Movie Crush Monday: Little C and Inception

Hey readers,
So sorry this post is late. I have a few not very good excuses, but as a lesson of why we are nice to other people, Christy remembered that I didn't make her do a punishment two weeks ago and she gave me a pass on this one. Score.

Last week CT talked about the lovely trip that was Midnight in Paris. Today I want to go on a different sort of trip. By special request of Fan-of-the-blog Matt, I want to follow Marion Cotilliard over to Inception.

This is modern high concept sci-fi as delivered by Christopher Nolan. The concept is that there are machines that allow people to travel inside someone's dream and manipulate the world of the dream in order to steal someones secrets. It's a cool and slick movie with enough twists that it usually requires multiple viewings to fully understand and there are still people arguing over that damn ending. 

Damn your symbolism, Nolan!

The movie can be a little hard to follow at times. It gets into dreams within dreams and then dreams within dreams WITHIN DREAMS. There are movies that are fun to watch drunk, but I can't imagine this is one of them as if you're not paying full atention it's so easy to get left behind. As with any sci-fi drama this requires a certain suspension of disbelief that is helped along monumentally by the actors. Every member of the cast from pre-oscar Leonardo Decaprio to Ellen Paige and Cillian Murphy are charming and relatable. If any of the main characters had balked and come off pretentious (a real risk when they're delivering lines like "An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow to define or destroy you") then the movie wouldn't have worked. It's a credit to both Nolan as a director, and Nolan as a producer that he was able to assemble a cast of this caliber. 

Get it? Caliber? God, I'm funny

The other thing I want to talk about is the visuals of the movie. Obviously when you're talking about the imaginary landscape of dream it would be so easy to go over the top or cartoonish with visuals. But Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister are so careful to make the dreams separate from reality without losing the gravity and consequence at all. By including in the rules of the world that if someone gets hurt in a dream they bleed in real life every wall of rushing water, every gunshot, and every crumbling building retains the weight of consequence. It's pretty impressive. 

I loved the movie enough that a few years ago I ran across a bound copy of the shooting script at a bookstore and had to buy it. CT and I still use it as a reference when we're planning out an action scene or we're trying to figure out how to describe something that feels fantastic. So thanks, Matt, for the recommendation. And I will be back on tomorrow for your regularly scheduled nerdy rant. 

Happy watching,

Little C