tom Hardy brings in a chemist he knows, Yusef (Dileep Rao, from Drag Me To Hell and Avatar) who has this tailored sedative that they can use on their mark. So he comes aboard and they start to prep.

Part of the prep involves a bit of exposition involving the dream-reality. Joseph Gordon-Levitt explains to Ellen Page that if you keep one small item that only you ever touch on you (so you're the only one who knows its weight and feel) you can figure out whether you're in your own dream or someone else's. Suddenly that spinning top Leo's been nervously fucking with for the whole movie makes (a little) sense . . .

Now, the mark. Ken Watanabe tells them that the mind they're all going to be breaking into belongs to evil white guy manque Cillian Murphy, son of dying evil white guy Pete Postlethwaite, who with the help of hench-evil white guy Tom Berenger (who's all of a sudden really fucking old . . . man, next time I watch Major League when I'm drunk I'm going to cry) is essentially going to have a monopoly on energy. Not just oil. Energy. The stakes are that high. Ken Watanabe wants them to make Cillian Murphy wake up one morning and decide to sell off Pete Postlethwaite's empire piece by piece, thus obviating the sinister hegemony that would otherwise follow.

Leo determines that the way they need to make sure the idea sticks when they plant it in Cillian Murphy's mind is for it to have a positive association, so having Cillian Murphy decide to do this to fuck over his old man who he hates won't work. They need to have him come to peace with the old fucker, “realize” that pops told him he's a disappointment (which he did; what a dick) because he doesn't want lil' Cillian to follow in his evil white guy footsteps, that he wants him to take that fuckin' suit off and be good.

For reasons I don't quite understand but make the movie infinitely cooler, it is decided that the way to pull The Inception Job is to create a dream within a dream within a dream. So Ken Watanabe flexes his nuts and buys the airline that Cillian Murphy is flying from Sydney to LA for his dad's funeral (the same route as Oceanic Flight 815, except in Inception all this hideously complicated shit actually makes sense) so they can have the first-class cabin to themselves. With the team all comfortably in place, the stewardess they paid off to help puts them all into a nice dream coma for the trip to LA, and we're off to the mindfuck races!

Action movie gourmands like moi will tell you, there are many ways you can go for your climactic action sequence. Car chases in the rain are always a good one (see King of New York—several times, please, God it's good—or the pleasant surprise that was the rain car chase in We Own The Night, otherwise not an action movie at all), or there's also the hotel shootout, good because there's elevators and stairs to fuck around on (most notable variant, John Woo going off his meds and doing it in a hospital in Hard-Boiled), and then there's the snowy mountain fortress angle (YarnGuy mentioned On Her Majesty's Secret Service and was polite when I meatheadedly brought up True Lies and xXx). In short, there are many options. Most directors pick one. Chris says “Fuck it, let's do ALL THREE!” At ONCE.

So yeah, layer one of the dream is Cillian Murphy tied up in the back of a van with Tom Berenger while our heroes are all asleep except for Yusef, who's driving the van while a locomotive (????) and several SUVs and motorcycles full of machine gun-toting henchmen types pursue. Level two, where all the sleepyheads are, is a super-modernist earth-tone hallway hotel, where after Leo tells Cillian Murphy he's dreaming (if ever a movie needed more meta, it's this one, God . . .) everybody goes to sleep in a hotel room while Joseph Gordon-Levitt takes his coat off so he can strut around in his vest. Level three is a snowy fortress where Cillian Murphy has to bust into a vault to find out his Big Secret.

A wrinkle that's introduced by Leo after everyone signs on (to the point where they're already in level one of the dream) is that if any of them get killed, they don't just wake up like they usually do. They go to Limbo, where you risk being trapped for years, even decades, even forever. When Ken Watanabe (who turns out to be a cool guy; remember, evil white guys in suits) gets shot in level one and they can't get him to a hospital, they realize they're up against the clock to keep him from getting trapped in Limbo forever. Leo is especially motivated to get him to wake up safely, since if Ken Watanabe doesn't wake up, Leo gets arrested and sent straight to prison the second they touch down at LAX.

