C'MON OSCAR, LET'S GO FOR A RIDE, VOL. II: 2010-11 PREDICTIONS

Wave your gold statuettes in the motherfuckin air, and wave them motherfuckers like they were based on a selection process that was remotely a meritocracy rather than a labyrinthine web of politics and stupid old people bullshit! (Wait, that's not how the song goes?) FUCK IT, IT'S OSCAR TIME!!!

Last year's Oscars were largely a snore because there were two legitimately great movies (The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds), a handful of really good ones (like Precious and District 9, for one of the funnier juxtapositions in living memory), and a flaming $300 million turd (Avatar), and there was no suspense whatsoever about who was actually going to win, with the only surprise being that Katherine Bigelow actually won Best Director (which wasn't really even much of one). This year's a different story, as 2010 was one of the sneakiest good years for movies on record.

The year started out with a wet stinky fart with Avatar dominating the box office for like ever, since no one seemed to give a fuck that it was fucking retarded and that moreover the FX weren't even that cool (sorry, civilians, you can get the same experience by eating mushrooms and watching the Smurfs, for a lot less money) and then Clash of the Titans coming along being like “Hey, we can take the lead guy from Avatar and suck even more!” and civilized people generally reaching for the whiskey bottle and wondering whether the Vicodin would be better in pill form or chopped up and snorted.

Then all of a sudden in the middle of the year shit started to absolutely fucking rock. Inception, The Kids are All Right, Winter's Bone started a litany of interesting, ambitious pictures that held reasonably steady until the end of the year, by which time there was a legitimately impressive roster of releases, with some excellent performances by actors, some truly visionary directing, and some fuckin a solid writing.

This means that, unlike last year, there were actual worthy nominees who got snubbed; Chris Nolan took the most public hit, not being nominated for Best Director for Inception, whose editor Lee Smith got royally fucked, not even getting nominated for one of the most magnificent editing jobs perhaps in decades. Best Director and Best Editing are the only categories where they really messed up the nominations (well, and a couple others that we'll get to later). Best Director, in a just universe, looks like this:

Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan
Lisa Cholodenko, The Kids Are All Right
David Fincher, The Social Network
Debra Granik, Winter's Bone
Chris Nolan, Inception

That's your five. Fuck David Russell and a polite request to vacate the premises to Tom Hooper and the Coen Brothers (who justfuckinbarely miss the cut, I am not pissing on True Grit in any way). But, hey, them's the bricks.

Also unlike last year, there's some actual uncertainty in the acting categories. Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Christoph Waltz, and Mo'Nique had that shit on lock even before the nominations were announced. This year, they don't even need to bother announcing the other four dudes in the Best Actor category, but the other three acting categories are still kind of up for grabs (it's a shame Jennifer Lawrence ain't got a shot). This necessitates the finest in analysis, from Movies By Bowes' ™ crack staff of one crackhead. Let's start with the ones I haven't any fuckin clue about:


Best Foreign Language Film

Always the most arbitrary award, because it never goes to the one movie anyone's ever heard of. It won't be Biutiful for that reason (also it apparently kind of sucks), and it won't be Dogtooth because it was the one everyone jumped to when they went “well it won't be Biutiful because people have heard of it.” I'm rooting for the Danish picture In A Better World so one woman director gets an Oscar, since Debra Granik and Lisa Cholodenko got boned by the nominating committee.


Best Live Action Short/Best Animated Short/Best Documentary Short Subject

No fuckin idea. But hey, you don't know either, that makes two of us.


Best Documentary Feature

This category's the most fun it's been years, with three king-hell badass pictures right at the top: Exit Through The Gift Shop, which isn't going to win—alas—though not winning will actually probably be better for Banksy's career than winning, just because it's hard to be anti-establishment with an Oscar (just ask Eminem) and we fuckin need Banksy to be anti-establishment. Also, if he did some shit like accept the fuckin thing as himself it'd be like, “right, you really are just some dude from Bristol in his late 30s. Fart.”

