One Battle After Another (4/5 Stars)

For the first fifteen minutes of this movie, I wasn’t sure what year this movie was taking place in. The setting seemed vaguely contemporaneous, but the characters and their actions seem to exist in the 1960s-1970s. We are introduced to a domestic terrorist outfit called the French 75. Leonardo DiCaprio plays their bomb expert. The main baddie is Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor. They stick up banks and declare that the money is being used to fund black liberation and civil revolution. What they lack in a coherent plan is made up for with narcissistic delusions of grandeur.

It doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes of screen time before reality sets in. The United States Government, led by Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (played by Sean Penn), arrests if not assassinates most of them. As Perfidia is being wheeled away in shackles, the arresting officers take out their smart phones and take selfies with her. And that is how I finally understood that this was taking place post-2007. Which is ridiculous when you think about it. Because no matter how crazy you believe our politics presently is, it still isn’t as crazy as it was in the 1960s-1970s when you had real domestic terrorists bandying about the country planting bombs (Weather Underground), engaging in shooting matches with the local police (Black Panthers), and sticking up banks (Patty Heart’s Symbionese Liberation Army).

The details of terrorism morph over time. Like criminals in general, terrorists live on the cutting edge of technology and infrastructure. In the mid-20th Century, the new interstate highway system and the arrival of civilian air travel allowed criminals to complete their activities and escape with unprecedented speed and distance from traditional authorities. The government took some time to catch up, but they did, which is why we no longer have such a scourge of serial killers and international terrorists. The new frontier today is in cyberspace, but “One Battle After Another” is stuck in the past. I am informed that Writer/Director Paul Thomas Anderson adapted this screenplay from a 1990 book by Thomas Pynchon titled “Vineland”. That would make sense, because the conceit of the movie would play much better if the prologue had taken place in the 1970s and the rest of the movie took place at the turn of the nineties.

Still here we are. Countering the 1970s vibe of leftist extremists, we are introduced to a very Reaganesque vibe of right-wing conspirators. They call themselves the Knights of St. Nicholas, gather in expensive tunnels beneath a California suburb, and seem to concern themselves solely with fighting the equally fictitious French 75. Col. Steven J. Lockjaw is presented with an opportunity to join this fabled league of white supremacists but encounters a difficult problem with a background check. You see, Col. Lockjaw had an affair with Perfidia Beverly Hills and the child she bore around the time of her arrest, could either be his or Leonardo DiCaprio’s. If it is his, he will have to dispose of this child. If not, well, its not that big of a deal, but I think the plan is to kill her anyway.

As is usual in the USA, the idiocy of delusional left-wing extremists fuels the excesses of the more formidable and much better funded right-wing kind. If the French 75 create an annoyance akin to a housefly, the Knights of St. Nicholas provoke a solution akin to swatting the same with a baseball bat. Col. Steven J. Lockjaw creates a false emergency to utilize his military force to infiltrate a small town in Northern California to search for his potential daughter, now about sixteen years old, named Willa (played here by Chase Infiniti). Colonel Lockjaw uses the army – not a SWAT Team, not a cadre of FBI agents – to search for a private citizen. He interrupts the prom of a local high school with a squadron of soldiers armed with assault rifles. Then he detains and interrogates the children to find Willa. (A very good performance is given by James Ratterman as the main army interrogator. He has very good screen presence and I was not surprised to learn that he is not an actor. He is an actual retired army interrogator.)

This is an extraordinary crime and fuels a chase around Northern California in which the French 75 abduct Willa to save her from Lockjaw, who relentlessly chases after her, all the while Leo DiCaprio tries to find his daughter and save her from everybody else. Meanwhile, the false emergency concerns an underground trafficking pipeline of illegal immigrants from Mexico. This pipeline is conducted by Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (played by Benicio Del Toro) who moonlights as a karate instructor while upstairs/downstairs of his dojo illegal immigrants sleep on mats. With all the crazy Americans on both extreme sides of the political spectrum around, Benecio Del Toro has done well to immerse himself in the calming stoicism of eastern philosophy. I am reminded of the hustler in Sean Baker’s “Prince of Broadway” whose illicit store on Canal Street is raided by the authorities and who, in the next scene, tells an employee to stick around because he will have something else going on in a few weeks. He just takes it in stride. I can only imagine what real illegal immigrants think of our cultural conflagrations. I presume it is not so different. After all, for every day they get to work and earn money in this country, they are playing with house money.

All these characters are well drawn, and the movie moves along at a fair clip. Del Toro and Sean Penn put in good work. Sean Penn is the type of movie star who seems to lose and gain inches of height between roles. Here he is at his shortest. Leonardo DiCaprio, more than anything, is a very good tastemaker and producer. He lends his star quality, no better or worse in this movie than in others, to get the movie made, which are always interesting stories told by very good filmmakers. He seems to be going through the list of all the best directors of his generation and will at the end have worked with most of them. I hear he will be working with Damien Chazelle next on an Evel Knievel biopic. I bet that one will be good too.

What can we say about Paul Thomas Anderson? He is one of the best moviemakers around and has quietly over a few decades has produced a kaleidoscopic portrait of California at varying times and places. (The sole exception is Phantom Thread which could exist just to confirm that P.T. could locate his movies anywhere if only he felt like it). It would have been a bit more interesting if he hadn’t changed the temporal setting of the book or at least updated the crimes and criminal outfits to fit the 21st century. For instance, there is a lot of crime being enabled by the dark web and Bitcoin. Wouldn’t it have been better if this movie was about that sort of criminal network. But maybe we don’t quite understand how that works yet. There isn’t that clarity that comes only with hindsight.

