Oppenheimer (5/5 Stars)

 

Seemingly every week we are treated to spectacles: ordinary people with superpowers, vehicles with impossible functions, events that can never happen. Oppenheimer may be the only movie confined to historical fact that gets close to all the extraordinary nonsense continually thrown at us. In 1945 a group of American scientists split the smallest thing known to man, an atom, and created the largest explosion the strength of 25 kilotons of TNT. Human beings had unlocked an unseen but potent energy in the universe and had harnessed for themselves the primal powers of the sun, nuclear fission. A month later, those same humans, specifically Americans, dropped two of these bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in a bid to end the largest war human beings had ever conducted against each other. It worked. The war was over, but an unease settled upon those responsible. After all, this wasn’t magic, it was science. Anyone could do it. And someday they would. And they could build an even bigger bomb using nuclear fusion. Then instead of killing 70,000 people in an instant like the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, millions could die with one hydrogen bomb over New York or Moscow. The Project Head, Robert J. Oppenheimer would later describe his reaction upon seeing his experiment work that very early morning of July 16, 1945. He thought of an ancient sacred Indian text in which the deity Vishnu reveals himself in his sacred multi-armed form and states, “Now I am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

‘Oppenheimer”, Writer/Director Christopher Nolan’s latest movie is a story of two rooms and a flashback. The first room takes place in 1954 where Oppenheimer is appealing a decision of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to not renew his security clearance. The second room takes place in 1959 where Lewis Strauss is seeking to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. In both rooms, the subject of testimony and cross-examination is the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), which is shown in the flashback from his school days through the The Manhattan Project, which culminated in the Trinity Test, the first successful testing of an atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Having a cursory knowledge of American history I knew about The Manhattan Project and the Trinity Test. I did not know that Oppenheimer was denied a renewal of his security clearance less than a decade later because of suspected ties with communism. As for Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.), I had never heard of him before and you probably haven’t heard of him either. Though his senate confirmation hearing pales in importance to everything else in the movie, it is itself a remarkable and curious moment in American history. A president’s appointments to his own cabinet are almost never contested, let alone denied. Before Strauss was rejected it had only happened once in the past 100 years.

This movie is based on the book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. As with all material based on real life, the challenge is not in the creation but in the editing. (My favorite metaphor is that fiction is like painting, documentary is sculpture). Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of this book and the editing of the movie is a marvel in organization. The movie is long but moves quickly. The cast is enormous, but characters are efficiently and memorably introduced. The movie switches between time periods and locations, but the viewer is never confused as to when and where they are. Nolan affects this by shooting the 1954 room and the Oppenheimer flashback in color, whereas the 1959 room and Strauss flashback are in black and white. Nolan even organized enough room for a twist in the plot, not an easy thing to do in a biopic.

Then there is the IMAX. I saw this movie in June in a normal movie theater and was compelled to see it at the Lincoln Center IMAX in September. It will be a good movie no matter how you see it, but you really should see it on the largest screen possible. Nolan uses the IMAX expertly, saving it for close ups of the quantum world, very large explosions, and expansive landscapes. It would not be incorrect to categorize Oppenheimer as a tentpole summer blockbuster. It is a BIG movie with lots of Stars. (This would be an indispensable movie for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon games. In just one example of many, Gary Oldman shows up as President Truman in a great “the buck stops here” scene). It also happens to be very good in the classic sense. The subject matter is compelling and morally complicated. It is rare that you see these two things together. Rare movies like Apocalypse Now and Citizen Kane come to mind.

Christopher Nolan has been a very good director for more than two decades. He is old enough to be a stubborn proponent of obsolete technology preferring shooting his movies with film cameras as opposed to digital cameras. He is also British and makes movies about billionaires, space, and World War II. He then could be characterized as a conservative filmmaker. But, this has never been the case, and continues not to be true. There are several instances of radical choices, for instance, In the first room, Oppenheimer is cross-examined as to adultery. One not only marvels at the presence of nudity in that particular setting but also how well it works. Nolan continues to be an expert on how to use time in his storytelling. The idea of splitting the movie into two rooms in the 1950s and a flashback that generally moves forward from Oppenheimer’s school days to the present and into the future past the two rooms (there are a few scenes in the 1960s) may not seem all that impressive until one considers how the movie would work if it was entirely linear. If the storytelling was linear, the movie would be ten hours long and irretrievably boring after the third hour when the bomb goes off.

About halfway through the movie, Nolan drops the two rooms and tells the story of the Trinity Test for an uninterrupted 30-40 minutes. Here are the most fascinating scenes in the movie. In particular, it is of continual concern to the scientists that the project is justified, after all, as one scientist points out, a bomb falls on both the just and unjust. The only reason why they feel compelled to build a bomb in the first place is because they do not want the Nazis to get there first. Then right before the bomb is built, Hitler kills himself in his bunker and Germany surrenders. There is a scene in which the scientists argue as to whether they should continue. Oppenheimer argues that the science will always be there, that people won’t understand it until they use it, and once they’ve used it, the horror of that understanding will usher in world peace since war will become unthinkable. (I will speculate that there is a much simpler reason why they continued. The scientists wanted to see if it would work.) Then once the bomb is built, Oppenheimer attends a meeting of the U.S. Military brass and they discuss whether and how they will drop the bomb on the Japanese. In one of those “you can’t make this up” moments from history, one of the potential target cities, Kyoto, is struck from the list because of its cultural significance and also because the general in charge of the list honeymooned there.

