Inception movie review By Elena Nola on July 17, 2010

Inception is probably the first movie of 2010 that movie lovers have been legitimately anticipatingthat is, looking forward to since that very first preview back in February. Certainly I was. Sometimes that anticipation is a bad thing, as when your hopes are dashed against a mediocre production; sometimes it makes a movie even better, when it meets or exceeds all of your expectations. Inception isnt quite the latter but certainly isnt anything else. Mostly, I think, what few preconceptions I had about the plot or scenario the movie would cover turned out to be wrong, so I cant call it what I expected, but the movie as it exists blew me away. The story of the filmand this is what surprised meturned out to be one story with several layers, not several smaller arcs as they tackled different jobs or something. No, its just one job, and it is a big job. A swan song for DiCaprios character, who wants as payment for the job the client to use his political connections to clear him of murder charges against his wife. What they are trying to do is not extract information (which is their usual line of work) but implant an idea that will then bloom from that subconscious/unconscious implantation via dream into the flower of a conviction from the man himself, by his conscious minds reckoning. They have to create layers within layers in order to achieve this implantation, this inception, as they call it, and there is a risk to all of them, going this deep, that if they die in the dream they do not awake but get cast into limbo where the time dilation might well render them a lifetime before the dream comes to an end. So here was the interesting thing about this set-up: I wasnt sold on the framing story, about DiCaprio trying to get home to his kids via this shady corporate spying deal, and we never saw anything about the man they were implanting with this inception to know if he was a villain or a victim. I didnt know who I should, in a moralistic way, be rooting for but by the time the action started, it didnt matter. I didnt care whether I was in favor of the missions execution; all I cared about was that within the parameters they were given, the objective was immediate and exciting and tense to watch them try and accomplish. The flashes back through the successive levels of the dream ratcheted that tension higher and higher, as you saw each team racing within its time dilation to beat both their clock and by extension the clock driving the entire structure. Another thing that made the story not matterI loved this conception of the dream world. For me, one of the only enduring ideas that stuck from my 13-year-old reading of The Wheel of Time books was the dreamworld his characters could enter, where things were like and yet not like the real world. I have a version of my parents road that I know as well as their real one, but yet it exists only in my dreams. And we all have times when were trying to tell someone about a dream, and we have to say things like well, in the dream this made sense or then we were just elsewhere, like you are sometimes in dreams, and this movie played with those ideas. The world had its own physics, its own rules, and the dreamer would never notice it was odd until s/he awoke, because in that dream those were the rules.

The visuals were the final piece of this movie, and they were awesome. From the scene early on with Ellen Pages character changing the physics of the world and creating streets that met at right angles along the x/y plane instead of the y/z, to the sequence when they are in a rolling van in one dream and the physics of that physical change affect the next level down so as the van rolls they are engaging in this fight that ranges from the hallway floor to its ceiling, to the sudden rearing of new buildings in the landscape or their equally sudden crumblingthis movie had some awesome things to look at. So if youre someone who likes visualsnot special effects, which were actually used sparingly in comparison to achieving the same effect, but better, via camera tricks, but visualsthen this movie is worth seeing regardless of other considerations.

But Ive spent all this time saying why the story didnt matter without touching on whether it turned out to be good. It did. It was a bit slow to get started, and you will leave the theater still thinking about it. There is a facile surface reading that you can take away and feel satisfied with. If your mind cant let go of the ideas that were incepted early in the film, however, if you paid close enough attention to note them, then you will start reevaluating everything. I have gone through three layers of understanding so far, and this is only in the first 12 hours since I saw it. I am planning to see it again alreadyI expect on a second viewing my theories will become obviously right or wrong. But on the first viewing, this film leaves you thinking. Chris Nolan is an excellent director, and I think he does better with idea movies rather than plot moviesfor as much as I enjoyed the first of his Batman movies (I was the one person any of my friends knew who didnt like The Dark Knight), I think they are the least of his films. He has a great cast that hes working with here; there were no real weak links, although Ellen Page was probably the weakest only because she wasnt doing anything we havent seen her do before. Which could easily be said of DiCaprio, too, here, except we forgive him for it because hes just so damn charismatic to watch anyway. Joseph Gordon-Levittoff his 500 Days of Summer backslide and back to his better formCillian Murphy (doing his usual naf thing, too), Handsome Bob from Rocknrolla (Tom Hardy), Tom Berenger, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, and John Hurt round out the rest of the cast. My bottom line on Inception is this: if you thought you wanted to see this movie, you do. And if you werent sure, imagine a mix of The Matrixs reality-bending and realityquestioning and Oceans Eleven slick, complex heist, and The Dark Citys mind games andMementos mood and fractured storyline, and you get some idea of what this movie is. Add in a dash of Plato (A mans mind, once stretched to encompass a new idea, can never go back to its original dimensions) and some hyberbolic space-time dilation, and I think it becomes obvious that you cant go wrong with this movie. Expect to be caught in the moments. Expect to be made to wonder. Expect to be made to think. And expect to want to see it again.

