creamygoodness

Last weekend I did something that I've just realised I haven't done for some time actually, I went off on a little adventure for an SGUK meet. Yes, I headed up to the exotic foreign climes of... erm... Leeds. Well, you can't have everything, can you? I headed up with Secretary, Mat8drb and Causy and was met at the station by Rhinosaredinos and our gracious host, Mirishal, whose abode we temporarily retired to in order to change into a more Vegas-themed outfit (I was personally rocking the black jacket and Hawaiian shirt look. Not the best of choices considering it was too hot to wear the jacket). Then it was out to the pub for fun and frolics. I had a good time, met nice new people, it was all win.
However, once we got to the third venue fo the night, the Fab Cafe, I unfortunately did that thing I always do when I'm out drinking, I hit that plateau of minor drunkenness and did not immediately plough straight through to the far shores of being utterly wrecked. This meant I was then unable to shift from minorly tipsy and thus shifted into overly paternal 'must look after everyone' mode.
This did, however, come in rather handy when one of our number overindulged somewhat and needed a little looking-after, and so it was back to chez Mirishal for drunken pizza and a better night's kip than expected, although have of me thinks I should have spooned with Causy. I awoke the next morning lying on the kitchen floor staring up at Hazzad's crotch. So it could have been worse. And before you ask, no she was not wearing a skirt you perverts, it was jeans. We stirred ourselves, made it down to the nearby Wetherspoons and consumed gloriously large portions of fried things. It was just what was needed. I was somewhat sickened by one of our number's lack of hangover, but karmic justice is a fickle mistress indeed.
After that was a brief stroll around some of Leed's sights and then back on the train home to London. I have a weird quirk where I don't consider a meet truly over until I say goodbye to the last fellow SGUK member (Adam doesn't count). So for me the meet was over after saying goodbye to Secretary at King's Cross tube station. Good times.

Meh, I'm alright. Work's a bugger at the moment. Our previous manager has left and our new manager's CRB check has been delayed and she can't give notice so I'm acting manager for anywhere up to the end of September. On the one hand I'm recognising that it's all awesome experience that I really need. On the other I'm not being paid anything extra for it and it's a fuckton of a lot of work, considering I also have to do my own job while I'm filling in for the manager. It's stress city right now, and I barely feel like each day off is enough time to mentally unspool before it's back to work. I need an extended break, right now I just can't unclench. Of course, it doesn't help that my staff (ooh! You see that? I called them my staff! Like a proper manager) keep calling me up on my days off. Because they can't cope without me, naturally.
Other than that, I've had some familiar old pangs of self-loathing and insecurity lately. Nothing serious, it's nowhere I haven't been before and I'll cheer up soon enough. But still, not fun. I wish work wasn't leaving me so drained so I could try and get back into my writing that I was just starting to get on a roll, but I couldn't count the mnumber of times in the past couple of weeks I've ended up falling asleep on top of my bed fully-clothed.

Lots going on over the next few weeks! The next few months are kind of full to bursting for me. Next weekend I'm off to spend a weekend with Vermin which is huge amounts of yay. She promises to show me the many fascinating and unbelievable sights of Carlisle. Like the new tarmac put down on her road. I also have coming up the stag do and wedding for two dear old friends, Traumatron and Nic who I'm looking forward to seeing again immensely, along with the rest of the Brighton crew. It's been entirely too long since I went down there so I'm pleased to be rectifying this. There is also, of course, the birthday of a certain flatmate who shall go nameless. There shall be drinking and dancing and possibly making a tit of myself. Oh yes. There may even be makeup. Secretary is very excited at the prospect of this. Additionally, I've heard that a long-standing Internet friend will be visiting the country for the first time in August. This is a guy I've known for about a decade now. It all started when we were playing TFC on the same server together. It feels weird to have an Internet friend that I've known longer than anyone off SG.

Inception is an absolutely remarkable film. It's at one and the same time an effects-laden, star-studded, big-budget Hollywood action movie and yet one of the most intensely personal films I've seen in a long time. It's an intricate puzzle box of a movie but also a straightforward heist flick. It's a metaphysical reworking of every heist film ever that rewrites psychoanalysis as gunfights and hinges the plot on moments of personal revelation. It boggles the mind that Christopher Nolan got so much money to make a film that must have been this hard to pitch, but my God I'm glad he did.

