Oscar History
Film Bitch History
Welcome

The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team.

This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms. 

Powered by Squarespace
DON'T MISS THIS

Follow TFE on Substackd 

COMMENTS

Oscar Takeaways
12 thoughts from the big night

 

Keep TFE Strong

We're looking for 500... no 390 SubscribersIf you read us daily, please be one.  

I ♥ The Film Experience

THANKS IN ADVANCE

What'cha Looking For?
Subscribe

Entries in Inception (20)

Friday
Jan282011

20:10 (An Irresistible Carrot)

Three years ago at the original blog, I created a series called 20:07 which became one of the most popular TFE features ever and spawned a slew of imitators 'round the web. Just for fun, let's resurrect that ol' pet for the remainder of Oscar season as we finish celebrating the films of 2010 before the new film year begins.

Screen capture: 20th minute and 10th second of Chris Nolan's Inception


 

Saito: Mr Cobb, how would you like to go home to America? To your children.

That Ken Watanabe (as Saito) is a sly fellow. He saves the juiciest dangling carrot for the moment he's about to lose the dream-hopper.

Wednesday
Jan262011

5 Things We Learned on Oscar Nom Morning...

Some of which we already knew but that's splitting hairs.


With 24 official Academy Awards categories and somewhere over 108 nominations announced each year (a few less publicized categories vary in number of nominees from year to year), there is always a lot to parse out on Oscar nomination day. Tuesday, January 25, 2011 was no exception as Mo’Nique, last year’s supporting actress winner for Precious, read out the nominees bright and early in that inimitable voice of hers. You can see the full list of nominees here (more info to come over the next few weeks). With so much to discuss, it’s necessary to break it down into manageable talking points.

5. Genre Bias Remains

Black Swan opened to sensational reviews, huge precursor favor and robust box office in December. The film even had to ramp up its expansion plans to capitalize on demand. In the end, it was still a horror films (of sorts) in which a ballerina sprouts wings and loses her mind. On Oscar nomination morning, it missed in key categories in which most people expected it to show. Inception opened to fanatical reviews and gargantuan box office, ending the year as the only member of the year’s top ten box office hits to be aimed at adults. In the end, it was still a sci-film (of sorts)...

READ THE REST AT TRIBECA FILM
for the other 4 talking points including a peculiar Sundance Festival  trick.

...that is if you're not completely burnt out on Oscar articles.

And if yah are... uh oh Blanche!

 

Tuesday
Jan252011

They're Here. The 83rd Oscar Nominations

The Day has arrived, capitals and bold intended.

I'm updated the OSCAR NOMINATION INDEX  so you can look at everything as a complete chart and also see how I did prediction wise. Or you can open up this post to check out the entire list of nominees.

The most interesting responses in terms of nomination levels have to be Black Swan and Inception, neither of which hit Oscar's sweet spot in quite the nomination tally levels people generally expected. Inception missed in director which MUST give Nolan some kind of snub record since he's now been nominated by the DGA three times. Black Swan missed in art direction and sound and costumes all of which, one thinks, should have maybe been givens.

When in doubt remember -- I also forgot -- that Oscar resists genre films when they have traditional drama to nominate instead (The King's Speech)

Complete list of nominees after the jump or you can just see the big chart.

Click to read more ...

Thursday
Jan202011

Distant Relatives: Solaris and Inception

Robert here, with my series Distant Relatives, where we look at two films, (one classic, one modern) related through a common theme and ask what their similarities and differences can tell us about the evolution of cinema.


Less human than human

It may seem hard to believe now but the original intent of science fiction wasn't mindless entertainment. These days, the intelligent sci-fi movie is rare enough that it needs to be noted, but back in a time before time, exploring issues of social awareness, philosophy, and humanity was the purpose genre. Inception is a film that's been criticized and accused of a good many things. It's been called too complex, and not complex enough, shallow, convoluted and cold. But in its best moments and in what it eventually narrows down to it hints at this question: In the equation of reality, how much is objective fact and how much is our own perceptions and projections? Should we and can we accept the parts of reality that may or may not exactly be real?

We don't know for sure if Andrei Tarkovsky, famous heady Russian filmmaker would find fault anywhere in Inception. But it's well known that his most famous film Solaris was a reaction to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he considered too cold and distant. That film follows Kris Kelvin, a scientist widower who travels to investigate strange occurrences aboard a the Solaris space station. Once there his wife reappears to him, although both she and he know that she is merely a projection of his psyche made flesh by the mysterious planet Solaris. After failed attempts to send her away (she keeps reappearing), Kelvin must decide whether he'd rather lose a lonely reality in turn for a world of fiction... but potential happiness.

