Inception Fails to Plant an Idea in My Mind

Christopher Nolan is known for mastering the art of the thoughtful thriller -- a suspenseful, high budget film that touches upon psychological or salient political issues. In Momento he questions the nature of memory. In The Dark Knight he addresses the side-effects of doing-good by making Batman a metaphor for interventionist America. Inception, his latest film, is a psychological thriller that questions the significance of waking life relative to dream states.

Inception opens with a close up image of the protagonist, Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) washed up on an unknown shore. He gets picked up by guards and presented to an extremely old looking Asian man. The next scene flashes to some unknown time before, revealing the old man to be Saito (Ken Watanabe). Dom and his sidekick, Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt), seem to be trying to steal something from Saito. But just when you think you're getting the hang of things, the scene shifts yet again to images of the same characters sleeping in an entirely different setting. The next few scenes dart between images of the same characters in one of three different scenes: a decadent Japanese palace; a sketchy apartment in an politically unstable city; and a train. Despite the suspense, the writing manages to situate the viewer well.

We learn that Dom is an extractor who is paid to perform the illegal job of entering people's dreams to discover their thoughts and ideas. Extraction is usually done for corporate espionage purposes. When Dom fails on his mission to steal from Saito, the Japanese business man offers to let Dom work for him, but to perform a much trickier task than extraction. Saito wants Dom to do an inception--to place an idea in someone's head. Specifically, Dom is to plant the idea in an energy heir's (Cillian Murphy) mind to dismantle his father's company once his father passes away.

The idea of Inception is initially mind-blowing and thoroughly captivating as your mind works to find out all you can about this new idea. I enjoyed the expository scenes where Dom explains the mechanics of entering others' dreams to his new architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page). Also cool to see pictures of Parisian streets fold up over each other. But as the film continues, and the mind accepts the idea of extractions and inceptions, Inception becomes just another plot-driven thriller.

The entire film is basically centered around Saito's one assignment for Dom. Most of the characters are simply two-dimensional vehicles by which to advance the plot. Dom is the only fuller character. His three-dimensional history is manifested by flashbacks of his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), and of his children. We learn that he is so desperate to accept Saito's plan because it would allow him to go back to the United States, which he has been banned from due to a mysterious crime from his past. But even Dom's regrets and secrets become an obstacle to the team's mission when his teammates learn that he brings a projection of Mal into each of his missions. And she's out for revenge.

The lack of depth of characters reflect the lack of depth of Inception's world. Though the world of Inception looks like ours, it's not. It's a world where entering people's dreams, getting addicted to living in dreams, and extraction are all possible. In order to be convincing, the rules of this world simply can't be invented as the story goes along. Unfortunately, Inception doesn't feel wholly formed, in contrast to an Avatar, for instance, where an environment is introduced, fully-formed. Limitations to extraction and inception are randomly introduced throughout. It's apparently difficult to plant ideas because people need to think that these ideas came from themselves. Instead of just going into someone's dream, the team needs to go into a dream inside a dream inside a dream. Like many mediocre thrillers, Inception uses some convenient situations to build suspense. For instance, in normal dreams, one's death leads to them waking up from the dream. But in chemically induced sleeps, death leads to an indefinite state of limbo. This conveniently creates more obstacles for Dom when one of his team members gets wounded in a dream. Too bad the audience just needs to take this for granted and not ask many questions. Unfortunately, the need to take too many things for granted makes Inception a shallow portrayal of a rich idea.

The Kids Are All Right: Probably the Best Movie of the Summer

"You want a family so much, go out and make your own," Nic (Annette Bening), the controlling half of a lesbian couple, tells the sperm donor who has fathered her children, at one point in Lisa Cholodenko's new film, The Kids Are All Right. Though the film's plot tells the story of how a family of four--Nic and Jules (Julianne Moore) and their two teenage children--deal with the discovery of their sperm donor's identity, Nic's statement sums up the movie's deeper issues. Notably, what makes a family, how to welcome a stranger into a family, and how to let children grow up.

These themes, told through a strong script written by Cholodenko and Seth Blumberg, make the film appealing to a wide audience. Nic's doctor self contrasts nicely to Jules' relaxed joblessness. They also have a college-bound, academically inclined daughter, Joni, and a slightly rebellious fifteen year old son, Laser. Laser prompts Joni to reach out to their sperm donor when she turns eighteen. Paul soon enters the family's life in his older-yet-slightly-youthful-motorcycling-organic-restauranteur way. He clashes with Nic's orderly world, dividing the family between those who like Paul and those who don't.

