>>Nostalgia For Infinity

It’s so nice to see an intelligent movie for a change. I can enjoy a dumb action flick or a sentimental tear-jerker as much as the next slob, but smart movies seem really rare if you don’t really watch many movies.

Critical reaction has been mixed. I like to think that all the people with different opinions to mine are narrow-minded or less clever than I am, because that way I get to feel intellectually superior even though I position myself as an everyman “reviewer” rather than some hoighty-toighty ivory tower “critic”.

This review is not the kind of nonsense I feared it would be when I first started writing it. I was afraid it would be another review where I’m dreaming I’m writing it and then I wake up but I’m really still dream-writing and only dreamed I woke up, but then I really wake up, but no, really I’m still dream-writing, ad infinitem (sic). This is a little bit like the movie, but most of the story challenges the audience to follow a very complex plot, rather than trying to trick the audience into falling for special-effects razzle-dazzle. There are dreams within dreams, but most of the time the audience knows when that is happening, even though this review may not really back that statement up.

So, does Inception make sense? I’m not sure. It makes more sense than most action films. It is not stupid. But it is complicated, and I’ll have to see it a couple more times before I decide if it plays fair. This sort of analytical laziness is fine because I’m a reviewer and not a critic.

On the other hand, any screenwriter who knows enough physics to understand that inside an elevator you can’t tell gravity from acceleration has my respect, because I like things that correspond with what I already know even when they’re mostly insignificant when discussing works in this medium.

This is not Leonardo DiCaprio’s best work but there are excellent actors in smaller parts, especially Michael Caine and Cillian Murphy. I’m going to assume you know the roles they play and not discuss them any further.

And Inception is popular, proving wrong the conventional wisdom that nobody wants to see films that make you think like the famously unsuccessful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Vertigo, Seven Samurai, Fight Club, City of God, or Nolan’s own Memento. Inception is already #3 on the IMDB all time greats — a little too soon but a good sign for the future of smart science fiction films, or at least an indicator of how fickle people can be when it comes to recent blockbusters.

Imagine Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy directed by Christopher Nolan. Then keep imagining it, and pretend you’re dreaming, because I’m not going to explain this bizarre conclusion to my “review”.

[Disclaimer: I've not seen Inception. I'll probably check it out on DVD as it sounds interesting. I also have nothing against Rick Norwood. He's probably a really nice guy doing cool stuff, but this is not a good review by any stretch of the imagination.]

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This isn’t really a review so much as a “Wot I Think” – a quick run-through of some half-developed ideas and reasons why I liked or didn’t like this film. I’ve been arguing with a few friends about this movie and figured I may as well appropriate this argument for Great Justice, i.e. a post on my poor, neglected blog.

So, Jonathan McCalmont has been writing alternative ballots for the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category of the Hugo Awards (an award perhaps best known for the controversy it causes by being utterly uncontroversial). Triangle is one of the films he included on the list and one of those which I checked out for myself.

The basic concept of Triangle is simple: a small yacht is capsized in an unusual storm and the few survivors are picked up by a cruise liner, the Aeolus, which appears to be uncrewed – until a masked figure begins picking them off with a shotgun. It’s not long before even weirder shit starts happening. Okay, from this point onwards there are going to be spoilers so if you want to check out the film free of preconceptions, stop reading now.

What makes Triangle unusual is its use of mechanics familiar to anyone who’s seen Groundhog Day or Primer – the sequences of events aboard the Aeolus, culminating in the murder of almost all of the survivors, continually repeat. Single mother Jess is the only survivor who appears to be an actor in these events rather than a recurrent victim, and as such she sets about trying to change events – to save the survivors, or to prevent them from boarding the ship in the first place.

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There’s a good discussion in the comments thread of a post in Nick Mamatas’s livejournal. (If you’ve not figured this fact out already, Nick’s blog is equal parts funny and intelligent – both the posts and the comments.)

I figured out when I was in my mid teens that ‘getting’ music was about familiarisation, or “acclimatisation” as I put it at the time (I used to scuba dive). That is, you needed to hear something enough times, hear enough variations on a theme, get sufficiently intimate with the conventions of a genre in order to get where it was coming from… to be able to parse the structure and language and aesthetics and so on. When I was younger and someone gave me the first Deftones album I just didn’t understand it. It was so loud, so distorted, that all I heard was noise – everything just smushed together into a mess. But I persevered because so many people said it was good, and eventually I got used to it, heard some more metal bands, and it all began to make sense to my ears. It didn’t take long to realise this didn’t only apply to music.

I guess this is part of the reason why I’ve always been so enthusiastic about trying out new things since then. Once you realise that not liking things is often just a result of not understanding it, it’s hard to walk away. I’m sure a lot of smarter kids figured this out when they were much younger, so I figured I had (and have) a lot of catching up to do. Besides, once you know all the rules it’s time to break them, right? That bit of received wisdom was drummed into me by a hundred how-to-write guides.

An unfortunate side effect of keeping an open mind is you can be too forgiving of mediocrity, purely through trying to see if there’s something more in there, buried deeper than you’ve gotten. Genuine awfulness is easy to spot, yet it’s tempting to keep trying with something that seems to promise more than it offers. But no, some songs, books, films etc. are just too average to be worth much of your time.

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