I am compelled here to note that science, capitalism, and democracy, those things that are the foundation of America as an idea, do not provide strength because they are right. Not all scientific experiments are successful. Capitalism doesn't always provide correct values. Not all democratically elected leaders are good at their jobs. The strength in these three things is that they are processes, not end results. And what they do is that they can be used to point out something that is wrong. The experiment fails, the stock market crashes, the politician is marred by scandal. And just as importantly, once this something that is wrong becomes apparent, the participants have the opportunity to self-correct. You can change the experiment or change your theory, you can create regulations (or remove barriers) to improve market conditions, you can vote out politicians that have proven themselves incompetent.

Before, during, and after the bombs were created and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the participants questioned whether what they were doing the right thing. This movie shows those arguments. It isn’t sure whether the bombs should have been created. It isn't sure whether the bombs should have been dropped. Moving forward, Oppenheimer acts to dissuade the U.S. Government from building the larger more destructive hydrogen bomb. Does that make Oppenheimer a hypocrite? No, it makes him a scientist. The enemies of the Open Society will look at this movie and see only weakness. They believe that history is a story told by the winners and that there is no truth but what power dictates. America won World War II. It won it unconditionally. Does this movie feel like a story told by winners? No, it doesn’t, and that is because we aren’t Nazis or Communists. We are allowed to second guess ourselves. To see the benefit of this openness, just imagine if it was the other way around and Hitler had gotten there first. Then this movie would be a propaganda reel with nothing but admiration of the creators and demonization of the victims. It was a good thing for humanity that America got to the bomb first.

TENET (3/5 Stars)

 

Boy, do I miss movie theaters. If there ever was a type of movie that necessitated big screen viewing, it would be a Christopher Nolan movie (The Dark Knight, Inception, Dunkirk). He specializes in IMAX photography and elaborate action sequences. He has not made a small movie for over a decade, the last being The Prestige in 2006. When I set out to watch Tenet, an original spy thriller (as opposed to the 26^th installment of James Bond or the 8^th Mission Impossible which was itself a remake of a TV series), I tried to see it on the largest screen possible, a big TV at a friend’s house. Terrible choice. Phones rang, people talked throughout, a young child spent half the time screaming and running around. It was hard to concentrate. By the second half of the movie, I had no idea what was going on.

 

Recently, I tried to see it again, late at night and very few other people around. Unfortunately, I still cannot say I completely understand the movie. I guestimate I am about 2/3rds into understanding. It is complicated. The downside of originality of course is that you are showing something new.

 

Tenet involves objects with reversed entropy. They are inverted in time. Now, the way human’s experience entropy is the progression of time in the presence and always going forward. When an object is inverted, it appears to the human to be going backwards in time. A sort of helpful example is an inverted wall that holds many inverted bullets. A character known only as the Protagonist (“John David Washington”) aims a gun at the inverted wall and the inverted bullet is shot out of the walled and is caught by the gun in the Protagonist’s hand. That is as simple as the temporal acrobatics get. Other temporal acrobatics include: fistfights, car chases, a heist, a military operation known as a temporal pincer move. These are incredible sight, but underneath the surface there remains a nagging question: What on earth am I watching?

 

I think a large problem this movie has is not that it introduces this wacky idea about inverted entropy, it is that the rest of the story is highly obscure. For instance, we do not know the main character’s name or anything about him. We do no know who is sending these inverted objects back through time or why they are doing so. The movie globetrots around the planet from London, to India, to Monaco, to Russia. It is hard to get a solid footing at any one place. All the characters are new and they speak like spies, that is, in vaguely threatening tones. I like to think I am a perceptive viewer, and I take as evidence that my understanding of previous Christopher Nolan films with their myriad temporal and structural complexities. Figuring out the puzzle is something I usually enjoy. Tenet is just one level too much. There are times when I think about this movie, and I remember a scene that doesn’t quite make sense and I’m not sure if there is an explanation somewhere or is it just sloppy storytelling and there actually is no explanation, perhaps the opening scene which involved an inverted bullet. Am I too know where that inverted bullet comes from? How did it get there? Now, I have seen the movie twice, and I still am not certain of it. I think two viewings are enough to conclude a movie is indeed confusing and not merely complex.

 

A fun thing about Christopher Nolan movies is that they sometimes are windows into the toys of the very very rich. I recall seeing Inception and being impressed very expensive suits of everyone in the first class section of the international flight. Here, we are introduced to a “Freeport”, which is where rich people store paintings to avoid taxes. Robert Pattinson walks around it in a very expensive suit and looks more adult than I have ever seen him.

