INCEPTION

Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard and Michael Caine

Eames: If we’re going to perform inception, then we’re going to need imagination.

I knew there was a good reason I fought so hard every night to hold on to my conscious mind and not let my unconscious mind take over.  I’ve got to make sure no pesky extractors get in there to steal my highly sought after secret thoughts.  More importantly, I’ve got to make sure that nobody gets in there and plants an idea that I would go on to believe is entirely my own upon waking up.  This latter assault is called INCEPTION and the extremely dangerous process involved in making it happen is the premise for Christopher Nolan’s film of the same name.  Nolan’s skill as a director gives him the tools to delve deep into the viewer’s mind but after waking up from the dreamlike state INCEPTION creates so delicately, it doesn’t feel like he left anything in there to hold on to.

In order for Nolan to sell INCEPTION, he has a lot of ideas to implant in the audience from the very beginning.  Leonardo Dicaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt play professional dreamers, men who, when connected to a fancy box that puts you right to sleep at the push of a button (where can I get this box?!), enter other people’s subconscious minds.  It’s way more complicated than that and INCEPTION does its best to ensure the audience understands its complex ideas.  To begin with, Nolan starts the action with Dicaprio and Gordon-Levitt in the middle of a mission.  This way we get to see first hand what their alternate reality is and it conveniently allows for explanation between characters indirectly aimed to help the audience situate itself.  Comparisons to THE MATRIX are not shocking to me.  Like that film, INCEPTION is a visual marvel that requires a lot of contextualization to get lost in.  And again, like that film, explanatory scenes that stop the action cold are necessary to keep everyone following.  THE MATRIX does one thing differently though – it makes it all about us at the same time so once we do get lost, we have just as much to lose.

Once everyone is on the same page, which takes almost half the film to accomplish, the real mission begins.  Inception, the concept of that is, is thought to be purely theoretical but Dicaprio is determined to make it a reality.  Dicaprio’s team, also including Ellen Page, Ken Wantanabe and the deliciously smarmy Tom Hardy, has been contracted to go deep into the mind of Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), the heir to an internationally successful corporation.  Once they get deep enough, they must implant an idea that will trigger Fischer to want to dissolve the company when he wakes up.  As the leader of the team, and the dreamer who has been doing this the longest, Dicaprio’s personal issues, primarily the ones involving his secretive past with his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), keep creeping into the collectively shared dreams.  Here, dreams and memories get easily confused and threaten to bring everything toppling down.  The corporate espionage angle though keeps the audience at a safe distance when we should all be able to draw upon the shared experience of getting lost in dreams.

Visually, there is no question that INCEPTION will have you dreaming of the fantastical sets and effects long after you’ve seen it.  As Nolan takes us deeper into dreams within dreams, he has total control over all the layers he has designed so deliberately one on top of the other.  He wows us with everything going on around us and grips us by making the success of the mission dependent upon a multitude of factors that must align perfectly within a very small window of time.  Considering how much work is involved in getting this deep and keeping all these layers balanced though, it seems odd that Nolan doesn’t appear to have any grander a purpose to achieving this feat other than proving he could.  In order for inception to work, to ensure the idea really sticks, the subject has to believe that the idea came from himself, like true inspiration.  Nolan burrows into the extreme depths of his subjects but leaves little to nothing insightful behind in the viewer to inspire us when we all wake up.

It's still a good time, mind you ...

DVD Review: UNCERTAINTY

Written and Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins

E1 Entertainment

The inability to make up one's mind about something can be infuriating.  When the choice at hand is one that will certainly alter the course of your life, that frustration can almost be debilitating.  Life will randomly throw explosives at you and there is no way for you to know where everything will land once you set those bombs off.  You do know that if you do nothing about them though, they will still go off.  If only we could split our lives into two separate entities, just for a day.  Then, maybe we could see that all roads lead us somewhere and that even though this somewhere is not where we thought we would end up, it isn't necessarily a bad place to be.  Unfortunately, life doesn't work that way but that doesn't stop writer/directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel from exploring just that in their latest collaboration, UNCERTAINTY.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 DAYS OF SUMMER) and Lynn Collins (X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE) star as Bobby and Kate, a couple with choices to make about their future.  Their journey begins on the Brooklyn Bridge and for the first five minutes, it would appear as though we are just as doomed as they are.  To set up their highly conceptual plot, McGehee and Siegel have the lovers speaking symbolism instead of words.  It is as painful coming out of their mouths as it is going into our ears.  Essentially, they are debating whether or not they can really do what they've been thinking about doing without actually saying what that is.  The choice is to go for it and suddenly they each sprint in opposite directions and meet up with alternate reality versions of each other on the other side.  Let the abstraction begin!

