Rumor has it that Christopher Nolan spent ten years writing the script for Inception. Truth be told, this barely seems like enough time to wrap one’s mind around so creative a world, let alone think it all up.  Of course, Nolan had the wiggle room that a dream world provides.  There is no exact defining of the relationships between reality and dreams, or to a dream within a dream within a dream, what is possible, what is not possible.  Still, the boundless lengths of Inception‘s imagination are awe-inspiring.

The world we see in the film features technology that allows for a shared dreaming experience.  An expedition into the mind of one, which can be visited by many, providing they’re all asleep and hooked up to each other by cords.  And it’s possible, to create this dreamed reality, without the knowledge of the one hosting it.  And you would probably never want anyone to see your darkest dreams, they can expose some of our deepest darkest secrets.  Enter a man with a select set of skills that allows him to use this technology to steal valuable information from the powerful, and unexpecting.  This man is Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.  He’s hired by the richest to steal the ideas of the richest.  But in Inception, he’s hired to do the opposite, plant an idea in the head of a man named Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), a billionaire to inherit his father’s nearly limitless empire.  This supposedly has never been done.

A man can’t pull off such a con by himself.  In fact, Cobb’s surrounded by many.  This includes a young ‘architect’ (the one responsible for building the infrastructures of the dreams) named Ariadne (Ellen Page), Cobb’s longtime collaborator Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Tom Hardy plays Eames, a master of deception.  The concept of planting an idea deep inside someone’s subconscious (inception, as it were), is thought to be so difficult, one dream world is not convincing enough.  The targeted victim needs to believe he came up with the idea. Cobb’s team needs to build a dream within a dream within a dream.  And possibly continue after that.   Of course when dealing in the pseudo-reality of a dream world, there are new sets of rules.  Like dying a dream leaves you in a vegetable-like state in reality.  Or the fact that you could go so deep inside a dream, you could forget what is real.

The ideas of shifting realities and the subjectivity of reality itself is something that Nolan has been interested in for a while.  In 2000, Nolan wrote and directed the critically-acclaimed Memento, the story of a man perpetually losing his short-term memory, who relies on his tattoos to tell him what he needs to know: how to track down the man who killed his wife.  This story was told backwards, the first scene shown last, and the last scene shown first.  It’s this interest in playing with reality and the perception of time that laid the groundwork for such a grand film like Inception.  In deed, it’s during the making of Memento that Nolan started writing Inception.  And grand it is.  You should have seen this movie when it was in IMAX theatres.  It’s one of those that is actually worth paying for.  But if you didn’t, you really should watch it on Blu-ray.  It’s the next best thing

The special effects Inception features are like a living, breathing, interactive M.C. Escher drawing.  Particularly thrilling are the scenes when new-comer Ariadne is discovering how to manipulate a dreamscape.  Her only limits: what she can imagine.  If the special effects come first in a long list of impressive traits, a close second must be Hans Zimmer’s powerful and dense score.  Its rumbling bass and trumpets hint at worlds and realities on the verge of collapse.  There’s an urgency to it that is only matched by lending itself to occasional nostalgia–something that underscores the film’s most tragic storyline, Cobb’s deceased wife (played by Marion Cotillard) that haunts his subconscious, and him, whenever he starts dreaming.

Nolan creation is grippingly entertaining, and powerfully emotional at times.  It’s truly a credit to his cleverness, and the genius of all involved with the making of the film.

The Blu-ray features an entire disc of bonus features, which are pretty freaking awesome. They include:
- Extraction Mode: Infiltrate the movie’s imaginative landscape to learn how Christopher Nolan, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the cast and crew designed and achieved the film’s signature moments
- Dreams: Cinema of the Subconscious: Can the dream world be a fully functional parallel reality? Joseph Gordon-Levitt and leading scientists take you to the cutting edge of dream research
- Inception: The Cobol Job: Comic prologue in full animation and motion: see the events that led to the beginning of the movie
- 5.1 soundtrack selections from Hans Zimmer’s versatile score
- Conceptual art, promotional art, and trailer/TV spot galleries
- Via BD-Live: Project Somnacin–Confidential Files: Access highly secure files that reveal the inception of the dream-share technology

Check out what I had to say about the film back when I saw it theatres here.

Warner Brothers provided BFR with a free Blu-ray for this review.

