Andersonesque:

Here’s the review that’ll be out in Eye Weekly imminently. The web’s filling up with reviews so fast that I thought I’d throw mine into the well as swfitly as I could. Plus, mine will be the only one that makes references to Julio Cortazar, Alain Resnais *and* a tasty snack food.

INCEPTION

Four stars

Though it’s certainly not the film’s most spectacular sight, the signature image in Christopher Nolan’s Inception may be a set of Penrose stairs, that self-closing circuit of steps that defies the laws of geometry. That’s because the movie itself is an impossible object, the kind of thing whose stubborn insistence on existing confounds everything we know about how the world works. And like the M.C. Escher posters that those stairs instantly evoke, it is bound to be scrutinized by stoned college students for generations to come.
Countless others will gaze in awe and wonder and then ask, “What the hell is it?” It’s a fair question, seeing as Inception’s contents swiftly move beyond what can be divulged in a plot synopsis. Here goes anyway. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a master of “extraction,” a technology that allows him to invade and manipulate another person’s dream world. Having made a business out of exploiting its potential for corporate espionage, he is enlisted by a powerful client (Ken Watanabe) for a job that imperils not just Cobb but his team of fellow extractors (as played by Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy and Dileep Rao).
As a lavishly expensive production that is not based on a bestseller, a comic book, a toy or a videogame, Inception is already a rare beast among Hollywood blockbusters. Unabashedly cerebral and dauntingly complex, it will test the limits of comprehension for many audience members even if — thanks to Nolan’s deft parsing of key info and mostly painstaking adherence to his own rulebook — Inception is actually easier to follow than a Transformers movie.
Not that Nolan’s film shares that much with the oeuvre of Michael Bay besides an undisguised affection for explosions. Indeed, for all of the recent efforts to designate The Dark Knight’s director as the heir to Kubrick (i.e., a populist iconoclast, which is the movie-biz equivalent of the Penrose stairs), it doesn’t much resemble the latter’s works, either. The Matrix is also emerging as a popular reference point but Inception only shares its sense of momentum, its often acrobatic action scenes and its fixation on the Buddhist concept of Maya (albeit filtered through a whole lotta Jung).
Instead, its kin is a weirder bunch – Inception take its cues from stories by Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar and from films as diverse as David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. Mind you, Nolan’s actual knowledge of these touchstones may be limited. After admitting to the New York Times that he hadn’t seen Resnais’ 1961 head-scratcher before making Inception, he joked that he may actually be “ripping off the movies that ripped off Last Year at Marienbad.” The director also accurately notes that for all its inherent instability, Inception is still constructed like a heist movie (Cobb even swears that this mission is his “one last job”).
Yet Inception’s most relevant antecedent turns out to be Solaris, another film — or films if you count both the original Tarkovsky and the underrated Soderbergh versions — whose trappings as a science-fiction epic cloaked a fraught romantic drama about a man and his dead wife. In the case of Inception, the deceased missus is Mal (Marion Cotillard), who has become as a troublesome part of Cobb’s subconscious since he refuses to confront the circumstances of her death.
And here, alas, is the one aspect of Inception that disappoints. What’s meant to be the emotional core of Nolan’s tale never warms the whole work like it needs to. Boasting plenty of power to astound but less to move, Inception is ultimately not as affecting as Memento or The Prestige, movies that displayed all of Nolan’s prowess at puzzle-making yet benefited from richer characters and a deeper sense of tragedy and catharsis.
Then again, no artwork that ventures as far into the impossible as Inception does can be expected to achieve every one of its aims – otherwise, what would all the attendees of future academic conferences on the film have to argue about? It may be wiser to make like those stoners with their Escher prints and get lost inside it for as long as the Doritos supply allows.

Gonna try to get some new stuff up here, starting with my interview with Vincenzo Natali for the quite fine and admirably pervy Splice. New review of Get Him to the Greek will also be up on Eye Weekly’s site and I’ll post links to the recent slew of Toronto Star reviews…

As an intense and inventive monster movie that doubles as a Bunuelian black comedy about parenthood, Splice would be a rare beast even if it weren’t arriving alongside far more conventional summer fare. And given what a strange and splendid creature it is, perhaps it was inevitable for Vincenzo Natali’s new movie to experience such a difficult birth.