While following the initial split is jarring, the split lives themselves are actually quite engaging.  Gordon-Levitt and Collins work well together and the timely manner in which their secrets and troubles are revealed to us is properly paced, allowing us to be with them in their confusion.  Consequently, it is easy to sympathize and hope for their future.  It is also easy to get lost in the colorful and carefully shot New York City backdrop.  It all culminates back on the bridge though and sinks back into awkwardness but everything in between makes for a stimulating time, both visually and mentally.

I'm not quite certain about UNCERTAINTY, but I do know that it distracted me from my own explosions for a couple of hours.  I'm not sure if any questions were really answered or if resolution is even the point though.  And so in saying good night to Bobby and Kate, I go back to my own confusion.

G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA

Written by Stuart Beattie, David Elliot and Paul Lovett
Directed by Stephen Sommers
Starring Channing Tatum, Sienna Miller, Marlon Wayans, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Denis Quaid


The Baroness: Would you look at that? Real American heroes.

I’m not American but the G.I. Joe’s were certainly heroes of mine when I was a young boy. After the financial success of the TRANSFORMERS movies, it was pretty clear that a G.I. Joe movie could not have been far behind. That said, after the Transformers of my childhood were so butchered and chopped up into easily chewable bits, I wrote off any hopes that the G.I. Joe franchise would be any better. I gave up entirely when I heard that Stephen Sommers, director of THE MUMMY, was going to helm. But here we are, finally facing the release of G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA and I find myself not surprisingly repulsed by the return of G.I. Joe. Instead, I find myself oddly enjoying myself. It is completely mindless but it is constant action that is as explosive as it is loud. With the barrage of noise and fresh visuals coming at you non-stop, it’s hard to notice, let alone care, that there isn’t very much depth.


G.I. JOE could easily be just another terrorist flick and, on many levels, it still is. What it needs to differentiate itself is personality. The characters really have to pop and impress with their special talents in order to become memorable and relevant. For the most part, the cast – from Channing Tatum as the new guy with a lot of promise, Duke, to Sienna Miller, as the bad girl with a penchant for hot shoes, The Baroness – does their part. There isn’t much being asked of them past owning their confidence and playing their lines as smoothly as possible but coming off cool is half the battle here. These are the elite after all; I would expect nothing less of them than being constantly on top of their games and not fussing their hair while they’re in direct combat with each other. It having been some time since I actually last saw an episode of the cartoon this film is based on, I can’t say that I recall all of the interpersonal relationships that lay the foundation of dramatic tension for the film (Duke and The Baroness used to be engaged?) but with as many as there are, the sequels, and there will be sequels, have plenty to play with.


Not all of the characters stand out and lead me to wonder why they bothered writing in these particular characters out of the dozens of possibilities if they intended to do nothing with them. Still, it isn’t just about character; there are also plenty of toys to play with. G.I. JOE is definitely not short on cutting edge visuals. While none of them are particularly earth shattering, what there is, there is plenty of. The coolest of the crowd and the central piece of artillery in the film are the nanomytes. These mechanical insects can invade a human body and eat disease but they can also eat through whole cities unless a killswitch is pulled to call them off. The Joes and their mortal enemies, Cobra, duke it out (HA!) for possession of these little buggers and their efforts take them all over the globe, from the Sahara desert to the polar ice caps to midtown Paris and Washington and they do it all in style.


G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA never elevates past its conventional construction to feel truly like the birth of an exciting new franchise but Cobra's rise is definitely a daunting one and they prove that they are not to be toyed with. Sure, there’s a prerequisite training sequence set to the song, “Bang a Gong” and a completely useless cameo appearance by Brandon Fraser but the action itself more than makes up for any of this. It passes the summer junk bar by enough to be good late summer fare. And after all, G.I. JOE is a summer blockbuster above all else so what more is there to hope for. So, now you know all there is to know about G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA and we all know what knowing is, don’t we?

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER

Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber
Directed by Marc Webb
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel


Summer: I’ve never told anybody that before.
Tom: I guess I’m not just anybody.

I don’t think there could have been better timing for me to see (500) DAYS OF SUMMER than the precise moment I saw it. Well, last night would have been fine too but it was sold out so I had to settle for today instead. The reason I say this is because I just met someone and we just started something that neither one of us can define just yet, just like Tom and Summer (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel) in the movie. For years, I was like Tom; I believed in the one and in love. Then, I experienced what I identified at the time as love. It went sour and so did my belief in possibilities when it came to matters of the heart and mixing those matters with other human beings. And so I became a lot more like Summer. She likes her life alone; she likes making her own destiny. After watching this modern day romance though, I think I can fairly say that I am somewhere now in between the two but I’m not sure if that’s any better.


