Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2013: The Wolf of Wall Street

 The Wolf of Wall Street is a study in excess, told in a masterful fashion, and a damn funny one at that, which continues to be misinterpreted, and that's a shame. I started my "Best of 2013" with American Hustle, a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed while I was watching it as both a movie about con artists but also as David O. Russell's homage to Casino and Goodfellas. And then I saw The Wolf of Wall Street, and remembered what a Martin Scorsese movie looks like when Martin Scorsese is directing, and not somebody doing a very good imitation.

 The difference is night and day: American Hustle strains under the weight of trying to be like the master, where Scorsese makes it seem effortless. There are dozens of examples I could use, but let's take one from the very beginning of the film, where Jordan Belfort (Leonard DiCaprio)'s Lamborghini is tearing through traffic, and has Belfort is telling us about how rich he is, he quickly points out that the car was white and not red, and as it switches lanes, bam!, color change. Scorsese transitions the color on motion, timed perfectly with the narration, and continues as though nothing happened.

 For those who aren't caught up on the story (or surrounding controversy that's going to rule the film out of any serious Oscar contention), The Wolf of Wall Street is based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, a stock broker turned penny stock dealer who scammed people out of their hard earned wages and lived a life of excess, beyond even the standards you'd think. He flaunted his illegality, fought the FBI and lost, and then turned on all of his friends to avoid serious jail time. Now he does motivational speaking engagements, and also wrote the book this film is based on. The real Jordan Belfort has a cameo in the film, introducing DiCaprio as Belfort near the end.

 Scorsese takes a very Goodfellas-esque approach here, throwing every trick in but the kitchen sink, and does it so well that you take it at face value. Jordan's narration will periodically shift to DiCaprio breaking the fourth wall, addressing the audience directly, making us accomplices in his schemes. The camera is constantly moving, swooping in and out of the madness at Stratton Oakmont, as Belfort's team of hand picked con artists move garbage stock and pocket the fees for themselves. Chief among them is Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), who quit his job immediately when Jordan provided a pay stub for 76 thousand dollars. Azoff introduces Jordan to crack and finds him some quality Quaaludes (Lemmon 714), but gets grief for being married to his cousin. His first cousin (the scene where he rationalizes it is uncomfortably hilarious, particularly because of DiCaprio's reaction).

 While this is undoubtedly Leonardo DiCaprio's show, the film is packed with well known actors in smaller roles that make a big impression. Continuing his streak of great appearances since 2012, Matthew McConaughey sweeps in at the beginning of the film, makes a big splash in a few scenes as Mark Hanna, the broker who hires Belfort and turns him from an idealist into a shark, and then disappears. There's a good reason his scene with DiCaprio in a restaurant has been compared to Alec Baldwin's scene in Glengarry Glenn Ross, because he makes that kind of impression and sets the stage for the film to come. Spike Jonze (her) has a similarly tiny role as Dwayne, the man who introduces Jordan to penny stocks, and Jon Favreau appears as Belfort's legal counsel. Rob Reiner is very funny as Jordan's father and has a few great scenes with Jonah Hill. Jon Bernthal, once of The Walking Dead, makes a good impression as one of Jordan's dealers, and Shea Whigham has a small but hilarious part as Belfort's boat captain.

 Jean Dujardin (The Artist) is a Swiss banker who agrees to hide Jordan's money in a scene where they communicate without speaking to one another. Absolutely Fabulous' Joanna Lumley is the aunt of Jordan's wife, Naomi (Margot Robbie), and private investigator Bo Dietl appears as himself, offering Jordan advice with FBI Agent Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler). And that's just scratching the surface - there's a cameo from Fran Liebowitz, who Scorsese recently made a documentary about, and I'm sure I missed a few others along the way. Almost everybody is playing broad, but the ostentatious style of the source material merits it - this is a life where people have so much money they don't know how to spend it.

 I suppose you could say that, ironically, The Wolf of Wall Street is excessive in every way except its length, which might sound surprising considering that it's a few seconds shy of three hours. It never feels like three hours, although you're probably going to be a little overwhelmed by the rampant profanity, drug use, and gratuitous nudity, even considering who directed the film. From naked marching bands to the differences in prostitute quality to a scene involving Quaaludes that rivals the best physical comedy you can think of, The Wolf of Wall Street pushes Belfort's indulgences well beyond what a normal person would consider "reasonable" or even "excessive." When a movie opens with tossing a "little person" and a conversation where he's referred to as "it," you know for certain: Hugo this ain't.