A Canada-France co-production budgeted at $26 million, the project was a far cry from Cube, the 1997 cult fave that established the Toronto-bred, L.A.-based director as a promising genre filmmaker. Movie sites maintained a steady stream of excited updates even before shooting began in Toronto and Hamilton in the winter of 2007-08. The casting of Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody added a classy note to a timely premise about renegade geneticists who fashion a new life form that soon becomes hard to control.

Yet Splice’s own fate became an equally tricky matter once it tried to find a home in the marketplace. A widely expected berth at TIFF failed to materialize (it finally premiered at the Sitges festival in Spain last October) and there were rumours of cuts and tweaks as Splice’s makers found themselves in the unenviable position of trying to sell an independent film just when the global movie business was bottoming out.

In an interview last week before Splice’s Toronto premiere, Natali calls the attempt to sell the film “the true horror story.” Things went from bad to worse when two possible U.S. buyers went out of business. By last December, Natali was sure that his pride and joy was destined for a straight-to-vid release, much like his underrated 2002 thriller Cypher.

But just like any self-respecting movie monster, the movie itself was damn hard to kill. For one thing, Natali’s vision survived the finessing and fine-tuning with its integrity intact. (The wonkiness of the final act and some missteps with the characters are easy to forgive given the work’s overall vitality and ingenuity.) Then it landed at Sundance, where Splice’s many admirers included Matrix producer Joel Silver. His enthusiasm led to the film’s acquisition by Warner Brothers, who – as Natali notes with no little amazement – are spending more money marketing and distributing the movie than its creators originally spent making it.

“Never in a million years did I think this film would reach a mainstream audience, especially untouched,” says Natali. “It’s an absolute miracle. We tried to be strategic about it but it was just dumb luck.”

It’s a very gratifying twist of fate for Natali, who spent 15 years trying to give life to Splice. His imagination was originally sparked by the sight of the Vacanti mouse, that poor little critter which — thanks to the labours of scientists at MIT — looked like it had a human ear growing out of its back. Natali notes that the cartilage structure was actually grown from cow cells but it still looked plenty freaky. It also got him thinking about the new frontiers of genetic science and how this fresh technology taps into our species’ long-held fascination with animal-human hybrids. (Just ask your favourite Egyptian god.)

“It’s a mythical notion that crosses all cultures,” says Natali. “It’s really something that’s part of our collective unconscious. Now to think that we are at a stage where these things can become reality — to the point where scientists have borrowed the word ‘chimera’ from Greek mythology to describe some of this work — that made me wonder, ‘Well, maybe these notions were implanted in us for a reason. Maybe it’s in our DNA to create these things.’”

In Splice, the thing in question is Dren, played by French actor Delphine Chaneac (albeit with a CG-enhanced form). Though Natali admits that Dren’s rapid development is still the stuff of science fiction, his “genetically engineered angel” is not such a far-fetched notion.

“In fact, the script was written in consultation with a geneticist,” he says. “What was consistently shocking to me was how every time I propose an idea or concept to him, he would say, ‘Oh yes, that’s possible.’ What I realized is that the bandwidth of what you can actually do with this science is much wider than I had originally assumed. Given that human beings from the beginning of time have always shaped their environments, I have no doubt we will in some way start to shape ourselves now that the technology exists.”

As intriguing as the film’s allegorical content may be, the most provocative aspect of Splice is its admirably perverse take on the psychological and sexual ramifications of Dren’s arrival on the scene. In other words, expect much squirming by moviegoers when the parental relationship between the creators and the created takes an Oedipal turn.

“This is a creature film,” says Natali, “but it’s a creature film spliced with a relationship story and a parenting story, one that ultimately evolves into a love triangle. Whenever anyone suggested that those parts of the stories be removed, I had no interest in making the movie. It’s the psychological component that I found so fascinating. There are some very complex relationships going on here, some of which get very Freudian.”

As Natali says, this is “archetypal stuff,” though presented in the shiny context of new science. “I think it’s the alchemy of those two things coming together that makes it so much fun.”

And while the racier content might not have gone down so well had Splice started out with an American studio, Natali jokes that his French partners took it in stride. “They were like, ‘This is great! Pourquoi pas?”