I am also of two minds on this film. It is incredibly infectious. First time feature filmmaker, Marc Webb, infuses his Sundance hit with plenty of fresh visual style and an appropriate hipster soundtrack to match. As a result, the film beams with possibility while speaking directly to the all the skeptics out there. That certainly isn’t an easy dichotomy to reconcile but it teeters ever so closely toward an underlying bitter tone that every so often threatens the film’s seemingly natural exuberance. It could be argued that this is the nature of love as hate would be its opposite and therefore naturally waiting around for when love gets flipped upside down. Tom and Summer just had me feeling so much joy though that I wanted nothing to do with the nastier side of things and, as the 500 days of their relationship were told out of sequence, we know the whole time that things will eventually go awry. I suppose that my resistance would mean that I may be leaning more toward love triumphant.


An authoritative male narrator announces at one point that there are only two types of people out there, men and women. The statement is instantly jarring and limits the perspective of the film. Why must this love story be told from only Tom’s perspective? He is not your typical straight guy because he is sensitive and a romantic but does that make Summer’s supposedly unique perspective any less valid? After all, she is the girl who doesn’t believe in happily ever after. At times, (500) DAYS OF SUMMER is trying so hard to be different and hoping that we won’t notice that it makes it difficult for the characters to truly be real. They are mostly just their unique perspectives, and as Tom is the clear protagonist, Summer all too often ends up being vilified for what she is doing to him because she isn’t as fleshed out as she could be. Still, Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel take the somewhat thinly designed characters and make them not only believable but entirely endearing and lovable.


Summer told Tom from the very beginning; she was not looking for anything serious. Tom, like most people who think with their emotions, heard her but believed what he needed to in order to appease his fluttering heart. We too were warned; the tagline from the film reads quite clearly, “This is not a love story. This is a story about love.” I should have known better than to expect anything different than what I was told to expect from the very beginning. And even though (500) DAYS OF SUMMER seems to want to break down a relationship into just the good times or just the bad times, it had enough love to remind me that it is really about all of those times combined. Maybe I’ll see it again and this time I’ll bring my date.

MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA

Written by James McBride
Directed by Spike Lee
Starring Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller and Valentina Cervi


2nd Staff Sergeant Aubrey Stamps: I know, I’m the only one left who knows.

I know this is too easy even for me but the true miracle at the center of Spike Lee’s latest joint, MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA, is that I was able to sit through it without screaming out of sheer frustration over how hollow the whole affair was. I don’t feel so bad about taking that oversimplified stance, seeing as how Lee himself didn’t seem to have any concerns about dumbing down this important history lesson. Lee is an accomplished filmmaker and MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA is an ambitious project, even for him. He prides himself, as well he should, on telling stories from an African-American perspective that is rarely taken in mainstream film. In this case, he chose to shed some much needed light on the soldiers known as the Buffalo Soldiers, all black regiments in the U.S. army. He wanted to give the world a fresh take on the World War II epic by using an unfamiliar voice but all he accomplished was minimizing their plight by weighing down his film in tired convention and never committing to any one point of view.


I don’t mind long movies when the story warrants the time spent. MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA opens in 1983. A postal worker (Derek Luke) has just shot and murdered a man who bought a stamp off of him for no apparent reason. A statue head, one with incredible value both financially and historically, has been found tucked away at the bottom of his closet. News of the statue’s recovery spreads across the globe and an investigative journalist (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is determined to understand why a seemingly law-abiding citizen would commit such a random act of brutality. This goes on for about thirty or forty minutes until the postal worker finally agrees to tell his story. It all started in Italy during the second world war. My question is, if it all started then, why did Lee waste so much time with a pointless excuse to get to the actual story when the story in question needed no excuse to be told? This all too tired Hollywood convention needs to cease. People need to start getting to the point.


The story, adapted from James McBride’s novel of the same name by McBride himself, follows a foursome of Buffalo soldiers who survive a German attack, find a young Italian boy in need of medical attention and eventually set up camp in a small village while they wait for reinforcement. During their stay, the soldiers make friends and enemies with the townspeople, which challenges the inherent racism of all involved. It isn’t a bad story; it is just written in such a false and incredible fashion that undermines the film’s credibility. There is no time for one liners when you are being attacked on all sides by the German army but yet somehow McBride felt that quips between gunfire would alleviate the intensity, as if that were necessary. There is also apparently no time for real character development. Bringing an untold story to light means putting faces to characters that had none before. Without development, these soldiers are nothing but black soldiers instead of real people. Somehow, by forcing us to face the colour of their skin, Lee made it so that is all we end up seeing.


