Inception

I finally get a feeling of how exciting it would be to be living when Stanley Kubrick was belting out his would-be classics. Of all the terrific directors' movies I've chanced upon, Christopher Nolan's probably the only one who comes as close to Kubrick's genius as possible. If The Prestige and Dark Knight weren't proof enough, we have Inception. Though I'm a bigger fan of the Coen brothers than of Nolan, after Inception, it's a no brainer as to who's better.

But here's the problem with Inception. While I willingly appreciate the way the idea was handled, I also I rue the fact that the idea was even handled. Let me explain.

Nolan has evolved with his movies, none of which was a simple write-and-shoot-for-the-money kinda movie.

Starting with Doodlebug, his movies have always had that superbly layered sub-text under it. Even Following, which apart from being a brilliant heist movie had noir shades to it, had that. In Inception, Nolan's given us the biggest glimpse into his mind (so far?). While I plainly love the concept, I am also frightened that this might be the biggest idea in his head. Inception might just be that masterpiece from Nolan - like Kubrick's 2001:A space odyssey or Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - very sadly, there can only be one such masterpiece. Which brings me to my point that I'd be immensely surprised to see something "better" coming from Nolan. While I want that to happen, I just don't see it happening. Before you start dismissing this, let me substantiate.

Shocking though this might sound, the idea for Inception seems to have been taken, or inspired, from a couple of episodes in Futurama. In that episode, the protagonist's (Fry's) mind is seeded with an advertisement for undergarments as soon as he runs out of his last clean pair. In another episode, Fry is taken back in time, in his dream of course, by some evil forces in order to gain a particular bit of information from him. Sounds similar? While these ideas were handled quite comically by the ever-funny Matt Groening, Inception had taken this to a whole new tangent with its sheerly brilliant screenplay.

SPOILER ALERT

In Inception, we're taken into a world where dreams can be accessed as easily as your bank account. Nolan gives us no timeline and no dateline and he doesn't tell us how the machine used to access the dreams work. Thanks Mr Nolan for that. To put this movie under a specific genre would be quite hard. In paper, it is heist, with a team coming together to perform an activity, much like a bank robbery. Then we have the unmistakable noir traits. Then come the sci-fi aspect.

Inception is a mix of many ideas into one. While Nolan could've made ten different movies out of the ideas he used for Inception, he chose to culminate them into just one film.

The aspect of designing the dreams, the need for an architect, is where Ellen Page comes in. Contrary to popular opinions, Page's character is probably the most important one in the movie, even more than Leonardo Di Caprio's. The initial scenes where Di Caprio explains to Page the ways the dream architecture works, he gives her the first insight into his own head.

Clearly one of the best scenes in the movie is where Page creates the glass walls and turns them towards Di Caprio to show him the layers in his own mind, to show that he is in fact, as confusing as any other human. This was essential, as he was a closed book and he needed to come to terms with the fact that Page had the power to reach inside of him. His reaction plainly shows that he didn't quite expect this from her. This whole sequence, unmistakably, is a reference to Nolan's earlier work, Doodlebug.

In the line of movies that explore the possibility of an alternate reality, Inception follows Shutter Island. Strangely, Di Caprio stars in both. I wouldn't be surprised if he comes up with his own movie on this theme!

More references flow out throughout the movie. The 'paradox' staircase is plainly lifted from Escher's painting, which, incidentally, is his take on Einstein's theory of relativity.

The much debated 'kick' in the movie is a real-life phenomenon that every one of us (well, those who sleep at least) experiences. It's the mind waking itself up, in case that initial burst of sleep was accidental. That of course, helps when you sleep, behind the wheel for example.

The dialogues were a disappointment, at least in some places. The characters kept asking the obvious questions to Di Caprio when they were confused, Ellen Page especially, and he was giving them such cliched answers. The answers weren't loaded and it was quite direct, which is such a waste of sound waves.