In a way, I think this is the film that Nolan's entire career so far has been building towards. You can see the disparate threads of his filmography come together to form one unbelievable whole: His obsession with the idea of control (from Memento right through to Dark Knight), his ability to create an intricate puzzle of a movie (Memento), even his musings on stroytelling and narrative. It also makes me wonder if he might be, very slightly, on the autism spectrum, but more on that later.

First off, I want to address the Matrix comparisons. I think it's an interesting place to start. To me, The Matrix was a film that had much higher opinions of it's own intelligence than it actually deserved. At the end of the day, the much-touted philosophy basically amounted to a stoner's proclamations of 'no, wait, dude, what if we're not... really real maaaaaan'. No, the real genius of the film (aside from it's sheer kinetic and visual bravura) was an impeccable structure that perfectly matched setpieces to developing character arcs.
Inception, on the other hand, is a film that I think is definitely going to be talked up as a really 'smart' film but, when you peel the layers away, there isn't really that much there. Please note first of all that I don't mean this as a bad thing. Again, the genius of the film is in it's construction. I dont' think I've ever seen a film so elegantly put together as this one. From the first scene right to the end it's a beautiful and intricate machine that just slides itself together. However, once you pare away the surprisingly straight-forward heist plot, there isn't much there to discuss. You won't be left with any huge metaphysical conundrums and it's not much of a meditation on the nature of guilt and loss. The main character has guilt, it fucks him up, he deals with it. It's all fairly straight-forward. However, this time I think the film doesn't have ideas above it's station. It's going to be talked-up by the people watching it, who are so blown-away by it's precision and the demands it places on the audience that they see more there than there might actually be.

Another point raised by a lot of the Matrix comparisons I've been hearing is something of a personal theory of mine. I feel like The Matrix's greatest legacy was the way it combined the Hong Kong Heroic Bloodshed/John Woo focus on the kinetics and drama of action with the Western focus on special effects and spectacle in order to expand the language of film-making. Inception feels like the next step along that slow evolution of form. Basically, as The Matrix was to The Killer, Inception is to The Matrix.

Putting aside those comparisons now, and delving into something a little more prosaic. The casting of the film is fantastic. Nolan has put together a crew of some of the best young actors around at the moment. As good as Leonardo DiCaprio is, I almost feel like he was slightly overshone by some of his supporting cast. My personal favourite was Tom Hardy (an actor I'm expecting big things from) as Eames, the 'Forger' of the crew. His job is to impersonate other people in the film in order to inset sly subconcious suggestions into their mind. However, if I'm honest, then my favourite was probably actually Ellen Page as Ariadne, the 'Architect' (who creates the mental landscapes of the dream) by sheer virtue of how fucking lovely she looked.

I've talked a little bit about the films precision, but mentioning the different roles the cast played made me want to re-emphasise it. Nolan has created a complex but logical set of rules, roles and terminology to govern the process of infiltrating someone else's dreams. Much of it is left intentionally vague (thankfully he doesn't try to create some technlogical macguffin to give a terrible explanation as to how it's possible) but it all hangs together beautifully. Nothing feels like a cheat and every piece of information you are given is important and relevant and all comes crashing together in the last act of the film.

And what a last act it is. The second half of the film is the actual 'heist', the infiltration of the target's dream in order to place an idea in his subconcious mind. It's an unbelievable display of bravura, with the action taking place on 4 discrete levels, with chains of cause and effect ping-ponging their way down through the different levels of the dream. Actions in one affect the next and so on. A particular highlight is Joseph Gordon-Levitt's zero-gravity fight in a hotel hallway. It's been a long time since an action scene put as huge a grin on my face from just being so fucking well done.

There is one thing, however, that I think might stop people fully engaging with the film, and it ties back in to what I said about speculating if Nolan was slightly autistic. His view of dreams is almost antiseptic in it's relative normalcy. Yes, there are moments of pure visual splendour and incredibly inventiveness, but the dreamscapes still feel incredibly real. I personally would have liked to see the dreams become more primal, elemental and surreal the deeper into the target's subconcious we went, but we didn't really see that until we reached the 'limbo' state, with the decaying city. Between his issues with control, the normalcy of the dreamscapes he presents and his seeming inability to fully engage with a romantic subplot (seriously, all of his movies are strangely sexless) makes me wonder what's going on in his noggin.

So then, after all those words vomited up all over you, what do I basically think? Inception is a daring and stunning film that both demands and deserves your full and rapt attention. Go and watch it because it is quite possibly the most important film of the year in the things it tries to achieve.