Inception - The Story Inception is all about a new form of corporate espionage: the ability to steal ideas while the owner's dreaming. This is done by means of an 'extraction' team. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) heads up the most successful such team, with Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as the point man who helps set up the scheme. They'll be joined for their riskiest mission by Ariadne as the architect (Ellen Page) who creates the perfect dreamscape, and Eames (Tom Hardy) as a forger/master of disguise. Yusuf (Dileep Rao) is in charge of

administering the drugs used to keep the team and its target in the dream state and who ultimately makes sure they all exit the dream safely. When we first are introduced to Cobb, a conflicted man who cannot return to his family in the States for a reason that's left unexplained for much of the film, he's in the middle of trying to extract a secret from a powerful businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe). The mission doesn't go as planned, but it does lead to a job offer Cobb can't refuse. In exchange for planting an idea in someone's head, Saito offers Cobb the opportunity to return to the US to be reunited with his family. That offer's impossible for Cobb to resist as he desperately misses his two small children, although planting an idea means the team will be entering uncharted territory. The target of the job is Robert Fischer Jr (Cillian Murphy), the heir to a multibillion-dollar corporation. Saito wants Fischer to break up his father's company so the team must plant that seed in Fischer's subconscious. How they go about tackling this mission, how they handle the complexities involved in journeying through a stranger's mind, and the emotional turmoil Cobb experiences as he spends extended periods of time in the dream state with - no spoilers here - someone whose presence both disturbs and thrills him, makes for an incredibly tense thrill ride of a film you have to experience to understand.

Ken Watanabe and Marion Cotillard in 'Inception.' Warner Bros Pictures The Acting Leonardo DiCaprio is having a terrific year with both Shutter Island and Inception clear examples of why he's one of the most sought-after and respected actors of his generation. DiCaprio doesn't go big when small will do, and that can also be said of the rest of the cast. Ellen Page may be diminutive in stature but as Ariadne, the sole female member of the extraction team, she's a fearsome presence. And as the chemist who handles the dreaminducing drugs, Dileep Rao (Avatar) is responsible for the film's lighter moments, of which there are very few, and he handles the task of providing comic relief well. Marion Cotillard (Nine) isn't part of the team (and I've deliberately left mentions of her character out so as not to spoil the film) but she does play a key role in Inception. Cotillard gets better with each project, and she's simply breathtaking and heartbreaking as a pivotal player in Nolan's twisted drama. Particularly impressive is Joseph Gordon-Levitt ( 500 Days of Summer) as Cobb's righthand man. Gordon-Levitt did 99% of his own stunts which is an impressive feat in this film, but he's equally as adept at handling the film's quieter moments. And Nolan has also brought back a few of his past collaborators - Michael Caine (as DiCaprio's dad), Ken Watanabe, and Cillian Murphy - to fill key roles. It seems Nolan can't do a movie now without Caine, which is good news for all of us Caine fans. Cillian Murphy, The Scarecrow in Nolan's Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, makes the character of an heir to billions into a sympathetic figure, playing him as someone who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth but who doesn't adopt the airs of a filthy rich man who thinks he's entitled. This sort of character has been done to death in films so to see how Nolan and Murphy have chosen to humanize the character is refreshing. Ken Watanabe is a terrific actor but I have to say that if there's anything about Inception that I was a little disappointed in it was the occasional scene in which Watanabe was a little difficult to understand because of his heavy accent. It's a minor

