From Slough to Bag End

Though we don't post a lot on film news, the Tolkien-nerd in me cries out that I give notice to the fact that several roles in The Hobbit have officially been cast. In addition to several Dwarves to be played by actors whose names I don't recognize (yet), Martin Freeman—Tim Canterbury (a.k.a. the "Jim" role) on the original Office, Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Dr. Watson on the BBC series Sherlock—has been cast as the title Halfling, the reluctant burglar, he that walks unseen, the ring-winner and luckwearer, Bilbo Baggins, Esquire. It's a choice that's been kicked around for years now, mostly because it's a very good one; Freeman is great at playing the everyman (especially the English kind), with a sense of being ordinary, compliant, and a bit put-upon, but with a potential for unexpected (seemingly uncharacteristic) courage when the need arises. The only other actor I can think of who might be equally good for the role is Tom Hollander, who starred in last year's excellent In the Loop. So Freeman's casting is some welcome, if not exactly shocking, news.

This is a production that's needed some good news for a while. Peter Jackson had been devoping it with Guillermo del Toro for some time, with the latter planning to direct it for MGM as two films—one covering the events of the novel itself (or at least most of it), and the other covering the six decades or so between that and Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday party with which The Lord of the Rings begins. But MGM's mounting financial problems (leading to the studio's upcoming bankruptcy) delayed work so long that del Toro left in May to pursue other projects. (While two del Toro Hobbit films was a tantalizing prospect, the fact that his next project will be his long-awaited adaptation of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness certainly makes his loss to Tolkiendom much easier to bear.) Though Jackson has now assumed the director's chair for both films, he has faced legal disputes over the rights with the Tolkien estate and New Line, the studio behind his Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as labor disputes with actors' unions that may force Jackson not to film in New Zealand.

Given that most of the news about the Hobbit adaptation has been negative for some time, the fact that it's apparently soldiering on regardless is encouraging and gives me hope that we may soon enjoy once again the wonder and spectacle that Jackson first brought us nine years ago.

P.S. — If Jackson has any sense, he'll find a way to incorporate this into the films. Forget Howard Shore; the main theme for the score is already written!

Everybody must get Stone(d)

PLATOON

First off, I should explain that while the words in quotation marks in the first paragraph of my last post were intended to quote what you'd said after we watched the film, I intended the quotation marks around "happy ending" in the third paragraph as scare-quotes, not (for lack of a better word) quotation-quotes. I guess I could've made that clearer. (Though in your last post you did write that the ending seemed to avoid "something that could be perceived to have a negative message"; maybe there's a difference between that and a "happy ending," but I'm honestly not seeing it.)

Secondly, I think our disagreement about the ending of Platoon stems from the fact that we simply see what the film is about somewhat differently. I agree that Taylor's "education," the various points that the film conveys about war can do to people, is an important element. But I think that to see that as the film's only purpose is to see it too narrowly. Platoon's not just about Taylor's learning the "moral of the story," so to speak—"the primal nature that can exist," "becoming what you loathe," "the experience of war can make any man a killer,"* etc.—but more about his Vietnam experiences as a whole and how they shaped his young life. It makes sense that Stone would look at it this way, since the events are partly based on (or at least inspired by) his own experiences in the war, with Taylor in many respects standing in for Stone himself (who came from an upper-middle-class family, dropped out of Yale, and enlisted at the age of twenty-one for combat duty in Vietnam). Taylor's more than just a character in a story whose role is to move the narrative along and illustrate certain issues, or at least that's how I imagine Stone saw him when he made the film. After all, nearly two decades of his life had already passed since Stone had served in Vietnam, so it would be natural for him to spend a minute or two reflecting on his fictional soldier's post-Vietnam life.