 

The bad guy leaves something to be desired. He is supposed to be a nefarious Russian oligarch but is played by Kenneth Branagh. Now, I know I’m supposed to be impressed by the reputation of Branagh, but I confess to not really liking him too much in anything besides Henry V, which was in the 1980s. His Shakespeare adaptations are poor and I refuse to see him embody Hercule Poirot. Here, he is kind just too soft and flabby to really have much of a nefarious screen presence. Of course, he is not helped by the confusing narrative. The Russian oligarch has a supermodel wife played by Elizabeth Dibecki. This woman is too tall. I’m not sure she is actually that tal. I think the movie may have added some inches. Either way, not my thing. As stated before, Robert Pattinson looks the part in this movie. John David Washington, as the protagonist, does a decent job. His character is a bit of a blank slate, so not much acting is required, but he does what is required in the action sequences, particularly the bit where he has a fist-fight with an inverted antagonist.

 

I can’t really recommend TENET other than to say, if you do see, try to see it in a theater. This is a movie that will be definitely worse seen at home.

 

Dunkirk (4/5 Stars)

 “Dunkirk” recreates of an early event in World War II when the German blitzkrieg flanked and encircled the entire British army at the beaches of Dunkirk while the German Luftwaffe bombed them from above and German U-Boats terrorized the British channel.

It is entirely possible that the large majority of the British army, around 400,000 men, may have died on that beach. The British navy was not sending the bulk of their destroyers to evacuate the men because of the superiority of the German air force and submarine fleet. The last and only hope was to draft all the “little ships” of the England, civilian boats, to cross the channel and pick up the boys. As a retreat it was so successful it became the stuff of legend. Only 40,000 men were expected to live. The British with the help of the civilian effort rescued ten times that amount and a good amount of the French army too.

Writer and Director Christopher Nolan treats the subject matter with solemnity and reverence. Individual stories are sacrificed to the events as a whole. (In fact, I can’t remember most of the names of the characters.) There is no back-story and no locations that are not on Dunkirk, therefore no characters that aren’t on-the-ground soldiers. This minimalism suits the sense of isolation and the impending doom felt by the men on the beach.

What is innovative is the structure of the story. Here, again, Director Nolan (Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar) engages his forte. The movie is divided into three parts and seamlessly switches between the three. The first is the Mole (french word for pier thing on the beach) and takes place over a week and covers the entire week that the evacuation took place in. The second is the Sea and takes place over a single day that the little ships were involved in the evacuation. The third is the Air and takes place over a single hour that the British Air Force provided a cover mission for the evacuation. The Air’s hour takes place during the Sea’s day which takes place during the Mole’s week. It is not necessarily intuitive that these stories could seamlessly move back and forth between each other, but Nolan once again proves that he knows how to clearly tell a seemingly convoluted story. I was not particularly confused as to what was happening when.

And it makes sense story-wise. If Nolan had told the story straight chronologically, the second and especially the third story-line would have been sandwiched unfairly near the end, thereby reducing the historical importance of the sea and air efforts. This way, they are all given equal time (even though the their times are unequal) and the movie has this interesting relativistic effect. The faster the characters move, the slower time seems to move for them, and an hour in a British Spitfire roaring across the channel equals the time spent by a man walking on the ground.

Most of the actors, though talented like Tom Hardy (airplane) and Cillian Murphy (ground), could have been replaced because of the deliberate motive of the movie to have the scenario overpower any one individual story. There is one exception and that is the civilian captain of one of the little ships, played by Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies). The nobility of the man shines through and gives incarnate form to the humble and collective spirit of Dunkirk that became the stuff of legend. His interactions with a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy) provide the heart of the movie. “There’s no turning back from this, son,” he states and there is a power in the understated yet unwavering purpose behind his intonations. Keep Calm and Carry On indeed.

Interstellar (4/5 Stars)

Whatever can happen, will happen.

Young Murphy Cooper (Mackenzie Foy) asks her father (Matthew McConaughey) why she was named after something bad. Her father replies that Murphy’s Law is not necessarily pessimistic. All it means is that (given enough time) anything that can happen will happen. The pessimistic side of this looks at chaotic unforgiving nature and all the ways it can and will disrupt the best plans of mice and men. But look at it in another light. For instance, if you believed that humans could adapt to anything, well then, given enough time our species should be able to solve any problem that the universe throws at it. Of course, the supposition that must be true is that human beings actually could someday evolve to be capable of anything, even going so far as to say master space and time. That is a wildly optimistic notion and it is surprising to come from writer Jonathan Nolan and director Christopher Nolan particularly since their non-Batman movies have been great explorations of self-delusion (memory in Memento, magic in The Prestige, dreams in Inception). But here it is, and it is a good thing the Nolan’s are in charge of this project because I’m not sure anybody else could have made it. It is perhaps the most expensive and epic intellectual exercise since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and only the Nolan’s have the box office clout to finance a movie like this. Try to see it in the theater because it is not going make any sense on a small screen.