 

 

Killers of the Flower Moon (5/5 Stars)

In the early 2000s, HBO produced a remarkable TV Series called The Wire, which I could argue is not only the best TV series ever made, but perhaps the best anything ever made in the medium of film. The first scene of the first episode of the first season is a stand-alone vignette: the Ballad of Snot Boogie.

Snot Boogie is a young black man who has just been murdered. A police detective questions a witness as to how it happened. Well, a group of men played a regular dice game, of which Snot Boogie regularly took part in. Snot Boogie was not good at dice and at some point in most dice games, after he lost most or all of his money, he would scoop up the money in the pot and run off with it. Usually he was caught and given a beat down, until one game he was shot in the back and killed. The detective questions the witness: if Snot Boogie always stole the pot, why did you let him play. The reply: “This is America, man. You gotta let ‘em play.”

Per the audio commentary of David Simon, the point was that American society was so rigged and unfair, that it became absurd that its citizens would take part in the hypocrisy of the American Dream, this notion that anyone could make it. That is, if Snot Boogie was highly likely to never win, wouldn’t it be more honest to stop pretending that he could, to simply not allow him to play anymore? That was The Wire’s America. It is also the America of “Killers of the Flower Moon”, except in this case, Snot Boogie gets super lucky and wins the pot several times over. Then, perhaps, to extend the metaphor, Snot Boogie gets shot anyway and his winnings are stolen.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is a bizarre story that could not take place anywhere but the USA. The Osage, a Native American tribe, were conquered by the USA in the 1800s and were forcibly relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma. It was desolate and unwanted land. That much is a normal occurrence in the annals of human history in all societies. What happened next is extraordinary. Decades later it was discovered that the land had oil under it and the Osage struck it rich. The movie informs us that their nation had the highest per capita wealth in the world in the 1920s. Substantial prejudice exists in the society, the Osage need white guardians to sign off on the disbursal and expenditure of their money and the white tradesman in town charge the Osage exorbitant prices, but even so, they are driving the latest cars, wearing 1920s high fashion, and intermarrying with the white populace (money trumping prejudice). When was the last time a conquered people were allowed to get that far? (To name some modern examples, I doubt we are going to see the Uighers or the Rohingya strike it rich any time soon.) Then, in a case study made famous by J. Edgar Hoover’s upstart F.B.I., many of the Osage start dying, some mysteriously and others not so mysteriously, to an extent that indicates the entire outside society is either involved in the murders or willfully blind to them.

Killers of the Flower Moon was directed by Martin Scorsese and stars, for the first time together in a Scorsese movie, his two main acting avatars Robert De Niro and Leonardo Dicaprio. They play historical figures, Robert De Niro as a man called King Hale an established businessman and philanthropist in the Osage Hills and Leonardo Dicaprio as Earnest Burkhardt, nephew of King Hale, a young man looking for work after his service in the Great War. The third main character is Mollie Burkhardt, played by Lily Gladstone, the Osage woman who marries Ernest Burkhardt and whose family members start and continue to die unnatural deaths. Martin Scorsese has a long and established history of making movies about people not exactly saying what they mean (think of all the Italian gangsters and their way with words) and this comes into play here as well. The characters are inscrutable in a way that perhaps only real people can be. 

We can start with Earnest Burkhardt, whose main attribute is his low level of intelligence. If we can say that the natural Leonardo Dicaprio role is one of ambition and charm (say Catch Me if You Can, The Wolf of Wall Street), this character is decidedly against type. Interestingly, Dicaprio doesn’t usually play uninspiring not-that-bright people, but when he does, they are some of his best roles (Revolutionary Road, Shutter Island). The movie takes a seemingly contradictory stand on Earnest Burkhardt both portraying him as the type of man who would rob at gunpoint, graverob, and coordinate murders of Osage but also one who loves his Osage wife. I assume the source materials bear this out because if it didn’t actually happen, you wouldn’t believe it. I am reminded of reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker which dealt with the enormous decline of violence in the modern era. In trying to explain the same, Mr. Pinker posited that part of it had to do with a sort of moral retardation in past societies. In parallel to a rise in IQs over time from better education, so there was also a rise in moral intelligence. That is, without the direct influence of a type of education that teaches abstract concepts such as empathy or equality between people, you would by default have someone who operates like Earnest Burkhardt. (Empathy is the ability to understand how something may be seen from another person’s point of view. Mr. Pinker suggests that this is an exercise in abstract thinking that a human needs to be taught in order to perform. This is in contrast to literal thinking which is like: I am white. You are red. We are literally different and so different behavioral rules apply.) The best thing that can be said about Earnest is that his disposition makes him predisposed to manipulation and so, given his nature, he may not be entirely culpable as he seems. In one scene, he is so easily manipulated that he fails to grasp that his uncle might be plotting to kill him too. But that is the best thing you can say about him.

Even more inscrutable than Earnest is his wife Mollie Burkhardt. I expect the creators of this movie found far less in the record about what made Mollie tick then the white people who were at some point interrogated by the authorities and cross-examined in court as to their actions. In various parts of the movie, Lily Gladstone’s facial expressions reminded me of the Mona Lisa. Why does she and her sisters marry white men? Is it a status thing? Is she in love with Earnest? Once all her relatives start dying, why isn’t she more suspicious? At some point, it would seem that she would rather be killed by her husband than consider the possibility that her husband would try to kill her. It feels like Scorsese did a decent job of portraying the Osage and the movie’s marketing materials heavily lean on assuring us of that point. Indeed, some of the best parts of the movie are all Osage. The field of the Flower Moon is poetry. The death owls are spooky. The best scene in the movie takes place in a powwow and concerns a moving speech by the chief of the tribe (played by Yancey Red Corn) about the present events and how they will respond to them.