  It's a glimpse into a world you'll never live in, and while it was cool to visit, I wouldn't want to stay there, and that certainly seems to be the point. And that's why I reject the consistent argument that The Wolf of Wall Street glorifies Jordan Belfort's behavior or makes it out to be something that up and coming brokers would want to emulate. Only an idiot looking to ruin their life very quickly would try to do anything that happens in this film. I don't suspect anybody is going to emulate Belfort's idiotic attempt to bribe Agent Denham, get called out on it, and then decide to kick the Feds off of his yacht, and if they do, they're not going to get sweetheart deals like he did.

 Don't misunderstand me: I'm not excusing what the actual Jordan Belfort did, but The Wolf of Wall Street doesn't glorify him in any way. Scorsese lets you see the world of the super rich, of the scum that floats to the top and lives a lifestyle that might be cool for a day or two (nice boats, lots of money and drugs, lots of sex and acting life a buffoon) but sticks around long enough to show you that you really wouldn't want to keep going. Even the Quaaludes scene, which proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Leonardo DiCaprio can handle physical comedy in a way nobody ever considered, has a sobering dark side when Scorsese cuts away to Belfort's young daughter watching her father. This is not a lifestyle that's admirable or worth emulating - it's fun to watch, and make no mistake that The Wolf of Wall Street is first and foremost a comedy, but it's unsustainable, even in the narrative of the picture.

 I'm also a little confused about the reaction to this because people are behaving as though this isn't something Martin Scorsese does regularly. Many of his most well renowned pictures are centered around seriously flawed protagonists, and most of the very best ones are based on real people who were still alive when he made them. Henry Hill no doubt benefited from Goodfellas, and Jake LaMotta didn't exactly hurt from Raging Bull. "Ace" Rothstein was based on Frank Rosenthal, who was still alive when Casino was released. Were they any more "glorified" than Jordan Belfort in their respective films? Or are they also presented as characters with serious issues, people who we relate to but wouldn't want to be in any more than a "wish fulfillment" capacity? I don't want to be Jordan Belfort any more than I would want to be Henry Hill, but I enjoyed seeing their stories told by a great filmmaker. If I want to object to the glorification of horrible people, I would again point you in the direction of Pain & Gain, a movie that simultaneously laughs at and glorifies (by casting Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Mackie, and Dwayne Johnson) kidnappers and murderers.

 In the end, it all boils down to whether The Wolf of Wall Street is a movie worth watching, and it's an easy "yes." It's funny, fast paced, excessive (does Jonah Hill play Donnie Azoff too broadly? I don't know, maybe?) but it never feels long. There's a playfulness in Scorsese's direction that keeps things moving, and DiCaprio hasn't been this good in a long time. I didn't see The Great Gatsby but I'll go out on a limb and say that this is the better "rich asshole" picture of 2013. Even with Shutter Island in consideration, The Wolf of Wall Street is far and away their best collaboration, and I think that once the controversy dies down people might be more comfortable with the film as a part of the larger body of Scorsese's work. There's something to be said for a great American filmmaker working at the top of his game, making movies well into his 70s that are as good as anything out there. No offense to David O. Russell, because I did like American Hustle a lot when I saw it - it's just that you picked the wrong year to tug on Superman's cape.

"C" is for Critters 3

 I don't think I've ever seen Critters 3, and it's been a long time since I saw Critters or Critters 2. I definitely never saw Critters 4 based on the way that this movie ends, although since it ends with a "To Be Continued..." I might have to suck it up and finish off the series.

 This sure was a different movie than I remembered the Critters films being, so I went back and checked the first two movies. See, I remember them being sorta sci-fi / horror blends with a little bit of goofy comedy, but I didn't really remember there being subtitles that explained what the critters were saying to each other (there sure were) or that the tone was so kid-friendly (although the protagonists are definitely pre-teens in Critters and Critters 2). Sure enough, when I looked they're all rated PG-13, so maybe I'm remembering them being more violent than they were.

