When You Know Too Much

I cannot see The Social Network. Let me back up. Usually, a movie you haven't seen yet is ruined by spoilers, details about the plot that lessen the impact of the film's surprises. Occasionally, however, a movie becomes so talked about that the peripheral chatter outweighs the film itself and overshadows it. I've experienced this three times: with Brokeback Mountain, Slumdog Millionaire, and now The Social Network. I've read about it in every newspaper, on every website, and seen news about it on every TV show. I'm too aware of it. The film occupies too large a part of my brain without having seen it. I would not be able to experience it in a fresh and enjoyable way at this point. Now I have to wait until the film is no longer on my radar so I can see it and judge it fairly, on its own terms, without being burdened with knowledge of awards buzz, critical analysis, details about the production, or its perceived cultural impact. I fear this may be never.

(Top: still from The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956, Paramount Pictures)

The Hobbit gets ugly

Though it has recently been announced that a film version of The Hobbit is finally going into production this February, directed by Peter Jackson and staring Martin Freeman as Bilbo, there are still some unresolved issues. Its really a quite contentious saga involving striking actor's unions, corporate intimidation, and bitter international rivalry. Watch a rarely riled-up Jackson explain things from his side:

Zach Galifianakis gets a taste of his own medicine

You might be familiar with Zach's on going web series Between Two Ferns, where he awkwardly interviews the likes of Sean Penn, Jon Hamm, and Natalie Portman and asks them inane questions like "do you like websites?" and "did you also shave your V for vagina?" In this video from a local news station in Texas, Mr. Galifianakis finds himself being interviewed by a real life counterpart to his Between Two Ferns persona. Its hard to tell if the guy is for real or just putting it on. Take a look -

"I didn't hurt it!"

The Vimeo Awards were announced earlier this month, which is where we find "oops", the winner for best experimental film. It is brilliantly and seamlessly cut together from found footage of people dropping their cameras. Take a look.



The camera becomes like a portal to these little extreme moments in people's lives. Some are more inane - "I'm gonna drop my camera into my laundry basket. Here we go!" - but many are filled with sheer exuberance, joy, shock, panic, fear, and wonder. My favorite moments: the remote-control plane smash cutting to a roller coaster, and the pure warmness and thrill of the father and his small daughter sledding. Just gorgeous.

Review: Winter's Bone

Debra Granik's Winter's Bone is a creaky, noirish hero's quest set in the impoverished Ozarks in the brittle dead of winter. Ree Dolly, a 17-year-old girl with a steely gaze and a quick mind, is saddled with raising her younger brother and sister and caring for their catatonic mother in the wake of her absent, meth-cooking father. Ree teaches her siblings to cook, shoot, and other adult responsibilities, as if, even at these tender ages, they may have to suddenly fend for themselves. Their is a wary, knowing doom in Ree's eyes that is heartbreaking; no 17-year-old should possess this kind of foreboding wisdom, but for her it is a necessity.

A thick undercurrent of cold, stinging dread lies beneath every scene; as Ree searches for her father, who has skipped out on his court date after putting the family home up for bail, she comes up against a frozen wall of secrecy almost everywhere she turns. Through it all, Ree faces enemies, gains allies, and passes trials and tribulations.
I'll not end without discussing what everyone who's seen the film is talking about: young Jennifer Lawrence's topnotch performance as Ree. A less ballsy director than Granik would have cast a 20-something to play the teen, and it would not have worked; there is no one better, of any age. Lawrence inhabits the character so thoroughly that it is hard to imagine she is not naturally of the film's milieu.

Review: Enter The Void

Trudging away from the theater as the end credits rolled, I had to struggle to keep from collapsing, the cosmic weight of Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void is so great. Expansive is too narrow a word to describe the film's universe and cinematic language.

Oscar is a young American living in Tokyo, dealing drugs small time to raise money for his sister's plane ticket so she can join him in this far eastern city of lights. We open on a scene of them bickering (the language of siblings), shot from Oscar's POV; this take lasts for at least the first 20 minutes of the film, wherein we see the lights of Tokyo, drug-induced hallucinations, and Oscar's moment of death at the hands of the police. Then things get weird.