Taylor isn't a mere cipher to convey the film's lessons, to serve a narrative purpose and then disappear; he's a broader embodiment of the Vietnam experiences of Stone and veterans like him, experiences that they carried off the battlefield and that shaped their post-war lives. Those experiences included saying goodbye to friends, returning to "the world," mourning the dead, and reflecting on what it all meant and how one should move forward with the rest of one's life. So I think that Stone intended the film's ending as a nod to those aspects of veterans' lives—indeed, to his own life. As a matter of fact, I think that it makes the film more "fulfilling," giving it a broader scope and meaning, rather than encapsulating the events we've just seen with an abrupt ending on the battlefield. Just because it isn't The Deer Hunter or Born on the Fourth of July doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't touch on post-war life in addition to depicting combat. (And besides, I have a hard time seeing a film that depicts an American N.C.O. as a homicidal psychopath, and most of the rest as brutal, cruel, or indifferent, as making much of an effort to pander to veterans.)

And such themes, issues, and messages aside, I stand by my assertion that ending the film as soon as Taylor kills Barnes would have been less stylistically and tonally appropriate than ending it as it does, which eases the audience out and offers a chance for reflection.

I should mention that my support for the ending doesn't mean that I think Platoon is flawless in all respects. My main criticism would be that it doesn't really convey Taylor's claim during the epilogic voice-over that he was "born of those two fathers," Sgts. Barnes and Elias, that they were "fighting for possession of his soul." Other than that line and an earlier one (in the scene when Taylor attacks Barnes in the tent) when Rhah reminds Taylor that he (Taylor) used to admire Barnes, he seems to be entirely on Elias's side throughout the film and disgusted with Barnes. Maybe there are cut scenes of Taylor looking up to or identifying with Barnes, I don't know, but in the cut we watched those two lines seem really out of place, obliquely hinting at an aspect of the film that we never actually see.

* On that point, we should remember that Sgt. Elias had been in Vietnam for three years and was an excellent soldier, but never lost his decency or humanity. So the moral deterioration that Stone generally depicts among the characters as a result of their war experiences isn't really universal or inevitable.

Casting the second (post on) Stone

In your recent post about my somewhat offhand comments about Platoon, I think you may have put words in my mouth a little bit. As a student of journalism I should scold you for putting quotes around words I never said. Who do you think you are, Aaron Sorkin?

Spoiler alert as well here folks, which should be obvious since this is a response to another spoiler-heavy post. But I imagine one can never be too safe about preventing the spoiling of a 24-year-old movie.

My feeling was not that the movie had a "happy ending" by any stretch of the imagination -- Taylor is shown clutching a grenade and contemplating suicide and then we watch helicopters en route to military hospitals depart from land being made into mass graves. My quibble was with what I called a sentimental ending. The only purpose that the last few minutes served to me was to show how Taylor had a lot of emotion on leaving Vietnam and it did not seem that was what the movie was about prior to that ending. I saw the movie as following Taylor's education as a man and discovering through war the primal nature that can exist. That scene with Barnes was so powerful because it was the end of his education: He does exactly what he loathed about the sergeant and discovered that no matter how much he thought he was better than Barnes, at heart the experience of war can make any man a killer. It was a powerful movie about how a man loses enough of himself to become a warrior, not how a man becomes sorrowful about war. What it came across as was Stone felt he had to make an ending that was a bit of a tribute to veterans more so than a fulfilling part of the movie.

The slightly half-baked idea I mentioned at the end of the movie may not have been exactly how the film should have ended. It did not need to be a Sopranos style closing. But I stand by my observation that Stone would have made a stronger finish had he made that scene the final one. Instead that last moments had the smell of something a studio usually tacks on to make a particular group (veterans in this case -- not that I think it was anti-veteran but that's a whole different subject) or Academy voters who do not like to see something that could be perceived to have a negative message.

Oliver's stones

PLATOON

— THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR IS SPOILERS. —

Matt, after watching Platoon a couple nights ago, you said that you didn't like how Oliver Stone ended the film; specifically, you said that the fact that we see Taylor (Charlie Sheen) being evacuated from the battlefield and saying goodbye to some of the survivors from his unit meant that Stone didn't have any "stones" (in the parlance of our times), and that film would have been much more "effective" if it had ended with Taylor shooting Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger). I disagreed at the time, but hadn't had the chance really to articulate why (beyond the fact that we wouldn't have gotten that great final epilogic voice-over). Now that I've had the chance to think about it a little, I'd like to explain why I think the right ending for Platoon is the ending it has.