Action ensues. When Ken Watanabe dies and Leo takes Ellen Page to level four of the dream—Limbo—there's a big-ass confrontation where it finally comes out that the reason Leo was so convinced inception worked was that he pulled it on Marion Cotillard to get her to want to leave Limbo. Leo tells Ellen Page the whole story about Marion Cotillard, how she died, and why her death meant Leo had to leave sweet home Estados Unidos. Leo fesses up that he and Marion Cotillard had been experimenting, and that they actually spent about 50 years subjective time in Limbo, where Marion Cotillard had invented a top that never stopped spinning if they were in a dream (just like the one Leo carries IRL, which tips over if he's IRL but keeps spinning if he's dreaming, giving Leo, who's a little addled, a much needed leg up on the universe) flipped out and lost touch with “reality,” so Leo pulled a murder/suicide to bring them back to the “real” world, where Marion Cotillard was still convinced that if she iced herself one more time, she'd be back in real reality. Only problem is, she died. And left a whole bunch of false evidence that he'd been threatening to kill her, meaning if he stayed around instead of killing himself to be with her, he'd end up in prison. So that's why Leo had to leave the country and become a globe-trotting dream thief who made enough money to keep his right-hand man outfitted in Savile Row's finest (sorry, I know we're not even talking about him but goddamn Joseph Gordon-Levitt dresses well in this movie).

All the action comes to a head and eventually Leo manages to triumph over the vagaries of dream-reality to find Ken Watanabe and wake him up, just in time to make the phone call to keep Leo from getting tossed in the shithouse. So instead of cops, Leo is greeted by Michael Caine, who takes him home to meet his kids. Leo sets his top spinning to figure out whether he's dreaming or not. And his kids turn to greet him, Leo gets to see their faces for the first time. Then we pan to his spinning top. And god fucking dammit, Chris Nolan cuts to black before we see if it tips over or not! BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

Oh the glorious troll that is the ending of Inception. Dude, the BAM Rose almost fucking rioted; seeing the kind of people who go to BAM get that pissed was almost as entertaining as the movie. Now me, I'm a little different. I'm with Chris, who was probably tittering like a shithead in the editing room imagining how pissed people were going to get and deciding to do it anyway. But I was also raised on Total Recall, which has the same ending, which I always loved. And seriously, a little ambiguity once in a while never killed anyone. I'm damn proud of Chris walking into the office at Warner Bros with his dick in one hand and the Dark Knight box office receipts in the other and announcing to them “I'm going to spend $160 million of your money on a picture where the audience has to decide whether any of it actually happened or not.” Because what are you going to say to a guy who—as one critic pointed out—made a three-hour allegory about terrorism with a straight-up, unvarnished anarchist for a villain and grossed almost a billion dollars? No? Child please.

Ending aside, let's get down to brass tacks. Yes, Inception has enormous balls. Yes, it pulls off the alchemy of being cerebral and intelligible, but does it win the treble by also being entertaining? And, apart from being entertaining, is it actually good?

“...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Motherfucker, if I have to quote James Joyce to tell you how good a movie is, it's fucking good. It was like they did market research to find out what kind of movie I personally wanted to see, edited out the lesbian sex so they could have a PG-13, and released it. I'll have none of this silly debate about whether people only like Inception because we grade Chris Nolan on a curve, or some wiseass looking at the part of that quote where Molly's like “as well him as another” and start lit-critting at me that I'm still being ambiguous about whether Chris is a good director or not. At this point, the only thing wrong with the guy is that the tops of people's heads are still getting chopped off unnecessarily. That's the last frontier he has to cross on his next picture. Everything I broke his balls about back in February has been replaced by sheer joy.