Sitting in on that powwow is the most inscrutable character of all: King Hale. Here is a guy that has lived in the Osage Hills all his life, understands and speaks the Osage language, has made friends with enough Osage to be allowed in the powwow in the first place and is ultimately the mastermind behind a lot of the killings. If Ernest Burkhardt is morally retarded, King Hale is morally deranged. One is reminded of the villain in Chinatown who,when asked why he is orchestrating a particularly nasty scheme, replies without hesitation “The future Mr. Gittes, the future.” King Hale makes a similar argument about the Osage, which boils down to the following: Since they are all going to die someday, there is nothing wrong with murdering them. Then once he is cornered and the truth let out, he somehow believes that society will forgive him. I am reminded of Sam Bankman-Fried, a pioneer of his self-coined “effective altruism,” who seemed to think it was okay to steal from his clients, and that the world would be okay with it, because he felt he was so much better at spending the money. 

Killers of the Flower Moon is 3.5 hours long. But don’t let that stop you from watching it. Indeed, there is a great place in the movie to take a break either for an intermission or even for the day. That would be around the two hour mark when the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation show up. (One thing about being stinking rich is that you can tell your problems directly to the President. It doesn’t appear at first that Mollie’s brief interaction with Calvin Coolidge would have precipitated direct federal action, but then again, Mr. Coolidge was historically circumspect with his words.) The agent in charge is played by Jesse Plemons, an actor who can somehow pull off normcore white guy and dangerous at the same time. The F.B.I does its work in a professional and competent way. Actually, it didn’t seem all that hard to crack the case, only a group of people with authority that cared enough to solve it.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (5/5 Stars)

Whenever some crazy person does some horrible thing in the world, deranged manifestos from the extremes of society are festooned upon us by a media exploiting our collective morbid curiosity. The dead are victimized twice. First they are robbed of their live, then their lives are forever connected and largely overshadowed by the attention spent on the perpetrators. Sharon Tate is a perfect example. This utterly blameless young woman was horrifically murdered by the Manson cult. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood uses this real event from 1969 Hollywood as its reason for being. However, upon exiting the theater, you may notice that during the course of the movie, you have learned far more about Sharon Tate then Charles Manson. Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino to his great credit has flipped the murders on their head. He showers attention on the victims and treats the perpetrator dismissively. This is too my great relief. I was very worried coming into this movie about what Tarantino would do with the material given that Roman Polanski was still alive. Coming out of the movie theater, I can marvel at the deft way Tarantino handled it all.

Reappearing in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained are Leonardo Dicaprio and Brad Pitt respectively. Tarantino writes them some tailor-made roles. Leonardo Dicarprio plays Rick Dalton, former star of Bounty Law, on the downward trajectory of his show business career (in an early scene, he gets presented the ‘opportunity’ to move to Italy and star in westerns over there). Brad Pitt plays Rick Dalton’s former stunt double, Cliff Booth. Cliff may or may not have been involved in the tragic death of his wife in the style of Natalie Wood’s mysterious fate. Nobody can prove whether or not Cliff did what and Tarantino makes it purposefully ambiguous. Enough people think Cliff might have to the point where he no longer is a working man (he also got into a fist fight with Bruce Lee). He spends his days doing odd jobs for Rick and feeding his bulldog.

Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are completely fictional. It is a testament to the movie that we become highly invested in them while waiting for the real occurrences to occur in the last half hour of an almost three hour movie. It must be noted that Brad Pitt at 55 years old still has a six-pack of abs. It’s absurd. While Leo plays worn and tragic, a type of role he has become very good at.

As a very present character is Hollywood itself. The 1969 production value, the neon details, the cars, the Playboy mansion, the year round sun. Most of all, that feel of innocence before those dirty hippies ruined the party and gave the sixties their hangover.

I very much don’t want to ruin this movie for you. If you don’t know anything about it, I think you should do some historical homework and then listen to nothing else. You should know something about the Manson murdes. Read the Wikipedia article. Then watch this movie. You will not be disappointed.

Would you believe me if I told you that this is Tarantino least vulgar and arguably least violent movie. It is on the same violence level of pre-Kill Bill. As far as cursing is concerning, not that much at all really. It’s kind of refreshing. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is top-tier Tarantino. Put it up there with Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained. Highly recommended.

The Revenant (5/5 Stars)

This much is true: In 1823 on Captain Henry’s expedition up the Missouri River, Hugh Glass was attacked by a bear. He was severely wounded. His compatriots could not carry him all the way back to the fort. Two young men, Bridger (18) and Fitzgerald (23) stayed behind to wait for help as the rest went ahead. Bridger and Fitzgerald abandoned Hugh Glass without food or supplies. Hugh Glass crawled and stumbled the some 200 miles back to the fort alone.