 Either way, Critters 3 is pretty fun but it's hard to argue that it isn't a dumb movie for kids for most of its 86 minutes. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but I definitely wasn't expecting some of the goofy shenanigans on display in this here movie. You know, the second sequel to Critters. Oh, who am I kidding?

 Critters 3 starts out in much the same way that O Brother Where Art Thou? does not, with some cheesy synthesizer music and a cartoony title font that let's you know this here is going to be some goofy shit, but then Clifford (John Calvin) and his kids Annie (Aimee Brooks) and Johnny (Christian and Joseph Cousins) are driving along singing "Big Rock Candy Mountain." I didn't see that coming, but I bet the Coen brothers did. It probably inspired them. Yup, I'm sticking with that.

 Clifford is on his way back from vacation with Annie and Johnny when they run over some firecrackers* and the tire blows out. They have to pull into an RV camp, where Johnny goes to throw his frisbee and almost goes over a steep incline. He's saved by Josh (Django Unchained's Leonardo DiCaprio), another kid hanging out with his mother (Nina Axelrod) and asshole stepfather (William Dennis Hunt), and said asshole stepfather feels the need to be all rich and obnoxious to Clifford while he changes his tire.

 The kids eventually do throw the frisbee off of the incline (technically, it's Leo's fault) and they run into this crazy survivalist named Charlie (Don Opper), who if I had remembered Critters 1 or 2 well enough I would have recognized as the nerdy guy who becomes apprentice intergalactic bounty hunter. Fortunately for me and all of the kids in the audience circa 1991, Charlie explains what happened in the first two movies, complete with flashback footage to jog our memories. It's also done in this obviously "kiddie" tone that's hard to explain unless you're watching it, but think of how everybody acts or is treated in Mac and Me and you'll have a pretty good idea. That's when I realized that this was not going to be a horror movie.

 Of course, Critters 3 decided to trick me when the family leaves the RV park and we jump ahead to the apartment complex they normally live in. We meet the sleazeball electrician Frank (Geoffrey Blake) who is in charge of chasing all of the tenants out. Said tenants include all of the stereotypes for "apartment" in movies: the fat lady who lives downstairs, the old couple upstairs with the husband who is a conspiracy theorist, the lady who works for the phone company that Annie is trying to get her dad involved with...

 Oh yeah, I didn't mention that, did I? So in addition to Clifford working for the railroad and being away from his kids a lot, causing family strife, he's also a widower after the result of something horrible happening to Annie and Johnny's mother. It's not explicitly stated in the film, but I'm guessing it had something to do with why the elevator at the apartment complex doesn't work. Anyway there's this family drama and a sleazeball mechanic who lives in the basement, so you could forgive my slight confusion. Also, the family unwittingly brings home critter eggs. Hey, you go to the RV park, you never know what could come back with you...

 The critters hatch and begin eating people, as they are prone to do, and at least when they kill Frank there's some suspense. But then Rosalie (Diana Bellamy) goes downstairs to see what happened to her laundry and they fail to kill the fat lady, so I kinda knew the score from there on out.

 Luckily, it turns out the asshole stepfather also turns out to be the asshole landlord, and he drags Josh over to the building in the hopes of evicting everybody without having to pay their "relocation fee" before turning the complex into a strip mall. I wonder if he's going to die or not? If it helps, in one of the best "that's why they couldn't call for help," he cuts the phone lines and turns off the power, just because he's that much of an asshole. So yes, of course the critters eat him.

 And nobody else. That's right, while they attack Rosalie and Clifford, they never kill another person in the movie, because everybody else is basically good so they don't need to die. This is the kind of movie that juxtaposes bowling on TV with Annie rolling a trash can down the stairs at critters, complete with a strike for both!

 I'm not actually bagging on Critters 3 because for what it is, it's all right. Certainly better than a lot of "part 3"'s that I can think of (okay, maybe two). This is definitely a movie that "borrows" from Gremlins 2: The New Batch (released the year before), particularly during the section of the movie where the critters just give up on chasing the tenants and goof around in the kitchen. One of them drinks soap and another one eats beans, and then there's a pie fight and antiquing, and I'll let you guess if one of the critters farts or burps bubbles (SPOILER: they do).