That means it's down to Inside Job and Restrepo, which means it's a coin flip: do you go with the—former, intellectually harrowing account of how far up our ass Wall Street's dick is, or do you go with the—latter—viscerally harrowing thing about combat troops in war? Guess it all depends which side of the bed the Academy wakes up on, but it'll be one of those two.

That being said, the best movie in this category is Exit Through The Gift Shop. Hands fucking down. Banksy is a fucking god.


Best Original Score

Hans Zimmer, motherfuckers.


Best Original Song

I don't really give a fuck. Randy Newman? Sure, why not. I'll be taking a piss when this one's presented anyway. This is why we either need to take a page out of Bollywood's book and actually fucking write good songs for this category, or just change the goddamn thing to “Best Needle Drop” and give the award to the hipster who decided to score a gun battle to “Two Weeks” by Grizzly Bear.


Best Sound Editing/Best Sound Mixing

Both of these joints had best be going to Inception. I watched Inception with headphones on a train coming back from Christmas and I was like “fuck, they should call this movie Erection.” Because of the sound, you see. Well, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's suits ahem but that's not the point. Seriously, if either of these categories go to anything else, the whole thing is a fucking fraud.


Best Makeup

The Wolfman. Sure it sucked, but Rick Baker owns.


Best Costume Design

An utterly invalid category this year due to the absence of Inception. Any movie responsible for that many people calling me gay for babbling about Joseph Gordon-Levitt's tailoring should fucking win Best Costume Design. Point fucking blank.


Best Editing

No Inception = The Social Network by default. But it's fucking bullshit that Inception is not nominated in this category. Seriously, we need to find out whose wives Chris Nolan has been fucking.


Best Visual Effects

No Tron: Legacy (which should have won, not even being nominated is retarded) = Inception wins by default. “Oh, there's your consolation prize for not being nominated for editing, Inception.” Yeah, suck my dick, Oscar.


Best Cinematography

A good field of nominees. Can't really go wrong with any of them except The King's Speech, which isn't even that bad, it's just the weakest of the five. General consensus is it's Roger Deakins' year for True Grit; I was amazed that he hasn't won yet, and that shit was gorgeous, so it's not even a consolation prize.


Best Animated Feature

Fuck knows. Don't care. I hear How To Train Your Dragon is good, but as part of the .0001 “Fuck Pixar” % of humanity, I just don't want it to be Toy Story even though it will be. I'm sorry, Pixar movies are so emotionally manipulative it's scary: what happens when Disney decides to use those skills for evil? HUH???


And now . . . the biggies:


Best Adapted Screenplay

Aaron Sorkin and a cast of thousands, and could very well end up being The Social Network's token Oscar, if the Academy indeed makes the howlingly retarded decision to fuck David Fincher. Unfortunately, this means Debra Granik goes home empty-handed, but hopefully she cleans up at the Spirit Awards.


Best Original Screenplay

Chris Nolan should win, but they're probably giving it to The King's Speech, which annoys me because not only does it wantonly fuck Chris Nolan over it's also an insult to Lisa Cholodenko, which is just like goddamn it man. Fuck the Oscars are annoying sometimes. Anyway, in a just world this is a coin flip between Inception and The Kids Are All Right, because you cannot compare those pictures. But this is not a just world.


Best Supporting Actress

Anybody's guess. Most likely are Melissa Leo for The Fighter or Hallee Steinfeld for True Grit, but more likely Melissa Leo.


Best Supporting Actor

A two-man race between Christian Bale and Geoffrey Rush. Bale's not as much of a favorite as people seem to think, but he still probably takes it so the Academy never has to vote for him again for anything (people really don't like that cat for whatever reason).


Best Actress

Another two-way race, this one between Annette Bening and Natalie Portman. I don't know why everyone's so convinced Natalie Portman has this one in the bag, because I'm goddamn near positive Annette Bening's winning it. First of all, this is another instance where you can't compare the performance. Natalie Portman in Black Swan gives one of those high-wire act, teetering on the brink of madness performances that are really flashy and everything but really, bizarrely, aren't as reliant on talent as they are a willingness to push oneself. It still, obviously, takes talent to do it that well.