But never mind these large issues; the brilliance is in the details. Cholodenko focuses on some choice moments to reveal Nic and Jule's relationship. Early on, they have sex to gay porn. It's loud, but completely untitillating at the same time like how any other married couple might make love. Laser later finds this porn and confronts his Moms about it. Their endearing explanation includes the fact that "women's sexuality is expressed internally, and sometimes we just need to see it externalized." Later, Nic reveals her sensitive side when she sings all of Joni Mitchell's "All I Want." "All I really really want our love to do is to bring out the best in me and in you too," Nic sings a cappela to a surprised audience of family members.

These lyrics speak to the type of the marriage Nic and Jules seem to strive towards: a companionate relationship where each partner expects to help the other one improve him or herself--not so different from the yuppie idea of a heterosexual companionate marriage.

Though the film is not overtly political, it seems significant that it takes place in California, a state that has recently repealed gay marriage. It implies that Nic and Jules married before the ban was passed. Though my no means perfect, their relationship is one that most couples can relate to. Jules announces that "marriage is fucking hard," and I could feel everyone in the audience nodding.

Critics have been swooning over The Kids Are All Right's "realistic portrayal of a lesbian relationship." But the realism of the relationship has also blinded reviewers to many other cliches in the film. Ruffalo's character, Paul, is entirely a cliche. It's the same scruffy-haired, somewhat irresponsible dude that Ruffalo always plays. He is suddenly jolted into a higher level of adulthood when he meets his biological children, and doesn't really know how to cope. Other cliches include the uptight person who drinks too much, and a daughter who yells at her parents that they need to let her grow up. These cliches make it easy to imagine the same story with a heterosexual couple, adopted kids, and the biological parents.

These cliches are ultimately forgivable since the film is so thought provoking in its own right, and beautifully acted. The family is quite memorable and not easily substituted in the mind. It will be difficult to find another release this summer that matches The Kids Are All Right.

Winter's Bone: Chilling and Satisfying

At first glance, Winter's Bone seems to be one of those gritty movies that are so popular at film festivals on the coasts about people with hard lives who live in the middle of the country. Like Frozen River, that other movie about a family trying to make ends meet when Father disappears, Winter's Bone takes place in the winter, casting darkness over the entire film, and shows the dark, cramped homes of non-coastal elites. Like Frozen River, Winter's Bone reveals a hidden society to the protagonist and to the audience. But unlike Frozen River, where a middle-aged protagonist purposefully enters the world of people-smuggling, Winter's Bone tracks one girl's coming of age with her unwitting discovery of an underground network of methamphetamine producers.

Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is a seventeen year old Missourian who goes on a quest to find her father as his court date approaches when she learns that he put their entire property as collateral for his bond. Unfortunately for Ree, she's also responsible for two younger siblings, Sonny and Ashley, as well as their mentally ill mother. Despite Ree's youth, the audience doesn't expect this to be a coming of age movie, since Ree already seems quite competent and hard-nosed at the beginning of the film. We see her cooking breakfast, teaching her siblings aphorisms "Never ask for what should be offered," and shooting and skinning squirrels.

After learning about her father, though, Ree's hard, yet routine, days are broken. She goes on a quest to speak with everyone known acquaintance of her father's. We soon realize that many of these folks are fellow meth addicts or dealers. Ree soon learns that many of these folks have secrets to hide. Her father's older brother, Teardrop (John Hawkes), aggressively holds her neck to caution her about talking to people. It's hard to know early on if he's protecting himself, or protecting Ree. Ree's next door neighbor tries to convince her that her dad died in a meth lab explosion.

As Ree's search continues, she unravels a network of hidden rules and hierarchies that govern this underground society. Two rules are ultimately important: loyalty, and the ability to forget what one's seen. But in contrast to a typical fish out of water story, the world that Ree uncovers has been right in front of her all along. She is a product of it all along without knowing it. As she is put through a series of trials to test her loyalty, we wonder if being born into a society of underground drug pushers will be enough to save her from them.

Joan Rivers' Comeback

The subtitle of a new documentary about a year in the life of Joan Rivers, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, embodies so many meanings in four words. First and foremost, it refers to Joan Rivers' personality. She is seen as a comedic icon with a penchant for the un-PC. Example: "The only child I could ever like is Helen Keller because she doesn't talk." Back in the 1970's, she openly made jokes about abortions, referring to them as "appendectomies." She is even unabashed at calling her own daughter "a stupid cunt" for refusing a $400,000 Playboy gig.