This much is also true: Right around the time Director Alejandro Innaritu and Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki were accepting their respective Oscars for Birdman, an on location film shoot was going on in the frigid winter of Wyoming or South America or some other godforsaken place. The conditions were so terrible that they were starting to leak into the press Apocalypse Now style. “The Revenant” was that movie and watching the movie, it looks like hell froze over on the film shoot. I do not know if this movie will join “Apocalypse Now” and “Fitzcarraldo” in the legendary realms of ridiculously hard film shoots but the affect in the theater is akin to those movies. In other words, this movie does the original true story right. It feels like Leonardo Dicaprio (Hugh Glass) was attacked by a bear, abandoned by his compatriots, and ended up crawling two hundred miles to safety through blizzards and Indian attacks. It is an intense awesome movie.

A main star of the movie (and what separates it from all other Westerns) is the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki. He is well known for two things. First are his long takes. There are plenty in this movie but I hardly recognized or paid attention to them. When watching his previous movies like Gravity and Birdman, the long takes were part of the excitement. They are less so here as Lubezki uses them plenty but does seem to feel as if he needs to use them exclusively. That is to say when it makes story sense to not keep on the same shot, he doesn’t. Second is simply the look of the movie that seems to only occur in movie shot by him. For the past decade he has perfected this beautiful look in movies such as The New World, The Tree of Life, Gravity, Birdman. It must be hard to do because it looks so great and yet he seems to be the only one doing it. “The Revenant” was shot entirely in winter using only natural light. The result is a movie that does not look like any other movie. It is a ghostly haunted visual effect of denotes the hardness and coldness of life at that time. Lubezki rightly was awarded the Oscar for the past two years. He may very well win again this year and he would deserve it. He is in the prime of a spurt of aritistic genius.

Leonardo Dicaprio may very well win his first Oscar this year and he too would deserve it. This actor I believe has achieved a certain Meryl Streep-ness or Philip Seymour Hoffman-ness that makes it seem that he is perfect for every role he finds himself in. The secret is a full on commitment to the role and if there ever was anyone committed to a role it is Dicaprio here. Here he is wrestling a bear, swimming through icy rivers, eating raw meat, and fighting hand to hand with Indians. His last role was “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It takes a special actor to be the right choice for both roles.

Playing his antagonist, Fitzgerald, is an actor that was made for rugged terrain, the art house muscle man Tom Hardy. The movie does a good job of setting up his villainy. He has worked painstakingly for the last six months only for an Indian attack to steal all of the wealth of the expedition. He was half-scalped earlier in his life (he has a scar that makes him partly bald) and so does not particularly like or more importantly trust Hugh Glass’s half Pawnee son. He is a desperate angry man. Between the two is Captain Henry played by Domnhall Gleeson, who is good looking enough to be a man with money but odd looking enough to belong in the 19^th century. This guy is everywhere this year and impressively pulls off many different characters.

I am playing with the idea of drawing up a syllabus of American History through movies and “The Revenant” is one of those movies I would love to have in it. What makes it better in historical terms that any old western is the unflinching way it shows the elements and the noble/savage way it treats Native Americans. This is particularly important because we have a tendency to look at history in black and white terms. But that is not how this movie treats the Akirawa tribe. It humanizes them and gives them appropriate motivations but it also does not hide the fact that they are extremely dangerous and have their own tribal prejudices. It also portrays them as losers in their struggle as is noted by a scene in which Fitzgerald and Bridger walk through the remnants of a massacre of an Indian village. This too is important.  Lastly, what other movie do you know takes place in 1823. No other movie. Exactly. 

The WOLF of WALL STREET (5/5 Stars)

Jordan Belfort and the Obscene Destruction of Wealth. 

It seems to have been completely forgotten by now but when Gordon Gekko made his ‘Greed is Good’ speech in Oliver Stone’s landmark 1987 film ‘Wall Street’ he was not waxing philosophically in a theoretical sense. He was speaking as a major stockholder of a company at a shareholders meeting. Specifically the company was Tarbell Paper and Gekko had bought up a large share of stock in order to streamline the company (sell off assets and fire unnecessary personel) and use the proceeds towards a large dividend payment. As a major stockholder he would certainly profit from such an action, but that was not the only reason Gekko put forth to justify his actions. Here is the complete speech:

[at the Teldar Paper stockholder's meeting] Well, I appreciate the opportunity you're giving me Mr. Cromwell as the single largest shareholder in Teldar Paper, to speak. Well, ladies and gentlemen we're not here to indulge in fantasy but in political and economic reality. America, America has become a second-rate power. Its trade deficit and its fiscal deficit are at nightmare proportions. Now, in the days of the free market when our country was a top industrial power, there was accountability to the stockholder. The Carnegies, the Mellons, the men that built this great industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money at stake. Today, management has no stake in the company! All together, these men sitting up here own less than three percent of the company. And where does Mr. Cromwell put his million-dollar salary? Not in Teldar stock; he owns less than one percent. You own the company. That's right, you, the stockholder. And you are all being royally screwed over by these, these bureaucrats, with their luncheons, their hunting and fishing trips, their corporate jets and golden parachutes. Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can't figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I'll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.

That’s right, the company was badly run. It had thirty-three vice presidents all being paid exhorbitant amounts of money for no particular reasona at all.  In other words, the company was ripping off its investors and should have been broken up, streamlined, and made more efficient. Does anybody remember this detail? I bring it up because this speech and this movie, to the horror I bet of its fire breathing liberal writer/director, has been credited as a main inspiration for the Wall Street we have today. There is an incredible speech in the Wolf of Wall Street that I’m going to put down in its entirety. It is given by Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, the founder of a brokerage firm named Stratton Oakmont. He is inspiring his traders to misrepresent to their clients that a bad shoe company, for which Stratton Oakmont owns 80% of the shares, is a must buy. The idea is to use their clients to drive up the price and then to sell their own shares at the peak. This will of course devalue the stock that Stratton Oakmont does not own but their clients do. This is dishonest and illegal and here is the speech:

Besides the “Greed is Good” mantra I would submit that there is very little similar in these two speeches. Our culture nonetheless does not make that distinction. Either you are against Greed and against both actions or you are for it and endorse both. 