Annette Bening, on the other hand, gives a much subtler performance in The Kids Are All Right. Her character is a bit of a control freak, and extremely uptight, and in a lesser movie with a lesser actress could have just been the most annoying fucking person on the planet. In Annette's hands, the character becomes enormously compelling, human, and the kind of person the audience can actually relate to. That, clearly, is not a substitute for artistic achievement, but Annette's attention to detail takes surgical skill (and I'm not just phrasing it that way because she plays a surgeon, but holy shit, how bout that, huh?)

You can't compare the two performances, but I personally am taking Annette, and I'm taking her to win because of the Hilary Swank losses in '99 and '04. Politics are a way bigger part of this than anyone wants to admit, but in this case, it'd be a deserved win.


Best Actor

Colin Firth. The biggest lock the entire night. It ain't a race, it's a coronation. But oh . . . what about his speech? Bahahahahahaha TIP YOUR WAITRESS MUTHAFUCKAAAAAAAA


Best Director

Okay. Even if they hadn't fucked up the nominations in this category and Nolan was still in, it'd be a coin flip between David Fincher and Debra Granik, if we were doing this on straight quality, with no politics or box office or anything thrown in. So, post-fuckup, it should be David Fincher finally getting some recognition for being fucking David Fincher (and The Social Network was a worthy picture to win for). But lo and behold, there's this absurd tantrum the old people are throwing where they're pretending that The King's Speech is this legendary, earth-shattering thing. It's a good movie, but come the fuck on, man. And Tom Hooper's just sort of there. Best Director means Best Fucking Director. That means David Fincher, of these five.

The probability at this point is probably 60/40 for Tom Hooper to win, but don't be surprised if Fincher wins. The fact that he's the underdog is absolutely fucking ridiculous, though.


Best Picture

It's The King's Speech. It's been The King's Speech since the old people threw their coup d'etat and decided The Social Network never existed. It's not an apocalyptic disaster if The King's Speech wins (it is good), but it's a sign that critics are being more completely marginalized. Critics, the people who actually study movies, were all in agreement: The Social Network was by far the best movie of the year. Then all of a sudden the guilds with all the old people give out their awards and suddenly The King's Speech is the only movie that came out in 2010? Child please. The old people are just pissed because a movie about all that computer shit that they're still convinced is a fad—AFTER ALMOST 20 YEARS OF THE FUCKING INTERNET—had all these damn critics all in a tizzy. Again, The King's Speech is a good movie. And yes, The Social Network is, at best, a parable, and at worst near-total fiction. But for fuck's sake, it's a brilliantly made movie. It's the best Hollywood movie in years. The choice between a good movie, that's nice and makes you feel good, and a great movie, that's a work of genius and makes you think is not a fucking choice. Great is better than good. But people prefer to feel than to think, so it's The King's Speech.

This isn't even taking into account the other movies that were better than The King's Speech this year: Black Swan, Winter's Bone, The Kids Are All Right, Inception, True Grit (Dabangg, Endhiran, Tees Maar Khan . . .) But, in spite of all my ranting, the fact that there are this many pictures that were better than the (admittedly good) heir apparent to the Best Picture statue is a sign that 2010 was a pretty fuckin good year for movies.


The other, more general, good news is, to use one classic example, Citizen Kane is Citizen Kane and me and maybe other four people under the age of 60 have seen How Green Was My Valley. I'd say Fight Club has more enduring relevance than American Beauty, but that'd just make me mad about David Fincher inevitably getting banjaxed this year. But the point I started to make, with Kane, is that the good news is, it's just the Oscars. History has a better voting record than the Academy.

NOT ONE, BUT THREE, 2010 TOP TENS!

I considered not even doing a Top 10 this year, or doing something weird under the pretense that I was somehow above whoring for traffic. Please. I will wear heels with goldfish in them for more traffic. So, a Top 10 list it is. No such petty considerations as “not having seen everything” or “methadone-shaky critical credibility” are gonna stop this guy.