The movie starts with humans on Earth confronted with the extinction of their species. It takes place about fifty years from now. Old Man Cooper (played by John Lithgow) talks of how when he was a kid it seemed like everyday something new would be invented. Imagine that, six billion people all wanting it all at the same time. But something happened in nature. There is this dust storm blight that kills vegetation. The only crop that can grow now is corn. The blight feeds on all the Nitrogen in the atmosphere and every year it creates more Nitrogen, which only makes the blight even stronger. Population has dropped. Technology has stuttered. Pretty soon humanity won’t even be able to grow corn and then everyone will die.

The last ditch effort of humanity is a secret NASA mission led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) to send a spaceship through a wormhole that has just been discovered near Saturn to a distant galaxy where hopefully there is another planet that can sustain human life. Matthew McConaughey, a retired pilot, is chosen for the job. So is Professor Brand’s daughter, Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), two other guys, and a couple of sentient robots named TARS and KASE. TARS has a humor setting in his A.I. and provides comic relief.

It is a very long journey and one of the most interesting conceits of this story is its portrayal of Einstein’s theory of relativity. One facet of this theory is that as one approaches the speed of light, the slower time goes for the mover. Another is that proximity to a black hole also slows down time for the mover. At one point in the movie a trip to a planet near a black hole that takes merely hours takes many years on Earth. And suddenly Murph Cooper is no longer played by the ten-year-old Mackenzie Foy but by the thirty-something Jessica Chastain. (It should be noted how remarkably similar Mackenzie and Jessica look like each other). I saw a great meme with a picture of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar that harked back to his first movie, Dazed and Confused, where he uttered the memorable line, “You know what I like about high school girls. Each year I get older but they stay the same age.” Of course this meme changed it a little bit. Now it reads, “You know what I like about my children. Each year they get older, but I stay the same age.”

Then there is a cameo by a well-known actor that I hesitate the mention because none of the advertisment material apparently wanted me to know about before he shows up quite unexpectedly. It is a great turn by that unnamed person. Matthew McConaughey continues his bewildering streak of very good movies. The same can be said for Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. And of course, it looks very impressive, the Black Hole and Wormhole especially. 

I don’t think I can say anymore without ruining some of the surprises. It is worth seeing, that is all. 

The Dark Knight Rises (4/5 Stars)

Occupying Wall Street, if only

I would say that director Christopher Nolan’s greatest ambition with his Batman trilogy is to make the effort worth his time and talent. Here is a guy who has made some of the best and most original movies of the past ten years (Memento, The Prestige, Inception) and yet finds himself in between each of his better projects having to make yet another Batman picture. He made the first one because he was not yet a famous director. He made so much money that he was practically forced to complete a trilogy. Of course, in this day and age, trilogies are things of the past when more money can be wringed out of the type of fans that feel they are honor bound to “must see” every movie about a character (see Twilight, Harry Potter, Terminator, Pirates of the Caribbean, Spiderman).  But with this movie I think we can be certain that Christopher has finally paid all of his Hollywood dues.  From here on out we should be able to enjoy his creative license unfettered by silly comic books

Comic books are silly. They are so silly that almost every trick a serious movie director can throw at an adaptation of one cannot completely overcome the unreality of it all. It takes a great director to come close though and Nolan employs some rather great tricks to get as far as he did.  

First, he has created a true never before scene spectacle by embracing IMAX and physical effects as opposed to 3D and CGI in his action sequences. There is a rawness and realism to physical effects that makes violence feel more visceral than computer generated effects. Compare the fight scenes in this movie with another comic book tent-pole this year, “The Avengers,” and you will see what I mean. There is an element of horror present in the way the main villain Bane, played by art house muscle-man Tom Hardy, goes around beating the shit out of people with his bare hands that is noticeably absent in “The Avengers.” You look at the way he kicks ass and go, “ouch.” It’s good stuff. (On another note, a serious detriment to the effectiveness of the action is the PG-13 rating. Bane twists and breaks a lot of necks in this movie, but these actions are only visually implied and always just off-screen.)  The IMAX is incredible and actually worth paying more money to see (as opposed to say anything but “Avatar’ in 3D). The cool thing is that Nolan is not just using IMAX for cityscapes and sunsets; he is using it for conversations and fistfights. And it isn’t for just a scene; half of the movie was filmed with IMAX cameras. There is more clarity, there is more detail, and it is far grander.

Second, Nolan actively tries to ignore elements of the comic book. Take for instance the character of Selina Kyle, played by Anne Hathaway. In the comic book she is a leather bound fanboy fantasy known more often as “Catwoman.” The name “Catwoman” is not uttered in this movie, nor does Selina Kyle spend her alter ego time in fetishistic leather carrying a whip. Nolan rightly chooses to drop these details and focus on the woman. In fact, he does this with Batman, played again by Christian Bale, as well. There is far more Bruce Wayne in this movie than his alter ego. And it works too. Usually it is the villain that spruces up a sequel because the hero is already established. Not here, Bruce Wayne is a more compelling character than the mysterious Bane. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Bane is never without this breathing contraption that covers his features and masks his emotions and motivations. You need to be able to see evil geniuses without their disguises in order to grasp the understanding needed to truly fear them. Masks are for flunkies like Darth Vader. Keep that in mind as you watch this movie.

