On April 9th, 1999, two things happened in Sacramento: I turned twenty years old, and The Matrix opened. The Matrix was a monumental film for me as it made me receptive and open for specific philosophical ideas and sent me on the way to pour soi from en soi. It would have been something, I suppose, that started me off on the road to being a philosopher, or philosophically inclined, but in this instance, I can easily credit it to watching The Matrix.
Back then, when I first talked with my dad about the film, something he said signaled to me that I was the one affected, and not someone mature enough to have already gone through a Cartesian epistemological trial by fire. He said, "That was a pretty cool idea for an action film." For him, a fancy action movie, using never before seen technological innovations, with an underlying theme of Cartesian existence problems, was novel.
Walking out of Inception the other day, after the last credit rolled and the house lights came up (saw it on IMAX, no 3D: really the best way to view cinema), that's pretty much what I said, "That was a pretty cool idea for an action film." When I really want to see a movie, I tend to read as many reviews as I can stomach, which isn't too many, but I've noticed that: 1) local liberal alt-newspapers tend to be harsh, but not as harsh as the AV Club in The Onion, which has quite good reviews; and 2) my opinion tends to be close to either reviewer in The New Yorker, which is generally snobby, uppity, and above all, a fan of cinema. With Inception, I didn't quite agree with Denby (one of The New Yorker's two reviewers).
I enjoyed the film. I thought some of the action sequences were awesome, especially the free-falling and weightlessness problem the characters deal with near the end. I did think the only real human aspect of the film is Leonardo di Caprio's character Cobb's relationship with his wife, Mal, played by Marion Cotilliard. I didn't find the storyline too ridiculously hard to follow, but that doesn't mean that simpler would have been bad. I was curious as to why I was rooting for one energy empire over another, and how exactly the world would be under the kid Fischer's domination had he not broken up his father's companies, supposedly of course.
And then there's the ending, which I suspected in the first few minutes, paid attention for throughout, and was not really shocked about when it happened. I can say that it bothers me that it bothered me at all. I more upset with myself for being annoyed at the ending, than I am actually annoyed at the ending. Does that make sense? My reason being for that is that I'm a huge fan of Thomas Pynchon's masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow, and one of the themes that he explores is one of the tenets of Post-Modern literature: the unreliability of a narrator. Whether a narrator is a first person "I" or simply the voice that tells the story, it wasn't really until GR that the reliability of said storyteller was ever in question. That's one of the annoying thing for readers who don't like Thomas Pynchon; sometimes his narrators are unreliable. This is not an oversight by a crappy writer; this is a deliberate way of messing with the reader and the art-form.
The questions I had leaving Inception were far more broad that Corrie's, but I attribute that to my comfort level with Pynchonian ideas about storytelling. I'll relay some of them here after some time, when the movie isn't so new, and I won't be spoiling anything. The ending annoyed me because I felt it was an easy cop-out, and I hope that didn't ruin anything. Maybe a few readers having not seen the film might, and after having read this, figured out the same thing.
But, I think I ran the train off the tracks...I definitely enjoyed the hell out of the movie. I think any film that makes me write so boringly about it, about it's themes and ideas--dreams and their importance--has got to be either great or atrocious.
I mentioned a while back that I'd been busy with jobs and apartment searches and writing a weird piece for Corrie's family reunion auction. Well, I finished that weird piece for the auction, and I could say there is a connection, absolutely accidental, between it and Inception, but I don't want to get into details. I want to let it explain itself. I call it The Big Weirdness.
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