annoyance and it only flared up a few times. And last but not least, Tom Hardy's a real scene-stealer as a forger who can kick ass and steal identities.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy in 'Inception.' Warner Bros Pictures The Bottom Line Inception makes a clear case for why the Academy Awards should honor ensemble efforts. Every member of Nolan's team pulls his/her weight in Inception and, as complex as this story is, one bad apple could have spoiled the entire film. The story revolves around Leonardo DiCaprio's character, however every one of the key roles is fully fleshed out, every actor is pitch perfect. Normally in a production of this size there's a character or two you sort of forget are even in the film after you've left the theater. That's not likely to happen with any of the characters in Inception. Nolan opted to go with as little CG as possible and to involve his actors in as many stunts as they could safely handled. That adds a level of realism to the film with the characters seeming to be in real peril. From the gorgeous sequence featured in the trailer with Ellen Page and Leonardo DiCaprio sitting at a table outside a Paris cafe while all around them storefronts burst into the air to a white-knuckle crash scene with a van filled with the team out of control and rolling down a hill to a high speed shoot 'em up sequence in the Alps to our heroes underwater in distress, Nolan's decision to do as much in camera as possible is shown over and over again to have been absolutely the right choice. There's an extra weight and grittiness to each of the action scenes that wouldn't have been there if they were CG creations. Cinematographer Wally Pfister and editor Lee Smith may have had the most difficult jobs onInception, but the results of their hard work is award-worthy. The film deals with waking reality and multiple levels of dreaming, and Pfister and Smith helped pull off Nolan's vision without making a single misstep. Inception isn't so much just a movie to sit through in an air-conditioned theater as it is a genuine cinematic experience. It's actually a little draining both mentally and physically, but not in a negative way. You become so immersed in this world Nolan's created that sitting through Inception takes a little time to recuperate from, and you'll be replaying scenes in your head for days trying to answer a few lingering questions. Worth every penny spent in the making, and worth every dollar forked over for a ticket, Inception may just be the best movie of 2010. As of mid-July, it's at the top of my list for all of 2010's releases thus far. GRADE: A Inception was directed by Christopher Nolan and is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action throughout. Theatrical Release: July 16, 2010

MOVIE REVIEW Inception (2010) Warner Brothers Pictures

A scene from Inception. This Time the Dreams on Me By A. O. SCOTT The relationship between movies and dreams has always been to borrow a term from psychoanalysis overdetermined. From its first flickerings around the time Freud was working on The Interpretation of Dreams, cinema seemed to replicate the uncanny, image-making power of the mind, much as still photography had in the decades before. And over the course of the 20th century, cinema provided a vast, perpetually replenishing reservoir of raw material for the fantasies of millions of people. Freud believed that dreams were compounded out of the primal matter of the unconscious and the prosaic events of daily life. If he were writing now, he would have to acknowledge that they are also, for many of us, made out of movies.

Melissa Moseley/Warner Brothers Pictures Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception. And movies, more often than not these days, are made out of other movies. Inception,Christopher Nolans visually arresting, noir-tinged caper, is as packed with allusions and citations as a film studies term paper. Admirers of Ridley Scotts Blade Runner andStanley Kubricks 2001 will find themselves in good company, though Inception does not come close to matching the impact of those durable cult objects. It trades in crafty puzzles rather than profound mysteries, and gestures in the direction of mighty philosophical questions that Mr. Nolan is finally too tactful, too timid or perhaps just too busy to engage. So Inception is not necessarily the kind of experience you would take to your next shrink appointment. It is more like a diverting reverie than a primal nightmare, something to be mused over rather than analyzed, something you may forget as soon as its over. Which is to say that the time nearly two and a half hours passes quickly and for the most part pleasantly, and that you see some things that are pretty amazing, and amazingly pretty: cities that fold in on themselves like pulsing, three-dimensional maps; chases and fights that defy the laws that usually govern space, time and motion; Marion Cotillards face. Ms. Cotillard, her most famous movie role evoked by occasional eruptions of dith Piaf on the La Vie en Rosesoundtrack, is the films principal enigma and its chief signifier of emotion. She is not, however, exactly a character in Inception. Rather, at least as far as a first-time viewer can guess, she is a projection in the subconscious of her husband, a specialist in corporate mental espionage known as Cobb and played by Leonardo DiCaprio with some of the same twitchy melancholy he brought to Shutter Island. To say too much about their marriage would be to risk compromising some of the pleasures of discovery tucked into a carefully crosshatched, multilayered story. Better to explain what Cobb does for a living, since that exhaustive enumeration of the metaphysical rules of his profession occupies an awful lot of the dialogue in Mr. Nolans script. Using a combination of drugs, wires and other vaguely Matrix-y methods, Cobb and his co-workers penetrate the minds of their slumbering targets, usually for the purpose of extracting hidden information. But a wealthy client named Saito (Ken Watanabe) induces them to try the much more difficult trick known as inception, which involves planting an idea someone elses mind that will bear fruit in the real world. Thats impossible! more than one person has occasion to exclaim.