Platoon is told in a realistic style, and its tone is reflective and mournful. You see this in its straightforward structure and visual style, in the voice-overs, and in the score. That being the case, it makes sense to follow Taylor off the battlefield, into the beginning of his post-Vietnam life, as he reflects on what the experiences we've just witnessed meant to him, easing the audience out of the film. Ending it with a sudden cut to black (or something like that) after he shoots Barnes would have been completely out of place in terms of the tone the film had established. Something like that would have been more fitting for a film like Natural Born Killers, with its much more stylized . . . well, style, and its shocking and aggressive tone. Ending the film that way would have had a jarring effect that the rest of the film just wasn't going for. (Of course, a lot of the events depicted are shocking and jarring, for instance Barnes's shooting of the Vietnamese woman, but the way they're depicted is not, in terms of editing and photography.) It would be much more in keeping with what would become Stone's signature visual and editing style in later films of his like The Doors, JFK, and the aforementioned Natural Born Killers, or with Kubrick's nearly contemporaneous Full Metal Jacket, which, from its opening shots of conscripts having their heads shaven to the strains of "Hello Vietnam," informs the audience of its more over-the-top and satirical tone. Ending Platoon as he did was perfectly in keeping with the seriousness and realism that Stone had spent the prior two hours establishing, and so was quite effective.

I certainly don't see the ending as a sign of Stone's chickening out by giving the audience a more upbeat ending than the ending you suggested. First off, it's not really much of a "happy ending": Most of the unit is dead (either from the North Vietnamese or the napalm bombing), we see bulldozers pushing mounds of corpses into mass graves, and our protagonist weeps as the voice-over talks about how he carried the war's emotional scars for the rest of his life. Moreover, we don't need those final scenes to know that Taylor was probably going to make it off the battlefield: He was obviously wounded badly enough to be hospitalized, but not so badly that he would die before U.S. troops found him (as they almost certainly would, since they'd beaten off the North Vietnamese assault (however pyrrhically) and would then search the battlefield for survivors and collect the dead). Even if the film had ended as you suggested, it wouldn't have been any more or less a "happy ending," except for its jarring emotional effect, which, as I explained above, would have been inappropriate.

In any number of other films, the ending you suggested would have been great. But it would have been tonally and stylistically out of place in Platoon.

Requiescat in pace: Kon Satoshi, 1963-2010

I just found out that anime director Kon Satoshi (or Satoshi Kon, as he's known in the West) died on Tuesday, at the age of forty-six. The cause of death was a pancreatic cancer that was already late-stage when discovered in May.

I'm not really a fan of anime. Most of the examples I've seen seem more concerned with attaching flashy visuals to cardboard characters and absurdly convoluted plots than with actually engaging the audience on an emotional and/or intellectual level. Kon was one of the few counterexamples I found. His filmography is brief—the dark Hitchcockian thriller Perfect Blue, the touching drama Millennium Actress, the powerful and funny Tokyo Godfathers, the surreal fantasy Paprika, and the television series Paranoia Agent—but easily establishes him as a significant and masterful filmmaker. Generally eschewing the fantastic and the bizarre for their own sakes (the exception to this being Paprika, his only misstep among his films; I haven't seen Paranoia Agent), his films focused on real-world situations—a celebrity stalked by an obsessed fan, an elderly actress reminiscing on her life, a homeless trio finding an abandoned baby in the trash—and how they impacted relatively ordinary, realistic characters. Fantastic elements—for instance, the documentarians comically finding themselves included in Chiyoko's memories in Millennium Actress—were usually only included to support the story, not the other way around.