 Despite the goofy tone, there are some novel solutions to "getting help" that don't quite pan out but I hadn't necessarily seen in this kind of movie. It isn't always as dumb and obvious as I feared it might be, and when there is gore it's pretty good. Critters 3 was written by David J. Schow (The Crow, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, which Critters 3 is better than) and was directed by Kristine Peterson, who made, uh, Kickboxer 5 and Body Chemistry, but who was also Assistant Director on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Tremors and Chopping Mall, so she's all right in my book. They both do a pretty good job here of balancing two diametrically opposed genres, and even if it's not as successful as The Monster Squad or The Gate, Critters 3 is entertaining enough.

 This comes in the period of DiCaprio's filmography before he was in This Boy's Life and What's Eating Gilbert Grape and right around the same time he was on Growing Pains, so he's okay. I mean, it's hard to distinguish him from the other kids in the movie other than the fact that he grew up to be the guy who Martin Scorsese works with all of the time, but in 1991 it's not like he was leaps and bounds better than Aimee Brooks or the two kids who played Johnny. He's probably more memorable in The Quick and the Dead, but you have to start out somewhere, right? It's not like they elevated his name on the cover like they did for Jennifer Aniston with Leprechaun.

 Anyway, so as Critters movies go I guess this is one of them. It's a respectable effort and reminds me of the days when New Line Cinema would make these little genre movies and everybody seems to be having a good time doing it. Back before David Fincher and those hobbits made it all prestigious and crap...

 Speaking of "prestigious crap," our next movie stars Django Unchained cameo have-r Franco Nero. And it's not Die Hard 2: Die Harder... or is it?

 * Speculation on the Cap'n's part.

Blogorium Review: Django Unchained

 Django Unchained is by far the most entertaining of Quentin Tarantino's films. This comes from a fan, an unabashed apologist. I look forward to Tarantino films and I rarely find myself disappointed after finishing each new offering. (The exception being Death Proof, which had the unfortunate task of being immediately compared to Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez's crowd-pleasing horror portion of Grindhouse.) As I revisit the films, I find I appreciate them more, and while Django Unchained may not be my favorite - not after one viewing, anyway - it's the most fun I've had watching a Tarantino movie since I saw Pulp Fiction at far too young an age.

 It's worth noting to the five or six of you who read the Blogorium but haven't seen Django Unchained yet that like Inglourious Basterds, its attachment to the title and the adherence to the legacy of the Django series of Spaghetti Westerns is tenuous at best. Yes, Franco Nero appears in the film, but most of the audience I saw the film with (and many of my friends) a) didn't know who he was or b) weren't aware that the title was based in any way on anything, let alone half a dozen movies about the titular gunfighter sometimes - but often not - played by Nero and directed by Sergio Corbucci*.

 That said, you don't really need to follow any of Unchained's cinematic antecedents - or necessarily be aware of them - to enjoy the story of Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave separated from his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) turned apprentice Bounty Hunter by Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). If you've seen the trailer, you know the basic beats: Schultz is hunting the Brittle brothers (MC Gainey, Doc Duhame, and Cooper Huckabee), and because they captured and split up Django and Broomhilda, his associate has the benefit of knowing what the brothers look like.

 What I didn't expect was how quickly this particular plot point is resolved, and for the most part by Django without the involvement of Schultz. It turns out that "the kid is a natural" at the bounty hunting business, not to mention the "fastest gun in the South," and by the time Django and Schultz head into the heart of Mississippi to rescue Broomhilda from Calvin Candie (Leonardo Di Caprio), the apprentice has surpassed the mentor. When it comes to dealing with the discomforting reality of slavery, and particularly of "Mandingo" slave fighting, Django has more of a stomach for it than Schultz does.

 Since we spend most of the film with Django and Schultz, I'd like to mention Jamie Foxx's stoic, composed title character (until he sees Broomhilda, anyway) and Christoph Waltz's amiable, conflicted Dentist / Bounty Hunter. As if to counter-balance Hans Landa, Tarantino gives Schultz's German dentist an appropriately disconnect European opinion of slavery - he feels uncomfortable at the concept of having to buy Django, even though strictly for legal purposes in order to free him. Until late in the film, when he can no longer help himself, Schultz is a man capable of maintaining whatever ruse is necessary to win legally. Django, he discovers, has a natural talent as a gunfighter, as a bounty hunter, and a fierce loyalty to what Schultz taught him. As he slowly transitions into the character audiences are expecting to see, Foxx earns our good will because he doesn't begin the film as "Bad Ass Django." When we come to the end of the film, he's earned a just victory.