The confusion can be directly traced to Adam Smith’s landmark treatise on capitalism “The Wealth of Nations” published in 1776. It is an extraordinary book in many ways but it also contains several errors. (Errors in groudbreaking masterpieces are not such an extraordinary thing. Read any tome of Aristotle and Plato and you will notice antiquated and mistaken arguments sandwiched between the words of wisdom on a regular basis.) One of the biggest errors concerns Adam Smith’s theory on the division of labor. He compares the winter coat of a poor worker in London with the loincloth of an African King. Why, he asks, can this poor man afford better clothes than a king? The answer is that London has a developed economy that uses division of labor. The African king made his own loincloth all by himself and did not have the time or capacity to make it any better. The poor man’s coat however had been touched by thousands of men. The herders of the sheep, the shearers of the wool, the transporters of the wool, the weavers, the salespeople, et cetera et cetera. The insight is that a man can do one simple task for one job far faster than he can do all the tasks for one job. If you build a network of all these different people doing their own respective simple tasks you will be able to produce far more than you could if one person did everything by himself or herself. The vast supply of goods that this network creates drives down prices for the goods themselves, which is why the poor man in a developed economy can afford better clothes than the African king in an undeveloped economy. Adam Smith than states that rational self-interest is what made the network possible. Each participant in the network was acting in his or her own self-interest not a sense of altruism.

And here is where Smith after pages of brilliant insights makes his error. Altruism is not the foil Adam Smith should have drawn for capitalism. After all not all rational self-interest is capitalism. An arms length transaction between two parties is in the rational self-interest of both parties. But if a man beats another man up and steals his lunch money that too is in the rational self-interest of the first man. Both men are being greedy. But one of them is trading. The other is stealing. That is a huge difference. In essence, it is the difference between capitalism and piracy/communism/fascism/etc and the fact that we as a society cannot tell the difference is a huge problem. The traders in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ take this corrupted thinking to its most logical and extreme end. They think they are capitalists and point to all the money they have gained as proof that they are. But they are not capitalists and this story is not a story of capitalism. It’s about thugs and thieves and the obscene destruction of wealth implicitly approved by a society that does not yet understand certain fundamental basics of economics.

“The Wolf of Wall Street,” is the fifth collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and actor Leonardo Dicaprio. It is arguably their best. It is certainly the most outrageous, funniest, crassest, excessive, and balls to the wall crazy movie they have ever made. It might have broken the f-word record, but I know for certain that I haven’t seen so much nudity in a movie outside of pornography. And the drug use, well I don’t think there is a scene in this 3-hour movie where somebody isn’t on something. The story comes from the autobiography of Jordan Belfort, a consummate salesman in that he could sell almost anything to anyone. After a brief stint on the real Wall Street, where his boss played by Matthew McCounaghey openly snorts cocaine in an upscale restaurant and counsels him to steal from his clients and masturbate at least twice a day, Jordan opens up his own penny stock brokerage firm in Long Island. The companies he shills are almost completely worthless but Jordan has an unbeatable sales pitch. In essence what he is selling is something way too good to be true. Get rich quick with penny stocks. He tells his clients that they can make money hand over fist by sitting on the couch at home doing nothing. Give me your money and you will win the lottery essentially. Jordan drives home this point by advertising his own lifestyle as proof that he knows how to make you rich. Look at Jordan’s big house, his beautiful wife, his cars, his hookers and drugs. Don’t you want to be just like him?

This is almost as important as the sales pitch because in order to become as rich as Jordan gets, he can’t do it all by himself, he needs hundreds of sales associates with the same unscrupulous tactics he has. He says to them: scam the people on the bottom and you will become as rich and decadent as me on the top. And boy does Jordan ever lavish on the temptations on his employees and clients. Every month, they have huge parties in the office with nude marching bands and strippers. Hookers roam the office corriders on a regular basis. Cocaine and Quallude use is rampant. For Jordan’s bachelor party he flew 50 of his coworkers to Vegas, hired 100 prostitutes, and trashed an entire floor of an upscale hotel. They have an orgy on the 747 to Vegas. The entire thing cost two million dollars. A drop in the bucket for a man who brags about being upset because he only made 52 million dollars last year. You see he was three million shy of a million dollars a week. He’s that kind of rich.

Do we care that people are doing this with other people’s money? For anyone wondering why the movie is three hours long, the answers are intertwined. The movie goes on so long because nobody stops Jordan. People don’t care apparently, probably because we have this ‘Joe the Plumber’ mentality about this type of excess. In other words, we aren’t against it because one day we hope to be on top doing the same thing. It’s the American Dream we’ve seen so many times in movies this year whether it was Spring Breakers, Pain and Gain, The Great Gatsby, or American Hustle. It is amazing how much bad behavior Jordan Belfort gets away with because he is rich. Sexual Assault, Public Intoxication, and Reckless Driving Under the Influence are just a few of his crimes. At one point he idiotically pilots his 170-foot yacht into a major storm and it sinks. A plane that comes in to rescue them crashes and the three people inside die. Jordan happened to be violating a court order at the time that instructed him to stay in the country. There are no consequeces.