Though we are with Oscar for every second of the film, the real star is Paz de la Huerta as his sister, Linda; we see her brother's face maybe twice, and mostly when he's dead. De la Huerta delivers a towering, harrowing, and fragile performance that is daring on a number of levels. Noe is a director who can win an actress's trust completely; those who've seen Irreversible know what I'm talking about. De la Huerta does everything, bares all (physically and emotionally), and goes everywhere the film demands.

Noe takes universal paradigms - life flashing before your eyes at the moment of death, the afterlife, and reincarnation - and runs with them. What blew me away was how the film explores these anxieties so deeply yet so simply. After he is killed, Oscar's spirit or ghost floats around the city watching over his bereaved sister, all the while trying to make sense of this new and confusing plane of existence. Like the opening scene, it unfolds entirely from his strict POV.

Perhaps the greatest pleasures of Enter The Void for me as a filmmaker are the lighting and color; the photography marinates in green and purple neon, such a great relief from the insidious orange and teal plague that is afflicting more and more films these days. Though filmed almost entirely at night, the city of Tokyo is so bright it acts as one giant practical light, providing all the illumination we need for a picture about death and life and all the sticky, unpleasant details in between. Some may find this method of cinematography a bit graceless; characters' faces will disappear into darkness for chunks of time and so on, but if you're bothered by this then you're missing the point. 

I can safely say that Enter The Void is unlike anything you have seen; I don't have to know you. The film is so completely unique that I have utter confidence no person has seen anything like it, no person but Gaspar Noe.

The Prestige: They Want to be Fooled

Part 4 in a series of essays on the films of director Christopher Nolan. Originally posted December 12th, 2008.

The Prestige is, on the surface, a story concerning rival magicians in Victorian London. But, at the heart of things, it is really a film about film-making.
As far as I'm concerned, the goal of any film is threefold. I call it the 3 Es: Engage, Entertain, and Enlighten. Before either of the later two can happen, the audience must first be engaged. This means giving them a point of reference; that is to say, introduce them to something familiar right off the bat: a character that is relatable, and a situation or conflict that is easily comprehended. Once the audience is engaged, it is the filmmaker's duty to then entertain them, by putting the established characters in humorous or nerve-racking situations. There is a certain flare for creating truly entertaining scenes that only a few select directors possess. There is a kind of showmanship quality to film-making. The final thing a film must do is enlighten the audience. That is, the film should come to a point that stimulates the mind of the viewer. This is not always achieved and is even more difficult to pull off than pure entertainment. This third aspect is what separates great films from those that are simply good. It helps the film stick in people's minds long after they have seen it.
The above three elements of the film viewing experience are directly comparable to the three stages of a magic trick, as discussed in The Prestige. These are The Pledge, The Turn, and The Prestige. The Turn is when the audience is shown something ordinary; a handkerchief or a small bird. This is much like the beginning of a film when the audience is engaged by something equally familiar. The second part is The Turn, when the ordinary thing is made to do something extraordinary, like disappear. "But," as Michael Caine's character says in the the film, "you wouldn't clap yet. It's not enough to make something disappear. You have to bring it back." This seemingly miraculous return of the vanished object is The Prestige, and it is the most important part of the trick. These latter two parts are similar to the way entertaining the audience can bring them to something enlightening; how a heart pounding chase scene can wind and twist and turn, and then deposit us at some great, profound truth.
Another convention of magic tricks that is shared in film-making is the suspension of disbelief. It is said in the film that the audience knows that it is only an illusion, but they don't want to know how it is accomplished. "They want to be fooled", as they say. This is equally true with the film viewing experience. Any individual of even average intelligence knows full well that what they are witnessing on screen is not entirely real, but they ignore that fact. They want something extraordinary. They want to see something aside from their familiar reality. They want to escape, and it is the job of both the magician and the filmmaker to render a believable fantasy for the viewing public.
Filmmakers are the magicians of their day. With both magic and cinema, people go to the theater to see something outside of their own, regular experience. They are, at first, presented with something against which they can compare their own lives. "I know what this is. I get this", they think to themselves. Then, through this relatable proxy, the audience is taken on a journey into previously unknown territory, where they witness things they had never imagined and certainly did not expect. Then, at the end of this voyage, and indeed because of it, we come to a profundity that we had not known, yet it is undeniably true. We leave the theater having gained a fuller experience. Or course we know it was all smoke and mirrors, but to dwell on this notion would ruin something very special.