Third, Nolan always contains an undercurrent of current political issues in the Batman movies. In the second movie, we had the Dark Knight providing vigilante justice against terrorism using techniques Dick Cheney would deem absolutely necessary. (It is a relief to see a movie tilt right in its politics every once in a while if only for originality’s sake.) In this movie, we have a strong current of class warfare. One of the early targets of Bane is the stock market where he takes several bankers as hostages. Then there is Selina Kyle, the cat burglar who steals from mansions and tells a vacuous billionaire, “There is a storm brewing, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” It would be an incredible and ballsy thing to do and pull off this type of conflict. Here you have Batman, whose alter ego is a billionaire playboy who inherited all his wealth and stature, and on the other side you have Bane, a man born with nothing in what is referred to as the worst jail on Earth. He escapes and builds his army of menial laborers and wayward forgotten youth underground in the sewers of Gotham city till one day he rises up to daylight and takes over the city. Unfortunately even though Bane professes that his many acts of terrorism are acts of class warfare against the greedy and ungrateful rich amongst us, it turns out it is just a cover for more humdrum motivation. Bane wants to simply destroy Gotham entirely. I know, I know. That disappointed me too. It’s a recycled nefarious plot that the movie freely admits is identical to the one in the first movie, “Batman Begins,” except this time the villain is going to try it with a nuclear bomb.

 There is a problem with that of course visually speaking. For those that remember “Batman Begins,” the Gotham in that movie looked and felt like a leaking shit-bucket, something that would actually make sense (using warped logic but still some logic) to wipe off the face of the Earth. You can’t say that of the city in which “The Dark Knight Rises” takes place. There has been a rather grand transformation of Gotham between the years, even more so considering the way the city looked like in “The Dark Knight.” I mean the first place looked fictional, the second place looked very much like Chicago, and this one is obviously Manhattan. The inconsistency is something that might make one wonder just where the hell is Gotham and why can’t the makers make up their mind about it. As far as I can tell, they changed the city to Manhattan in order to service a plot point. They needed a place with bridges to blow up. Again, the problem is that Manhattan nowadays looks unavoidably like a big pile of money. So a story about class warfare could certainly work, but a story about destroying a city because of its wretchedness wouldn’t. I will however give the movie credit in one important respect. It wasn’t the logistical nightmare that “The Dark Knight” was. Bane’s plans may be too grandiose to be plausible but they still followed the internal logic of the character as opposed to the meticulously thought out miracles of foresight the Joker, supposedly an agent of chaos, kept accomplishing.

Let me take a moment to explain what I mean by “too grandiose to be plausible,” because that phrase strikes to the heart of what the problem is with most comic book movies. Nowadays these movies are not simply content to be fun-filled frivolity. Nolan’s Batman trilogy is perhaps the best example. There is plenty of psychology, pathos, and Deep Meaning all over these movies. However the schemes of the villains are far too successful to make any sense given how simplistically they are accomplished or on the other hand how simplistically they are brought down. Because of this, the movie gains a feeling of unreality whenever say an entire police force armed only with handguns decides it would be good tactics to charge a line of tanks and machine guns at least fifty feet away from it in a narrow alley (and actually succeeds in doing so). This feeling of unreality tends to undercut all of the psychology, pathos, and Deep Meaning. There’s this great quote from Spiderman. It goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” In respect to moviemaking, writers and directors have the power to pull heartstrings, change minds, and make us care deeply for the lives of fictional people. At the same time though, if they choose to commit the viewer to such catharsis, they also have the responsibility to not fill the rest of the movie with contrived bullshit. That means if you want to make me care about Michael Caine crying up a storm, I better not see action sequences that confound the laws of logic or physics or both later on in the movie. I really don’t think that is too much to ask. For the record, “The Dark Knight Rises,” for the most part does not have this problem. It just has it to the point where I cannot say it is a great movie. It isn’t. 

Inception (5/5 Stars) July 20, 2010

A movie of immense ambition perfectly realized

I recall a scene from Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Being John Malkovich’ where the title character starts crawling into the portal that will lead into his own head. Another character looks on and remarks, “What happens when a man goes through his own portal?” It was a very good question, particularly because at that point in movie history it had never happened before. There was no genre outline for what was supposed to happen. The movie had defied genre and boldly stepped into the realm of the truly original. I remember the sense of suspense and wonder that came from watching that particular scene. Where will this movie go? What will I see? What is going to happen next!? Now take the suspense and wonder from that one scene in ‘Being John Malkovich’ and prolong it for an entire movie and you will get a sense of what it feels like to watch “Inception,” the new movie by Director Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo Dicaprio. It is an experience that must have accompanied the people who first saw such movies as “Apocalypse Now” or “Citizen Kane.” It is an experience that occurs only when a movie reaches for that zenith of Ambition and realizes it perfectly. I don’t have to see any more movies this year to say that “Inception” will be the best one. It is quite possibly one of the best movies ever made. 