Spike Lee makes important movies but sometimes, he makes them with the knowledge of just how important they truly are. MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA is at times horrifying and at others, beautiful. Mostly though, it is tedious and disappointing. It is not so much disappointing that Lee wasn’t able to pull off such a huge endeavor but more so that if anyone could have done it the justice it deserved, it would have been him. Now, the story has been told but the point was never made.

STOP-LOSS

Written by Mark Richard and Kimberly Pierce
Directed by Kimberly Pierce
Starring: Ryan Phillippe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Channing Tatum, Timothy Olyphant and Abbie Cornish


Steve Shriver: Shit, I’m gonna miss blowing things up.

A bunch of American army boys piss away their time at camp, horsing around and yelling obscenities at each other while they wait their next posting. The style is gritty and raw. There are no Hollywood glamour shots of pretty boy stars, Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum or Joseph Gordon-Levitt; there is just confusion over where their day is headed. Before long, the team is manning a road blockade. Director Kimberly Pierce keeps the framing and the editing tight in this opening sequence and shoots the intensity high into the clear-blue, Iraq sky. Each car that approaches the young, scattered soldiers could be a disaster. One second they’re lusting over a girl back home, the next they find themselves in the middle of a full-on ambush. The lot of them all fall into line and show what good soldiers are made of – boys that become men in a moment’s notice without thinking. And then they fight. Moves are made in as calculated a fashion as is allowed in the back alleys of a foreign land. Some of the men live and some die fighting. Within minutes, STOP-LOSS has you and then without warning, the film suddenly turns into a hip-hop musical montage, establishing the stop-and-start pulse of the film that ultimately leaves it for a loss.


It has been nearly ten years since Pierce made her fearless directorial debut with BOYS DON’T CRY. It was a commanding assault on the viewer’s nerves with each scene building panic and mounting anxiety. You were never given a chance to breathe and the tragic story it told became unforgettable as a result. This is why it is all so strange to see her impose breaks upon the viewer. Not only does it grind the flow to a halt in the dirt but it also exposes the need to repackage the current wave of Iraq war themed films. On the one hand, it makes some sense to cut the film together in an MTV-inspired style to market the war to the generation that is actually fighting it (it should also be noted that the film is MTV produced). On the other hand though, this approach subsequently comes across as a compromised version of Pierce’s potential vision. That said, perhaps the new design is necessary in order to get the film’s important message across and heard.


The message in this latest condemnation of the Iraq war effort is to bring attention to the “stop-loss” process. The term itself refers to the army’s right to force soldiers into another tour of duty at the end of the term they voluntarily signed up for. It is only supposed to be invoked when the war is still ongoing so you can imagine the outrage felt by Brandon King (Phillippe) as he is expecting to be signing his discharge papers and is told instead that he is shipping back to Iraq. Infuriated by his government’s backdoor approach to get around the lack of a draft, Brandon goes AWOL in search of a way out. While taking advantage of the soldiers that enlisted freely to fight for their country is appalling enough, it becomes even more so when you see how messed up the returning soldiers have become after balancing being boys and being men in such devastating situations. Pierce’s subtle presentation of the young men of Middle America is smart enough not to exaggerate their psychological damage but their table manners speak volumes to make her point. These are men who cannot carry on a conversation without recounting atrocious experiences they suffered through and have no concept of how uncomfortable they are making everyone around them. Another tour of duty could reasonably crush them if it doesn’t kill them. With that in mind, Brandon’s escape is not just warranted but imperative.


At one point, Brandon makes a homecoming speech to the people of his Texas town. Midway, he is overwhelmed by how much he has been affected by the simple sights and smells of his home and he cannot go on. Everything he was fighting for becomes clear to him but a fellow officer interrupts his speech in favor of a more crowd-rousing message. People don’t want to face the reality of the war; they just want to hear that their side is winning. And while Pierce’s point is important and still firmly made, it is impossible to feel as if this film that took so many years to make is actually the film she intended and not a film that was designed to profit from a specific market. Still, it is worth applauding for providing a product that will be most enjoyed and appreciated by the demographic that is actually fighting on the front lines as opposed to an older generation that until now has been able to just sit back in the theatre and quietly criticize the war from afar.