10 replies to this topic

[Gilly]

Why does everyone think this movie was so good? I mean, yeah it had some cool metaphors and its all symbolic and crap, but overall as a movie I found it to be mediocre and a bit sloppily constructed from a thematic perspective.

So for those of you who enjoyed it, what's the appeal?

[poli]

It was no Tom Hanks movie, that's for sure.

[Nick]

I just enjoyed the trippy dive into the unconscious, which they conveniently misnamed "subconscious."

In fact the movie was a modern-day Alice in Wonderland designed, rather mockingly, to show people how compartmentalized their minds have become by the smoke and mirror effect of technology.

[Galen]

Movies about dicking around in brains have always been popular. The very nature of them, to explore a person's psychological make-up at some of its deepest levels, portraying physical manifestations of something so personal to someone, interests me in a very humanistic approach. I'll admit that Inception has some really bad portrayals of how sleep actually works, but the idea of the film was enough to get me interested.

[Gilly]

polikujm, on 18 November 2010 - 05:34 PM, said:

It was no Tom Hanks movie, that's for sure.

Your bug does a figure-8.

[Gilly]

Galen, on 19 November 2010 - 03:48 AM, said:

Movies about dicking around in brains have always been popular. The very nature of them, to explore a person's psychological make-up at some of its deepest levels, portraying physical manifestations of something so personal to someone, interests me in a very humanistic approach. I'll admit that Inception has some really bad portrayals of how sleep actually works, but the idea of the film was enough to get me interested.

Yeah but this one just felt sterile and overly scientific-feeling compared to, say, Pi. Personally I am actually more inclined to think of things in the way they're portrayed in Inception, because I would love it to be that simple but movies like Pi and Altered States just have such a mystique of self-tinkering and the sort of visceral threat of insanity that comes along with it, that totally thrashes something like Inception where the assumption is like "We're just playing notes on a piano...they are sort of big notes, and we don't know what they'll really sound like, but we know it'll do what we want it to do..." which is not really how the brain works, we're far more chaotic overall, and yet precisely organized in the specifics, than that kind of "estimating" view of the brain could ever explain. When you're trying to change people, you either have to overload them, or hit just the right note; you can't sort of aim at a target and hope you hit close enough to the middle. The neurotic brain is so smart that, if you don't hit the issue dead on, it will sense you getting close, and skitter away with the bulls-eye, leaving you to shoot at an empty target while it sets up a new maze for you to navigate before you get another shot at the money.

[Nick]

Which is why I think Inception's "societal message" had less to do with intrapsychic maneuvering, and more with the default wiring that has been carefully constructed... over the course of a "life time," to the point that the orchestrator of such a system very much could strike basic keys almost at whim, insured against system collapse by the recursive function it runs on. Hollywood is a golden egg of a conduit for the CIA on the real...

[Nick]

Pi is almost its antithesis, in that sense. It represents the individual transcending the collective, to the point where the, uh, "learned elders of zion" are actually rejected because of the unlimited potency and inherent value that the "truth" carries for its beholder; the masochistic psychosis is so horrid because the "secrets" of the collective unconscious become embedded in the individual, in the process of transfusion. It renders Neo being "The One" a joke, by comparison.

[borderline]

Gilly, on 18 November 2010 - 12:46 PM, said:

Why does everyone think this movie was so good?

idk but me and my bf saw it in theaters the morning after dropping acid so we got really into it, relating to it at the time haha

[Gilly]

Pi <33333333333

[poli]

Gilly, on 19 November 2010 - 11:42 AM, said:

polikujm, on 18 November 2010 - 05:34 PM, said:

It was no Tom Hanks movie, that's for sure.

Your bug does a figure-8.

Fuck you man.