The glimpses we got in The Dark Knight that Chris finally learned how to direct action bloomed (all right, I'll stop with the Joyce) into all-time classic sequences (and one beautiful bit where, when Leo's machine-gunning guys, Ellen Page goes, “Are you really killing them?” and Leo says “No, they're just projections.” Best. Meta-cinematic joke. Ever.) One of the rules to the three-layered dream sequence at the climax is that whatever happens one layer up from you has an effect on your layer (i.e., IRL affects layer one, layer one affects layer two, layer two affects layer three), so when Yusef is trying to keep the van from getting shot to shittereens by all the machine guns and subsequently drives it off a bridge and creates a freefall, Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets thrown around all over the place in the fancy hotel. While fighting with bad guys.

The first fight was motherfucking ridiculous. The van was swerving around and going up on two wheels and shit. So Joseph Gordon-Levitt, while fighting this large black stuntman, was fucking running up walls and throwing him against walls that turned into floors that turned into ceilings and holy fucking shit. WHEN THE FUCK DID JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT BECOME THE GOD OF ALL THAT IS MALE? Did I miss a Facebook bulletin? Seriously. In a movie with Ken Watanabe and Michael Caine, JGL is the alpha badass? I mean, sure, the English guy is cool, and he cracks a couple jokes about JGL being a tightass. But . . . JGL is the one who gets to kiss Ellen Page. Score one in Joe's column.

The zero-gravity fight, when Joe was floating around trying to figure out how to drop people in zero-gravity (did I mention how much I love cinema, Chris Nolan, and Joseph Gordon-fucking-Levitt?) and the one henchman comes out of nowhere and they fight IN ZERO FUCKING GRAVITY and JGL wins without even breaking a sweat? Yeah, that one was kind of all right. In the sense that cold beer, orgasms, and Low are kind of all right.

But we find ourselves falling into a trap set by critics like Stephanie Zacharek of Movieline, who wrote, “If the career of Christopher Nolan is any indication, we've entered an era in which movies can no longer be great. They can only be 'awesome,' which isn't nearly the same thing.” Her review was negative, mine is kind of orgasmically positive, and yet we come to the same conclusion. I don't think Inception is great, but I do think it is awesome. However, I would argue that Inception succeeds fantastically well in being what it, on one level, is: a summer movie you can nosh popcorn to and whose fight scenes (the first JGL hallway fight, por ejemplo) make the audience (read: me) audibly gasp “Get the FUCK outta here!” I would further argue that, with Inception, Chris Nolan failing to be Jesus Christ and transubstantiate the summer movie into Serious Cinema is not the death knell of Serious Cinema. As long as there are expatriate Iranians and Romanian feminists and hipsters in Williamsburg there will be Serious Cinema. Chris Nolan is a hybrid—he's as smart as all these people making all their serious little art pictures, but his aesthetic influences as a filmmaker are pop directors like Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, and the Wachowskis (comparisons borrowed from the New York Times) instead of Tarkovsky, Godard, or Maya Deren (and I'm not talking shit about them, especially Maya Deren). It's like pop music. You'd be a dipshit if you walked around comparing Paul McCartney to Beethoven (or, to keep the metaphor closer, Penderecki), but that doesn't mean “Things We Said Today” isn't a staggering fucking pop song.

So yeah. I had a great goddamn time at the movies today, man. I leave you with a sign of how mysterious and strange the world we call home truly is; ladies and gentlemen, our new sartorial overlord:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Wonders never cease.

A PRESTIGIOUS MEMENTO FROM THE INSOMNIAC KNIGHT

As a student of the human condition—with a specialty in the more retarded aspects thereof—I spend time lurking various internet fora. The less essential the subject, the more entertaining the forum. As much as I love movies and am consumed by them, I will grant that there are more important things in the world. You'd never get that concession out of your average imdb forum regular.