Now let me think, what was the movie about? It was very vivid when I first watched it. It would be best if I saw it twice but I will take a crack at describing it anyway. Right now there is a unique form of Corporate Espionage called ‘Extraction.’ A group of specialized corporate thieves drug a person, invade his subconscious through his dreams, and steal an idea. It’s a bit complicated. One person, usually the architect, is the actual dreamer. They create and control the dream world. The others involved in the heist and the actual victim are voyeurs in the dream and their subconscious fill in the blanks and details of the dreamer’s world. There are several dream rules that you may remember from your own experiences. Some of them include: You can never remember how a dream started. The dream is especially realistic because when a dreamer is dreaming they can’t tell that they are in a dream. You can escape the dream by dying or falling but ordinary pain won’t wake you up. The time in a dream is prolonged because of the amount of brainpower you exert. For example, ten seconds in the real world is a minute in a dream. Most interesting is the concept of a dream within a dream where all the previous rules apply but even more so.

But alas there is just too much to explain for a dinky little review. I can only say this: that the enormous amount of exposition was always exceedingly interesting to learn and exhilarating to watch. Most importantly, it made sense. Writer/Director Christopher is a master storyteller in that sense. Recall what he taught us in “Memento,” about memory and what he taught us in “The Prestige,” about magic. Both had convoluted plots but we always understood what was going on and why. In this movie he teaches us with the same skill about Dreams. But that’s not all. In this movie, the intellectual exercise is just half the equation. Let’s not forget that Christopher Nolan is also the man who gave us “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight.” Those were both great big summer blockbusters with incredible action sequences. “Inception” is the successful combination of Nolan’s two disparate talents: Intellectualism and Spectacle. Oh and what a powerful fusion of imagination it is! The thing about Dreams you know is that they are bound only by imagination. Thus huge special effects sequences fit right into the story seamlessly. They never feel forced. In fact, these action sequences will make you think even more about what is happening. This is best combination of smarts and physicality since “The Matrix.” It’s like Charlie Kaufman wrote a James Bond script. One of the best scenes has Joseph Gordon Levitt involved in a fistfight in a hotel lobby where the laws of gravity keep on shifting. Wow! No, I don’t have the space to explain why, but it was awesome! If Christopher Nolan doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Director this year then the Academy has a hole in its head. 

Wait, I’m getting too far ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning. Leonardo Dicaprio is the leader of the group also known as the Extractor. His long time associate is played by Joseph Gordan Levitt (3rd Rock from the Sun, (500) Days of Summer). He is the Point Man. These two are approached by a very powerful corporate man played by Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai). He is the Tourist. Watanabe wants Dicaprio not to steal an idea from a corporate rival played by Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later, Batman Begins) but to give that man an idea. This is known as “Inception.” If you thought Extraction, something that you had never heard of before was hard to pull off, Inception is twice as tough to accomplish. Too succeed in this mission Dicaprio hires Dileep Rao (Avatar, Drag Me to Hell). He is the Chemist and will provide the hardcore sedatives to lull everyone into a 10-hour deep sleep on a plane flight across the Pacific. Dicaprio also hires Tom Hardy, a man who specializes in shape-shifting. Within dreams he can impersonate friends, enemies, and beautiful women. He is the Shade. Then Dicaprio visits his father, played by Michael Caine, and asks for his most brilliant student. This turns out to be Ellen Page (Juno). She is the Architect. The Chemist will drug everyone. The Architect will design the Dream Space. The Shade will trick the corporate rival. The Tourist will provide backup. The Point Man gets to beat up bad guys in gravity changing hallways. The Extractor will plant the idea. 

I should also mention that the Extractor has something dark buried in his subconscious. It is the vision of his wife who used to be a part of his team. She is played by Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose). Since the Extractor’s relationship with his wife ended somewhat violently, his vision of her in his subconscious is quite a dangerous thing. Let’s just say she tries very hard to wake everybody up (i.e. she has a habit of killing people). 

By the way, I have only described the setup to the heist itself. So everything I just told you about is exposition. When we get into the heist, which plays out on several levels of dreams within dreams, then it gets really really interesting. I won’t give any spoilers because you wouldn’t be able to understand them anyway. It would be impossible to understand what happens in the second hour until you have actually watched the first. There is no way to jump into the middle here. Every single minute of the 2 hours and 40 minute movie is important. (By the way, those two hours and forty minutes seemed like a half hour watching this movie. I couldn’t have been more entranced.)