The King's Oscar Speech

Every year gives us at least one film with its eye firmly on an Oscar statue, and 2010 is no exception. This time it appears to be The King's Speech, a film about King George VI's speech impediment. Cinematical examines its chances:

There are plenty of things in Speech to appeal to the Oscar voter. It's a period piece about the inner workings of the British monarchy, and, more importantly, about the vulnerability of those in power. Like I said, everyone loves an underdog who overcomes and thrives in his or her new milieu, but even more so when it's someone who is in a position of great power.

And WW2 is involved. But will Americans, even those who are Academy voters, care that much about some boring British monarch with a speech impediment? I already don't. And I would hardly call the goddamn King of England an "underdog". Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part, but I doubt the greatness of Inception will be hard to forget, even come Oscar time. 

Colin Firth looks pretty bored already. Not a good sign.

Review: The Square

Boring, even when wet.

This sloppy Aussie noir could have been a really great film; it gets off to an excellent start, but becomes lazy and uneven as things plunge to a finish.

Produced by many of the same blokes who recently brought us Animal Kingdom, it is in fact directed by Nash Edgerton, whose brother Joel played a supporting role in both films and helped write The Square. Understandably, it feels very much of the same cinematic universe.

The main problem is our blandly stoic protagonist. This is the second Australian film I've seen in as many weeks with a boringly morose hero who's expressionless visage and blank attitude make it very difficult to empathize with him. His face remains frozen in the way pictured above for almost every minute of the film. Additionally, and I don't think this is too much of a spoiler, he doesn't appear to really learn anything by the end of the story, and his constant grimace does not help. He has no arc, he just does things, then the movie ends. If we cannot sympathize or at least be entertained by the protagonist, then nothing else matters; the hero is the face, of the movie and if the face is nearly comatose, then so are we.

Review: Animal Kingdom

The short version is that writer/director David Michod's feature debut is an Australian answer to Goodfellas.

The long version is that Animal Kingdom is a lyrical, operatic, and beautifully brutal film about the unraveling of a Melbourne crime family, anchored by some brilliantly visceral performances.

The Codys are a family of bank robbers, mostly made up of adult children who've grown up in this life and know nothing else. We find the Cody clan as they grapple to stay one step ahead of the cops; the law in Melbourne has been driven to shooting gangsters unprovoked in broad day light in a desperate effort to clean up the city.

The family, in these waning days, consists of plucky, calculating matriarch 'Smurf' (charismatic Aussie vet Jackie Weaver, giving what might be the year's best performance) and her four grown, near-feral sons, who snarl and sun themselves like a pride of lions. The boys are given to fits of confused, frustrated rage as they feel the ravenous heat closing in on them, and a crushing paranoia settles on their psyches, particular that of 'Pope' (played with unsettling vulnerability by Ben Mendelsohn), the eldest and perhaps most vile.
The film begins with the estranged Cody sister dying of a heroin overdose, leaving her teenage son, Josh, with no place to go but into the care of his diabolically loving grandmother. Josh, or 'J', is clearly a reflection of what Smurf's sons once were, as they are a foreshadowing of what J might become if he follows in their lawless footsteps.
Played with constant restraint by newcomer James Frecheville, J provides provides us with a guide through the world of the film, but also presents its two main flaws. The teenager narrates for the first act or so to fill in some narrative gaps, but I didn't really find this necessary. It doesn't give us any essential information, and his delivery is crushingly monotone to the point of distraction. This brings me to the film's second flaw - Frecheville's performance itself. I can appreciate that J is meant to be an awkward, introverted kid and all, but the actor and director take it too far, and he just comes off as nearly comatose, which is not what you want, especially in a character that was so obviously added to the script in order to be an audience surrogate.
The boring protagonist aside, Animal Kingdom is an excellent film and a promising debut from young Aussie auteur Michod; the unique zeitgeist he evokes, and his virtuosic mastery of mood, tension, narrative momentum, indicate a cinematic master in the making.

Review: Centurion

Genre maestro Neil Marshall's new film, Centurion, is all killer no filler, an economic narrative about a band of Roman soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in Northern Britain. The mis en scene is lean, agile, and tough, like its characters, and similarly smeared in dirt and drenched in neon-red blood. Story and execution work brilliantly and symbiotically together. 