Matters of life and death are discussed on imdb, thousands of times a minute. Whether The Shawshank Redemption, The Dark Knight, or Avatar is the greatest movie ever made. Multiple, endless threads entitled “Quentin Tarantino: Does He Steal or Pay Homage?” And, most importantly for what I'm leading up to talking about, everyone's “My top 5 directors” list. The greatest thing about these lists is that a good 90% of them consist of the same five directors in various order, and if you relied exclusively on imdb for your assessment of who was who in movies, it would not be difficult to come away with the impression that the following five men are the only people who've ever directed a movie:

Stanley Kubrick
Akira Kurosawa
David Lynch
David Fincher
Christopher Nolan

Not a bad group of directors, by any reckoning. The wallpaper on my desktop is a self-portrait Stanley Kubrick took at the age of 16, so you won't get me to knock Kubrick (“misanthropic” and “fucking Martian” are terms of endearment.)


Kurosawa I've never much liked, but for subjective reasons—his importance to the cinematic canon is indisputable (though I do have my doubts as to how many of the 16 year old Andrew Sarris manqués on imdb have actually seen his pictures; his name is impressive to drop, especially by a 16 year old against another 16 year old).

David Lynch is fuckin' great, but he's so weird that you can't compare him to anybody else. Maybe Buñuel, but even Buñuel made more sense than Lost Highway or Mulholland Dr.

David Fincher is probably his generation's premier visual stylist, but every now and then (lookin' at you, Panic Room, stop trying to hide) he gets bushwacked by a shitty/mundane script. The 16 year old fanboys, on the other hand, recommend David Fincher for literally every single unoccupied directing job in the studio system. The Fantastic Four? Oh, Fincher should direct. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants? Gah, you're even debating this? Hire Fincher! “Man, you know, WALL-E would have been so much better if David Fincher had directed it.” Still, as ridiculous as some of that shit can get (“Dude, Gandhi would have been so dope if Fincher had directed it, bro”) and as much as I stupidly sometimes blame David Fincher himself for the esteem in which 16 year old retards hold him, there's no getting around the fact that he directed Se7en. He directed Fight Club. He directed Zodiac. Aside from the clamoring of high-pitched voices demanding that David Fincher direct a remake of Lassie, he deserves respect, and his place among his generation's elite directors.

And so we come to Christopher Nolan, who by virtue of directing Batman Begins and The Dark Knight has ensured that no white male between the ages of 12 and 35 will ever need Viagra again. Well, except me. Not that I need Viagra (not when one can freeze frame that shot in The Player where Gina Gershon is wearing glasses and a business suit). But I don't get as excited about the comic book movies as most people seem to, because my favorite comics (golden age Heavy Metal, Watchmen, Maus, Transmetropolitan, et al) are unfilmable. As uncool as it is to say these days, I don't consider the gay Adam West Batman to be any kind of crime against humanity (and how gay could it be with Julie Newmar in that catsuit, people?) Sure, The Dark Knight Returns is great, The Killing Joke is brilliantly disturbing and a masterful artistic achievement. Yaaaawwwwwwwn.

The other major result of Nolan's forays into comic book hagiography is his “A CHALLENGER APPEARS” style advent in the middle of discussions about whether David Fincher should direct a remake of She's All That. “LOL you're retarded, Christopher Nolan would be much better and he should cast Christian Bale as Freddy Prinze, Jr.” “STFU you *beep* retard, ONLY DAVID FINCHER CAN DIRECT THE REMAKE OF SHE'S ALL THAT.” (Note, the fact that you can't curse in an imdb forum leads to hilarious teenage Internet Tough Guy swagger-fest posts with dozens of *beep*s peppered throughout.)

But, you may ask, sure these dumbasses who annoy you think that he and David Fincher are the only directors currently working within the Hollywood system, the issue is, can Christopher Nolan actually direct? By the (very low) standards of the Batman series thus far, sure he can. Christopher Nolan is as superior to Joel Schumacher as the Yankees are to my intramural softball team at Bard where I used to have to swing the bat one-handed so I wouldn't spill my beer. He is also—and yes, I am going there—a clear superior to Tim Burton, who is probably the most overrated living director (seriously, keep Ed Wood—which is only marred by the presence of the hideous Sarah Jessica Parker—and toss the whole fucking rest of his career).