I think it is fair to say that Leonardo Dicaprio has the best agent in the world. He has done nothing but superior movies for about a decade now. (Shutter Island, Revolutionary Road, The Departed, Blood Diamond, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Catch Me if you Can). When you think about it, he also has an odd habit of picking roles that involve doomed romances. For instance have you noticed how many times his love interest has died/gone crazy (Inception, Shutter Island, Revolutionary Road) or that he’s died/gone crazy (Titanic, The Aviator, The Departed) or they both have died/gone crazy (Romeo & Juliet, Shutter Island). Then there are also instances where he just dies (The Quick and the Dead, Blood Diamond) or the love simply goes unrequited (Catch Me if You Can, Body of Lies, This Boy’s Life). I think his most successful romance was with Cameron Diaz in Gangs of New York and I can’t really even remember if that relationship was ever consummated. He plays J. Edgar Hoover in his next movie, a closeted homosexual who openly despised gay people. Hoover did have a long-term relationship with another FBI man though. It seems hard to believe that a story about Hoover just might be Dicaprio’s most successful romance, but it might have that potential. With Dicaprio’s fine performances in two movies this year I believe he should be a front-runner for a Best Actor Oscar. If I had to choose which movie to nominate him for, it would be Shutter Island, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t also do a great job here. 

If I had to choose a performance I thought looked like the most fun though it would have to be Joseph Gordan Levitt’s. His fight in the hallway was just ridiculous. Also I had a blast in the scene where Ellen Page realizes an entire city landscape is at the whim of her imagination and starts rearranging the physics of it. What can I say, this movie is special. A freight train runs through a city street without the aid of railroad tracks. Yes it makes sense. Go ahead and take a leap of faith with a master storyteller.

A final note on the ending of the movie, which I believe was about one second to short. I believe that it would have toppled. I say this because I would be extraordinarily confused if it didn't. Right now, I am certain that it was wrong of Nolan to end the movie on an ambiguous note at all. To think he diligently led us all that way only to cut us off at the last moment is decidedly uncool. Of course, I remember being underwhelmed by the endings of both "Memento" and "The Prestige" when I first saw them also. But After watching both those movies again, I became much more accepting of what Nolan was trying to teach me. That's normal. When a movie introduces a new way of thinking about something (whether it be memory, magic, or dreams) it is hard to accept the new thought process right away. I know it is quite possible that "Inception" will be an even better movie the second time around. I'll add to this review my thoughts about the ending as soon as I get to see it a second time.