As for whether audiences in North America will welcome his efforts – especially when it’s positioned as an alternative to The A-Team – Natali can’t say for sure but he’s been encouraged by the responses during preview screenings.

“I’ve been to ten cities with the film and almost without exception, the majority of the audience stays, and they ask very intelligent questions. So the way I take that is that the audience is smarter than it’s generally given credit for, especially by studios. And they’re really hungry for new stuff. There’s a strong desire for fresh meat and I think that Splice is that. And frankly, I don’t think Splice is so smart! It’s not high art – this is a creature film. It just happens to have maybe a little more sophisticated characterization than most horror films but I don’t see why this can’t be a popcorn movie. That’s what I think it is!”

Been busy with travelling and work but finally got the chance to put together the unexpurgated version of my interview with Geddy Lee for the feature about Rush that appeared in the March 2010 issue of The Walrus. Here… for posterity’s sake…

What with the recent academic study of the band [Chris McDonald’s Rush, Rock Music and the Middle Class], the new documentary [Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage] and tributes like the one on The Colbert Report, are you surprised to be the subject of so much veneration lately?

I know it’s strange. It just goes to show you that if you hang around long enough, strange things happen.

It sounds like you’ve been very involved with the movie and providing the filmmakers with a lot of the documentation.

They’re nice guys and they seem very passionate about what they’re doing so when they have a request of you, it’s very hard to say no. They’ve been over to the house, sifting through all the plastic containers, the endless plastic containers of Rush ephemera that I’ve somehow collected over the years. It’s been a kind of interesting walk through the past to help from sort through a lot of those things, things that I forgot I had, pictures of us from the very old days. It’s been an interesting experience.

Would you consider yourself the band’s de facto archivist?

I don’t think so much. It’s hard to tell. I think everybody has their own select things that they’ve pack-ratted for years, just things you don’t have the heart to toss out — reviews or backstage passes or photos of each other or goofy little things. I remember the very first tour, we did, I kept the keys for the hotel room because I thought we would never ever go on tour again and I wanted to have some sort of souvenir of being in Marietta, Georgia or some such place. A lot of those things become kind of iconic in your own life. I look at them and I smile and I don’t have the heart to throw them in the garbage. So you have to find somewhere to store them so we have these bins and bins of stuff.

So this legacy has a literal weight as well as a metaphorical one.

It’s unwieldy, frankly, from the sense that I don’t like to think so much about the passage of time. I don’t like to dwell on the past. To be involved in the documentary has been a bit hard from that point of view because they’re making so much of things that we’ve done in the past, and asking questions about details 25, 30 years ago — a lot of them frankly have just got out of my head. It’s a bit uncomfortable dwelling so much on what has happened. We are more used to looking forward, I’m more comfortable looking forward and not trying to be constantly aware of how long I’ve been in the same rock band.

Do you think the band has been diligent about having new directions and new challenges rather than being mired in the past?

It’s exciting to look forward. I just got back in Los Angeles where I met my partners and we had an amazing time just catching up. We hadn’t seen each other for quite a while as a group. We had a wonderful dinner. Thinking about exciting things to do in the future is never a problem, but when you dwell so much on the past, it just feels wrong somehow — it seems self-indulgent. You want to spend time thinking about things other than your own face, so to speak.

Can worrying about matters of business or historical import have a negative impact on artistic endeavours?

Oh yeah, and you’ve got a life and other interests. There’s lots to talk about. There’s books and movies and art and work in all the other things that everybody else wants to talk about, the fun things in life, the interesting things in life. Sometimes when you’ve achieved a certain level of notoriety or success, it forces you to be in this cloud of your own history, which I find very uncomfortable.

Is that also because there’s a version of the band that belongs to other people and a version of band that’s relevant to you?

That’s right. We have so many different fans from so many different walks of life and their music means something slightly different to a lot of them. They have a common ground between them on what they like about our music. That’s amazing to me, and it’s wonderful, and it’s enabled us to keep going through their support and all that. But that’s fun for them to think about, and if we were to compare notes between a fan’s vision of what we are and my own vision or Alex’s vision or Neil’s vision, they’d probably be quite different.

I know that success can actually compound that problem – despite what all the fans may feel, you have to somehow make what you do feel new to yourselves.

