"Phooey, I say, on all white-shoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day." ~J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)
Report: 10 Million Killed Annually By Stepping Out Of Comfort Zones
REVIEW: Is Inception This Year’s Masterpiece? Dream On
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.
In Inception, Nolan does the impossible, the unthinkable, the stupendous: He folds a mirror version of Paris back upon itself; he stages a fight sequence in a gravity-free hotel room; he sends a train plowing through a busy city street. Whatever you can dream, Nolan does it in Inception. Then he nestles those little dreams into even bigger dreams, and those bigger dreams into gargantuan dreams, going on into infinity, cubed. He stretches the boundaries of filmmaking so that it’s, like, not even filmmaking anymore, it’s just pure “OMG I gotta text myBFF right now” sensation.
Wouldn’t it have been easier just to make a movie?
But that urgent simplicity, that directness of focus, is beyond Nolan: Everything he does is forced and overthought, and Inception, far from being his ticket into hall-of-fame greatness, is a very expensive-looking, elephantine film whose myriad so-called complexities — of both the emotional and intellectual sort — add up to a kind of ADD tedium. This may be a movie about dreams, but there’s nothing dreamlike or evocative about it: Nolan doesn’t build or sustain a mood; all he does is twist the plot, under, over, and back upon itself, relying on Hans Zimmer’s sonic boom of a score to remind us when we should be excited or anxious or moved. It’s less directing than directing traffic.
For the complete review, follow the link: MovieLine Reviews
And, thank you for an honest and intelligent review.