Kon's focus on story, character, and genuine emotion and drama set him apart from the vast majority of anime filmmakers. His animes weren't the only ones more interested in telling affecting stories than with showing off the most bizarre robot or mutant designs, but in my (admittedly rather limited) experience they're few and far between (Grave of the Fireflies, the films of Miyazaki Hayao). I own only one anime DVD that isn't a Miyazaki film or The Animatrix, and it's Tokyo Godfathers. Not Ninja Scroll, not Ghost in the Shell, not even Akira. As pieces of storytelling, Kon's films stand head and shoulders over the vast majority of the competition in the world of anime. It's a true shame that such a creatively fruitful career should end so soon. Kon's death is a loss to anime and to cinema as a whole.

— — — — —

Before his death, Kon wrote a farewell message, which can be found in translation here.

End of the Days of Devin

Though this blog has never been in the tertiary-source business of discussing film criticism and critics themselves (for fear of creating a Moebius strip of critical self-referentiality so profound and powerful as to risk tearing a hole in space-time itself), I believe it's worth making an exception in this case.

Devin Faraci, editor and chief contributor to CHUD, is leaving that site. It sounds like it's completely amicable—simply a matter of pursuing other opportunities elsewhere—but I have to admit that it's a bit shocking and disheartening. When Nick Nunziata founded CHUD about ten years ago, Devin was but a lowly poster on its message board; from there, he began contributing reviews and articles, then became a site editor, eventually writing a substantial portion of CHUD's content (for a while he wrote virtually every film review and at least half of the news stories), conducting film-set visits and interviews, and becoming CHUD's public face in such venues as G4's Attack of the Show. To a great extent, he has become the voice of CHUD—a site he's helped to make one of the best, if not the best, in online film news and analysis—as well as one of the most intelligent and reliable film critics writing today. His strong opinions and take-in-or-leave-it attitude have rustled a few feathers—you can thank him for reigniting the Great Online Video-Games-as-Art Wars recently—but he always backed them up with thoughtfulness and an understanding of and appreciation for film history and theory. As you can tell from how often I mention it on this blog, CHUD is my primary source for film news and analysis, and Devin's contributions there have been a huge part of making that so. (The fact that we're currently making our way through the Planet of the Apes series is thanks to him.) During the past few years that I've been regularly visiting CHUD, Devin's reviews and articles have done a lot to increase my appreciation for and critical thinking about film, and I would unhesitatingly recommend them to anyone else interested in enlarging his cinematic world.

I wish him all the best and plan to continue following his work. And despite losing him, CHUD still has too many immensely talented contributors to cease being an enlightening and entertaining source for all things filmic.

Richard Kelly = Orson Welles

In that they each only need to have made one film to solidify their respective places in filmmaking history. Maybe that seems a bit hyperbolic, but I just rewatched Donnie Darko for the first time in several years and was just astounded by the confidence, complexity, and vision on display; it's a joy to behold. I was one of the few to have seen Donnie Darko in its theatrical run back in the fall of 2001, and even then I got the sense that I had seen something unique and special. Not even Southland Tales can dim that burning flame. Excelsior, Mr. Kelly!

P.S. — I'm not afraid to admit that this is a drunk-post, so I reserve to right to retract it at the time and place of my choosing.

Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Awesome

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

This has been kind of a weak summer movie season. That's not to say it's been a complete disappointment—Toy Story 3, MacGruber, I Am Love, and The Other Guys were all good (for very different reasons), Iron Man 2 and Predators were fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing The Expendables in the very near future—but going in there were really only two films I could honestly say I was really excited about: I've already seen one of them three times, and I just saw the other for the first time less than an hour ago. I can now say with complete confidence that those two definitely make the rest of the summer worth it.