You know what? Fuck it, I'm going to do more than one Top 10 list. Let's start with . . .


Top 10 Pictures I Haven't Seen

True Grit
Fair Game
Biutiful
The King's Speech
Four Lions
Animal Kingdom
The Killer Inside Me
Blue Valentine
A Solitary Man

All of which I'm looking forward to for a variety of reasons. True Grit needs no introduction: I love the Coens, I love Jeff Bridges when he's got a good script and a real director, and I didn't like the original all that much (Duke was awesome, movie was half-assed), making it a prime candidate for a remake. Fair Game seems like a prime candidate for one of my periodic world-affairs nerd-outs, and a fine opportunity to smile at Naomi Watts for a couple hours; also, I like Doug Liman when he has an actual script.

Biutiful looks like it's going to be two-plus hours of misery wank, but Alejandro González Iñárritu makes me really want to sit through two-plus hours of misery wank. I watched Babel when I was coming down from a migraine and thought it was the tits (and no, not just because of Rinko Kikuchi's), so I'll give Biutiful a shot, aunque Guillermo Arriaga no escribió esta película. Nadie es perfecto.

The King's Speech is one of my soft spot pictures. I have this fatal weakness for diagrammatic feel-good English pictures about people overcoming adversity. It helps that most of them, take Billy Elliott for one shining awesome fucking example, are pretty good. And I like that this one's got a twist: the guy who needs to overcome adversity . . . is the king! Jolly good, cheerio, pip pip old chap. Of course, it's Colin Firth, and I'd watch Colin Firth read the letters to the editor from the Sunday Times. Anyway, all's I'm saying is, if you want me to defend my love of formulaic British feel good movies, all you're getting in response is a “fuck you” and maybe a “stop bothering me” if I'm feeling loquacious.

All I heard about Four Lions is that it's got serious balls and the director's crazy. That always gets my antennae perky. Animal Kingdom's Australian, say no more. The Killer Inside Me is Jim Thompson, Michael Winterbottom, and C-Fleck, which intrigues me, as all three of those motherfuckers were/are nuts. Blue Valentine made the four people who've seen it walk around stunned with smoke coming out their ears, which always intrigues me. And my mom told me to see A Solitary Man, and I'm a good son. (EDIT 1/1/11: Mom: "You made a mistake. It was Animal Kingdom I told you was good. I have Solitary Man on my queue, I haven't seen it yet." Whoops. Still want to see A Solitary Man, though.)


Top 10 Movies That Weren't Good Per Se (Or Even Actually Movies) But That I Still Liked

From Paris With Love
The Warrior's Way
Red
The Town
Heavy Rain
Lost
The Runaways
The A-Team
Tron: Legacy
Human Target

Again, not every movie on this list is good, and only seven of them are movies (and you can make a decent argument that some of the movies aren't even movies). But show me someone who only likes things that are good, and I'll show you a morally consistent tight-ass who has a lot less fun than I do.

From Paris With Love I've already yakked at length about both here and at Premiere, but the bottom line is that movie is fun. It takes time-dishonored action movie clichés and puts slight, subtle, intelligently conceived variations on them, kind of like the way a skilled guitar player can make an ordinary chord progression sound like something exciting and special. Which leads to another way to describe From Paris With Love. It's rock 'n' roll. And I like rock 'n' roll.

I covered both The Warrior's Way and Red for Tor.com; you can revisit those reviews if you like, or if not I'll say both were stylishly executed diversions, if lacking that feverish “let's do another line!” intensity of From Paris With Love. Jang Dong-Gun handles a sword almost as well as Helen Mirren does a machine gun, and if you know me you know movies with cool swordfights and Dame Helen Mirren firing machine guns get much love from yours truly.