In any case, Cobb and his team are trying to induce a young man (Cillian Murphy), whose father (Pete Postlethwaite) is a business rival of Saitos, to break up the company he is about to inherit. This bit of commercial intrigue provides the fairly banal material foundation on which Mr. Nolans phantasmagorical world is built. The pursuit of competitive advantage by well-dressed, emotionless men is hardly the stuff that dreams are made of, Humphrey Bogarts observations at the end of The Maltese Falconnotwithstanding. And the content of those dreams, once Cobb and company have dropped into their marks sleeping mind, is often curiously pedestrian. Most of the time, one group of guys with guns chases another, in cars across the rain-soaked streets of Los Angeles, on foot through the corridors of a retro-elegant hotel, and on skis and snowmobiles through an icy Alpine landscape from which James Bond might recently have departed. A lot of this is what is the critical term of art Im looking for? pretty cool. And the heist-movie cast of mind-cracking technicians is also cool. Dileep Rao is the shaggy, anxious nerdy one. Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are a pair of wisecracking specialists in something-or-another, and Ellen Page is the architect. This means that she designs the physical environments in which the dreams take place, and also that, like a precocious sophomore in a graduate seminar, asks the right questions and spells out the obvious connections. She also notices that Cobbs personal issues are clouding his ability to work, and putting the rest of them at a vaguely defined but serious risk a graver danger than just waking up. (The conceit that theyre all dreaming takes some of the edge off the movies violence, since its hard to grieve for extras who are just projections in some elses mental theater. On the other hand, that is pretty much what all movie characters are. This is what I meant by overdetermined.) Cobb, whose life depends on suppressing emotions and memories that he cannot control, is thus a typical Christopher Nolan hero. His air of guilt and sorrow the sense of unfinished psychic business pushing against his conscious intentions marks his kinship with Christian Bales Batman, with the detective played by Al Pacino in Insomnia and with the anguished amnesiac played by Guy Pearce in Memento. Mr. DiCaprio exercises impressive control in portraying a man on the verge of losing his grip, but Mr. Nolan has not, in the end, given Cobb a rich enough inner life to sustain the performance. The accomplishments of Inception are mainly technical, which is faint praise only if you insist on expecting something more from commercial entertainment. That audiences do and should expect more is partly, I suspect, what has inspired some of the feverish early notices hailing Inception as a masterpiece, just as the desire for a certifiably great superhero movie led to the wild overrating of The Dark Knight. In both cases Mr. Nolans virtuosity as a conjurer of brilliant scenes and stunning set pieces, along with his ability to invest grandeur and novelty into conventional themes, have fostered the illusion that he is some kind of visionary. But though there is a lot to see in Inception, there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolans idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears. If Mr. Nolan cant quite reach this place, that may be because his access is blocked by the very medium he deploys with such skill. And the limitations of Inception may suggest the limits not only of this very talented director, but also of his chosen art form at this moment in its history. Our dreams feed

the movies. The movies feed our dreams. But somehow, our imaginations are still hungry. Inception is rated PG-13. The violence is stylized and sometimes bloody, but not likely to cause nightmares.

