Movie Review - 'Inception'

Inception Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Marion Cotillard Directed by Christopher Nolan Rated PG-13

There is almost always something new to dissect and digest in each scene of Christopher Nolan's Inception, a film made with so much bravura that it's hard to dismiss any part of it. A near-perfect heist movie, a near-perfect sci-fi movie, and a near perfect film noir, it is the work of an absolute clinician in total control. The only drawback is that watching Inception means consciously watching Christopher Nolan work, and he may have been such a perfectionist that he drains out of this a little of the joy of watching the movies. Anne Thompson, the great film journalist at IndieWire, compared Nolan's latest to Stanley Kubrick, and that's partially true. The tone of the film, the high-wire act the filmmaker walks knowing that there's nearly as much risk of failure as chance for staggering success, is reminiscent of Kubrick. And, in fact, Inception has some of the fingerprints of Kubrick's The Killing on its most basic structure. However, a comparison of what Nolan is attempting to do to anyone, even a great filmmaker like Kubrick, isn't fair to what is one of the most technically accomplished films you'll ever see. Original storytelling, original stuntwork, and original visual effects add up to a disorienting experience, and yet, Nolan takes great pains in making the plot, its characters, and its unique world make perfect sense throughout, although it still requires a massive amount of explanation, so complex is Nolan's story. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) wants nothing more than to get home to his children. He's half a world away, constantly working, waiting for the day when he can finally return. He's offered one last job by a powerful client named Saito (Ken Watanabe). Cobb is a thief of sorts. He breaks into people's minds and steals their deepest secrets. Cobb and his associates insinuate themselves into a subject's dream and, extracting pivotal pieces of information through what is self-evidently referred to as Deception. The dream state is chemically induced, and is shared by a team, just as there would be necessary workers during a bank heist: Someone to plan it, someone to be a decoy, someone to crack the vault, and someone to drive the car. The dreams themselves seem longer than they are. For every five minutes Dom is under, an hour of dream time elapses. Supposing the dream went one level deeper - a dream within a dream - those five minutes would buy Dom about 12 hours. That's a long time, which serves an extractor very well, because the world of the dream is completely constructed by an architect. In other words, all the world's a stage.

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Get 'Em While They're Hot: Four 'Inception' Clips

You can get reviews of Christoper Nolan's highly anticipated Inception now if you want to. I haven't read any of them, but then, I never read anyone else's critiques before I see a film. But I do know the consensus leans good to very good, but it's still early. I'm sure it won't veer too far downhill, though.

We won't dwell on them here, though, because what's more important is new clips from Inception, guaranteed to make no contextual sense whatsoever. I hope you're fine with that. Wisely, we're not shown too much more than extended sequences of stuff we've already seen in trailers and, more specifically, the commercials. And, finally, a bit of Ken Watanabe (in the clip "Most Skilled Extractor"), who to this point was something of the ghost in all of this. Also, the fourth clip is by far the most explanation of anything we've gotten so far, but that's not saying much. And neither does the clip, appropriately.

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Watanabe Making Directorial Debut With WWII Film?

Pajiba says Ken Watanabe may soon make his directorial debut; they also say he's a bad ass, so no matter what happens with 442nd, they're at least half right. Watanabe sprang to America's attention by completely showing up Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, to the point that it crystallized for me what's wrong with every earnest Tom Cruise Oscar-hungry performance: He's trying way too hard to act. Watch Watanabe in that thing...man, he's smooth.

And then in Memoirs of a Geisha, which was a pretty average movie, he again stole the show, and in Eastwood's Letters to Iwo Jima, we just had to admit that this guy pretty much knows what he's doing, and he always does more with less. So whatever he's up to next, I'm always ready to give it a look. That, conveniently, includes Inception, which I would have seen, anyway. Now, this 442nd: Pajiba describes it as "the true story of an American-Japanese military unit assembled during World War II and sent on virtual suicide missions in the European theater. For their efforts against the Nazis, that unit go on to become the most decorated unit in American military history."

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Trailer, Poster for John Cusack's 'Shanghai'

For no particular reason, I was wondering the other day whatever happened to Shanghai, a period piece reuniting John Cusack with his 1408 director Mikael Håfström that features a good international cast and cost way too much ($50 million) to just disappear. Now it's back on the radar, with a new poster and trailer.

Click to see the full poster If the project is new to you, it went into production two years ago. At the time, the Weinstein Company didn't really have a release date planned. Then it looked like the end of 2009 sometime, but that never materialized, either. Some of that, I'm sure, had to do with the studio not really having the money to release a bunch of movie around the awards season. And so it waited. Now, however, it looks like Shanghai might actually hit the US later this year, as soon as September, with other international releases planned before that. What follows is the international trailer, and I'm sure a US version will be coming our way soon, particularly if that release date gets cemented. Looks like a handsome production, if nothing else.

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New Photos From 'Inception,' But Not Many Details

"Complex and ambiguous are the perfect way to describe the story," said Leonardo DiCaprio of this summer's Inception, the biggest enigma of the blockbuster season. We're still in the dark about what it is, what its aims are, and what characters the members of Christopher Nolan's all-star cast are playing. All we know, really, is what we don't know.

The Los Angeles Times has a new interview with Nolan (which is about the paper's fifth in the past year), and a couple new photos are featured in the article as well. You can click on any of them to see a larger version; a couple are part of the film, and two others feature Nolan on the set. Backing up what the Times says, that this is Hollywood's first existential heist movie, DiCaprio recognizes that's not an easy thing to sell, or even execute. "It's going to be a challenge to ultimately pull it off. But that is what Chris Nolan specializes in," Leo says.

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