The performance by Leonardo Dicaprio and also by his sidekick here Donnie Azoff, played by Jonah Hill, is arguably the best of his career. It is notable in its sheer lack of vanity. One particular scene stands out. Jordan and Donnie take these very old Qualuddes that unbeknownst to them take a very long time to kick in. When they finally do Jordan is far away from home. He is paralyzed by the force of the drugs and has to crawl out of the country club, into his car, and get home. It is a tour de force comic scene and the Leonardo and Jonah’s respective Oscar nominations are duly deserved.

The directing by Martin Scorsese and editing by Thelma Schoomaker is as always especially brilliant. He uses all the tricks in his bag in this movie and then some. In plenty of ways this is the biggest movie he has ever made. Imagine that, at 77 years of age he is still making his best movies. Killer impressive.

Go see this movie and bring along a dark sense of humor.

The Great Gatsby (5/5 Stars)

Those familiar with the art of director Baz Luhrman have generally had to meet him halfway. For many artists the old ‘meet halfway” is usually not worth the trip. Greatness or the lack thereof though not entirely causal is highly correlated with accessibility. But Baz is one of those exceptions; the shortcomings of his movies (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo and Juliet, Moulin Rouge) in terms of believable human emotion and orderly plot rhythm are oftentimes successfully offset by the larger than life ambition of his musical numbers and the overall gorgeousness of the production (costumes, sets, cast, and etc.) One cannot say that his approach makes perfect movies. Moulin Rouge, being a very good example, has as many awkward transitions and stilted drama as incredible moments of inspired grandeur. The silly and great existed not only in the same movie but also sometimes within the same scene for instance when two middle-aged men sing and dance Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” surely one of the more unforgettable scenes I have ever seen.

It is my pleasure then to announce that The Great Gatsby largely avoids Baz’s regular pitfalls and it does so by strictly adhering to the superior writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose book this movie very faithfully adapts. It is not much to say that F. Scott Fitzgerald is a better writer than Baz Luhrman. Most everybody is. It means far more to say that Fitzgerald’s words can complement the visual ambitions of Baz because like Moulin Rouge and his previous movies, The Great Gatsby is something of an orgiastic delight of colorful sensations, including an extended look at one of the more incredible parties I have ever witnessed in a movie. (For those that thought the Miami sleaze-fest in this year’s Spring Breakers looked like fun, they need to take a gander at what a real party looks like. Sure the version of Jay Gatsby’s continual party at his long island mansion is probably unapproachable in real life, but it still contains several nostalgic elements we seem to have completely lost in the 21^st century i.e. parties where people dress up and not way-way down and actually know how to dance.) There is an especially inspired moment in The Great Gatsby that introduces the enigmatic Jay Gatsby (played by Leonardo Dicaprio) after much hype to the climatic swell of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” while a multitude of fireworks explode in the distance. As far as first impressions a la Baz go, I would rate it just as high as when Romeo first spies Juliet through a fish aquarium in Romeo +Juliet.

The best of Fitzgerald’s writing is preserved through the narration of Nick Caraway (played by Tobey Maguire) and seamlessly interweaves itself with the extremely restless camera of Baz as it does such 3D contortions as starting at the top of the Empire State Building and descending till it ends with a close up on Nick Caraway’s upward looking gaze on the street. At another time the camera will travel unbrokenly between Jay Gatsby’s nouveu riche mansion to across the bay where his romantic obsession Daisy Buchanan lives with her aristocratic husband (played by Joel Edgerton) in her own mansion. This may seem a bit much, but on the other hand it is not like Baz is adapting Ernest Hemingway here. If you want to see a Hemingway-esque movie, go see Jeff Nichol’s Mud. Here we are adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose books unapologetically overflow with the kind of flowery vocabulary that makes it a perfect fit for what Baz likes to do.

I suppose now it is the point of the review where I rewrite my high school book report. I will try to do a better job of it this time. I cannot recall saying anything that insightful back then.

The Great Gatsby is narrated by a young man named Nick Caraway who moves to New York City during the roaring twenties and takes a Wall Street job. Right next door to Nick is the Gatsby estate where endless parties go on almost every night though no one quite sure knows why. Gatsby is a ghost at his parties. Most partiers never see him. One day, Nick gets an invitation. Weirdly when he shows up, he finds he is the only person to get an invitation. What’s more is that the reclusive Gatsby wants to meet him. Gatsby puts on quite a show and story for Nick. Gatsby is from a highly respectable family who are all dead now that sent him to the best schools and such. Then he went to war in WWI and became a war hero. Nick, who unbeknownst to Gatsby is a down to earth guy, is surprised even more to find out the reason he is being treated to such a display. Jay Gatsby is in love with his cousin Daisy Buchanan, a woman who rejected him once because he was too poor. He wants Nick to ask Daisy to meet him for tea, nothing else. That is what all the parties were for. He was throwing them just to entice Daisy to show up. And when she never did, he invited Nick. There is a great scene where an especially nervous Jay finally asks Nick to ask Daisy to tea and thinks it is necessary to sweeten the deal by offering Nick connections to all his Wall Street buddies. But Nick declines the offer. He will do it as a favor. Imagine Jay’s surprise. Nobody in the “respectable society” he is so desperately trying to shoehorn into never once did anything for free or as a friend.

