At the Cinema - July 2010

Inception – 10
You’ll like this movie if you like:
a. Seeing a classic
b. Christopher Nolan’s imagination
c. Seeing something you’ve never seen before

The blockbuster summer of 2010 finally got kicked off, just when it seemed like it wasn’t going to happen. It supposedly took Christopher Nolan 20 years to conceive this story and I’m sure glad it wasn’t 21. In Inception, he lifts the constraints that the real world provides and enters the world of dreams, and this opens up his moviemaking to a vista beyond the worldly boundaries we’re used to.

This starts as the story of a professional thief named Dom, played vigorously by Leonardo Dicaprio, who does his thieving within the dreams of his victims. He has demons both while he’s awake and while he’s asleep, and it’s those demons that provide just one of the obstacles as he accepts his latest dream job.

He may be able to gain some freedom from his demons if he can do an Inception – plant the seed of a dream in the target. How do you do an inception? Well, first you assemble a dream team – an architect, a forger, and a chemist. Don’t ask – you’ll understand it when you see it.

Christopher Nolan showed promise with his Memento, then he got carried away with The Dark Knight, which seemed to go on forever. Here, he has no such problem. At the 2 and a half hours that blockbusters require these days, they zip by like you’re in the dream. It’s a magical time, and the scene of his partner (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt in another resume-builder) in a hall \way dream fight is one of those draw-dropping scenes that make us love the movies – you ain’t seen nothing like it.
How did they do this scene? In a free falling aircraft, like Apollo 13, to simulate weightlessness? There seems to be little CGI here, and a lot of cool execution.

This is the movie of the year so far. Go See It.

Salt – 9

You’ll like this movie if you like:
a. Angelina Jolie
b. The Bourne Trilogy
c. The idea of a female James Bond
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Angelina Jolie is our movie star. She is pure charisma and screen presence like no one else working today. There is a scene early in Salt where she is interrogating a suspect and she just stares at him, and she holds your eyes like she is pulling your eyelids open.

Then, it’s off on one amazing adventurous chase after another as she tries to prove her innocence, or is it avenge her guilt?

This is Saturday Matinee Adventure – 2010 style. The action is often ridiculous of course, but Angelina commits to it with such verve, you just have to laugh and stay engrossed.

My only quibble, much like with the Bourne movies, is that there is an awful lot of blurry action, where Salt is kicking a lot of male ass and we’re never really sure how she does it because the camera’s jumping faster than she is. But, the story is all the more fun the more farfetched it gets, and one cringes to think of a male in the role of Salt, as it was originally intended for Tom Cruise. No, No – but the thought of Angie and Tom swapping roles and Angie appearing as Cameron Diaz’s love interest in Knight & Day – now we’d have lined up for that lip fest. Can you imagine? You can? Get your mind out of the gutter.


Joan Rivers – A Piece of Work – 9

The camera followed Joan Rivers for a year of her life, and that couldn’t have been easy on anyone. But when they spliced the footage together, along with historical footage what emerged was a fascinating show business biography – probably more real than any other movie ever made about show business.

Joan is shown in all her insecure, obsessive glory. Famous for her plastic surgery, this is a revealing portrayal of what it takes to be successful on the roller coaster of show business, and her total obsession with filling her calendar with billable dates is a revelation in motivation.

Today we hear about people who aren’t willing to work for a living. Here’s the other side of the coin.

I always found Joan Rivers to be a little on the crude side – not witty humor, just shocking. But watching how she plies her craft and takes every funny day seriously, earns respect. Fascinating piece of film.