But, you may point out, with increasing annoyance that I still haven't gotten to the fucking point yet, just because he's better than Joel Schumacher—he of the Mr. Magoo camera eye—and the lucky bastard who gets to fuck Helena Bonham Carter, that I haven't yet answered the long-delayed thesis topic of this post: CAN CHRISTOPHER NOLAN DIRECT? Let's take a look at the ol' curriculum vitae:


Following (1998)

Not a bad first feature, and very stylish considering the non-existent budget. Gained some cachet when everyone was blowing each other about Memento when the hipper-than-thou resorted to their standard “you only like x because it's popular” gambit and started telling everyone Following was so much better than Memento, which was generic mainstream crap just because it had actors you'd seen before. As a result, a lot of pissed-off Memento fans went in to Following without the generous, expansive, patient attitude you need to watch experimental films. Ultimately, the problem with Following is that it's just interesting enough to keep you watching, but not deep enough to have any kind of satisfying totality. Still, for a first time out with no money, not bad at all.







Memento (2000)

Clever is not a four-letter word, but it was treated that way by a lot of people who thought this was too gimmicky. Sure it was self-consciously clever. Sure the backwards structure was a gimmick. The structure was neither as lame as the naysayers said or as earth-shatteringly profound as the furiously fapping fanboys insist to this day. Me? I thought Memento was just a damn fine night of entertainment. Guy Pearce shoots Joe Pantoliano in the opening scene and we spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out why. Pass the popcorn, baby, I'm hooked.

We spend a while explaining Guy Pearce's amnesia, which seems variously bullshit contrivance and kinda half-ass plausible, but a whole lot of time looking at his crazy tattoos, trying to figure out just who the hell Joe Pantoliano is, just who the hell Carrie-Ann Moss is, and seriously, trying to figure out who Guy Pearce is. The story unfolds at a nice, brisk clip, and all kinds of cool little touches are thrown in, like the classic:

Guy Pearce (voice-over): Okay, so I'm chasing this guy . . .
Other Guy fires gun at Guy Pearce.
Guy Pearce (voice-over): Scratch that, he's chasing me.

A lot of people don't buy the ending. Not me, I think it's terrific. But the reason I've always liked Memento is because—in spite of its low budget and bona fide independent status—I judge it by the same standards as a normal Hollywood thriller. Because, in spite of all the cute writing, Memento is shot and cut in a very dull, stiff, conventional fashion. It's not even in that unobtrusive Sidney Lumet style where he's pulling his Network false humility “I don't want to get in the way of the script” routine. Memento is actually really boringly shot. That doesn't get in the way of it being good, since the script is the thing here, but still. It's the one Achilles heel Memento has.


Insomnia (2002)


It's actually this movie that made me decide to do this post, because I've been up for about 36 hours for a variety of highly entertaining reasons. I'm not quite at the point Al Pacino is toward the end when he's supporting his entire body weight with his beer bottle while Nicky Katt tells the greatest joke ever: “What has two thumbs and loves blowjobs? [points thumbs toward self] Thissssss guyyyyyyyyyyyy . . .” But don't fuck with me. Because I'll explode.

Insomnia was first a Norwegian picture with Stellan “THESE ORDERS ARE SEVEN BLOODY HOURS OLD” Skarsgard, easily one of the coolest actors currently breathing. The original Insomnia was pretty good, it was a little stiffly paced and flat visually, but Stellan Skarsgard gets fuckin meshuggeneh (always fun to watch).

The remake is a borderline pile of horseshit involving Al Pacino's inability to sleep because it's sunny 24 hours a day in Alaska in the summer. Actually, the real reason Al Pacino can't sleep is because Robin Williams is running around overacting and for truly stupid reasons has decided that he's going to announce that he's the killer to the cops. And he lights up Al Pacino's partner—the guy from the Hal Hartley movies—right in front of Al Pacino, which leads to some gravelly-voiced angst. And a whole lotta not sleepin'.