Rising star Michael Fassbender (pictured) fronts a solid ensemble, which includes fellow Brit Dominic West, Irish veteran Liam Cunningham, and strong female characters brought to life by lethal Ukrainian beauty Olga Kurylenko (also pictured) and mousy yet quietly confident englishgirl Imogen Poots. There is no ego in this cast; everyone works towards the quality of the whole, while still managing to shine in there own rights. This unity perfectly reflects the ideal dynamic among Roman soldiers, which is tested as Quintus Dias (Fassbender) leads his fellow warriors through the treacherous proto-Scottish wilderness.

One surprising element of Centurion is its contemporary sensibilities; it will resonate with modern Americans for its themes of soldierly brotherhood, the physical and emotional scars of war, the difficulties confronting a foreign army against insurgency. Above all, and indeed through the prism of these ideas, the film asks the timely question of what a conflict is worth. These ideas are thankfully subtle, never coming close to insulting, Avatar-esque levels of obviousness.

As with many films in the historical action genre, Centurion is fueled by healthy doses of testosterone, but is not without a woman's touch. Though it does not pass the Bechdel Test (there are only two major female characters, and one remains mute), it still provides realistic examples of women in a genre usually dominated by men. In film's of this ilk, on the rare occasions that women do show up, they are usually nothing more than eye candy or helpless damsels in need of rescuing by a strong alpha male. Not so in Centurion; Kurylenko's Pict warrior Etain is a brooding, intelligent, and deadly force of nature, who can hold her own against any man in the picture without coming off as overly butch or blandly evil. On the other end is Poots as Pict outcast Arianne, who has convinced the leaders of her native, patriarchal society that she is a witch so that she may live a peaceful, independent existence on her own. Quintus and his brothers-in-arms come upon her at their most desperate hour, and it is she who does the rescuing. She treats their wounds, feeds them, and gives them refuge for the night, but she is not simply here to serve the men. Arianne has a rare agency; a wholeness that we don't often see. She and Quintus are drawn to each other, but not to fulfill some lame, trite requirement that our hero have a love interest; they are equal entities, and the attraction that forms between them is very real and perfectly natural. Credit is due to Fassbender and Poots, who convey this budding relationship with admirable subtlety, and create a bond that lingers even as Quintus and his troops move on down the road.

Review: Robin Hood

Russell Crowe pondering what retirement home would be good for Old Man Scott.

Ridley Scott is getting senile. Case in point: his latest directorial gig, Robin Hood, starring frequent muse Russell Crowe as the eponymous English folk hero. The film might be Scott's worst to date; it is laden with tired action adventure cliches, populated by one-dimensional characters, and meanders directionless for most of its running time. The story is so confusing and muddled that just 24 hours after seeing it, I cannot for the life of me relate what it is; the goals and motivations of each character change so frequently that, not only are we unreasonably challenged to figure out what they are doing and where they're going, but the actors themselves seem to have little if any idea.

In addition to the director's apparent senility, another factor that likely contributes to the film's jumbled story is the fact that the script went through a number of labored iterations in Development Hell, and was even being severely rewritten during filming. This explains a great many things, from lazy character development to jarringly uneven narrative momentum to a number of painful violations of story logic and continuity. Perhaps the constant script modifications are also to blame for numerous, inexplicable moments of extremely ill-advised attempts at sit-com level comic relief, shoe-horned in with no regard for tonal appropriateness. 

As far as I can decipher, the original intent of this film was to give Robin Hood a believable and gritty origin story, Batman Begins style. I can appreciate this, and there are brief glimmers of this premise shinning through at certain moments, but when the rest of the ordeal is such an embarrassing mess, it only makes the film an even greater tragedy. 

Considering the people involved, this realist interpretation of the Robin Hood myth could have been really great. With previous historical epics like Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven (the director's cut), Ridley Scott has shown the capacity to be the David Lean of his day; it is all the more painful when a giant of cinema trips and falls so far. It might seem low to blame Robin Hood's terribleness on Scott's advanced age, but the audience gets the distinct feeling that the director's failing mind, coupled with the ever-changing and confused script, created a perfect storm of screen hackery.

Review: The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle

Writer/director David Russo's The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle continues the rapid expansion of Seattle's cinematic language we've been witnessing recently.

If the film has a traditional story, it is as follows: a young computer programmer suddenly comes down with an existential crisis, compelling him to bombastically quit his cubicle and get a job a with a corporate custodial service. One of the companies in the office building he cleans tests experimental cookies, to which he becomes addicted. Then things get weird.

