By David Ross. I saw only a few Hollywood films this year. Among Oscar contenders, I caught The Social Network (a well-told tale within narrow parameters), Toy Story 3 (a film our great-grandkids will revere no less than we do), How to Train Your Dragon (Avatar without the brainless politics), and Inception (ludicrous spew of egomaniacal director).
What to say about Inception, a film so self-enamored that it twists itself into knots the better to quaff the fragrance of its own rear end? It’s just bad. Badly acted, badly directed, badly written.
Science fiction is supposed to trace the arc of human possibility and send us postcards from our own future, or at least from a conceivable future. Inception, like the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, imagines a factitious technological development and spins a strictly arbitrary tale. There’s no reason to give a damn. Inception is not about the implications of our present reality but about itself. It’s fixated on the superficial dazzle of its own self-enwound idea. Dr. Apuzzo’s review in these pages appeared upside down (see here), but it might equally have appeared in mirrored reverse, to indicate the film’s narcissus gaze.
And then there is Leonardo DiCaprio, the baby-faced siren who lures directors to their artistic deaths. DiCaprio’s fatal attraction is one of the great mysteries. Do directors remember Titanic and see nine zeros where a performance is supposed to be? He’s lumbering, puffy, and nerveless, genetically closer to Keanu Reeves than to Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro. Christopher Nolan is taken in – okay, we expect as much; but Martin Scorsese four times? DiCaprio has laid waste a whole generation of potentially good films, starting with Danny Boyle’s The Beach. Brad Pitt has also ruined his share of films, but he has not gotten his mitts on nearly as many prestige projects.
Ellen Page is cute enough, and I enjoyed Juno as much as the next nerd who likes to see his own kind hold its own on screen, but no actress is less destined to be the next Sigourney Weaver. She jumps, she runs, she shoots, all the while conveying the sense that she’d much rather be reading Zadie Smith in some nice coffeehouse of the mind or maybe working on her grad school applications.
I did see one more Oscar nominee, come to think of it. Exit through the Gift Shop is a strange piece of work: a documentary about an aborted documentary about street art. It follows the director of the aborted documentary, Thierry Guetta, as he evolves from vintage clothing store owner, to illicit street-art videographer, to daredevil street artist called Mr. Brainwash, to celebrity artist in his own right, despite having no training or experience whatsoever. Guetta now sells his Warhol-style lithographs for large sums at the highest strata of the auction world. Complicating matters, there’s speculation – probably correct, if I had to guess – that Exit through the Gift Shop is an elaborate prank perpetrated by its director, the legendary street artist Banksy, and that Guetta is merely a Banksy frontman. The Times of London floats this theory here.
Whether documentary or mockumentary, Exit through the Gift Shop is, at the very least, a postmodern artifact to be reckoned with. It begins by celebrating the authenticity of street-art heroes like Shepard Fairey (creator of the red, white, and blue Obama icon) and Banksy himself; it morphs into a deconstruction of postmodern inauthenticity as the putatively talentless Guetta manufactures a vast body of work in no time and successfully sells himself as the latest phenom to emerge from the streets; it morphs again into a vindication of Banksy on the assumption that Guetta has become rich and famous selling art that is, after all, Banksy’s.
What to make of this? Exit‘s pretzel-logic is no less involved than Inception‘s, but we find ourselves implicated in it; its maze is our maze, and we have a vested interested in finding our way out. Something, for once, is at stake.
Posted on March 8th, 2011 at 10:04am.