 On the opposite side are Calvin Candie and his house servant Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson). Candie is the spoiled, sadistic, and not particularly bright third generation owner of Candieland, the third biggest plantation in Mississippi. While not immediately apparent, it becomes clear that Stephen is the real power behind the throne, and he realizes quickly what Schultz and Django are up to. There's been some debate about the merits of Stephen being arguably a worse human being than Candie, and I'm not sure what side of the fence I land on. It's clear that he's happy to perpetuate slavery on the plantation in order to maintain his own standing, but much of what he does in the film is a reaction to his distaste for Django in principle.

 Much as it pains me to say it, Tarantino really dropped the ball with Broomhilda, the least developed female character I can remember in any of his films. Yes, she occupies most of the first half of the film in Django's imagination, linked to Die Niebelnungen by Schultz's recognition of her name (Brunhilde was in all likelihood "Americanized" to Broomhilda by the Brittles or Candie), but when we're finally introduced to Kerry Washington's character in the present narrative, she's naked and being kept in "the hot box" for trying to escape. Admittedly, she doesn't have it quite as bad as the other failed escapee, who Candie feeds to his dogs after Django seals his fate. Nevertheless, Broomhilda never develops beyond a crying, fainting, screaming, tortured plot device. I don't blame Washington so much as I do Tarantino, because there's just not much of a character there.

 Django Unchained may suffer from that in other instances, as there are a lot of recognizable actors in small roles, many of which you might miss entirely. I saw Amber Tamblyn but not Russ Tamblyn, neither of whom factor into the narrative at all. Candie's toadies include Tom Savini, Robert Carradine, and almost unrecognizable Zoe Bell, and Walton Goggins, who may be the only character that registers at all.You'll also see Bruce Dern, Tom Wopat, and James Remar in two roles - once as the slaver Schultz kills to buy Django and later as Candie's "muscle."

 Tarantino pops up late in the film with another superfluous cameo, this time with a terrible Australian accent to answer the question "could this be any more obnoxious?" He's accompanied by Michael Parks and Wolf Creek's John Jarratt, and if nothing else, Tarantino's (SPOILER) death scene elicits laughter enough to justify his nearly pointless appearance.

 In the past, moreso in the pulpy Kill Bill films than in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has mixed humor in with his violence to keep the audience engaged, but I can't recall anything quite as funny as the proto-Klan scene in Django Unchained. When Big Daddy (Don Johnson) brings together his posse to kill Django and Schultz for (legally) killing the Brittle brothers on his plantation, they quickly realize that wearing masks with hoods on makes it almost impossible to see. The impromptu meeting to complain about the masks is played broadly, with Jonah Hill of all people the straight man, one of Big Daddy's lackeys who tears his eyehole. It's one of many scenes in the film where the comedy is overt and designed for the broad laughter it invariably gets (at least from every review I've seen). Juxtaposed with the at times brutally violent sequences - Candie's introduction, for example, which is accompanied by an exceptionally rough "Mandingo" fight - Tarantino balances entertainment with a sobering truth about the world these characters inhabit.

  But is there a degree of "white guilt wish fulfillment" in the revenge narrative of Django Unchained? I feel like the question can't be avoided. It is apparent that crowd reactions to the movie have been similar - if not identical - to the one I experienced: laughter, gasps, uncomfortable chuckles, and some degree of cheers as Django tears his way through the slimy bastards at Candieland, saving Stephen for last. The audience I saw the film with was racially mixed, but it seems like there is a sense of relief in seeing Jamie Foxx blowing holes into these villains that satisfies a white audience's discomfort over our past.

 Yes, it's not all of our pasts, and not all of our ancestors had slaves, but slavery remains one of the great unresolved chapters in American history, so Django Unchained, like Inglourious Basterds before it, allows audiences to feel comfortable (by proxy) watching excessively violent retribution against two universally loathed types of people (Nazis and slave owners). In both instances, the oppressed turns against the oppressor and systematically dismantles their enemy, regardless of historical accuracy. (Unless, of course, historians have been wildly exaggerating Hitler's final hours.)

