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Steven Boone commented on 'Inception': As eye-catching, and as profound, as an Usher concert

Belated thanks, montiliana. Much food for thought.

Posted on July 22nd, 2010 6:29pm

Steven Boone commented on 'Inception': As eye-catching, and as profound, as an Usher concert

Wow, this thread is still alive? Well, symbot, I am definitely out of step with these times, and I'm alright with that. I didn't smoke weed or join a gang growing up, either. Crowds are overrated. I could answer your charges at length (I'm actually sitting on my hands to prevent from doing just that), but I prefer to just point you to an article by Jessica Winter from 2006 that makes more sense now than ever: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/08/13/the_lost_art_of_film_editing/ As for personal context, check out a piece I wrote about Charlie Chaplin on this site last week. I didn't give Inception "its due as a fast-moving, eye-catching genre picture" because I don't think it is. As we speak, I'm watching a '70s crime movie called Machine Gun McCain that most definitely fits that description. You might as well ask me to fawn over Lil Wayne's two-step jig after seeing the Nicholas Brothers defy gravity.

Posted on July 22nd, 2010 6:26pm

Who knew the real 'Basquiat'?

Where are Basquiat's relatives? His homeboys from Brooklyn? We do hear a little from his estranged running buddy Al Diaz (co-creator of the locally famous SAMO graffiti tag). And in the informal video interview that Davis shot in 1985 (and which forms the spine of this documentary), the painter mentions that he was once the "black sheep of the family" until he "started doing well." Davis cuts to a still of him dressed like a stockbroker, sitting next to a desktop computer. We get glimpses of the high school dropout's strained relationship with his accountant father, which prompted him to run away from home at 17. But, as with another Basquiat screen biography by a friend, Julian Schnabel's Basquiat (1995), the people of color are almost as rare as they were in SoHo galleries in the 1980s. More

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By Steven Boone

on July 21st, 2010 12:59am

Steven Boone commented on 'Inception': As eye-catching, and as profound, as an Usher concert

Naww, AtomManhattan, I'm not a film critic out of frustration or envy. I love writing about film, just as much as I love filmmaking. I'd say most film critics are like that. And while many of us DO have some practical filmmaking experience, the truth is that virtually everybody is a film "expert." This culture is saturated in movies, and we all have a ton of experience "working" with images, from birth. The kind of distinction you make between your "artist/writer" pals and the rest of us is just the kind of Mensa-membership segregation that films like Inception encourage. (I have this crackpot theory that all of the big pop sensations last decade (CSI, Bourne movies, George Clooney-running-down-the-street flicks) were designed to make those from a certain class of urban professional feel good about their jobs. And for the rest of us to bow low, haha.) And, formally, this film has more in common with Alice in Wonderland and Avatar than its academic pedigree lets on. These are all bloated white elephants that mean to trample us. (But at least Avatar made a gesture toward the downtrodden, however silly.) Can I "out do" Inception? Depends on what you mean by that. I'm sure I could not helm a production that massive without having a nervous breakdown, just as I am not fit to lead a Marine company into the Afghan mountains. Box office performance? Pfft. I'd be happy to take in $200 at the door. But if by that you mean make something that engages and entertains whatever size audience, hell yeah. And I'm sure it won't take $200 million and four continents. Go on YouTube and, amidst all the dancing babies and narcoleptic cats, you'll find teenagers and shut-ins making little gems that pack more wonderment in 5 minutes than the whole of Inception.

Posted on July 20th, 2010 7:58am

Steven Boone commented on 'Inception': As eye-catching, and as profound, as an Usher concert

montiliana, thanks for your thoughtful response. Well, I'm a lot easier to understand than Inception. (Not that Inception is hard to grasp, despite certain folks awarding themselves medals for "getting" it.) Here's the big spoiler w/me: Nearly every review I write grapples with the same problem: that the visual language has broken down; that even the filmmakers popularly regarded as wizardly crowd-pleasers have lost much sense of the power of screen time and space. The way they hopscotch through scenes, they might as well be amateur pornographers. Lunge, thrust, jape. Uniformly first-rate production design and cinematography mask these symptoms. (It's a popular illusion akin to New Yorkers' belief that the Yankee$ are a hometown institution instead of a 'roided-up collection of mercenaries.) Go into a quiet room, shut the lights, and watch this scene to its conclusion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvBcl40QOhQ See how much was communicated. How few (but brilliantly chosen) words. How beautiful. Understanding is not the problem. Your friends are not dummies. Pleasure is the lack here. These movies we're getting are unshapely and rhythmless, no matter how many layers of designer duds they have on. Where many others see "slick," I see a disregard of basic directorial craft spackled over by expensive actors and production values. That's what unites Nolan and a critics' whipping boy like Michael Bay. Okay, to put it yet more crudely (but maybe more effectively): Visual pleasure is the lubricant for any ideas and emotions one might introduce into these big summer movies. That doesn't mean eye-popping trillion-dollar images, but an understanding that each image forges a delicate relationship with the audience, and with its brothers in front and behind. This delicacy can be shattered outright by a director who privileges his ideas over that relationship. OR it can be massaged and coaxed for potentially explosive cumulative impact-- in the manner of great foreplay, by a filmmaker who possesses, as Stephanie Zacharek once said of David Lynch, a visual flow "as sensitive as a set of fingertips." Don't laugh. That's not highfalutin stuff. That's truly good storytelling, and the real key to a great, viscerally stimulating time at the movies. Look what was accomplished with the equivalent of Inception's dry cleaning budget: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMYLjlpP0NY

Posted on July 19th, 2010 9:12pm

Steven Boone commented on 'Inception': As eye-catching, and as profound, as an Usher concert

bromidictirades, you pay me the highest compliment there. I like provoking thoughtful disagreement rather than either empty approval or dismissal. I agree with your analysis of the dreams and memories depicted in the film. But my argument isn't that Nolan has been lazy in the conceptual department, just that his way of relating his ideas is frustratingly uncinematic. I don't think even Alan Greenspan has a subconscious so arid and tidy. Critics and intellectual types take it as a given that Nolan is a master of the form because he's so conceptually ambitious. I'll take Steve McQueen's Hunger or (for an example more in Nolan's playing field) Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds over Inception any day, because those directors understand how to let moments develop a certain weight and resonance in screen time. It's a really pissy, picayune-seeming argument I'm making, but to me, it is the central problem of most films today- especially mainstream behemoths like Inception. Everything is cut together not like a dream or a memory so much as a trailer, a TV spot or a music video. Nolan sells it to us. Maybe 30 years of exposure to sales montage has rewired most folks' inner life to reflect that, but certainly not mine. The recursion that marks all of Nolan's films really works well in all but his Batman films and this one, which, in pursuit of their ambitions, forget the basic pleasure of a narrative that unfolds at the shot level. I'm starting to think this guy should move into comic books, where a stream of jargon and exposition is a pleasurable thing to take in alone, flipping pages. I would probably have eaten up Inception, the graphic novel. In the darkened theater, there are so many more effective ways to get at the big ideas. See 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stalker. Metropolis. Shoot, even The Matrix, to some extent.

Posted on July 19th, 2010 12:59pm

'Inception': As eye-catching, and as profound, as an Usher concert

Inception could be the film of this as-yet untitled decade. If Dark Knight was about criminals and lawmen trading hats, Inception is about a post-law world, where master thieves and mercenaries go about their business without much hassle from the authorities. In fact, the only real authorities here are billionaires. More

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By Steven Boone

on July 16th, 2010 7:00am

Kisses in a dirty old town

Kisses, a barely feature-length Irish film about kids on the run from abusive households, opens with a black-and-white shot of a girl staring numbly at a dead fish floating in a tank, set to mournful indie rock. It seems to signal a long soak in the miserablist kitchen sink: think of the grim stylings of Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers, who often track underclass kids dodging societal traps set before they were born. More

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By Steven Boone

on July 15th, 2010 8:00am

Steven Boone commented on How to save the summer movie using only Charlie Chaplin

You kids quit fighting on my lawn! :) jonnieutah, in no other art form but the cinema do folks feel so comfortable describing masterpieces from the past as quaint relics. Art breaks out everywhere, always, yes, but my larger argument is that the kind of art we're becoming increasingly resigned to in the exponential era is turning us into, well, assholes. The emphasis on production, power, rapid consumption and disposal, along with a kind of manic-depressive pendulum swing between fake euphoria and fake terror, is producing an audience of mean, ugly, narcissistic people like never before. Don't look at me like that. :) The wreck that cultural commentators and philosophers feared American society was becoming as early as the start of the Industrial Age never really took its full, unsightly shape until we got non-linear editing, broadband Internet and DVD. These tools are great, indispensable, but they have fallen into the hands of business people who had been waiting impatiently all last century for a way to make media more efficient and lucrative. Not better, mind you, just faster at turning a dollar. (They could only do so much with analog cable TV and VCR's, as they are partly tethered to real time.) It's those assholes who now set the clock not only of production but consumption. Remember that Chaplin churned out a lot of classics at Mutual and Essanay but his masterpieces tended to be the ones he indulged a lot of time and care upon. That's the whole reason he joined Griffith, Fairbanks and Pickford to form United Artists, to be as free as possible from the banker's clock, which is indifferent to the human experience. And the movies are about the human experience. I don't want to go back, I want to go forward: The other day I told my movie-loving nephew that I was writing about Chaplin, and he said, "Charlie who?" When I sent him some YouTube clips of The Circus, he was blown away. "This is better than anything out now. And I never even heard of this dude."

Posted on July 13th, 2010 11:21am

How to save the summer movie using only Charlie Chaplin

If The Dark Knight has helped kill the already enlarged heart of summer movies (which were founded upon the nimble, character-based thrills of Jaws and Star Wars), then films as soulful and thrilling as The Circus, if shown at a big multiplex instead of an arthouse like Film Forum (where it opens this week in a new 35mm print along with Chaplin's sublime short, The Idle Class), could resuscitate a movie tradition currently lost in greed and folly. More

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By Steven Boone

on July 12th, 2010 10:03am