I generally have few basic ideas while watching a movie. Like everyone else, I too want to be entertained, involved and thrilled. Also, my expectations are normally set very low when it comes to cinema these days. And yes, my intellectual acumen can be put to question, so I don't want to stake too many claims. Lastly, I am a bad storyteller.
I am not anti-experiment cinema, and when I say that, I am talking of movies that break the notion of the beginning, the middle, and the end. Not that I will break off into an essay here, just that all of us have seen this kind of cinema in the last few years. Going by Nolan's own history, the movies I've watched--The Prestige, Memento, besides the Batman series, both have been experimental and played with psyche. I think that's his art that he is attempting to master-the human psyche. I appreciate his intention, but I do think with Inception, things could have been better, yes.
Nolan's logic of putting dream within a dream, using physics, and lot of other flying-spaghetti logic, there was still lot of depth that could have been explored in the movie. If you are experimenting with science and drama, then the attempt has to be to restore some palpable logic. And here, he does attempt to thrill as well as let his imagination loose. But, people who claim to have good concentration skills, of course I claim that too, aren't they disappointed in hindsight of being left with too many details? While I do admit I liked it when I came out, I realised I had very little to say why. When you talk back for a movie you watched, everyone has a personal touch of their experience. Mine was, that I tried too hard to concentrate, getting lost somewhere in the middle, then being told by my friend about the construed logic of the sequence. Apart from that, what I later realised is that watching a movie became a sort of project mid-way, I was frowning. Can anyone tell me what I've just missed? The movie of the century! I liked the fact it was gripping, but what was it saying?
If I think of pros, I would say increasingly complex world realities, I think, have bred this kind of psychological warfare. And, I do not know for sure whether Nolan was attempting to show the manic desire of human mind to overpower reality completely or simply showing his cunning when it comes to designing a movie so complex, people would hesitate to put it down! Either way, he had me think. This is relatively new ground, and he has delved somewhere into the basics of human mind to string it together. But is it tightly strung or attempting to be something new altogether, is again, a painful thought. What do I take home from this?
I am left with just DiCaprio to talk about, for whom, this is a consecutive mind-game genre film after Shutter Island. The about to turn 40-year-old, Mr. DiCaprio said in an interview, that roles like these help him purge. Surely, film scripts like these should help Nolan uncover his own mind, like he said so himself that he had this idea 10 years ago. Is too much art, just for art sake then, to be loved or loathed? I have a pathetic sense of devising a straight answer here.
Much love, Mr.DiCaprio. No love lost.
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