Yeah, exactly. It’s one thing to be in a band for almost 40 years. It’s another thing to be in that band and still feel like you could thrive creatively. That’s the challenge every time around - that’s the really hard thing. So if the creative thing is struggling, which it does at times, you’re miserable. There’s no making yourself feel better or feeling like, “Well I’ve achieved this success, so it’s okay.” It’s not okay. You’re only as valuable to yourself as your most recent work in many respects.

There’s also the fact that you may end up competing with yourself in other, earlier incarnations.

That’s true. The whole idea for a study found just going through the motions or repeating ourselves would be just intolerable.

Yet it strikes me the fans have appreciated that about you, among the many things they do. Do you think you’ve enjoyed a unique degree of respect from them?

We have such a range of fans, and they have a very deep relationship with us. A lot of times we encounter them and for the most part they are very respectful. Or just nervous, or shy. But it’s never really prevented us from carrying on with our lives, or being able to go to Caplansky’s Deli for a sandwich. It’s never been like that, at least not in my mind. Everybody has a different attitude about their own sense of freedom and their own feeling of what’s comfortable out in the public. For me, I like to live my life and I don’t like to feel like there’s any barriers and I always feel that whatever or whoever I encounter along the way, it’s deal-able. It can be reasonable, if handled properly. I think it’s the attitude you take with you. And our fans as I said are very respectful and it’s never really been a problem.

Reading about the history of Rush, it strikes me that it’s a lesson you learned from other bands early in your career – that to be decent and generous to others means you can receive the same treatment in turn. Come to think of it, it’s the whole ‘do unto others’ lesson!

Exactly. As opposed to the “I have been hurt, now I must hurt others” school of social science!” Well, y’know, you come up and you pay your dues, and for us success was never an overnight thing — it was a very, very slow thing and that suited us just fine. We were always able to make a living and we were always able to do what we wanted to do creatively. There were leaner times and there were fatter times, but it was really about the whole picture of it. We were trying to build a career, not just have a hit. As a result, we realized along the way that there’s a way to treat people and there’s a way to carry on your life. You’ve got to live with yourself at the end of the day so why not have a good environment, a positive environment? So that’s we’ve chosen to do.

I think that allows you to set a tenor for the relationships.

I think that’s true. You send out a vibe and you receive that vibe. Our real fans do get what we’re about to a certain degree and certainly the spirit that exists, that’s what you feedback on. That’s why it’s so much fun to play for them — they’re so welcoming and so happy that we’ve decided to share three hours and the same venue with them. It’s kind of a love-fest going back-and-forth!

They also see you so much as underdogs even to this day. There’s a defensive tone among the fanbase about the band not quite getting its due. Yet there’s been these weird manifestations of Rush love in movies or books lately and even your first Rolling Stone profile in years and years. Have you witnessed some kind of change?

It kind of polarizes some fans. Some of them love the fact that we’re suddenly getting mainstream attention. Others don’t — they like the fact that we were their private Idaho. We went to the premiere of that movie I Love You Man, which we appear in. Somebody sent me some article that had some comments from fan blogs and some of them were upset that Neil and I went to the premiere, thinking going to a movie premiere was not a Rush thing to do. I thought that was really interesting and strange. But we went and it was okay and we all survived and our fans survived as well. No one was injured in the appearance.

I Love You Man really keyed in on Rush’s value as a pretext for male bonding, too.

That movie is something we witness every night! My only regret is, it did a disservice to the growing number of female Rush fans that we have. There’s no question that by and large are fans are male. And it is like that, they do react like that, and we see it. When we were making that movie in talking to the writer and director, we could confirm that this is something we witness many, many times from the stage looking out. The high fives and the hugs. And you break into a song and they’re just so happy you’re playing that song, and they’re singing it. It’s cool and it’s real for sure. And the girlfriend with her arms crossed, sitting there rolling her eyes, going, “What does he see in this band?” You can just sense that. You can always tell the girlfriends that have been dragged along, let’s put it like that. But one thing that the movie doesn’t portray and people don’t realize is we look out there and we see girlfriends who have dragged their boyfriends along — they’re the ones who are bored and can’t understand it. That’s a cool turnaround.

How did you enjoy doing your own special episode of The Colbert Report?