Having just finished (as of last night) the sixth and final volume of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim saga, "Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour," and watched the great Edgar Wright's adaptation, I'm just astounded at what a perfect match these two artists, the graphic novelist and the filmmaker, are for each other. Both the Scott Pilgrim comics and Wright's work—Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz—combine a high-energy, cartoony aesthetic with interesting, realistic, full-bodied characters and genuine, honest stories about those characters' search for meaning and connection in life. Scott Pilgrim, a goofy, well-meaning but immature young man clumsily, painfully feeling his way into adulthood, fits right in with Tim, Daisy, Shaun, and Danny. However, despite the similarities, Wright isn't just reciting O'Malley's story but telling his own, and isn't afraid to make the characters his own. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is just as much an Edgar Wright film as it is a Bryan Lee O'Malley story.

— SCOTT PILGRIM'S PRECIOUS LITTLE SPOILERS (for both the comics and the film) —

That said, the film borrows very heavily from the comics, especially for its first two-thirds or so (covering roughly the first four volumes). During that part of the film, virtually every change Wright made was merely taking things out rather than adding his own material—though what's there, while originating with O'Malley, still bears Wright's distinct stamp. Despite how much from the comics Wright was able to cram into the film (without overdoing it or slowing down the pace), there are a number of elements that didn't make the cut: Ramona's glowing head, Knives Chau's father and Scott's old friend Lisa from vol. 4, most of the details about Scott's history with Kim and Envy (to which the film merely alludes), the trip to Honest Ed's in vol. 3, the recording of Sex Bob-omb's album, and Scott's battles with various robots in vol. 5. As the film progresses, though, it differs increasingly from the comics: Scott's battles against Roxy, the Katayanagi twins, and Gideon are very different, Envy's "weak point" behind her knees is transferred to Roxy, and Ramona's battle with Knives is moved from vol. 2 to the film's climax. I'm not really complaining or anything, it's just interesting to see the degree of faithfulness to the source material change over the course of the film.

Speaking (some more) of faithfulness to the source material, it's worth mentioning that the film was already in production before O'Malley finished the final volume (which was only released last month), so the two versions of the Scott Pilgrim saga's finale differ greatly. — ÜBER-SPOILAGE TO FOLLOW, OBVIOUSLY — What's interesting are the elements that the two versions share (but utilize in different ways): the NegaScott, the final showdown at the Chaos Theatre, Scott's death, his resurrection thanks to his 1-up. So there must have been some collaboration between O'Malley and Wright regarding these details. However, the overall "message" with which the story concludes differs significantly between O'Malley's version and Wright's. In vol. 6 of the comic, Scott comes to realize that the source of his immaturity is his unwillingness to address his past actions truthfully and learn from them; instead, he's always remembered his past in such a way that he's always the good guy and those he's hurt either were evil or weren't really hurt at all. Though alluded to throughout the series, it doesn't become explicit until Scott visits Kim in vol. 6, when she contrasts the reality of Simon Lee, her harmless high-school boyfriend Scott beat up to date her, with Scott's fantasized memory of a "villain" from whom he had to rescue her in vol. 2. By perpetually lionizing himself and demonizing or ignoring those he's hurt, he never had to change or improve; as Kim tells him, "if you keep forgetting your mistakes, you'll just keep making them again." That puts the entire premise of the series—"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," the good guy forced to battle bad guys and win the day—into an entirely different light, as an expression of Scott's childish, selfish view of himself and the world. It's only when he owns up to his own failings that he's able finally to overcome Gideon and get another chance with Ramona. The film doesn't include this thematic element other than several references to Scott's being an irresponsible "heartbreaker" and his incredulity at this; instead, the lesson he learns is "self-respect," which involves his admitting to cheating on Knives with Ramona (and vice versa) but has more to do with his fighting his battles for his own reasons rather than just to win the girl. That's fine in itself, but it doesn't fit especially well with the failings we've seen Scott exhibit previously or with how he plans to go forward at the film's end; if anything, doing things for himself rather than others seemed to have been much the problem in his life, and in the end he still ends up winning the girl anyway. This doesn't really take away from the film, but it does make its conclusion a bit less meaningful and "earned" than the comic's. — BACK TO REGULAR SPOILAGE —

