Dogtooth, Beetle Queen, Inception, Sway
I've seen very few films this year and Dogtooth is probably the best so far. Given the concept, the director actually uses a lot of restraint (and when you think about real cases like that monster in Austria, you realize the premise is not at all far-fetched). Taking it farther could've possibly paid off, but would've put the whole thing at risk. I'm not really interested in allegories, generally, but this film works both ways. Funny, disturbing, and touching. Excellent cast. Best lines: the one about "bad influence" and "Bruce!"
Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, in spite of some very fine moments, didn't really come together as either a documentary or an essay film, and relied on stereotypical nihonjin-ron for the narration. There were two awesome characters--an entomology professor and a Ferrari-driving rural beetle hunter. Way too many shots of generic Tokyo that were, I guess, supposed to illustrate similarities between Japanese society and insects (the low point was a strained comparison between a wiggling socked foot on a train and a worm hatching from a white cocoon). Went with coworkers: after the awesome trailer, we really wanted to love this, but felt a bit disappointed.
Click to viewSway, the debut feature by writer/director Miwa Nishikawa (who made my favorite film of 2009, Dear Doctor), had its share of problems, but given the tricky nature of the subject matter (and the risky choices she makes), it holds together remarkably well. It's hard to say anything without major spoilers; I'll just say that anyone interested in contemporary Japanese film can't afford to ignore Nishikawa.
SS & I saw Inception on Monday. I kept an open mind, in spite of not liking Nolan's Batman flicks. I kind of enjoyed it but also thought it was a complete mess and a blown opportunity.
Great cast. I was OK with Decap. For some reason I didn't like Marion Collard in this at all. Probably because she was playing Decap's annoying memories.
The dream settings were visually boring and seemed like a total failure of imagination. A hotel, a beach, a van in a city. Stacey noted that the snow dream looked exactly like some video game level (they all reminded me of the N64 Goldeneye game). Only Decap's city was kind-of interesting. My reaction here was the same as the pseudo-Costa Rican rainforests in Avatar--why would you spend so much money to make something that looks so generic / uninteresting?
The action sequences were almost complete garbage, especially in the snow world. There is enough empty bombast here (and "bombast" is really the strongest impression) for an entire summer of blockbusters. Probably the most frustrating part of the film were the frequent repetitive cuts back to the senseless action happening on higher-level dreams (hey, in case you forgot, the *projections* are still attacking). The zero-g hotel fight was promising but badly in need of some Hong Kong choreography.
In the first "Matrix" movie, the foundation of the metaphysics was clear and clean: machines took over Earth and made a digital sleepworld for people. In this film, I felt like Nolan started with a simple idea (shared dreams) and then thought about all these details (synchronized kicks, totems, etc) without clearly establishing the basics. By the end I was dizzy with questions about how or why any of it worked. What determines whose subconscious is hosting the dream? How do they install the architecture? Why did they go into someone else's subconscious when they went "down a level"? Wouldn't you just be "deeper" in the same person? Why would the human mind have developed an immune-system to deal with dream-invaders?* Why would the totems work at all--a top could fall just as easily in a dream, right? How come they never follow the one dude's advice to "dream bigger", thereby setting traps for the projections etc? If all he has to do is think of a grenade launcher, shouldn't it be much easier to fend them off?
The story about Decap and his wife was not at all engaging. Why did he love this woman? Why can't he let her go? She just a crazy and possessive memory at this point. SS had the best thoughts on this. She should've been an actual threat, more like a malicious spirit, possibly even a ghost stuck in the dream-limbo world rather than just a projection from Cobb. It would've been great if their interactions were Possession-level crazy.
Ellen Page has the most unfortunate line. Something about synchronizing kicks when they blow up the hospital.
Everything was too loud. The score would've been fine had it not played through every second of the film.
The New Yorker review touches on what is perhaps the biggest shortcoming by comparing Nolan to Buñuel (Lynch, and others, would work as well). "Cobb’s intercranial adventures aren’t like dreams at all-they’re like different kinds of action movies jammed together."
My take on the ending: Saito made it out, sort of kept / cheated on his promise to DeCap by leaving him dreaming on a level where he could be with his kids.
*(And another thing...In this interview, Dileep Rao says that the host of the dream is the one who stays awake on that level, which makes sense, except that the projections should then stop attacking, right? Or, I guess, it's not enough that the dream-visitors are asleep-in-th-dream and have actually *left* to be hosted by someone else. Ugh. Normally I'd find this kind of questioning tedious, but the success of this film requires Nolan's complex rules to be understood and accepted by the audience.)