 Was it historically appropriate to use the same racial epithet 109 times in one movie? Probably. Does it still feel excessive? Sure, but I might argue it's necessary to. It tempers the escapism a bit, and calls into attention the baggage surrounding Tarantino's use of the "n-word" in his earlier films. Like the flashbacks to the dogs tearing into the runaway D'Artagnan, there is a conscious level of discomfort in place during Django Unchained. The question is what end it serves: to contextualize the fictional narrative in real horrors or to justify further audience catharsis when Django has his vengeance?

 Slavery and the Holocaust were both very real, and while to some degree I can understand Spike Lee's reasons for dismissing Django Unchained as "disrespectful" sight unseen, Tarantino's film is, like Basterds, a movie. Since Kill Bill, Tarantino's output has largely been increasingly operatic tales of vengeance, enacted on increasingly horrendous villains. Django Unchained is more streamlined, more satisfying as entertainment - it's a two-and-a-half-hour extension of the climax of Basterds, and while the film doesn't skirt around uncomfortable imagery, there is a concerted effort to leave viewers cheering at the end. It's escapism, constructed brilliantly, and so I'm conflicted about how much I should simply allow Tarantino's accomplishment to stand as a film and how much of what's behind the hybrid of Spaghetti Western and Blaxploitation influence what makes me uncomfortable while laughing.

 Can I give it a pass because it's just a movie? Particularly when Tarantino doesn't let John Ford off of the hook for putting on a KKK hood as an extra in Birth of a Nation, or the following paragraph (used partially out of context when reprinted by The Huffington Post):

"One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously. To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else's humanity -- and the idea that that's hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms. And you can see it in the cinema in the '30s and '40s -- it's still there. And even in the '50s."

 If Ford and, by extension, Griffith, were perpetuating a notion, that Tarantino is theoretically rebuking with Django, I'm still torn as to how to reconcile the ugly reality present in the film with the heightened reality of a revenge film, one told to provide a cathartic reaction for audiences who feel some degree of discomfort about said ugly reality. It's not whether Django Unchained can have its cake and eat it too, but how we as an audience are complicit in reacting to this disparity. It's not "did I enjoy Django Unchained" so much as "should have I enjoyed it as much as I did" and why?


*   To be honest, it's not really an issue unless you're expecting Django Unchained to be a Spaghetti Western (or "Southern" as Tarantino prefers to call it), but I'd suggest you look a little more locally for direct influences on the film. Specifically, Fred Williamson's "Charley" trilogy, which I  would prefer not to mention by their full names, and of which only the third film - Boss - is available on DVD. They center around a freed slave who ends up on the run (it directly influenced the Blacksmith's backstory in The Man with the Iron Fists) and who alternates between fighting oppression and tormenting the racists he comes across.

Blogorium Review: Inception

The trick one runs into when reviewing a movie like Christopher Nolan's Inception is how not to spoil the film for people who haven't seen it yet. Trust me when I say it's better not knowing much about Inception heading into the theatre, because even if someone gives you a rough outline of the film, it's still not going to adequately prepare you for the meticulously constructed narrative and its many twists and turns.

So I've decided instead to simply share a few thoughts I had about Inception after watching the film and sampling other reviews online. Personally speaking, I really enjoyed Inception and was quite pleased that despite all appearances, Nolan's screenplay avoids most of the obvious "twists" inherent to every heist / con-artist film.

And make no mistake, that's exactly what Inception is; while it's true that the film plays in the realm of science fiction and skirts around neo-noir frequently, the film is structured around a Michael Mann / David Mamet-esque "one last job" backbone. Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a specialist in breaking into other people's minds and stealing their ideas. When a con involving businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) goes wrong, Cobb is given an offer he can't refuse: do one job for Saito, and his "most wanted" status in the U.S. will be cleared away, allowing him to return to his children.

Nolan wisely places a film that involves dreams within dreams, shifting time continuum's, unreliable subconscious tics, and flexible rules of physics into a basic structure. Even if you aren't following the rules of how someone enters dreams, cons the "mark", or steals information (or plants information), you still have a basic idea of what's at stake. Cobb assembles his team: a forger (Bronson's Tom Hardy), a chemist (Drag Me to Hell's Dileep Rao), an architect (Whip It's Ellen Page), and his right hand man (Brick's Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to help break into Robert Fischer, Jr (Sunshine's Cillian Murphy)'s mind. If you're paying attention, all of the rules are in place to explain what role each person plays and how they fit into the con / heist, but I think what's keeping audiences in seats is that you can follow the story without the tech speak.