Again, some fans loved it, and some fans were upset that Stephen interrupted our performance with comedy. That’s because we were putting on this whole joke, where we’re playing this song that’s so long that it really can’t go on a 30-minute show. It was us who suggested, “Why don’t you just interrupt us and do some comedy shtick?” A lot of fans got the joke and thought it was great and some fans were upset that he dared to besmirch the song with his interruption. It was blasphemous behavior, let’s face it!

It’s interesting to see how the band’s always had a sense of humour and humility about itself yet there are people out there who want to fight on your behalf somehow.

I think that’s true. I’m sure that we have a lot of fans who have less of a sense of humor about us than we do. But that’s easier for us. To some of these fans, they’ve found something in our music that has really helped them or given them some sort of positive reinforcement or done something that has given them great comfort. And that’s a serious thing and it’s a serious thing in their lives. To make that into some sort of joke belittles what they’ve gotten out of it in their view. So I understand that. It’s completely in the eye of the beholder.

Have you felt similar about the music and musicians you’ve loved?

Oh yeah. The bands I grew up with were gods to me. And you don’t want your gods to come down off of the pedestal and be too normal. You want them to be godlike and untouchable. Very early in my career, I had the misfortune to meet one of my heroes, and he was really drunk and it was a very bad impression. I said to myself, “I don’t want to meet any more heroes.” Then I met another one years later, who was such a charming and good guy. What can you do? Everyone has the right to be too drunk in a situation, I suppose! You can’t control every encounter with a fan and sometimes you can’t be on your best when you meet someone.

Do you feel a great pressure in those meet-and-greet type situations? You don’t want to disappoint anybody.

It’s a very hard situation to learn how to deal with, but you do learn how to deal with it. For me, I just try to remember what it means to them. They get literally two minutes with us at the meet-and-greet to get their picture taken and say hello. It doesn’t matter if I’ve already met 50 people in the lineup. They’re still as excited as they were when I walked in there so I have to pay them respect of treating that encounter not too flippantly. You see some of them and they’ve been thinking about it all the time up the lineup, what are they going to say in their one minute, five times out of 10 it comes out all wrong. I really do feel for them. They’re tongue tied and they don’t know what to say. They want to say a whole lifetime worth of things and they only have a minute. It’s a tough situation for a fan, I think.

Jeez, trying to get this updated but I’ve been immersed for weeks in the building of IKEA shelving and the watching of Olympics. I’m going to publish longer versions of the interviews I did for my article about Rush in The Walrus. In the meantime, I want to put up my review of The Messenger, [READ MORE]

Two recent pieces of film writing here. One is for Eye Weekly in advance of TIFF Cinematheque’s The Best of the Decade: An Alternate View. The other is a review of A Single Man which ran in FFWD magazine in Calgary. January lethargy has a strong hold on me but I keep trucking. That spirit [READ MORE]

Songs from the Second Floor

Yes, it’s one of those stories. You can find it on the Eye Weekly site along with fresh reviews of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Nine. Here’s the full version with dubious best-of-decade Top 20 attached, freshly augmented with titles I forgot!

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As far as I know, Roland [READ MORE]

My mealy-mouthed new reviews of Avatar, The Young Victoria and Broken Embraces can all be found on the Eye Weekly site, along with this year-in-review essay. I include the lattermost piece here because it feels so damn blog-gy. The decade-in-review essay I wrote for next week is even bleaker. I may expand it for the [READ MORE]

Just a quick note to say how much I’m enjoying the panel discussion over at The Auteurs about Clive Holden’s very excellent Trains of Winnipeg. It’s getting me thinking about film distribution and consumption in new and interesting ways, even if I do feel rather out of my depth. Faced with so much seasoned artspeak [READ MORE]

This is one of the things I was most looking forward to this year, at least on a level of unmitigated geekery. James Quandt at TIFF Cinematheque (previously known by the less ungainly name of Cinematheque Ontario) has just released the results another of his best-of-decade polls of the best films according to a jury [READ MORE]

Yes, there must be gajillions of these being uploaded onto the web as I type these words. But I do honestly believe my review (also here at the CBC’s arts site) has the two best opening paragraphs I’ve written lately. So all you other Twi-heads types can suck it! Jason out.

All of the characters in [READ MORE]