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Watch, Watched, Watching: Strange Times


Ramsay B.

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14 minutes ago, john said:

Without the top wobbling it’s definitely a dream.

I think the point is he's introducing uncertainty. 

Spoiler

Saying whether it's reality or not, he's happy now because he saved his kids.  This is a common conclusion for Nolan films.  Prestige ended the same way.  Even with the first Batman he interrupted the narrative to have Bale save Joffrey very near the end.  TDK's climax entails him sacrificing himself for Garrison's son.  The entire story of Interstellar is centered around McConaughey trying to save his daughter.

 

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21 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

How did the dilophosaurus get in the car?

JP has deep flaws all over it, but fuck it, who cares. It's the best dinosaur movie ever made, and some of the things you just have to go with. Like just the path the cars go on. How does that make any sense? 

 

21 hours ago, Leofric said:

I assumed they thought of the cool stunt of the car lodged in the tree first and then after filming it realized a T-Rex with his stubby arms couldn't throw a car up into a tree.    Therefore car had to fall onto the tree, so they added the cliff.

Hard to say what they were thinking. I've always given the flaws a huge pass cause this is one of the earliest movies I can ever recall seeing in theaters, and loved dinosaurs immensely as a kid. As a 4-5 year old kid I even re-enacted the first Grant/Hammond scene on my mom when I busted open her door and said defiantly, "What the hell do you think you're doing in here?"

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1 hour ago, DMC said:

I think the point is he's introducing uncertainty. 

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Saying whether it's reality or not, he's happy now because he saved his kids.  This is a common conclusion for Nolan films.  Prestige ended the same way.  Even with the first Batman he interrupted the narrative to have Bale save Joffrey very near the end.  TDK's climax entails him sacrificing himself for Garrison's son.  The entire story of Interstellar is centered around McConaughey trying to save his daughter.

 

I hadn’t realised that about Nolan films, that’s interesting. But I don’t see how you get the save the kids scenario without the uncertainty. For me, it’s definitely a dream until you see the top possibly wobbling. Personally I can buy that Cobb is willing to accept dream kids but it’s nice to have the ambiguity that means it’s possibly real.

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1 minute ago, john said:

For me, it’s definitely a dream until you see the top possibly wobbling.

Well, if the top starts wobbling that eliminates the uncertainty he's trying to emphasize.

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1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Spoilers, the shark at the end of Jaws 4 roars like a lion. 

There, I saved someone a bit of time. Don't watch it.

It also explodes for no reason in some cuts of the movie. Right after Mrs. Brody has flashbacks to an event she wasn't present for. 

I always figured the end of inception was a dream because weren't Cobb's kids exactly as they were when he last saw them? same age, same clothes?

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By the way, I recently saw an episode of Star Trek Voyager from the mid 90s with a plot that really mirrors Inception. The starship crew is stuck in a dream and the Native American first officer is able to help them navigate through it due to some inappropriate mystical vision quest stuff. So not only do they have totems so they can tell when they’re in a dream but they also have layers of dreams and if you die you wake up in a different layer of dream. Really wouldn’t be surprised if the Nolan brothers have seen this episode.

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3 minutes ago, DMC said:

Well, if the top starts wobbling that eliminates the uncertainty he's trying to emphasize.

If the top falls it’s not a dream. We don’t get to see whether it falls so it’s still ambiguous, that’s how I see it anyway. If the viewer wants to think it’s all still a dream then just imagine that it corrects itself and keeps spinning.

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Yeah the top doesn't spin for long enough to make it definitely not fall, it's just, for me, a pointless bit of uncertainty.

The problem is abetted by the fact that we do see the top fall earlier in the movie, so even if the ending is a dream, it's only the ending and all of the other scenes in reality were in reality (ie no possibility that Mal might have been right all along which would have at least had some setup), or his top is unreliable because it wasn't his totem therefore not just introducing uncertainty but removing any certainty from the movie whatsoever.


The ending really only works for me if the top falls, which is why the ambiguous shot irrirates me so much.
 

21 minutes ago, john said:

By the way, I recently saw an episode of Star Trek Voyager from the mid 90s with a plot that really mirrors Inception. The starship crew is stuck in a dream and the Native American first officer is able to help them navigate through it due to some inappropriate mystical vision quest stuff. So not only do they have totems so they can tell when they’re in a dream but they also have layers of dreams and if you die you wake up in a different layer of dream. Really wouldn’t be surprised if the Nolan brothers have seen this episode.


