All Things Incepted

If you're anything like me, you can't get enough Inception information, analysis, and theorizing. So I thought I'd compile some of the better pieces on the film that I've found lately in the ol' series of tubes.

(And be forewarned, a lot of these contain substantial SPOILERS, so click the links at your own peril.)

• For a couple weeks leading up to I-Day, CHUD's Devin Faraci wrote a series of articles dealing with various aspects of the film, ranging from the rotating-hotel fight sequence to Hans Zimmer's score to a video showing us what Inception would have been like had it starred Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero.

• Devin also wrote an article analyzing the film's meaning as he saw it, both at the immediate level (i.e., "how much of it was a dream?") and at a more "meta" level of what Nolan was trying to say with this film. A very interesting read.

• At Cinematical, Peter Hall has a piece that first examines six of the interpretations of the film already floating around (keep in mind, the piece was published only three days after Inception's release—what a movie!), and then points out five plot holes that he perceived. (Most of these "plot holes" didn't bother me at all when I watched it, because there seemed to me to be perfectly intuitive explanations—not necessarily the only or the correct explanations, mind you—for them. But that's probably a subject for another post.)

• For a bit of an inside scoop, New York magazine has an interview with Dileep Rao, who played Yusuf the dream chemist. Luckily, the interviewer doesn't waste time with boring stuff about how he got attached to the film, how he enjoyed making it, what he thought of the other actors, etc., but instead goes straight for what we're really interested in: how does stuff like limbo and kicks and different dream-levels work? Answers to your nitpickiest questions, straight from the horse's mouth (or at least as close to the horse as we're ever likely to get). (However, Rao, like me the first time I watched it, is under the impression that the third dream-level, the mountaintop hospital, is Fischer's dream; but as one "Viewdrix" convincingly explains in the first comment, the dreamer in that level is actually Eames. I guess no one's a 100% reliable source when it comes to Inception explanations.)

• Finally, if you haven't already spent enough time on Inception—and I spent five hours watching it last weekend—then /Film has a two-hour-or-so-long podcast in which David Chen, Devindra Hardawar, and Adam Quigley discuss their impressions and interpretations, and about halfway through are joined by the New York Press's (in)famous critic Armond White, whose, shall we say, less than positive review has already created enough waves in filmreviewdom for Roger Ebert to address the controversy. (Though White's obviously a very intelligent and learned critic, I have a fundamental, visceral inability to take seriously someone who not only thought that Gentlemen Broncos was better than Inglourious Basterds, but called it "the 2001 of 2009." Though, on the other hand, he's right that Crank 2 was better than Avatar, so who knows what to think.)