I liked Inception. A lot. Except for the G.I. Joe/Her Majesty's Secret Service/Golden Eye (the game) snow level. And I could have done with less gun play in general. And why didn't Ariadne just change the walls of the snow fortress so they could get the combination? Or make a hill rise from the snow to block the bad guys on their snowmobiles? And by the way, weren't they supposed to spend like three weeks or something at the snow fortress if you follow the math they laid out earlier? That's a lot of time to get into the safe. What were they supposed to do the rest of the time?
But that's not the point of the movie. If you start trying to unravel the mechanics, you're missing the point. Just leave the loose threads alone and you will still be wearing and appreciating the embroidered beauty of a handsome sweater! It's a sweater than I enjoyed, and not only because I am obsessed with dreams, especially my own. I liked that the architect was name Ariadne, which many people thought was Oh So Obvious, although they couldn't put their finger on why exactly. (Ariadne is mostly known as Theseus' savior against the labyrinth and the minotaur, which relates to the film, although I initially thought of the figure of Sleeping Ariadne, which is traditionally interpreted as being a portrait of hypnopompic/hypnogagic confusion. And by the way, if you're looking for obvious, how about mannered Morpheus [hello, Greek dream deity!] with his red and blue pills [duh!] of The Matrix.)
Indeed: I hated The Matrix. Inception was sort of like The Matrix, but good. A real movie, that is, with some real, non-sci-fi themes. I really appreciated some of the broad ideas that emerged from Inception: the frailty of memory; how falling in love feels like it lasts forever; how Leonardo's interior version of his dead wife became his antagonist because he could only remember her through his own guilt; how the gnostic vision of reality as an illusion can be lethal.
Or is it? Any movie that can inspire the teenage girls who run the dressing room at Forever 21 -- where, yes, I was trying on some items; SECRET TIP: F21 has some nice, cheap basics for guys -- to parse various personal theories of reality is alright by me. I'm very glad Inception was nominated for an academy award, alongside a surprising strong group of non-blockbuster films. I guess it is a good movie year after all, despite that Steve Elliott is totally pissed off that Blue Valentine was overlooked. But none of this is the point of bringing up Inception. What made me think of the film again was that I discovered these images of Battleship Island, a once-dense but abandoned small city in the Sea of Japan that happens to look a lot like Level 4:


Many more pictures here, at one of my favorites: Dark Roasted Blend.