A year ago, Nolan mezmerized the world with the action-filled The Dark Knight, And his ability to masquerade an extremely good action hero film as a modern masterpiece.  This is what Nolan does.  It’s his talent and livlihood.  He makes the action genre seem new again.  There’s nothing genuinely new in Inception.  The marvel of the film, is that he makes it seem like there’s something there that we’ve never seen before, when we actually have.

The story, which is also penned by Nolan, follows a remarkable man named Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the same, emotionally haunted character he played in Shutter Island.  Cobb is one of the leading players in a new field of sub-conscious corporate espionage.  He explores the dreams of high-powered people, in order to steal their ideas, and secrets in the world of their dreams, when the subconscious is at its most susceptible.  This business, as you can imagine, is both dangerous and lucrative.

Cobb is married to Mal, represented by Marion Cotillard.  I say represented, because Mal isn’t actually a character in the film, but rather a representation of Cobb’s psyche.  Is this getting confusing?  Be prepared, the film is as well.  I won’t reveal too many plot points, because doing so would ruin the magic that Nolan has created here.  I will say, that due to criminal charges, Cobb is not allowed to return to the US, and congruently, his children, who live there.  Cobb is presented with an opportunity, the chance to not only steal an idea from someone, but plant one in someone’s head without this person knowing.  Cobb is, unfortunately, an undeveloped character.  I say undeveloped because he is someone I would personally love to know more about.

Cobb assembles a solid team.  There’s Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt), Cobb’s best friend.  There’s Ariadne (Ellen Page), the new-comer “architect” of these dream worlds.  She’s new, but extremely gifted.  There’s Eames (Tom Hardy of RocknRolla fame), and Saito (Ken Watanabe), the rich gentlemen and CEO hiring Cobb to insert this idea into the new CEO of his rival company.

We mustn’t forget Cillian Murphy who plays Fischer Jr., this new young CEO.

There’s much ambiguity in the rules of the worlds Nolan creates.  He allows for a science which creates the techonlogy of “group dreams.”  Basically, an acid trip where all those tripping (and connected to the same machine) are allowed to experience together.  This all occurs in the dream state.  A dream state which is curiously mundane.  My dreams do little to imitate rational life.  But in Nolan’s world, somehow, this does not need explanation.

To explain the plot in plain terms would be to say that the Cobb’s team members have to synchronize events in a dream, within a dream, within a dream, within a subconscious.  And in each of these states, there is a different speed of time.  Again, this is confusing, I reiterate that there is much that I missed in my first viewing of Inception. The mischief this team gets into leads them from the downtown streets of a metropolis, to the confines of a extremely chic hotel, to snowy mountain tops, to a crumbling and abandoned city.

There are explosions, drama, a score that instructs the viewer on how to feel.  All of this is nothing new.  But again, I say, this is where Nolan is most talented, but falls short of a master of film.  He takes what we’ve seen a million times before, puzzles, mystery, characters that aren’t fully developed, and makes it all seem intriguing, and takes a two hour and twenty two minute run times, and makes it feel like all I want is more.

The technical achievements of Inception deserve the most praise.  There is a particularly stunning fight seen in a hotel between all sorts of “projections” and Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, in which the pull of gravity is shifting constantly making their world spin over and over.  The effects here are breathtaking, and in today’s screening, I was truly reminded of the importance of summer blockbusters.

There’s nothing visionary about Inception, but that doesn’t mean it was deftly directed, with brilliant performances, and a mindbending plot that will leave you completely in awe of this director.

4 out of 4 stars

The tale of An American Crime is based on a true story, and it’s really one of the most disturbing crimes in American history.  If you don’t know about Gertrude Baniszewski and what she did to Sylvia Likens, read it here on wikipedia.  It will blow your mind.  Because I was aware of the backstory, I desperately wanted to see this at the 2007 festival.  Showing conflicts made this impossible, but it’s finally out on DVD.  Catherine Keener headlines as Baniszewski, Ellen Page plays Silvia, James Franco play Baniszewski uber-loser of a boyfriend, and there are a few other respected actors (like Bradley Whitford) that sprinkle cameos here and there.

Basically, Baniszewski accepts two teenage girls as borders in her home that she shares with her six biological children.  She’s ill (it’s not made clear with malady), there’s no man supporting the family, and she may have a small prescription drug problem (mind you this all takes place in Indiana in the sixties).  Sylvia and her sister are left with Baniszewski for twenty dollars a week, while her parents tour with a carnival (I’m not kidding).  Seeking an outlet for the bitterness cause by the steaming pile that life has served her, Baniszewski starts abusing Sylvia: beating her with belts, rounding up neighborhood children to sear words in her body with a hot needle like ‘I’m a prostitute and proud of it.’  The horrors piled on Sylvia are unending, and unbearable.