The film has just enough brilliant sequences to keep us interested, including a clever riff on the "Flight of the Bumble Bee" scene from A Clockwork Orange, and yet another instance where the mere repetition of the the word fuck equals hilarity (although slicker than the opening of Four Weddings and a Funeral, it is still not as genius as this scene from an early episode of The Wire). But perhaps the most original scene is the first one: a rapid-fire journey following a message in a bottle through the waters of Puget Sound to a pebble beach in Seattle, set to the music of "Awesome", a local band that provides the entire score.

Owing equal debts to both Fight Club and Eraserhead, Russo's film already feels like it has settled comfortably into the cult cannon. The film bastes in macabre corporate satire and nightmarish, Cronenbergian body horror. Additionally, there are enough Snatch-esque quick cuts and spastic splashes of traditional animation and dancing text to satisfy a wide range of arty tastes.

Review: The Girl Who Played With Fire

Noomi Rapace, who reprises her role as Lisbeth Salander in this sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is far and away the strongest element of The Girl Who Played With Fire. While the first film in the so called Millennium Trilogy was a solid and gripping mystery, its successor is merely a pale reflection, resting entirely on the understated greatness of Rapace’s excellent performance.

There are some things here for fans of the first film or of the books each is based upon. The intrigue this time has more to do with Lisbeth’s past; those reoccurring flashbacks from the first film of a 12-year-old Salander lighting a man on fire are finally put into context and explained. Also, Lisbeth’s sadistic case worker, Bjurman, factors into the mysterious plot. This kind of continuity is comforting, and helps us to ignore the film's weaker direction and lazily uncreative photography. By picking up these threads from the previous film, the trilogy takes on the same familiar feeling of a serialized tv drama.

More on the lazy cinematography. Film blogger Todd Miro wrote an article at Into The Abyss about “one of the most insidious and heinous practices that has ever overwhelmed the industry.” - The orange and teal color palette. He explains how it came about:

You see, flesh tones exist mostly in the orange range and when you look to the opposite end of the color wheel from that, where does one land?  Why looky here, we have our old friend Mr. Teal.  And anyone who has ever taken color theory 101 knows that if you take two complementary colors and put them next to each other, they will "pop", and sometimes even vibrate.  So, since people (flesh-tones) exist in almost every frame of every movie ever made, what could be better than applying complementary color theory to make people seem to "pop" from the background.  I mean, people are really important, aren't they?

Now it seems this color theory has been exported to other countries, namely Sweden; The Girl Who Played With Fire suffers from this grading worse than any film I’ve seen, and makes the examples Miro highlights on his blog look subtle in comparison. In nearly every shot, the only two colors are orange and teal, regardless of location, mood, or what have you. Here are just a few examples from the film:

Review: Bass Ackwards

    Linas Phillips proves the importance of cinematography and music to the art of film with his first non-documentary feature, Bass Ackwards.
    After an ill-fated affair with a married woman, Linas (played by Phillips himself) gets a (literally) shit job on an alpaca farm, where he discovers and falls in love with a lemon - a VW bus that has had its middle third removed and then welded back together. Deciding that he needs to move back in with his parents in Boston, Linas takes the strange looking vehicle and sets off from Seattle for a trip across the country. this cross-continental excursion forms the heart of the story; the random encounters he has with strangers on his way East bring a genuine spontaneity to the film.
    Shot by Sean Porter, the film looks singularly gorgeous; it was filmed on a micro-budget by a skeleton crew, but you would never know that to behold it. The camera is always handheld yet never unsteady or nauseating, as is too often the case with films in the so-called 'mumblecore' genre, which Bass Ackwards is akin to in many ways. If Lynn Shelton's Humpday had been shot this beautifully and deliberately, it would have had more going for it than just acting; it would have been a complete film.

   And there is no reason why films of such a small production magnitude and loose style cannot look so good. Film is not just about the writing, or the acting, or the cinematography; it is a marriage of all these elements. the best films bang on all these cylinders, creating an indefinable harmony on the screen that can only be called cinema.
    Another essential element that adds to Bass Ackwards' greatness is the original music by Lori Goldston and Tara Jane O'Neil. it is composed mostly of contemplative, spacious acoustic hooks, with the occasional dollop of gentle electric guitar added for good measure. Not merely obligatory or thrown together, the score is a robust, living and breathing creature that comes along for the ride and acts almost as Linas' sonic mood ring.