The Town (aka The Fackin Tann) is a new entry in the pahk the cah at Hahvid Yahd subgenre of pictures where actors go up to Boston, get unflattering haircuts, and develop accents of the highest cartoonishness. B-Fleck did a fine job directing this picture, and the cast is awesome (Jon Hamm kicks mucho ass as the one guy in the movie without a Bahhhhhhhhstin accent; despite this, it's great fun to bellow “DAWN FACKIN DRAYPA!” whenever he does anything cool, which is frequently) but the script is dumb, and the whole thing with B-Fleck falling in love with Rebecca Hall teeters on the brink of full retard; wondering whether it'll tip or not is more suspenseful than whether B-Fleck and Jeremy Fackin Renner ah gonna fackin get away with the final fackin heist. Still, flaws aside, B-Fleck's here to stay as a director; I just hope he gets more/better help with the script next time.

And now, Heavy Rain, which isn't a movie, per se. But it kind of is. I don't have anything new to add to this, except regret that that La Marseillaise joke didn't work better.

Lost, too, not a movie, but that didn't stop me from yammering like a coked-up parrot about it back in May. Those couple months I spent with Lost were great fun, and concentrating the geek-out in a small period of time probably helped me enjoy it more than the people who suffered through the weeks between episodes only to find out “FUCK it's a fucking Kate episode.” I would be like “Ah, a Kate episode. Oh well.” I think its rewatchability was killed by the way in which it resolved, but that doesn't diminish the first time through one bit. It also makes it a good choice for a localized thing about “best of” a given year, as it was a much-enjoyed one-shot.

The Runaways was a weird movie. Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart were both really good in it, though their performances were a lot more committed to depth and totality than writer/director Floria Sigismondi's script and direction, both of which were concerned almost completely with surface. The Runaways were a singularity in pop music history, an all-girl rock band that charted at a time when that simply did not happen. The Runaways is one of many “rise to fame/crash and burn” music biopics, which is kind of sad, because it could have been more. Still, it's a watchable movie, and should get a lot of credit for avoiding major ickiness in re: 15-year-old Dakota Fanning doing coke and making out with chicks. Anyone looking to perv on that stuff will be disappointed, which is a credit to Sigismondi.

I won't defend The A-Team, partly because I don't remember anything about it except Sharlto Copley being awesome and Jon Hamm (again) showing up at the end as the villain for the sequel if there's going to be one. I really should watch Mad Men at some point, that guy rules.

Again, no defending Tron: Legacy. It was energetic. And Olivia Wilde, though painfully underused, sure is pretty. Empty-headed fun is a proud tradition in cinema. But, you know, not on a Ten Best list.

The not-so-good/not-a-movie list concludes with Fox TV series Human Target, which is pretty good, but not a movie. The story of enigmatic ex-assassin turned protector of the innocent Christopher Chance (Mark Valley), Human Target is well done on a modest scale, with pretty good action and an engaging supporting cast headed by Chi McBride and Jackie Earle Haley. It's an old-school TV show with a decent sense of the modern age, inasmuch as an old-school TV show needs to have such a thing. And, like most of the things on this list, it's something I enjoy very much but can't/won't defend.


And now, with no further ado . . . the TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2010 (that I've seen), in ascending order from 10 to 1:

Endhiran

Singing, dancing, SF, Indian Voltron Cobra, and Aishwarya Rai. This one's good for anyone with the capacity for joy in their lives. More here and here. This picture got me very excited about getting more into Indian movies, and while I'm still at the very early stages, I'm going to keep on it.


Runaway

Oh, Kanye. Kanye, Kanye, Kanye. The second I heard he directed a 35 minute video for his 9 minute single, I immediately said, “I need to see this.” And OH holy shit. He apparently worked closely with noted hip-hop video director Hype Williams on this, but really Runaway is like Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch showed up at Yeezy's place and said “What's good, baby, you want to split a five-strip between the three of us?” and gave Ye three tabs and a camera and watched as he staggered giggling out into the woods. The scene where Kanye gets pissed at the fancy dinner party because the snooty fucks are snickering about his half-phoenix/half-Victoria's Secret model girlfriend and Kanye stomps over to the piano and starts playing “Runaway” as all the ballerinas come in . . . well it's just as great as the description makes it sound. The movie was a great and thoroughly apt preview for Kanye's album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, as it's just as beautifully crafted and duckfucking insane as the record.