In order to preserve as much of the mystery of the film as possible, I'm not going to say anything about Mal (Marion Cotillard). Plenty of reviews will give you a bare bones explanation of who she is and what role in Cobb's life she plays, but the less you know about Mal, the better. I will say there's a sneaky bit of intertextuality on the part of Nolan involving a music cue and La vie en rose, but that's not really a spoiler. It's just sly.

At this point I'm going to deviate away from the film until I know more of you have seen it, because there's no point discussing the beginning and the end (and the ramifications of both on the story) if you haven't seen the film. I will instead focus on a few thoughts that can be shared without blowing any of the major plot points:

- It's very hard to watch Inception and not think of Shutter Island, and not just because of Leonardo DiCaprio. Both films begin with a very similar music cue, have an attachment to water, feature an unreliable protagonist (okay, that might be a spoiler for both films), and toy with the audience's notion of what is a dream and what isn't. That Nolan and Scorsese do so in a way that one film is reminiscent of the other (I dare you to watch the opening of Inception and not think of the first five minutes of Shutter Island) is not a knock on Inception, it is merely a strange synchronicity between two films I greatly enjoyed this year.

- I've been trying hard to find faults or something that doesn't quite sit right about Inception, and because so much of the film works, it's tricky. I don't really want to discuss Mal much, which is the only points of resistance I really came up against, so I'll focus on critiques I found elsewhere...

The bulk of the negative reviews online have to do with the fact that while Inception is about dreams, the film itself is very mechanical and logical, and hence not "dreamlike" enough. To this I must say that the critique is fair: Inception is not reflective of a "dreamlike" state in the way that Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire or Linklater's Waking Life are. That's fair. Characters don't shift in appearance or are magically substituted for another (save for one carefully explained bit of trickery on the part of Hardy's Eames), and for a movie about levels of the subconscious, Inception maintains a logic structure that is inconsistent with dreams.

So yes, to that degree, the film is more of a labyrinth or a puzzle box than a reflection of an illogical dreamworld. For that, I suggest you look elsewhere. What I will say is that Inception is so well constructed as a heist / con movie that the dream infiltration and rules surrounding it are almost incidental. Yes, it will make you debate what was a dream and what wasn't, but you're not going to come away from the dreams thinking about A Nightmare on Elm Street. You will see things in the film that haven't been tried on the scale or scope of other "dream" movies, and despite the fact that I know most of them had to be CG in one way or the other, the Cap'n was successfully tricked into believing what I was seeing.

The mistake is, I think, assuming that this is actually a movie about dreams. Go in expecting that and it's entirely possible to feel cheated, to think that Inception (like Memento) is more about the technique than the story. Yes, that's the "hook" for Inception, the gimmick it rests its hat on, and it allows for some pretty amazing set pieces (the hotel sequence with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Arthur stands out), but in spite of that Inception is a character-based film about doing anything possible to hold on to the past. In that respect, you're going to hear a lot in classrooms about how Inception is neo-noir, and it's not an unfair point to make. The film does have many of the basic tropes: a fear of the future / obsession with the past, a femme-fatale, smoke (though not nearly to the degree of some noirs), and a reliance on water imagery.

That being said, the tropes being used are all taken in different directions at one point or the other, just as the tropes of the con / heist film (and really, if you want modern precursors to Inception, take a look at Heat or Heist) are turned on their ear. I was pleased that certain things I expected to happen didn't involving characters that almost always serve the same purpose, and part of my appreciation for Inception comes from that fact that Christopher Nolan took one of the most reliable types of genre pictures and consistently found ways to keep it interesting and fresh.

I'm looking forward to watching Inception again, as the film really begs for a second or third viewing - not because of any particular twist, but because there are layers to the plot that are only clear once you've seen it play out. Seemingly incidental elements merit closer inspection, and I'm slightly amazed two and a half hours go by so quickly. Inception's box office success this weekend does mean that every now and then the average moviegoer will flock to see something even if they don't follow it completely. That may be the best thing I can say about the film without spoiling anything.