    The look and sound of Bass Ackwards together successfully create a  dreamlike blanket of tone that would not exist without either of these things. The writing and acting can be brilliant and affecting (and in this film, they both certainly are), but they cannot stand alone and do not a film make.

Insomnia: Increasingly Fictionalized

Part 3 in a series of essays on the films of director Christopher Nolan. 

     Insomnia, Nolan's first post-Momento film, is full of metaphors for the writing of a film or novel, from developing details to killing off characters, from constructing a narrative to fandom.

     When Ellie Burr first meets detective Dormer, she gushes about his career, telling him she’s followed all of his cases and that she even wrote her thesis on him in college. She is his biggest fan. Similarly,  as the cops uncover the mystery behind Kay Connell’s murder,  we discover that Kay was a huge fan of local crime author Walter Finch, and even got to meet and spend time with him. It is not a coincidence that Ellie and Kay are both at least partially defined by their respective fandoms; it compliments and foreshadows the collaboration between the men they admire, Dormer and Finch. 

(Warning: Spoilers ahead)

Memento: Extreme Moments

Part 2 in a series of essays on the films of director Christopher Nolan.

    Christopher Nolan’s Memento comments upon and explores the relationship between films and memory; this is most effectively achieved through the film’s unique editing, both how events unfold in reverse order, and by juxtaposing silent, out of context snippets with the scene at hand.

    Like any experience, watching a film creates memories. Likewise, these memories are unique for each person; what shape they take depends greatly on the individual’s state of mind, previous experiences, world view, and engagement with the film. After you are finished watching a film, you have a new set of memories, and, again, like all memories, they were triggered by intense emotions. Therefore, the parts of a film you remember will be different than those recollected by your neighbor, because you have responded to certain shots or scenes or musical cues based on how they made you feel, and what existing memories they recalled and are now tied to.
    In the case of Memento, for example, if you have ever gotten a tattoo, or you are a tattoo artist or know one, your mind might assign specific emotional significance to Leonard’s tattoos, where as others in the audience who do not share this kind of experience will only treat these inky notes on the body of our protagonist as merely parts of the story. Likewise, if you own the same make and model of the car that Leonard drives, you will more than likely create a memory of the film focusing on this detail, while others will pay it no mind. Technically speaking, you are all watching the same film, but in essence you are not; the film each person remembers will be different, because as it enters the brain it is melted down and blended with a person’s biases, interests, and life experiences to create something completely unique. The filmmakers address this subjectivity directly, when Leonard says, “Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record...”

Review: Inception

Unfortunately, due to the nature of Christopher Nolan's latest film, Inception, I am unable to write an adequate review of the film without spoiling it. One of the biggest thrills about seeing the film is discovering just what it is about, who all the characters are, and the world they exist in. To describe that here would be to rob the uninitiated of a rare and breathtaking experience.
I considered perhaps instead talking in depth about how the film made me feel, but I am finding myself at a literary loss. And besides, my emotional state while watching Inception has already been summed up quite thoroughly by a man the Internet has dubbed "Double Rainbow Guy". He hits every emotional note that I did while experiencing the film.

Following: The Hazards of Observation

Part 1 in a series of essays on the films of director Christopher Nolan

    Christopher Nolan’s debut feature film, 1998’s Following, is a story about the voyeuristic nature of moviegoing as much as it is about a lonely young man who follows people around the streets of London.

    The unnamed protagonist, a struggling writer, begins following random strangers to gather material for his novel. Things take an odd turn when one of these strangers, a sharply dressed man named Cobb, notices him and takes an interest in the young man’s strange hobby, quickly pulling him into a life of petty burglary. The young man joins Cobb, as he is hurting for cash - and human interaction - and justifies his participation in the crimes as a way of accruing story ideas.

(warning: spoilers ahead)

"We create the world of the dream."

With the impending release of Inception this week, I've decided to write a series of essays about the work of director Christopher Nolan; one on each of his films, which include Following, Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and now Inception. One of the things that fascinates me the most about Nolan's films is how they explore the very nature of cinema itself, from creation to consumption. This will be the guiding thesis for each essay. Look for the initial piece, titled "Following: The Hazards of Observation" to be posted sometime this week. I'll try to post these on a weekly basis. Until then, enjoy this: