THINQon : Inception - A leap of faith

Cinema Room Films Inception Inception - A leap of faith

THINQon is a platform for a more intelligent web. It aims to replace the ruling paradigm of the web – that of sharing and gathering information – with a sharing and achieving of understanding. Instead of the Q&A model it offers an experience. A platform for discovery of ideas, people, and yourself. Continue >

Arthur Mont

Inception - A leap of faith

Latest Post: August 15, 2010 at 5:06 AM

70 followers

Let me start by getting the obvious out of the way – Inception is a must see movie!

Christopher Nolan is an excellent director and the movie fits him. He is not a physical director, in the sense of making you feel your body (hence I hated him in Batman Begins, as doing a non-physical creation of Batman is blasphemy, but Dark Knight was great), but Inception is a film about dreams which then fits his non-physical nature very well.

What is the movie about?
A leap of faith. What is this leap we need to take to get from our world of shadows to the real world? What do you need to believe in, and to let go of, in order to get to the promised land? The understanding that inception, starting something, beginning something, has to do with a leap of faith is a nice understanding of Nolan who also wrote the screenplay. A leap of faith is not required to extract information, but to create something new it is required – that is a deep understanding even if many had it before him as he doesn’t just know it, he understands it. (The risk of death in this leap is a debatable aspect of it).
Like Frankenstein your creation has a life of its own and is uncontrollable.

Another aspect of the movie is obviously on art. How the director/writer creates a place we come to, how it operates to convince us of its truthiness, and the problems s/he faces. Saying this would be inconsequential, but showing this, that’s a different matter altogether, and Nolan shows it masterfully. There is a mastery of the image in the movie and its 2 dimensionality. I wonder what it would be like to have such a film in 3D as at the same time it would operate against what the film is about. (I remember wondering the same thing about Memento at the time, of whether one should choose a technique which operates for the what he’s saying or against it).
The ingenuity and the interest of the film is in how it operates, and it operates flawlessly.

Great actors with DiCaprio leading.

It’s not at the level of a masterpiece, but it is an excellent movie. I don’t think Nolan is at the rank of the great, but he is right behind them and his films are getting better.
Any thoughts?

Films Discussed

Batman Begins [Blu-ray]

The Dark Knight (Widescreen Single-Disc Edition)

Inception

Memento

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Arthur Mont	in "Avatar / Avatar"	(Cinema Room)
Chris Utterman	in "Post coitum omne animal triste - After sex every animal is sad"	(Bedroom)
Arthur Mont	in "What is truth? / With another"	(The Living Room)

Julie Sabatier tagged this post as Highly informative and Very enjoyable.

John Stevenson tagged this post as Insightful.

Reply to:

George Browning, I like to play the flute.

July 16, 2010 at 12:37 PM

14 followers

You liked Shutter Island Arthur. The relation between Inception and Shutter Island, both Leonardo DiCaprio vehicles of not so unrelated plots, is quite interesting. It's the rare actors who somehow become auteurs on their own.

There is the example here of the topic of Tom Cruise, and I wonder how these two films will fit in DiCaprio's signature?

I very much liked your point on the leap of faith and its connection to creation which is obviously the topic of the film. I wanted to add the important connection between creation and extraction. Note that to create, the creation has to fit well and thus the importance of extracting well. I'm sure one could add some farming metaphors here, or sculpting.

I also really liked the palpable nature of creation in the movie. You can touch it. It's true that Nolan is not what you call a physical director, witnessed by the total lack of details in creation in the movie, but he does manage to make you really feel the act of creation. Many art house directors have tried this but very few have succeeded. At the moment, I can't think of a single movie which transfered for me this feeling more (Jacques Rivette's attempts come to mind though).

Films Discussed

Shutter Island

Arthur Mont tagged this post as Insightful.

Reply to: or

Chris Utterman

July 20, 2010 at 4:46 PM

27 followers

It's a beautiful movie!
I was reading several reviews of it and as usual my reaction is "What's going on with these people?" They are overworked, that's true, but I also think it comes from a lack of respect to the reader. They don't think the reader is smart enough to understand things and so they water down everything, telling the reader: "Wow, what great visuals the film has." That's something the reader can understand.
I'm speaking of both main stream media, but also the supposedly more intellectual papers. You wouldn't believe the visuals of the film.

Perhaps it is because they don't have time to think about the film and have to publish a review very quickly, but this is not the only reason, and sadly this is what we are used to reading in reviews.

For example, critics seem to have missed everything after the first few minutes of the film. They view the film simply as extraction. The art of cinema and how you extract (money?) from people. I think you are the only one I read who speaks about creation, and what does it mean to really create something inside someone. To give rise to an idea within a person. This is actually the name of the movie!
How come they don't speak of it?

It's true that the visuals of the film somewhat hinder our thinking, but isn't that one of the topics of the film? To create an architecture which is real enough to convince but interesting and beautiful enough so that the visitor is fascinated?

Amy Silberman tagged this post as Insightful.

John Stevenson sent kudos.

Reply to: or

Edna Stern

July 26, 2010 at 12:30 AM

86 followers

Having just seen the movie, I'd like to add to Arthur's line of thought about creation. Throughout the movie, I couldn't help thinking "what a magnificent fugue this is!", in the way it is build, introducing one element after another, juxtaposing them and how each level brings a light to the previous one and deepens our understanding to the whole. Our seeing the final waking ups at each level is like the final stretta (a short reminder of the theme in each voice) which brings in the perfect chord and harmony. Nolan also plays with the well known composing game techniques of the mirror and the contrary movements (when Ariane is walking the first time in her street creation).

I thought Nolan constructed an amazing fugue in this movie, actually a real masterpiece in my opinion, Arthur, and as for his choice of actors, I thought he was showing it very clearly that he built the script in a way that will remind us of the actor's great previous characters. I'm thinking of the first scene with Dicaprio which threw me back to the Titanic (I thought how nice that Jack made it after all!), and as George mentions Shutter Island (both personage share the great difficulty of letting go), or Marion Cotillard and the choice of Piaf's song for waking up.

It's also a reflection on relationship. Amazing how so much love can turn into so much destruction. The will to possess, to close on a person. Then the terrible way he found of getting out, using her. The danger and double edge sword in the total immersion in the beloved one.

Films Discussed

Shutter Island