Connections between the two films are immediately apparent. Both protagonists' wives are not only deceased, but of suicide, a plot device responsible for creating the most intense grief.  Both films present us with two states of being, either Earth/Solaris or dreams/waking and both protagonists must decide between the two of them.
 
In Inception, all of the business about implanting an idea in a man's head and corporate intrigue is almost a macguffin, a plot device which exists to place DiCaprio's Cobb deep into his own subconsious (represented by the Limbo). Here is a concept that Solaris does not share. There is no macguffin, no sideways entrance into the psyche. Tarkovsky doesn't wait long (by Tarkovsky standards) to put Kelvin into contact with his "wife".

You don't really exist

just reflections of real people

Each film's protagonist is a man in reality. When the film asks questions about humanity we experience it through him, his pain, his desperateness, and ultimately his decision to accept or reject reality. But to appreciate the questions raised it helps to understand the events through the prism of the deceased wives. Kelvin's wife Hari has consciousness and is by all standards an autonomous being but one who realizes that she is a construct of her husband's perception. Inception's Mal, as a projection of Cobb isn't necessarily a sentient being, but as we see her in flashbacks, as we know the real Mal, we see a woman who is constantly uncertain of whether or not the world around her is real or not, and struggles to knw how much of it is simply her creation. These women give us a good sense of how these films view the human condition, in both an active and passive sense. We need not be in a dream to wonder how much of the world around us is influenced by our own projections like Mal, nor do we need to know we're fictitous like Hari to recognize that the only understanding anyone can ever have of us is skewed by their own subjectivity. The world never exists in an objective state to us, and we never exist in an objective state to the world.
 
When Inception begins Cobb is already mimicing Mal's state of uncertainty at the reality of their reality. Cobb understands that dreams can be so convincing that one can become lost without ever knowing it. Conversely Kelvin doesn't fear getting caught in unreality and is always aware that his wife is, in fact, not real. But he fails to recognize the power of the dream and soon her unreality doesn't seem to matter as much to him.

'Tis better to have loved and lost...

would you give up reality if it never existed in the first place?

You mean more to me than any scientific truth. - Solaris

In comparing Inception with Solaris, it's easy to dismiss Inception as the big blockbuster for the masses that gives its medicine with a heaping helping of sugar while trumping Solaris as a highly-demanding work of art that isn't diluted by explosions and car chases. But that would be unfair. Nolan may serve up his philosophizing surrouneded by a buffer of entertainment but he's reached more people recently than Solaris, which wasn't exactly a big hit when it was released even among the idealized, Godfather and Nashville-going audiences of the 1970's. If anything, Inception proves that people aren't as opposed to complex films as Hollywood thinks. No, Steven Soderberg's Solaris didn't do so well, nor would Tarkovsky's today, though I doubt either of those men would have made changes for the sake of a bigger audience.

Which suggests that audiences will only go so far. Yes, Inception's insight isn't at the level of Solaris's, and yes Inception is often criticized for glossing over its climactic reality vs fiction decision. But like Solaris, the film ends on a vague suggestion that all along, the distinction between fact and fantasy may not have really made a difference. One great writer said of the film, "This exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious, this great examination of the limits of rationalism and the perverse power of even the most ill-fated love, needs to be seen as widely as possible." Of which film, you ask? Such is their similarity that it could be either. And I have to wonder, does the reality matter?

 

Saturday
Jan082011

Podcast: "You Haven't Seen The Last of Us" Pt. 2

You listened to Part One already, right?

PART TWO (23 min)
Topics Include:

  • Why is 127 Hours still falling like a rock?
  • Will there be a surprise nominee Best Pic nominee? If so, what?
  • Deep thoughts about the rise of James Franco
  • Art Direction & Costume Design: Alice in Wonderland, Inception
  • Nick predicts an Oscar night Black Swan gag from Anne Hathaway
  • Original Score: Alexandre Desplat, Hans Zimmer, Trent Reznor, Daft Punk?
  • Debra Granik and Best Director
  • "Hip Young Directors" Chris Nolan, David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky
  • Burlesque

Podcast: You Havent Seen Pt 2

Page 1 ... 1 2 3 4