Second, there's the meaner interpretation of Joan Rivers as the work of plastic surgeons. She is notorious for having face lifts up the wahzoo. Her Comedy Central Celebrity Roast appearance resulted in a barrage of jokes along the lines of "Joan Rivers has had so many facelifts, that she has to sneeze out her clit." Sigh. But this documentary allows Rivers to defend herself on the topic of plastic surgery, and she has several good points. To Rivers, plastic surgery is a progressive thing for women, giving us an opportunity to purchase something we weren't born with. Beauty--or the lack thereof--has been a constant theme in Rivers' life, and a source of many of her jokes. "My mother told me that looks aren't everything." Beat. "She told me this often."

Finally--and most importantly--Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is about Joan Rivers doing whatever she can to find a piece of work. At 75 (now 77), Rivers is as energetic and eager as ever. The source of her passion is less a desire for money as a desire to matter. Through interviews with her manager, Billy Sammeth, we learn that Rivers's long-running private joke is "let me get my sunglasses" before she opens her datebook so as not to be blinded by the pages of inkless white. So this year in the life of Joan Rivers is really a year in the life of Rivers making her career matter. The journey begins with a a new play, Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress. Since Rivers's Broadway debut, Fun City, bombed she had been reluctant to open a new show in New York. This time, she takes the play first to Edinburgh and then to London to test the waters. Though the audience feels bad for Rivers when she only receives weak critical reception, Rivers is able to put this immediately behind her to do her next big thing, appear on celebrity Apprentice.

At the same time, money still plays a role in Rivers' life. Rivers lives "as Marie Antoinette would have lived had she had money," in an ornately decorated Manhattan penthouse. She claims she has to work to support this lifestyle. In addition, she has many staff, including a housekeeper, a manager, an agent, and two assistants. These each come with children whose private school tuition Rivers has also kindly taken up. As such, we Rivers finds herself doing gigs in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin, boarding a plane to LA, sleeping for three hours, and waking up again in Minneapolis. Though her lifestyle might be garish, and her personality garrulous, there is something commendable about Joan Rivers' work ethic. At film's end, I found myself rooting for her in her goal of exceeding the longevity of Don Rickles' and Phyllis Diller's careers.

The Inanity Coming-of-Age-in-the-Age-of-Rock Movies

Now that the boomer generation is getting old, and the generation that remembers where they were when the Beatles premiered on Johnny Carson is getting really old, nostalgic movies are coming out about the birth of rock. Two such films, Taking Woodstock and Pirate Radio, cover much of the same material. Young, straight and narrowish people are suddenly exposed to romantic hardships, hidden secrets of the past, and forced to grow up all with music in the background. Taking Woodstock, which aims to vaguely trace the history of Woodstock, centers on twenty-something Elliot Teichberg, and his journey to bring a music festival to his town of Woodstock while gaining independence from his parents. Pirate Radio, which aims to trace the history of off-shore radio stations in Great Britain in the 1960's, centers on a teenage Carl's stay on the Radio Rock ship while he discovers sex, the identity of his father, and civil disobedience.

Neither film is particularly insightful. Both revel in cliche and heavy-handed delivery of messages. Taking Woodstock tries to tell people to believe in themselves, and break loose by having Elliot (Dmitri Martin) discover his homosexuality and get high on acid to Jefferson Airplane's "Red Telephone." Long sequences of haziness illuminate the freedom of drugs. Similarly, Pirate Radio tries to sell people on the idea of fighting for what you believe in by having Radio Rock's entire crew agree one by one to stay on the ship even after the government shuts it down. Elgar's Nimrod swells in the background. Long montages of random Brits enjoying Radio Rock illustrate music's liberating effect. We get it: music equals love, democracy, and all that is good in the world.

The one thing that makes Pirate Radio more entertaining to watch than Taking Woodstock is that Pirate Radio takes itself way less seriously. Maybe it's the British sense of humor, but the film seems to wink at us during a ship-sinking scene that reminds one of the drama of Titanic. Things are resolved a bit too easily, but also with humor. In one set piece, two DJ's play a game of chicken by climbing on to the mast and then jumping off. Plus, the music selection is fabulous. Pirate Radio hits all the Sixties greats aside from the Beatles, including Cat Stevens, the Beach Boys, and Leonard Cohen. Taking Woodstock only has some snippets of Woodstock acts. Though Pirate Radio is a bit long clocking in at 2 hours, its soundtrack makes an otherwise vapid movie bearable. Too bad Woodstock can't say the same.