I couldn't sleep the other night and HBO was showing "Inception"

One thing first:

a) I am not a Leonardo DiCaprio hater. If you are, don't bother with me. Saying "I don't like XYZ because so-and-so was in it" is a discussion I don't need.

I thought the idea of inserting ideas into dreams or using dreams to do industrial espionage was brilliant.

I thought the setup of Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) having a dead wife (Marion Cotillard) and personal demons that complicate the "mission" was excellent.

The character of Ariadne (Ellen Page) worked well as the second womanly interest in the movie. She wasn't a rival to Dom Cobb's dead wife and that was good.

I liked that immediately in entering the dreams of Robert Michael Fischer (Cillian Murphy) that things go wrong was excellent. It gives the author a chance to show the viewer (or in a book, the reader) that the characters aren't jsut going down a prescribed plot by rote but dealing with life as it always is, unexpected. The piecing together of four dream states and one reality is well done and the viewer is always left amazed at the interleaving of dream and reality.

I did not expect to enjoy this movie after all I heard about it. That's why I put the condition about DiCaprio haters. One of the websites I read about movies has a dedicated DiCaprio hater and he/sh/it colored every review with that feeling.

However, this is a movie of details and more details and even more details. SO if you only enjoy fluffy action flicks with car crashes and explosions, don't watch this, you won't understand what is happening.

I liked the movie "Inception," but I have to say that I am really really really fed up and sick and tired of the "man with personal demons bullshit."

I think the best example of the worst movie was like this was "Firefox" starring Clint Eastwood, the movie was SUPPOSED to be about some super shit hot fighter plane that the Soviet Union had developed, and how the U.S. sneaks in a guy to steal one of these super planes (Clint Eastwood's character.) So, did the viewer see a great action flick with lots of flying and fighting and action? NO! We got to see over and over and over and over how Clint Eastwood's character was a "tortured soul with his inner demons..." blah blah blah.

OK, so I agree with you on MOST of your opinion of "Inception," but very much unlike you, I absolutly hated that we see yet another reasonably good movie RUINED by the much overused "tortured soul with his inner demons..." bullshit. Can Hollywood turn out ONE movie with the hero who does NOT have some major mental defect?

Yes they can but there all comedies, I am with you, can I just see an action movie that is just an action movie. If you stop and think about it almost every single one of them is as you described.

River

I have some problems with the overreaching plot of this film. My problems have nothing to do with Leonardo. He was fine. My problem was with the writing.

Allowing that technology could allow us to enter dreams, does not explain why the dreams are so stable. When most people dream, locations, people, and everything around you shifts all the time. Dreams are not that stable of an environment.

Dream time being longer than real time, and getting longer the further down you go? That made no sense to me. Yes, I have imagined that things have taken a long time in dreams, but usually it is due to subconscious editing that glosses over important points. Dream time is editing, like the time compression in a movie montage. You don't actually have more time.

Multiple dream layers? This kind of pissed me off. If you go to sleep and dream, in a dream, it would merely be a continuation of the same dream. Further (as having experienced this) it makes the dreamer aware of dreaming. The dreamer then is having a full lucid dream. In a lucid dream you become a complete god. It is very cool. As soon as their target was told he would be entering a dream, they would have lost him, he would become too powerful to manipulate. They would have especially lost him when they told him outright that he was in a dream.

Timing things in a dream. No. Just, no. You cannot tell time in a dream. This is one of the fundamental understandings of the dream state. You cannot read a clock, or read words. This is a function of the conscious mind, not of the unconscious.

The writers entire understanding of the dream state was flawed. I would have preferred the explanation of a virtual reality environment, in which they were convincing the target that he was in a dream. I think that would have been more interesting.

I fully admit that the movie was well crafted, and the acting wasn't terrible. It was an enjoyable flick, and I did kind of like it. It just doesn't hold up under any scrutiny.

That's the premise of the film - that you can enter dreams and you can control them. I don't think that this is possible in reality but I'm willing to give the movie the benefit of the doubt to enjoy it.

There is a definite trend in movies to do non-linear exposition as more than just flashbacks.

Gots to love Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

DeaconBlues (imported) wrote: Thu Jun 23, 2011 7:17 pm I liked the movie "Inception," but I have to say that I am really really really fed up and sick and tired of the "man with personal demons bullshit."

... (snip)

I absolutly hated that we see yet another reasonably good movie RUINED by the much overused "tortured soul with his inner demons..." bullshit. Can Hollywood turn out ONE movie with the hero who does NOT have some major mental defect?

As a writer, I have a problem with that type of criticism.

A character without an "inner turmoil" is like having Mister Rogers as a protagonist. Even John Lovitz in "Mom and Dad Save the World" had issues with his masculinity.

I will grant you that some scripts use the "troubled character" as a crutch but the entire story of INCEPTION depends on the Dom Cobb character feeling guilt for having having lost his wife and thinking it was because he went into the dream state too long and too deep and just might have left a suggestion that caused her suicide.

Just watched this movie and loved it.

The action was not there to entertain but to give the plot a sense of immediacy at least that's my opinion.

I liked the idea of a dream within a dream, the deeper you go the more powerful it is.

Ending with the top spinning but almost wobbling what a sucker punch.

When it was over I checked my totem.

Into the dark recesses of my mind.

As for controlling dreams either it is possible or my subconscious likes playing, haven't done it for a while but I have manipulated my dreams.

My dreams seem to have rules or boundaries tho push it to far and they collapse in on themselves I wake up or maybe that is just the end of the rem sleep cycle. The trick is to figure out it is a dream and NOT wake up, most of the time I realize it is a dream and it crashes. I had to play along and go small, never built up to anything impressive but it was interesting to take a dream about hiking and turn it into limited flying that was as far as I ever got.

First you have to remember dreams, helps to write them down as soon as you wake up, every detail you remember and keep doing that. At some point I realized when I was dreaming mine kept crashing at that point for months.

I started doing it because I was having a repeating nightmare and couldn't really remember it.

Yes it is dark down here time to surface.

I thought it was pretty much a take off of a Dennis Quaid film called "Dreamscape", made in the mid eighties. So finding it not to even be an original idea, I pretty much hated the film.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth (imported) wrote: Fri Jan 13, 2012 11:29 pm I thought it was pretty much a take off of a Dennis Quaid film called "Dreamscape", made in the mid eighties. So finding it not to even be an original idea, I pretty much hated the film.

Elizabeth

Inception didn't do much for me, but then I don't have any experience with dreams, so I couldn't tell if the dreams were realistic or not. Everyone I was with got lost in the dreams within dreams within dreams, but I thought it was pretty much like remembering which level of the parking lot you are in.