What are we to think of Gatsby? This is a question that the whole country wants each and every young citizen to contemplate. Here is a man that embodies so many of the contradictory values of America. He comes from a poor family and worked hard to make his fortune, but he lies about his past and presents a consumerist façade of aristocracy and easy living. His great ambition and individuality have led to success, but it is accomplished by being a bootlegger with shady acquaintances. He is driven by love, hope, and idealism, but his dreams are unrealistic and ultimately illusory.  He is rich. He is kind. He is handsome. He is a criminal. He is a home wrecker. He is a phony. But importantly, F. Scott Fitzgerald chose to write of Gatsby through the eyes of Nick Caraway, a character whose realness is undeterred by the sound and fury of the Roaring Twenties. We see Gatsby clearly through Nick the way no other person in the story does. Gatsby does much that is corrupt but his ultimate purpose is incorruptible. Everything he does, he does for love, and this he proves beyond a doubt when he is prepared to take a manslaughter charge for an undeserving woman right after she rejects him. There is much about Gatsby that we may sneer at but Nick Caraway remembers his father’s advice once passed down to him a long time ago, to always look for the good in people. And that special type of good Nick sees in Gatsby stands tall amidst all the fucking shit he imposed on his life and all that life imposed on him. That is what made the man Great. 

Django Unchained (5/5 Stars)

Adult Supervision is Required

Somewhere in Texas. 1958. A Craggly Ridge of Large Bare Rocks. And then a women’s chorus of tenor voices: DJANGO! and then the low baritone of some old crooner DJANGO! And then up on the screen in bold red print, the words DJANGO UNCHAINED. The camera pans down to find a row of slaves in chains shuffling through the wilderness led by two slave traders on horses. The crooner continues his bouyant country ballad, about this man named Django, his lost love, and striving on. And with that first thirty seconds, writer/director Quentin Tarantino announces that you are going to see something you have never seen before.

Well perhaps you have seen parts of it before in different places. Perhaps you have seen solemn dramas about slavery like Roots, or Amistad, or Beloved. Or perhaps you have seen a Spaghetti Western, maybe an unserious action flick starring a stoic man-with-no-name in the company of bad men, fast women, and violent humor.

But I doubt you have seen both, a movie that portrays slavery without being racist or insensitive and at the same time is a helluva lot of fun to watch. Slavery is this nation’s great shame, a national embarrassment of epic proportions. The movies as culture or cultural reflection have had a terrible time talking about it. Early masterpieces of cinema were explicitly racist. The first blockbuster, 1915’s Birth of a Nation, claimed that ex-slaves provoked by northern carpetbaggers bullied and disenfranchised southern whites until the Ku Klux Klan saved the day. Other great American movies that took place during slavery like 1939’s Gone With the Wind white-washed slavery omitting anything but the tamest versions of it. More recent movies about the antebellum South, being race-conscious, sometimes omit black people all together. Think Cold Mountain. When it is talked about, there is a tendency for some pundits to claim the discussion would actually cause racial violence. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing premiered to claims that it would start race riots in 1989. Then, pathetically, you have Fox News and its insistence that a black guy in a black panther cap standing outside a polling booth is somehow intimidating to white people, in 2012 for chrissakes! (By the way that news story eerily parallels a scene in Birth of a Nation). It is my hope that Django Unchained represents a sort of The Producers watershed moment in our culture that allows us to shed our century long cowardly approach to slavery in movies. 

Do you know what I mean by a The Producers moment? I don’t mean the recent movie or the broadway revival. I mean Mel Brook’s original 1967 movie about two Jewish play producers who purposely put on a sure-fire flop, Springtime for Hitler, in order to cheat little old lady investors. Think about that date: 1967. That’s twenty-two years after World War II and a genocide that murdered 6 million Jews. It must have taken a lot of chutzpah to make that movie, which purposely made light of WWII and portrayed Hitler as a kind of gay flower-loving hippy. But it was the correct thing to do both culturally and comedically because it took this huge evil and made it okay to laugh at. That’s important because one of the main tools of assholes in general and these assholes in particular was fear. Good people do not stand up before it is too late because of fear. (Btw I’m not counting Charlie Chaplin’s The Dictator because it was made before the Final Solution was fully known). But when you flood your culture with Hitler jokes the fear dissipates. We aren’t afraid of Nazis anymore. Hell, they make for great entertainment. They are Hollywood’s best villains and most frequent losers. They haven’t won in a movie since Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

It is to Tarantino’s great credit that he has pulled a Mel Brooks’ and exploited a long dormant treasure trove of national psychosis and fear that is just screaming to be tamed and used for entertainment purposes. So what are we afraid of that this movie is making us confront and not just confront but also enjoy confronting. Well, counter-intuitively, it is most likely our fear of black people. America, unlike say Nazi Germany, is a winner of history (at least so far). Now it is much easier to make fun of a power structure like the Nazis when they are already defeated, but there has not been a race revolution in this country in which white people were deposed. White guys are actually still in charge around here (for the most part). And because we are still in charge, we tend to be rather defensive (or at least as silent as possible) about whom we inherited the power, even if some were downright evil, lest….well, what? Just what do you think is going to happen if we stop being defensive about our past?

