The Film Thread: Page 112 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

The Film Thread

Qwiss

timBO! wrote:
Swedish people don't dream so it's hard for them to grasp the concept. Poor lambs.

😆

Rex

Our winter is 6 months and it is pretty much pitch black then. Sleeping, and dreaming, is pretty much all we can do.

banduan

the lols I had reading people explaining away the 'deep' meaning of inception.

Mirth

Humble Rex wrote:
It really is.

Co-signed.

Still watched it twice so maybe I should shut it. :\

Burnwinter

'Absolute wank-job' is a little harsh on Inception, but it's certainly just another premise-based film that fails to crank it up to the next level.

Like the Matrix, Prometheus, etc there's little verisimilitude, inelegant exposition, and when it comes to the crunch an awful lot of needless handwaving about Cobb's subconscious.

You should be hammered by a film like that and pick up the pieces later, instead it's constantly stopping to give you a breather and half-arsedly explain what's going on. Fuck that.

Saw Snow White & The Huntsman last night. Unexpectedly decent, probably the best MTV fairytale that you'll ever see.

Stewart and Hemsworth aren't too bad, Theron is such a solid actor, and the seven (wait, eight?) dwarves are played by a phenomenal cast of character actors: Ian McShane, Nick Frost, Ray Winstone, Bob Hoskins, Johnny Harris, Brian Gleeson, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan …

And the CG effects are very, very classy.

Coombs

banduan wrote:
Coombs, I don't agree that alternate narrative devices should be dismissed as gimmicky. Nor do I think its fair that a director needs to break convention to be good.

I don't generally subscribe to any sort of rule regarding alternative narrative devices, and if I did it would probably be in favor of them! I don't think Nolan's efforts in this regard have, to date, been alternative at all. In fact, I'd say they are just conventional techniques made to seem alternative, i.e. gimmicks. They don't actually serve to tell the story in a different way, because the key to solving any ambiguity there may be can always be found in some bit of exposition or with a "twist" ending, which inevitably reveals that its been the same old Aristotelian narrative structure all along.

Burnwinter

Have to disagree with you there ... Memento definitely has an alternative narrative, one in which the motives of the characters are gradually laid bare in reverse chronology, and are sometimes unexpected.

But the greatest strength of the premise is Leonard's amnesia, and not the time reversal.

For me the screenplay sharpens and brings to the fore the (explicit: perhaps a bit heavy-handed) themes of experience, trauma, vengeance, healing and forgetting in a way which would never happen in a conventionally structured thriller.

It's a very good central performance by Pearce as well.

There is a brilliant novel called Soldier of the Mist by Gene Wolfe which has a similar premise with a forward arrow of time. The protagonist, a Roman soldier, forgets the events of each day, but keeps an increasingly long set of preparatory notes about his life on a scroll. He has a loyal slave read the scroll to him each morning to remind him who he is, who to trust, and what has been happening. Good read.

Coombs

But the end result of Memento undoes all that good work with the big "reveal." The whole movie falls into place well enough (as always, executed quite well by Nolan) but that's just my problem with it. It falls into place. It doesn't have the balls to leave us in a state of amnesia, it gives it all away. It could've been a different way of a telling a story, but it ended up just telling it the same way and cutting the scenes out of order. Going backwards might as well be going forwards. It's intuitive to the nature of the medium. What is really interesting to me is going in different directions altogether, and not necessarily arriving at "THE END" by the end of the film.

You can put a movie forwards or backwards and gradually reveal the narrative. It doesn't HAVE to go backwards to work. The backwardsness doesn't really have a philosophical aim either (at least, not a strong one). It doesn't feel necessary, by the end, to the concept of the film itself, and is therefore in my view, superfluous.

EDIT: Book sounds interesting, will pick it up if I see it around.

EDIT AGAIN: And again, I agree that the premise of amnesia, and the premise of the film in general, is quite good. It's the execution that is, although generally well done on a mechanical level, totally uninteresting to me.

Burnwinter

I didn't think the twist ending was entirely conclusive, but as a thriller it was probably dramatically essential that the "reveal" (in this case, the motives, rather than the events) took place.

The backwardsness doesn't really have a philosophical aim either (at least, not a strong one)

I have to disagree with this, again. Like many thrillers it's a film about a wronged protagonist seeking vengeance.

Leonard's amnesia and the "reveal" (or at least the big question that the reveal raises) is a materialisation of the film's idea about revenge: that revenge is a further destabilisation and not a restoration, just more entropy, that ethical action is not transactional in that way despite the expectations of the audience.

In terms of the main effect you could achieve something similar with just a single concluding flashback, but on the way to the twist we get a series of mini-twists that are enabled by the more systematic reverse chronology.

The kicker, and the film's best moment for me, is when Carrie-Ann Moss's character plays the role of needy, weepy ex-lover, only to shift gears to vicious cruelty in the next (chronologically previous) scene, safe in the knowledge that Leonard's amnesia will exonerate her in a handful of minutes.

Burnwinter

Mind you, I agree that Nolan's technical brilliance accentuates his other failings at times. I really felt that strongly during the concluding 'nested action sequence' of Inception.

Never mind the failures with respect to the premise - Inception as an 'experience' (a theme park ride, if you like) felt even more vapid as a consequence of the quality of the editing and the intricately shot and staged video game physics of the whole thing.

The fact that the best they could come up with for the innermost layer of the lucid dream was a Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory base assault with machine guns was pretty damning. I came out of the movie thinking "my real dreams are a damn sight scarier than that shit" ...

RonBurgundy

Burnsy: You criticize Inception and praise Snow White and the Huntsman? Remind me never to discuss films with you ever again. 😆

Burnwinter

😆

Hey, I said it was unexpectedly decent 🙂

I'd say Snow White's about on a par with Inception, probably a bit better than TDKR. 😉

Timbob

Burnsy is on record as saying that the awful Conan remake is awesome. Need I say more? 😛

Burnwinter

Hey, I gave that film a deserved 6/10 🙂

banduan

Burnwinter wrote:
Saw Snow White & The Huntsman last night. Unexpectedly decent,

but it

Captain

Anne Hathaway is eminently watchable. That's all.

Burnwinter

Might as well just search her on Google images if that's your idea of a good film.

Watched a few flicks over the weekend:

Hitchcock's The Secret Agent - really old one (1936) starring Gielgud and Peter Lorre. Can't say it was too brilliant by the standards of the director, but it picked up towards the end. Lorre's character was a bizarre racist caricature 6.5/10
Tarkovsky's Mirror - well it's brilliant isn't it? Combines the rural shots from Solaris with the dreamlike interiors and effects from Stalker in a fairly engrossing psychoanalytic journey - and is nice enough to clock in at under 2 hours. Superb and unusual film 9/10
The Illusionist - really nice animation by Sylvain Chomet (Triplets of Belleville) based on a screenplay by Jacques Tati. Not really my bag but very cute and endearing 8/10

Qwiss

I watched Battleship the other night. Absolutely terrible.

RocktheCasbah

Watched Ted on Saturday.

Heeelarious.

banduan

qs! wrote:
I watched Battleship the other night. Absolutely terrible.

I didnt dare

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