Now, I'm not one to poke holes in verisimilitude unless you pull some Straw Dogs shit on me and I have no choice. But I have insomnia. Insomnia doesn't mean you're awake all the time. When it hits you bad, what happens is, you watch X-Files reruns until 5 in the morning and then putter around your apartment singing Bob Dylan songs to yourself until the 6am morning news starts, and about a half hour into the morning news you blink your eyes and it's 10-11 and time for coffee. Also, that rarely happens consecutive nights without a couple hundred dollars worth of cocaine, and I've never had a couple hundred dollars worth of cocaine. Anyway. Al Pacino being awake for five, ten, however many bullshit amount of days in a row it's supposed to be is just fuckin dumb. I don't care if he is Al Pacino, he'd be dead, or permanently insane.

Oddly enough, even though it's fucking retarded and there are about ninety annoying flaws—many of them in the movie's central nervous system—Insomnia is not that bad a movie. Partly because Chris kind of learned how to shoot, or at least without that fucking arthritic shooting and cutting he had the last time out. Partly because, until pretty recently, sending in Al Pacino to save a shitty movie about MEN was so reliable you could set your watch by it. In any case, it's not worth rewatching, but it doesn't suck, and it served its purpose in proving that Chris could direct a studio picture.


Batman Begins (2005)

My first exposure to this movie was in the form of a phone call from my friend Steve in Chicago. I waded through a little screaming and hyperventilating, about thirty-five fucks, and various and sundry expressions of frustration and displeasure before I realized Steve was talking about how badly filmed the action scenes in Batman Begins were.

Me: “They're really that bad, that you notice they're that bad? They're not just undistinguished?”
Steve: “No, dude, they fucking suck. Motherfucking the whole thing is fucking shot in fucking closeups and shit is so blurry you can't even tell who's fucking doing what to fucking whom!”
Me: “Well, scratch going to see Batman.”

Because, really, life is too short. I did finally see Batman Begins but not until it was on HBO, and the action scenes sure did look like shit, but I wasn't sure whether it was just pan-and-scan mutilation or what, so I Netflixed it for the sole purpose of determining whether the action scenes actually did suck that much. Sadly, something was lost in translation seeing the whole-screen image: the action scenes still sucked, but they didn't suck balls. I had been kind of excited watching Christian Bale kick ninjas in the nuts while making that Welsh taking-a-dump sound on HBO, because the possibility existed that in viewing the totality of the image a level of ineptitude yet to be glimpsed in the history of mankind, let alone cinema, might present itself. But no.

The rest of the movie isn't that bad, although they take for-goddamn-ever with the origin story and the villains, aside from Cilian Murphy as the Scarecrow, are gay. Not good gay, not George Sanders saying “read my column, the minutes will fly by like hours.” Gay. 7th grade gay. First of all, Batman fighting the fucking Mafia? And Gerald from the fucking Full Monty is not only an American but Italian? Fuck outta here. Ra's Al Ghul. Feh.

But, like I was saying before I got sidetracked, the movie really isn't that bad. Christian Bale does a decent job, though I must have missed the part where he has his vocal cords removed every time he puts on the Batman outfit. However, when he gets done doing donuts in that military vehicle and says to Morgan Freeman, “Does it come in black?” Yeah, I surrender, that was good. And I don't care if I'm the one cranky old fart left who remembers that the pre-Scientology brainwash Katie Holmes was hot. She was. Sure she was in over her head in this movie. The fucking director was in over his head in this movie.

Again, that Insomnia caveat. In spite of all this, not that bad. And, unlike Insomnia, rewatchable. But make sure you have some friends and some beer so you can movieoke the action scenes Rocky Horror/The Room style.