'Up' Movie Review

By Rebecca Murray, About.com Guide See More About: Dug, Kevin, Russell and Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) in 'Up.' Disney/Pixar How does Pixar continue to do it? 'It' being put out quality films that spring from simple, straightforward stories that are designed to engage all age groups, aren't offensive, are entertaining, gorgeous to behold, and don't disappear from your memory 10 minutes after you exit the theater. With each new release Pixar manages to best itself even when it seems doing so would be an impossibility. Pixar's ninth film, WALL-E, set the bar high but somehow, someway, Up manages to top it - a task I personally never thought they'd be able to accomplish. I mean come on! Up's the story of an old man who ties balloons to his house. He looks grumpy, I can't relate to him, and just an old guy floating off in space isn't exactly the most compelling premise I can think of for an animated movie. Yet within 5 minutes, maybe even less, Up pulled me in and I never wanted the movie to end. The same thing happened with WALL-E. A lonely robot left on the planet has to clean up garbage and that's supposed to be entertaining? I said, "That'll never work." Yes, I ate those words. I'll happily munch on some more after doubting Pixar could make me like a grouchy senior citizen who dreams of adventures in a far-off land. The Story We first meet up with Carl Fredericksen as a young boy who dreams of being an adventurer as he watches newsreel footage of explorer Charles Muntz. Carl's quiet and sort of shy, but his love of Muntz leads him to Ellie, a sassy little girl who is as outgoing as Carl is introverted. They make for a great team and in fact will go on to share their lives together. From elementary school through high school and on up into adulthood, Carl and Ellie are inseparable, sharing every moment of joy and sadness together while dreaming of a time when they can actually take off on an adventure in the wilds of South America just like their hero, Muntz. But jobs and health issues and whatnot have a way of intruding on dreams, and Carl and Ellie grow old never having visited the South American jungles. And then, sadly, Carl becomes a widower with just his lovely little house and his beautiful memories of Ellie to keep him company.

Carl Fredericksen in his flying house in 'Up.' Disney/Pixar Writer/directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson tell us all this in no more than the first 20 minutes of Up. So much backstory crammed into such a small time frame - they should teach other filmmakers how to accomplish this with as much integrity and finesse as they display here.

Unfortunately, Carl's home is right in the path of new construction. Unable to stand up legally to those who want to level his house, Carl finds the perfect way to keep his home intact. He'll kill two birds with one stone. He wants to visit South America before it's too late and he needs to remove his house from its current location. The solution: ties thousands of helium-filled balloons to his roof and float away. He's even rigged up a way to steer. But Carl fails to take into consideration the persistent presence of an overly helpful Wilderness Explorer scout named Russell. Russell didn't know of Carl's planned getaway and was on the porch when Carl's house lifted off. With no way to put the house down and South America set as his goal, Carl and Russell become unlikely traveling companions. Touching down just short of his target landing spot - Paradise Falls - Carl and Russell must walk the house (with balloons still attached) a mile or two to the perfect spot. On the way to the house's final resting spot they meet up with a huge exotic bird Russell names Kevin (why? who knows) and a super friendly dog named Dug (not Doug). Dug's wearing a fancy collar that allows his thoughts to be translated into English, a plot device that's so incredibly funny that Dug deserves a film all to himself. Dug's mind works about how you'd expect a canine's thought process to, with lots of happy thoughts interrupted often by shouts of Squirrel! So, now they're in South America and all is as it's supposed to be, right? Nope. There's danger lurking around every corner for poor Kevin, and it's up to Carl, Russell, and Dug to keep the rare bird safe. The Bottom Line What can be said of Pixar's animation that hasn't already been said time and time again? It's dazzling, simply stunning to take in, and so incredibly beautiful you forget you're watching an animated film and instead just lose yourself in an amazing adventure. From dog hair to bird feathers to the humans in Up to the 10,000 balloons that hold up Carl's home, Up animators have surprised us once again by surpassing the quality and beauty of every previous Pixar film. And let's face it, Pixar is the standard bearer for this medium. They do it better than every other studio out there, and that's because they never sacrifice character development for cute/fancy animated tricks. They don't play down to kids, they don't take shortcuts in plot development, and they are able to get you emotionally involved and invested in animated characters in a way their competitors have never been able to duplicate. Up plays on your heartstrings and there are one or two scenes which may have you grabbing for a tissue. I'm not joking about that. It got to me and I don't get emotional about a film unless an animal dies (no, that's not what happens in Up). And speaking of animals, dog lovers are going to go crazy over Dug. He's an adorable little guy who's brave and loyal and is sure to remind you of your own furry best friend. Up is storytelling at its best. The adventure film takes audiences through the full spectrum of emotions, with action and thrills mixed with comedy and suspense. A sure lock on an animated film Oscar nod, Up delivers a wondrous world filled with people and creatures you'll fall head over heels in love with. Up earns a spot as one of the best films of the year, and not just in the animated category. GRADE: A Up was directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson and is rated PG for some peril and action.