The story itself, is as dark and brooding as real life allows.  It’s like Hostel, but this actually happened.  The problem is, O’Haver butchered it like Bush butchered our economy.  Central acts that should have been the most powerful, lacked any sort of intensity.  First class performances by Page and Keener (who have both yet to let me down in a film) couldn’t save this middle-of-the-road waste of time.  The script chose to gloss over the bitter truth of the story in lieu of unreliable, first-person narrated fantasies, unending shots of Keener crying on a couch, and a whole lot of other boring elements that makes this film not even worth a rental.  The end was so cushioned against the terror and dread of the real story, that you actually don’t really care what happens to Sylvia.  It’s an American crime to watch this film.

1 out of 4 stars

The Tracey Fragments is filmed all ‘stream of consciousness’ with the screen constantly showing between one and 20 (by my count, at least) different views of the same, or sometimes different thing.  It’s like McDonald saw an episode of 24 and thought, ‘if splitting the screen three ways is awesome, twenty five ways will be soooooo bitchin’!'  In case you were wondering, it’s not.  It’s annoying, confusing, and when it’s at its best, you just feel like you’re watching a bunch of security monitors.

Tracey follows the protagonist Tracey, the ‘normal fifteen year old girl, who hates herself’ as she travels around the city, looking for her younger brother who disappeared on her watch.  In her wandering, the film vaguely references domestic abuse, drug use, murder, prostitution, molestation, and rape, but doesn’t really have the balls to make a statement or even to actually have it happen in the movie!  Since it’s stream of consciousness, we don’t know what is really happening, and what is in her head.  I personally hope that Tracey’s transvestite (or transgendered, I’m not sure) therapist really happened, because that was one manish looking woman.

Remember the aggravating, barely audible voice-overs from Terrance Malick’s The New World?  McDonald took that concept and multiplied it by 20 as well.  Sometimes there’s five or six people muttering inaudible nonsense.  And when you can hear it clearly, it waxes all pseudo-philosophical about the circle of life and how horses die, turn into glue that kids eat, so the horse eventually becomes human, and frustrating bullshit like that.  The only vaguely non-annoying trait of this whole things was Ellen Page’s fantastic acting.  She really is brilliant.

It’s not that I’m against anything that’s off the beaten path.  I don’t expect a linear, orthodox narrative, I even kind of liked Aronofsky’s completely un-understandable The Fountain, because it had it’s interesting moments.  I mean come on, the Tree of Life sprouts out of Hugh Jackman’s stomach on the top of a Mayan pyramid in the end.  But Tracey provides us with nothing interesting, nothing new to say, and leaves you feeling angry you watched it.

0.5 out of 4 stars

Rottentomatoes: 40% – Cream of the Crop: 56%

Rated R for strong language throughout, some sexual content and violence.

It’s unfortunate that this film doesn’t really come together.  I’m a big Ellen Page fan, and even she was tied down by the restraints this film placed on her and the other cast members.  These restraints include the script that comes from us from first time writer Mark Poirier, which is witty, and clever, but one hundred minutes of stinging zingers and caustic sarcasm do not a good film make.

The rest of the cast didn’t hold much promise for me, so I didn’t expect much.  I was, however, pleasantly surprised by Sarah Jessica Parker’s performance.  She got all frumpy (well, she wasn’t all fashionista, at least) and played a toned down part that wasn’t all self-important, and I liked it. This whole mess was accompanied by one of the most annoying, acoustic, emo-bull-shit soundtracks I’ve ever heard.  It’s like Murro was afraid the audience (apparently he didn’t expect smart people to see his film) wouldn’t catch on that each scene was touched with a tinge of melancholy, but also a little hope.  See the tracklisting here for songs not to listen to.  Ever.

The whole thing wasn’t a loss, there were some funny moments where I actually laughed out loud (but just a little).  And if you’re one for happy endings, then this is for you!  But for me, it wasn’t worth waiting to get there.

1.5 out of 4 stars

Rottentomatoes: 49% – Cream of the Crop: 48%

Rated R for language, brief teen drug and alcohol use, and for some sexuality.