The Dark Knight 07/18/08

Yes, I know, I've got some explaining to do. My decision for giving this film a rotten rating is actually resting on paradoxical sands. If this film was less serious, carried less moral weight, and didn't contain potent messages, I don't think it would be getting a negative review. But the fact that it is serious, that the filmmakers did intend to challenge the viewer with grotesque situations, that they deliberately pulled our emotional strings, and that they decidedly drew conscious parallels with current political situations, should place upon them great responsibility to the viewer. And the fact is, this story cheats. The movie cheats, and despite the great performances, action sequences, and its often noble intentions and ambitions, on principle I will give a bad review. You simply can't take advantage of an audience like this. You can't intentionally persuade people to be moved so deeply on false premises. I compare this movie more with something like 'Silence of the Lambs' than 'Iron Man.' That's how creepy and dark it is. There are reasons why filmmakers are very careful about making Holocaust pictures. The Nolan brothers should have taken a step back and thought it through once more on this one. 
What exactly do I mean when I say a movie cheats? There are many cliche examples (Watch 'Hot Fuzz') like bad guys firing off rounds and rounds of automatic guns and not hitting anything. There's the implausibly tough female, the indestructible man, and who can forget the old 'Oh my god we're about to be hit by train!' Here in this movie is a version of the 'insurmountable enemy,' a villain with such incredible mobility, intelligence, and material at his disposal that any attempt to beat him becomes implausible. The first time we see the Joker he's robbing a bank. He has told his flunkies to kill each other off so he can keep all the loot. By the end there's just him. The next time we see him he's got new flunkies, the police take one of them in. He turns out to be a schizophrenic psychotic. We are told most of his flunkies are. Now I don't have a masters in business management, but how does one run an organization that is intelligent enough to pull off triple crosses, infiltrate and intimidate the entire police and D.A. office, and have enough foresight to do some of the insane things in this picture with a gang of psychotic madmen that have a habit of killing each other off. The thing about the Joker, and these are his words, is that he's a force of chaos. At one point he admits he never has a plan. Where and when he says this is especially ironic. He says this to the new Harvey Two-Face in a hospital that he apparently has just rigged to explode. Keep in mind that like an hour ago, he had been in this abandoned warehouse taking over the entire mob. He set a spectacle by setting 34 million dollars on fire. The money's in this big pyramid, which someone had to take days to build. Who? Who knows. Not the Joker because he's been taping himself in some penthouse torturing policeman. In just a few hours after he blows up the hospital, he somehow sneaks 100 barrels of oil and a couple bombs into two ferries. He figures out how to stop their engines, take over the PA system and cast forth dire messages all from some abandoned skyscraper, where apparently he found time to take hostages and dress them up as clowns to perform yet another double cross on police snipers who would have no idea where to find the Joker if it hadn't been for Batman's top secret surveillance techniques. Therefore Joker must have super intuition or super paranoia to prepare himself for things he logically should know nothing about. My point is that this guy has to be some sort of super genius at logistics and coordination to pull any of this off. Does that reconcile with Heath Ledger's portrayal of a chaotic madman?
Commissioner Gordon may be a nice guy but he's a horrible police chief. His hapless cops go around in SWAT patrols getting completely blind sided by the Joker's forces, losing to them most of the time in direct confrontations. I wonder where The Joker is getting the manpower to do these things. I wonder where he gets big rigs, garbage trucks, and a vast number of empty warehouses. How does he know exactly where to trip up a helicopter? If I wasn't mistaken, half the criminal underworld was jailed early in the picture. Who are these people? There is also a bigger question of how they get paid, what with the Joker's penchant for lighting all of his money on fire. 
In a lesser movie this sort of thing wouldn't matter as much. But 'The Dark Knight' is rife with deep scenes and a couple grotesque situations that shock your conscience. I glared at the screen hoping the makers of this film didn't have the gall to blow up a ferry full of people in a PG-13 film. By that time, I wouldn't be surprised if they did. There was a couple of scenes that reminded me of the 'Saw' franchise. There's a particularly cruel one in which a newly engaged couple are tied to chairs in different places. In front of them is a time bomb and a radio. This way they can conveniently weep to each other as they are waiting to be blown to kingdom come. At least this movie had the taste not to show any real torture, but still we get to hear about it. The Joker explains how he got the scars on his face. The stories are decidely untrue, he changes it every time to befit the situation. Whatever is more horrifying. My God, is he one fucked up dude. 
The Dark Knight can conveniently be linked with current political situations. I think it is meant to. The Joker represents forces of evil in the world, Islamic Jihadists come to mind. We don't understand them, we don't know what they want. We can't negotiate with them or buy them. We don't know where they come from, or how they gain the ability to do what they do. Batman here goes through a change, he can't be a willy nilly super hero like Superman. He, as Dick Cheney would say, needs to turn to the dark side to beat the Joker. We see a city wide, highly illegal, super surveillance machine. Batman represents vigilanteism, secret covert action, a necessary evil. He's rough with the bad guys. He throws the Joker around in the interrogation room. I very much expected him to go through with some sort of 'enhanced techniques' in there. As Commissioner Gordon says at the end, Batman isn't a true hero. He doesn't represent our values or wishes. We are waiting for the day when we no longer need someone like him. He is simply the hero we need for these hard times. Wow, what a bad message. 
I have yet to get political in my reviews, but this movie necessitates a certain dialogue. So I myself will delve into the dark side to give the counter argument. I think this movie illustrates perfectly the mindset of many Americans that is simply wrong. The fact that we feel, as a nation, a need to delve into the dark side ourselves is because we have a strong misconception of the enemy. We think who we are up against is a form of the Joker. But what this movie illustrates if you look at it closer, and pick it apart like I have, is that an enemy like the Joker is conceivably impossible. No matter what the morals are, we have to admit that flying several different planes into several different buildings at the same time takes a certain amount of logic and coordination. These people are not chaotic psychopaths. They are rational beings that have a great deal of foresight, and to some extent, good management skill. It does no good to label them as crazy, evil, or cowards. That's a fundamental misinterpretation of our problem. Suicide bombers need bombs and paychecks. Like everyone else they eat, drink, and sleep each day, most have families, and all of them have a cultural history. If you understand what that is, then you have gained enormous insight into how they work and what rules they follow. The Joker knew Batman's rules and exploited them tragically. We have yet to figure out how the Joker ticks and he still frightens and confuses us. 

The Prestige 01/10/07

:fresh: Christopher Nolan's film about dueling magicians hit it right on the spot. It is a very clean and complete film. Very beautiful, well acted, and choreagraphed editing wise to a tee. The story is an aptly told one as it is filmed in the present, the past, and the very past, with flashbacks and flashforwards that constantly shift this way and that but never seem forced and seem inseperable from the what the story is. As a constant shifting between who is ahead and who is behind, who we like and who we despise, who has the upper hand? We never know. 

Like I said before this is a very good and decent film. Not once does Nolan misstep. But it is not a great film. Perhaps this is because I saw the twists before they became apparent. (Nolan failed in tricking me with his magic but succeeded in making me enjoy the movie anyway.) I feel that he gave one too many hints as too what lay ahead. But what really made the movie anti-climatic was also one of the main points in the film. In this way I felt dissapointed but enlightened at the same time. It is what Christian Bale says at one point in the film. He refuses to give the secret of a magic trick to his wife for the bullet catching trick saying that if given the magician no longer means anything to the audience. Then at the end of the movie we are given the secret of the magic trick and then suddenly the movie no longer seems so special. And we exit the theatre with the knowledge that an obsession for simple truth and the finding of it is no match for the marvels of one's own imagination.