But what, you may be asking, about the film as its own beast, independent of O'Malley's comic? Pretty darn great. I'm already a substantial fan of Wright's work, and Scott Pilgrim fits right in: energetic, imaginative, hilarious, with real characters dealing with real issues. Though Scott isn't dramatically different from the kinds of characters Michael Cera generally plays, he isn't just channeling George Michael Bluth for the umpteenth time; Scott's much more of a spazzy slacker than the uptight, rather nebbish Bluth boy. Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Ramona is exactly the right melding of sexy, sympathethic, and cold, coming across, like O'Malley's Ramona, as multifaceted rather than schizophrenic. The rest of the cast is great too, especially Kieran Culkin as Wallace, Scott's gay room- and bed-mate. Strangely enough, while Sex Bob-omb frontman Stephen Stills mostly hangs in the background in the comics, I really liked him in the film (played by one Mark Webber). Each of the evil exes gets his (or her) moment to shine, except for the Katayanagi twins, though, to be fair, they don't make much of an impression in the comic either. My socks were thoroughly knocked off when the Vegan Police who showed up to exact vegan justice on Todd for his vegan transgressions were played by Tom Jane (who just wants his kids back!) and Clifton Collins (who just wants his testicle back!). (Funny, Jane appeared in an episode of Arrested Development with Cera, while Collins appeared in Mike Judge's Extract with AD alum Jason Bateman, so feel free to use that info the next time you're playing six degrees.) Since music is a pretty significant part of the story, it's a good thing that the original music composed for the film (by Beck, among others) happens to rock. And no mention of the film's music would be complete without saying how much it warmed my geeky little heart to hear samples from The Legend of Zelda, like mother's milk to one raised in bygone days on the NES.

Indeed, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is awesome, surprising no-one.

Digging into the ol' O&MTM mail bag...

In response to a recent comment by "M" (taking a break from sending 007 on his latest mission, I assume) asking which directors' films would I see, no questions asked, knowing only that they were the director. An interesting question. The Coen Brothers and Nolan were the first to come to mind. Tarantino, Aronofsky, P.T. and Wes Anderson, Fincher, Spike Jonze, Guillermo del Toro, Judd Apatow, Edgar Wright, and Jody Hill would fit the bill as well. (As you've probably noticed, these are all relatively recent filmmakers, with only the Coen Brothers' directing career beginning earlier than 1990. This list may make me look like some philistine who never watches anything older than Star Wars, but a glimpse at our "Movies We've Seen in 2010" sidebar list easily puts the lie to that. Rather, I've limited the list to living directors; otherwise, Kubrick would certainly lead the pack.) 

There are several other directors for whom this would generally apply, were it not for one or two counterexamples from their respective filmographies. Spielberg would have qualified, were it not for The Terminal, which I've never had the slightest interest in seeing. I've been a Terry Gilliam fan since childhood, but I've heard too much negative to feel too enthusiastic about seeing Tideland. I'm also a Lynch fan, but I confess that I haven't yet mustered the courage to see Inland Empire, from what I've heard the Lynchiest of his body of work. Scorsese is certainly one of the greatest filmmakers of the past fifty years, but his last few films, though mostly quite good, haven't been up to his earlier career's high standard, and from what I've heard Shutter Island is merely OK but not Scorsesian. There was a time when I probably also would have said Ridley Scott and Tim Burton too, but lately both of their careers have tended more toward predictability, mediocrity, commercialism, even self-parody. (Is there any more fitting word for Burton's Alice in Wonderland?)

Of course, the nice thing about the great filmmakers, even ones who, at times over the course of their careers, become hit-or-miss, is that even the misses are usually at least interesting misses, failures that still contain some vision or spirit and are still worth visiting, if only once.

Actors, on the other hand, are a completely different matter; they're by no means merely incidental to a film's final quality, but generally they have a far smaller role to play in making a film what it is. In cinema, the creative buck stops at the director, so in the end the success or failure of an actor's performance is the success or failure of the person directing him. So I honestly can't see myself watching a film solely on the basis of a particular actor's being in it.