That sounds pretty likely. I'm also told there's similarities to the 60s film Last Year at Marienbad but I've never got round to seeing that. Also obvious comparisons to Total Recall (which I view as a much better film tbqh) and more broadly to Satoshi Kon's Paprika and Millenium Actress.

I don't think any of it is plaigarism though just to be clear (except Marienbad since I can't say for that, though the plot synopsis doesn't seem that similar.

 

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25 minutes ago, RumHam said:

It also explodes for no reason in some cuts of the movie. Right after Mrs. Brody has flashbacks to an event she wasn't present for. 

Doesn't see have some kind of telepathic connection with the shark too? 
 

Quote

I always figured the end of inception was a dream because weren't Cobb's kids exactly as they were when he last saw them? same age, same clothes?

From what I skimmed, who knows? The kids haven't aged, but they also said he only has his wedding ring on in dreams and he wasn't wearing it at the end. Fuck if I know.

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Good grief -- Scorsese all the way. 

But here's the thing.  There is no art or accomplishment that is made and practiced by only one person.  Art and accomplishment are built on, inspired by, sizzled and zinged by a variety of milieus in which other are working with the same tools to incarnate their visions and obsessions.  None can incarnate except by co-habitation. Nobody fills every single person's cuppa tea either. Myself cannot stand Star Wars in any form and haven't even liked any Spielberg flic I ever saw.  That includes Lincoln.

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51 minutes ago, john said:

If the top falls it’s not a dream. We don’t get to see whether it falls so it’s still ambiguous, that’s how I see it anyway.

Right this was exactly what I was trying to say.  Sorry if I was unclear.

45 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

all of the other scenes in reality were in reality (ie no possibility that Mal might have been right all along which would have at least had some setup), or his top is unreliable because it wasn't his totem therefore not just introducing uncertainty but removing any certainty from the movie whatsoever.

Well, this touches on the alternative interpretation - that he was dreaming and/or dead even before the start of the film's events.  I like that one more than he got stuck in dreamworld once he organized a team to go in there.  But thinking about the movie in that case, just means the whole exercise was about getting him, I dunno, out of purgatory?

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7 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

The fact that there is discussion years later is the exact reason why the ending is ambiguous. If the top fell, there is nothing to think about or no alternatives to explore, no reddit threads, no dueling theories.

If only people bit on my theory that Ace Ventura dies at the end of the second film....

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10 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

The fact that there is discussion years later is the exact reason why the ending is ambiguous. If the top fell, there is nothing to think about or no alternatives to explore, no reddit threads, no dueling theories.


Possibly (I think it's perfectly possible to leave a film with plenty to discuss without introducing that kind of ambiguity but it definitely adds to the debate) but that isn't an inherent positive.

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8 minutes ago, polishgenius said:


Possibly (I think it's perfectly possible to leave a film with plenty to discuss without introducing that kind of ambiguity but it definitely adds to the debate) but that isn't an inherent positive.

Agree, but in this case, especially when the whole film is about the nature of reality, I think it works well.

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7 hours ago, DMC said:

Heh, no.  But there are others to mention in terms of comparing their catalogues.  Hitchcock, as has been mentioned, obviously, but most of his work is not my cup of tea.  I don't think anyone can match 70s Coppola with the two Godfathers, Conversation, and Apocalypse Now.  But after that it's pretty sparse for him.  Welles, too, was volatile but also genius, just couldn't stop drinking and eating.  If we're going old school there's Ford, Bergman, Kurosawa, Huston, Wilder, Kazan to consider.  Recently, I think Ridley Scott merits acknowledgement.

I’d also add the Coen brothers, who have a pretty strong filmography, going back well over 30 years. They do have some misses in there, but it’s a pretty good mix of genres and types of movies, too. And at their best (Fargo, No Country for Old Men, etc) they’re as good as it gets. 

As far as Nolan? He doesn’t belong in the same conversation as Spielberg, imo. The latter would probably be on my Mt. Rushmore of directors, the former not even close. 

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3 minutes ago, Nictarion said:

As far as Nolan? He doesn’t belong in the same conversation as Spielberg, imo. The latter would probably be on my Mt. Rushmore of directors, the former not even close. 

 

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