You mean...it was all just a dream?

I don't know about you, but I hate that moment at the end of The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy realizes it was all "just a dream." L. Frank Baum never copped out that way--there never really was any explanation of Oz and how there could be such a weird world you could travel to and then come back. And I hate when characters are sent to dream or fantasy worlds and they spend all their time saying, "Hey! Everything is all crazy and mixed-up here!" Of course, it is, you idiot, it's a dream world! Weren't you paying attention? (George Bailey is particularly cement-brained in It's A Wonderful Life. Can't he understand that angel?)

On the other hand, the concept that the "real" world and "dream" world could be reversed dates back at least to Calderon's Life Is A Dream in 1636, if not before. This leads to endless discussions about whether or not what we are experiencing is someone else's dream, and that if they wake up, we'll be gone.

Happily, Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010) skips past all that boring nonsense and heads straight into the maze world of dreams. We're not bothered with explanations or rationalizations, so we can go straight to exploring the idea of shared, directed and lucid dreams. And Nolan has come up with a new structure for an action film. Memento is the famous backward movie. Inception is built like Russian nesting dolls, or like a 3-D chess game. Besides the delightful intricacy of the conception, you get the delicious sensation of cutting between three or four different James Bond movies at once. (And clearly, Mr. Nolan is paying tribute to the fabulous ski chase in On Her Majesty's Secret Service without the terrible rear screen projection inserts that mar the earlier work.) A couple of critics of my generation thought that was confusing. They probably missed something while drinking their Ensure and yelling at the kids to get off their lawn. A 5-year-old could understand this movie. Those critics have hardening of the brain cells.

I have never enjoyed CGI as much as the sequence in which Ellen Page's character starts monkeying with the dreamscape in a number of impossible ways. When she folds two views into a pair of echoing mirrors with DeCaprio in the middle of them, I couldn't help sensing a tip of the hat to Orson Welles, who uses that image in both Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai, not to mention the foreshadowing of having multiple versions of the characters operating in parallel dreams simultaneously.

While I love seeing Ellen Page playing a superbrain--is there anyone better at that?--I was disappointed in forcing the very cool Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play a plodding stick-in-the-mud. And as wonderful as Marion Cotillard is, she must not get caught in the trap of playing the mysterious wife of the big American film star. She needs to get back to films which are built around her, and not devolve into an interesting European extra attraction. She's too remarkable an actor for that. And before I leave the acting (DiCaprio was OK, didn't spoil the movie, still not a very interesting actor), Tom Hardy, who has been building a decent resume, really stepped out in this film as Eames, a man who plays hard but never loses sight of the stakes, ready to avoid a loss he doesn't need to incur. I suspect he will soon become a movie star. Incidentally, is Michael Caine in the movie as anything else than a good luck charm? Did he have a larger role that was cut from the film? Or is he simply required by law to be in every film ever made?

My only serious criticism of the film is the tenuous connection between the "top" story--the effort to get a young man to reject his father's legacy without rejecting his father--and the "bottom" story--DiCaprio's effort to reconcile himself to the responsibility he feels for his wife's death. Yes, both are linked to the idea of "inception," i.e., origination of ideas. But the two stories are emotionally unconnected, which makes for an overall chilly tone for the film. It is exciting, visually stimulating, remarkably suspenseful, considering the boxes it puts itself in, but it is not moving or touching. That could be said for most of Nolan's work--lots of head, little heart.

But you could say the same for Stanley Kubrick, and his stuff isn't too bad.

First look at INCEPTION

The following is a substantially unedited email from Filip Piasevoli, a former student, who is not only a film enthusiast, but one, as you will see, is alert to recurrent themes and tropes. Also, he starts with a very amusing and telling anecdote about film (and gaming) fans today:

Yes, it's 3:12 in the morning and I felt the urge to email you after attending the midnight release of Christopher Nolan's Inception. Here is my recap of the night.

I knew the night would be memorable when we managed to sneak Jamba Juice smoothies into the theater on a hot ticket movie, an almost impossible feat. During the coming attractions, a trailer came up with the basic premise of "you never know when you'll bump into someone that will change your life." Alright, maybe a little hackneyed but who knows if a director can add a fresh spin to it. 5 people get into an elevator and one is a shady character. The lights go out, a girl gets "bitten" or something that makes her scream. By this point, everyone in the theater is pretty much wondering what the **** is going on UNTIL the words appear on-screen "directed by M. Night Shyamalan". At once, all 300 people in the theater give an exasperated laugh of "who the hell keeps letting this guy direct the *****iest screenplays ever written?" You couldn't reproduce the genuine disgust amongst all movie goers at the appearance of his name; absolutely one of my favorite movie experiences of all time.

I don't want to ruin the movie for you at all because its so incendiary in the way it causes one to think throughout the movie. You're literally taught to think in a completely different way than you may be accustomed to and then Christopher Nolan expects you to think AND learn along those lines for two and a half hours. I was absolutely enthralled during the movie at the fact that I could keep up with everything that was being thrown into the mix ad it made me enjoy it that much more. At the same time I love the way the movie highlights the key universal features of dreams, for example the falling feeling that wakes you up, or the feeling that you've spent a lot of time in a dream when it's been a relatively short time in the real world.

Please get to the theaters and see this soon and let me know how you feel. Overall, a good, enjoyable movie if you can follow along. I don't think that it will get acceptance from the majority of the audiences because it's so hard to follow along with but I absolutely loved this new, thrilling experience that will remain a landmark movie in my opinion in the same way that Memento redefined the way a tale can be told. Bravo Christopher Nolan, whoever wrote the screenplay (too tired to IMDB it at the moment) [for the record, it is Nolan himself--his first original since Memento, although that was an adaptation technically], and Leo Decap for delivering in a role where no one really knows what happens at the end (just like Shutter Island). That's it for my comments...

Yes, Fil, you can count on my getting to the theater ASAP. I have been anticipating this movie since the last holiday season when they started running the teaser trailers. I strongly admire Nolan's work, I teach Memento in my film course, and I really can hardly wait (I have a family obligation this weekend) to see this film.