Kick-Ass/Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Although these two pictures are quite different, I mention them together because of the comic book connection, and because both frequently made me go, “Wow, is this really happening . . .?” One main difference is that the titular protagonist of Kick-Ass assumes the mantle of comic book hero as a conscious choice, while Scott Pilgrim has it thrust upon him. Both are tales of dorks who achieve great things and end up with stunningly beautiful geek-friendly girlfriends. Despite that similarity, though, these two pictures are vastly different, similar only in their being fantastically entertaining in their own ways.

One thing I do have to say though, as awesome and capable of taking care of herself as Hit-Girl was (Chloe Moretz is ridiculously good in the role), when Mark Strong punches her in the face during the climactic boss fight, it bothered me. Sure she'd killed all his dudes. But she's a fuckin 10 year old girl, man.

(One final note, speaking of Mark Strong: seeing all those English guys, like Dexter Fletcher and Jason Flemyng, playing NYC Italian mobsters was a lot of fun).


The Kids Are All Right

I'm a very big Lisa Cholodenko fan, and have been for years, and was thrilled when she finally put a new picture out (she's been directing TV for forever). I love the way she deals with sexuality, leaving politics out of the question and focusing on the way things actually are. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore's marriage is one of the best, richest, and most honest portrayals of a romantic relationship I've ever seen, and bonus points to Lisa C. for not turning Julianne Moore into a villain for banging Mark Ruffalo out of validation, instead treating her like a real person who made a mistake. Also, leaving it relatively ambiguous though guardedly optimistic about the future of the marriage at the end of the picture is a nice touch, and one of my favorite things about Lisa Cholodenko as a director: she leaves all the cheap melodramatic Hollywood shit at the door and says “All right, people, let's make an actual fucking movie.” God, I love her.


The American

Hey there, Anton Corbijn. Thanks very much for this picture. George Clooney as an aging, shadowy, tight-lipped guy who makes custom-built weapons for assassins and works for a Dutch guy who won a bet with Lance Henriksen to see who could be more of a leathery badass? Sure, I'm all in. Oh, and thanks as well for Irina Bjorklund, Thekla Reuten, and Violante Placido (che bellezza immortale e celestiale . . .)

Every single shot in this movie is so beautiful you feel it. The execution is beautiful, elegant, precise. Oh, and anyone who claims this picture is boring either needs a fucking brain transplant or got given a bootleg copy of The Limits of Control (which was similar in premise and did suck) by mistake.


Inception

I still stand by all this, with the addendum that it gets even better with repeated viewings. And watching it with headphones on is an exquisite experience if you're into sound. It's also a lot less confusing each revisit; if you pay attention, it's all laid right out for you right there. Bravo, Chris Nolan.

By the way, I know box office grosses don't necessarily mean anything, but it rules that this picture of all pictures has made $800+ million.


Black Swan

Again, I pretty much said all I needed to with this post. Jesus Christ, Natalie Portman was good in this. And remember, nearly everything from the first act break on is a metaphor.


The Social Network

No more need be said than this: a movie that not four months ago I thought of on a level with Ridley Scott's rumored adaptation of Monopoly, I know think is the best studio picture since . . . fuck, I don't know. Best in years. For a movie that's so heavily fictionalized, it has an amazing sense of this time and place, the modern age. More here.


And, finally, the #1 . . . drum roll . . .


Winter's Bone

Give Debra Granik what she needs. And get the fuck out of her way. She's one of the best directors in the world right now. And let's see what we can do about making sure Jennifer Lawrence doesn't have to do fucking comic book movies, shall we? I know Matthew “Kick-Ass” Vaughn is directing that X-Men thing she's in next, and he's awesome, but I don't want any fucking around with an actor this good. Jennifer Lawrence HAS IT. Give her roles where she can act. I know this is asking a lot (Gender equity? Crazy talk), but let's give it a try.


Well, that's it. Angry comments about shit I “forgot” are always welcome. Happy New Year, everyone!

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.