A movie worth writing about

INCEPTION. This has been a long time coming, and I would like to say the time has been spent mulling over my thoughts. But, well, that would be a lie. Every time I open my Google Reader I see that it says there are two posts waiting for me to read and I feel guilty. So while waiting for Thirsty Thursday this week, I'll put some thoughts to proverbial paper. Keyboard I guess.

Having seen the movie (trailers) twice, I can say that those who say one has to see it more than once to "understand it" are either being what the kids call a "hater" or exaggerating. I got it for the most part the first time but there are certainly layers of meaning that come out after seeing it a second and -- what I hope will soon be -- third time. The first screening was mainly consumed with following the twists of plot and it was not until revisiting the move that I was able to appreciate the full extent of the scope of Christopher Nolan's filmmaking. Watching Memento in between, I found myself focusing on how well he had transitioned from a small-scale to a grand-scale director.

Inception has that complex storytelling packed full of nuance, metaphor, and layers of meaning found in movies generally relegated to small budgets and art-house theaters. But partly as a result of his commercially successful Batman franchise, Nolan has been given a studio budget and produces his movies in a way that reminds me of classic epics from the studio age where a director could fill the screen with his vision. From beginning to end, Inception is an immersive movie where the level of production value fills the screen with his vision. This is a movie that should properly be experienced on a large screen. In Memento we follow one character and use creative filmmaking to tell an individual story with the focus at all times on Leonard (Guy Pearce). For Inception the lead actor might be Leonardo DiCaprio, but party due to its ensemble cast, the real main focus is the world and the dreams. The characters are each more important for how they serve as our conduit into the understanding of Nolan's exploration of the concept of reality. More on why DiCaprio's Cobb is the most-developed character will have to wait.

I also got the sense of a more classic style of filmmaking in the actors chosen. DiCaprio might be a movie star but one known for using his post-Titanic career to position himself as a serious actor instead of a matinee idol. Start culling through the rest of the cast and you pull people known for providing strong performances in movies, not as btox-office draws. I get the sense that in making this movie Nolan pretty much said "I want a Joseph Gordon-Levitt-type actor" or an "Ellen Page-esque ingenue" and instead of trying to find someone to fit the bill, he got those actors. I have a running idea in my head that I go back to of who would be my dream ensemble if I were casting a movie (a topic I think worth making a post about, now that I think of it) and there's a sense I get that he did the same thing. And cast them.

Alright those are general ideas I can write about for those who are living under a rock and therefore not seen this movie. Now begins...

SPOILER ALERT

Now that is out of the way, the question is what I think the movie is about. As I discussed with you before, I do not think that the top -- his totem -- is going to fall. Although I have avoided reading analysis before writing this I did see one twitter post that made me think. Whoever it was wrote that it didn't matter if it fell or not because he was happy -- although it was written somewhat more eloquently. My reasoning for why it does not fall are somewhat related to that. The question of whether the whole movie is a dream is not something I will probably ever be able to tell for sure, although as I think of it again, I start to consider how much every character seems to act how he would expect -- specifically how certain he is of Ellen Page's reaction. Anyhow, that is for another post. The main idea I felt after coming out was that reality did not matter to him anymore and so his creation of his own world where he could be content is what mattered to him and so that's what he chose to do. Watching it more I think I'll be able to look more at the idea of how Nolan is exploring denial and how the idea of happiness itself is not an authentic but instead manufactured concept. Again, that might be for later.

The other part of the post that I couldn't really say before the spoiler cutoff is how much I admired the pacing of the movie. The movie holds suspense for roughly the last hour by cutting those different dreams together that are so different not just in atmosphere but also in the type of suspense created. From the idea of a falling van and a race against time and

an action-movie fight, we get a run of the different ways a movie can use its tools to keep an audience enthralled. Again, filmmaking on a grand scale. Nolan really shows in this movie how his ability as a small director and large-scale director can both be used at the same time.

Also, I think I might need to see the movie again. Soon. But there's my start to the discussion.