Author: Jason Apuzzo

By Jason Apuzzo. As I mentioned several days ago, critical tongues are starting to loosen on Inception, as at least a few sensible critics are starting to call the film what it actually is … which I will be telling you more about later this week.

The latest evisceration of Inception (coming right on the heels of David Edelstein’s much-discussed attack on the film) comes from the marvelous Rex Reed today, writing in The New York Observer.  Reed’s review is a delightful, witty take-down that more or less encapsulates my own view of Nolan’s work – which is essentially that his films are always less than they seem, not more.

So what’s going on here?  Why has it taken so long for serious film writers to begin evincing skepticism toward Christopher Nolan’s work?  The reason is fairly simple: many critics were taken aback a few years ago when Nolan’s The Dark Knight did as well as it did, and are now trying to be ahead of the curve.  Or another way of putting it: a lot of critics don’t want to be on the wrong side of fanboys.  We have no such fears here.

Allow me to quote extensively from Mr. Reed’s artful and acerbic demolition of the much-indulged Nolan:

At the movies, incomprehensible gibberish has become a way of life, but it usually takes time before it’s clear that a movie really stinks.  Inception, Christopher Nolan’s latest assault on rational coherence, wastes no time. It cuts straight to the chase that leads to the junkpile without passing go, although before it drags its sorry butt to a merciful finale, you’ll be desperately in need of a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

Writer-director Nolan is an elegant Hollywood hack from London whose movies are a colossal waste of time, money and I.Q. points. “Elegant” because his work always has a crisp use of color, shading and shadows, and “hack” because he always takes an expensive germ of an idea, reduces it to a series of cheap gimmicks and shreds it through a Cuisinart until it looks and sounds like every other incoherent empty B-movie made by people who haven’t got a clue about plot, character development or narrative trajectory.

Like other Christopher Nolan head scratchers-the brainless Memento, the perilously inert Insomnia, the contrived illusionist thriller The Prestige, the idiotic Batman Begins and the mechanical, maniacally baffling and laughably overrated The Dark Knight – this latest deadly exercise in smart-aleck filmmaking without purpose from Mr. Nolan’s scrambled eggs for brains makes no sense whatsoever. Is it clear that I have consistently hated his movies without exception, and I have yet to see one of them that makes one lick of sense. It’s difficult to believe he didn’t also write, direct and produce the unthinkable Synecdoche, New York. But as usual, like bottom feeder Charlie Kaufman, Mr. Nolan’s reputation as an arrogant maverick draws a first-rate cast of players, none of whom have an inkling of what they’re doing or what this movie is about in the first place, and all of whom have been seen to better advantage elsewhere.

I’d like to tell you just how bad Inception really is, but since it is barely even remotely lucid, no sane description is possible … Through the use of computer-generated effects, buildings fold like cardboard containers, cars drive upside down and the only way you can wake up within the dream is death. None of this prattling drivel adds up to one iota of cogent or convincing logic. You never know who anyone is, what their goals are, who they work for or what they’re doing. Since there’s nothing to act, the cast doesn’t even bother. It’s the easiest kind of movie to make, because all you have to do is strike poses and change expressions. …

Inception is the kind of pretentious perplexity in which one or two reels could be mischievously transposed, or even projected backward, and nobody would know the difference. It’s pretty much what we’ve come to expect from summer movies in general and Christopher Nolan movies in particular, but I keep wondering: Can he do anything of more lasting value? He’s got vision, but creating jigsaw puzzles nobody can figure out and using actors as puppets who say idiotic things, dwarfed by sets like sliding Tinker Toys, doesn’t seem like much of an accomplishment to me.

I’ll be weighing-in on Inception myself later in the week, but this will do for now.

Posted on July 14th, 2010 at 2:48pm.