The Prestige (2006)

Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale are rival magicians who get competitive at the expense of innocent people's lives and their own souls. Scarlett Johansson shows a lot of moxie trying an English accent. Michael Caine manages to stay awake long enough to act in a couple scenes. But—and note, the universe decided to put “Cat People” on my iTunes right when I started talking about this movie—David Bowie plays Nikola Tesla in this. Which means that The Prestige is awesome.

The movie looks great—Chris, a couple weird choices like having a couple exteriors in Victorian London be modern-day LA notwithinstanding, has been coming along nicely with the visuals—and the constant mindfucks that Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale lay on each other (and the audience) are entertaining up to a point, but the third act feels as long as the whole first two put together, just because there comes a point when shit just gets a little too “get the fuck out of here.” And so The Prestige is ultimately three-quarters of a pretty sweet movie, but that three-quarters is damn fine. (For comparison's sake, see also The Illusionist, which isn't as good but compensates by being a bit more laid-back and having a more satisfying ending).

Minor aside: DAVID BOWIE PLAYS NIKOLA TESLA. Note the following massive achievements in David Bowie's acting career:

---managed, in The Man Who Fell To Earth, to look more like an alien as basically The Thin White Duke than he did as Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane.
---played the Elephant Man.
---those tight pants in Labyrinth.
---responsible for the single strangest sequence in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, for which he should receive an honorary Oscar, the Nobel Prize, and a brand new car.
---nailed Andy Warhol. As in, played the part of Andy Warhol well. I don't know if he ever nailed nailed Andy Warhol, I've only heard the same Mick Jagger rumors you have, though “Angie” was not about Angie Bowie, it was about Anita Pallenberg.
---turned in the single coolest cameo ever in Zoolander. Don't look at me like that, it was great.


The Dark Knight (2008)

Rectifies a huge problem with the first Batman by introducing a proper villain: The Joker. Heath Ledger was the truth, RIP. The whole cast is pretty great, too; Aaron Eckhart in particular is tremendous. Christian Bale, though, still has that weird removed-vocal-cords voice as Batman.

One really surprising thing here is that out of nowhere Chris jumped in his progression as a visual stylist from retard to functioning retard to average Joe to HOLY FUCKING SHIT. The Dark Knight is not only a gorgeous-looking movie, it's gorgeous with a swagger, like, yeah bitch, watch this crane shot, that'll show you motherfuckers raggin' on the crappy framing in Memento.

Although Chris always was a pretty good writer, his writing took a similar evolutionary leap as his camerawork. There are dozens of meticulously constructed subplots, little touches of brilliance, and the script provides Tiny Lister with the best part of his career since he played the president of the universe in The Fifth Element (the shame of being told “you got knocked the FUCK OUT” by Chris Tucker in Friday now a distant memory).

Alas, the one caveat with The Dark Knight: it's too fucking long. But you have to hand it to Chris, at this point in his career, that's less of a flaw than some of the millstones he was dragging around earlier. Movies that are too fucking long are in fashion. But this really is too fucking long. After the Joker blows up the hospital the pacing falls off the rails and the resolution—which is goddamn depressing, dude—takes forever to come together even though it's so obvious as to be foretold. But, again, like The Prestige, the first three-quarters makes up for the rest. And the first three-quarters of The Dark Knight can hold its own with anything in cinema. The only reason dickheads like me harp on it not being perfect is because it was so close to perfection.


Inception (2010)

This will serve as the conclusion, since Inception's not out yet. But I'll answer the long-ago posed question (“Can Christopher Nolan direct?”) by saying, I'm every bit as excited about Inception as all those fanboys I insult constantly. Yes, Christopher Nolan can direct. His pictures are flawed, but who among us is not? Even when his movies don't work, he still has a level of intelligence and balls uncommon among mainstream directors. And when his movies do work, they can even make someone like me become passionately invested in a comic book movie. That takes skill, boys and girls.

So, come join me over on imdb, where we can read about the rumors about Chris Nolan and David Fincher's heated competition to snag the Little Orphan Annie reboot! But proceed with caution, and think before you post.