What this movie can hopefully do is show just how absurd those fears are by taking them head on. Django, played by Jamie Foxx, is bought by a German immigrant/dentist/bounty hunter named Dr. King Schulz, played by Christoph Waltz. Dr. Schulz does not believe in slavery but needs Django because he is trailing some wanted fugitives named the Brittle Brothers. Dr. Schulz does not know what they look like but Django does because he was a field slave at the latest plantation the Brittle Brothers ran. Django tried to run away with his wife, Broomhilda, but was unsuccessful. Both were whipped and sold separately. Schulz makes a deal with Django. If Django helps him find the Brittle Brothers, Schulz will set Django free. After showing his worth as a fellow bounty hunter, Schulz has another proposition for Django. Continue on with him, as his partner for a year and Schulz will then help Django find and free his wife. This takes them to the Plantation of one Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, who is a repulsive indulgent Francophile that does not speak French and is a connoisseur of Mandingo fighting. Mandingo fighting consists of making black slaves fight against each other to the death and punishing them with death if they refuse to do so, both of which we see in this movie. Things come to head at the Candieland plantation after unsuccessful negotiations of buying Broomhilda fall through. Django kills a lot of white slaveowners.

Tarantino has unsuccessfully mixed the right amount of dialogue and action in his movies before (Kill Bill too little substantive talk, Inglourious Basterd way too much talk) but he hits exactly the right notes here. Django Unchained is an almost three hour movie, feels like an hour and a half, could have gone longer and I would not have cared. The dialogue is deliciously revolting and actually reminded me of some great Shakespeare villains like Richard II or Iago. Rarely is evil so articulate. Take one scene with Calvin Candie: After he learns from his house slave Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson, that he is being tricked by Schulz and Django, he decides to turn the tables with a basic class in racist phrenology. The psychology of why he chooses to do this is pretty perverted. His black house slave has just educated him that Django, another black man, has tricked him. So Candie produces a skull of a former house slave named Ben, saws a portion of it off, and points out the subservient dimples. Basically he is using pseudoscience to explain why he is in charge even though it has just been objectively proven he is the stupidest person in the room. But the psychological twistedness of Candie pales in comparison to that of the house slave, Stephen, and this is where Django Unchained starts to enter into the realm of masterpiece. The character that Samuel L. Jackson plays is a literate educated wise old man who raised Candie and probably runs the plantation whenever Candie is gone. An obviously capable person, he instead spends all his time hobbling, shuffling, shucking, and jiving. And you won’t find any other person on the plantation willing to treat the other slaves worse than Stephen. He is so totally aware that his power derives solely from his ability to stroke egos, stamp out dissent, and pretend he is not smart enough to know what he’s doing. I believe the term is HNIC. There can only be one, Django be warned. When I think of the regular Samuel L Jackson character type I think of a strong, authoritative, wise person. I can’t think of another role that could be so against this type and at the same time be so right. If you wanted a great example of how slavery strips away all the nobility in a person, think of how you have seen Sam Jackson in any other movie and then watch him in this one. I can imagine him heading off stage and washing his mouth out with soap after every take. The ridiculous thing though is that even while you are watching the performance of subservient stupidity in Jackson’s performance you still get a sense of how subversively smart Stephen really is. To pull that off, I believe is top-notch acting and I think if anyone we’re nominated for an Oscar from this movie, it should be Sam Jackson.

Now going back: To be afraid of this movie, you would have to hold onto two absurd notions. One: you would have to believe that slavery was somehow justifiable. Perhaps if you just saw Gone with the Wind you wouldn’t understand the big deal. But here we have most of it: You have the absolute poverty of slaves (Django starts the movie shuffling through a wilderness with no shoes, shackles scraping up his ankles, no shirt or coat); you have the cruel and unusual violence inflicted upon slaves without due process (whippings, mandingo fighting, hotboxes, being torn apart by dogs, etc.), and you have the utterly disrespectful attitude of slave-owners that treats slaves as disposable property at worst and children at best. Are we not at a point in this country where all the above is universally rejected? Surely it is enjoyable to everyone, regardless of race, when the hero of the story (Django obviously) rescues his lost love and the villains (the slave-owners obviously) get their comeuppance.

Two: you would have to believe that black people today might resort to racial violence against white people. This is probably the bigger problem. The reason why it is offensive for Fox News to show that one black panther guy at the polling booth is that it infers black people cannot tell the difference between antebellum slave-owners and modern day white Americans, a lack of trust between fellow citizens that can be nothing but insulting. I believe you could show Django Unchained in most anywhere in America and audiences everywhere would have basically the same reactions. They would laugh at the same spots, they would cringe at the same spots, and they would applause at the same spots. Our attitudes toward this subject matter are the same and I’m glad this movie can come along to prove it.

I just want to mention one more thing and that is Tarantino’s cameo and the epilogue to this movie. Tarantino is no fool I’m sure. He knows that audiences will be able to recognize him when he gets on the screen. For this very reason Hitchcock put his cameo towards the front of his movies in his later career. He noticed that when everyone saw him they were distracted from the story. But Tarantino is incredibly noticeable in his cameo so I have to suspect he knows he is noticeable, in a say deux ex machina sort of way. The epilogue of Django Unchained is the most unbelievable part of the movie and Tarantino’s appearance and the way his character (An Australian?) enables the epilogue to happen is an admission that the movie’s end is less about practical realism and more about fantastical indulgence. As a critic, I have a pretty simple rule about this sort of thing. If I liked the movie, go ahead. If I didn’t like the movie, you are an egotistical indulgent sonofabitch who is insulting my intelligence. That at least is how I felt about the last line of Inglourious Basterds. I, however, loved this movie. So this ending is just fine with me. The movie earned it and I would not have it any other way.

I’m sure there will be many movies imitating Django Unchained pretty soon. I suggest you see it while it is still original. 

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.