These are but very few references. And this is again why I think Nolan's beginning to run out of ideas. I sincerely hope he doesn't because he's one of the more exciting directors of our times. Scorsese, sadly, is a bit past his prime, and there's only so much about James Cameron you can like. Somehow, strangely, Clint Eastwood is still churning out some excellent stuff (Grand Turino is better than some of his earlier works) and then there's Guy Ritchie, who also, is running out of themes. The Coen Brothers, who make some of the best mind-fcuk movies, (some even better than Gilliam I suppose) are way cooler than Nolan. But Nolan gets the prize just because he's more popular and frankly, quite brilliant.

But despite all this, I love the movie. Just for the sheer guts the man had making something of this scale. The number of theories doing the rounds online based solely on the final shot is a testimony to his creation. Nolan's unleashed a beast of a movie. It left me thinking a great deal and the volume of deconstruction required for this movie by itself is mind blowing.

This and That..

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a time of desperation, it was a time of utter contentment. It was up, it was down. It was the freaking roller coaster ride, it was the most satisfying cruise.

It was walking all that distance in the sun, it was whirring away in the bike. It was being scolded early in the morning for being insufferably wrong, it was being correct. It was the need to emphasise, it was not giving a damn. It was unsurmountable guilt, it was plain innocence.

It was wanting to catch her eye, it was giving her the slip. It was not knowing what to do if the attention was caught, it was showing her the finger. It was agonizing to even face her, it was joy beyond imagination to meet her. It was unbelievable suspense trying to figure it out, it was plain as day what the intentions were. It was spending ages thinking of ways to impress her, it was slitting away to another room at the sight of her. It was concern when she jabbed her toe, it was the poker face.

It was being me, it was being myself. It was being the usual stupid self, it was a brain wave moment. It was a moment of unforgivable foolishness, it was an epiphany. It was self-depreciation, it was boasting. It was gratitude, it was ungratefulness. It was self-sacrificing, it was an ego the size of a mountain.

It was happiness, it was sadness. It was the idiocy, it was a stroke of genius.

It was me, it was stupid. It was me, it was brilliant.

The insomnia creeps up

It's kinda boring to be an insomniac. One spends the nighs wide awake like an owl, and the days feeling all tired and sleepy, except when one decides to hit the bed, one doesn't sleep for more than a couple of hours, after which one wakes up like one's been jolted with a micro ampere of electricity. (Seriously, even a single ampere will kill one.)

Insomnia makes one type long sentences with a lot of commas in them. One also looks up random and useless trivia.

When one spends close to twenty hours a day being awake, wide or bleary eyed, one is exposed to a lot of things that normal people aren't. (The assumption being that anybody who doesn't spend twenty hours a day awake is normal.) And this is fun. This is vital information that one can use to taunt the normal folk.

For example, if anybody says that Chennai is a concrete jungle and one can no longer hear the birds chirp early in the morning, they are lying. Well, they aren't, because more often than not, they aren't awake during these early hours. One is, and that makes one privy to the information that birds do chirp, rather happily if one might add, at around 5 am in one's neighbourhood.

One leaves work at around 1250 these days. One watches the first half of the midnight football match and leaves immediately to get back home before the second half starts. It's just five kms away anyway. The fact that one has to make it before the second half starts is enough motivation to torture one's bike to get one home fast enough, not that one needs the motivation, one usually rides like a maniac who's rushing to a hospital for a kidney transplant. When one rides that fast, there aren't really many things one can notice en route. But there are some startling things that stand out.

Like this junction in T Nagar for example. The usually crowded junction, which is literally packed with traffic that measures its moves, like somebody's going to nuke them if they move too many metres at once, is absolutely devoid of any human life. A stray dog is happily sleeping. A couple of dogs are probably engaged in coitus, it's hard to say when one's going that fast. There is a lone ice cream vendor who's cycling to wherever he's cycling. One stopped him once and asked him for something to eat and he said that only the ice creams above 15 bucks are available and since one doesn't earn and one is still shamelessly mooching off his parents, one refused to buy the ice cream. One put up a long face and rode back home in solitude.

Since one's house plays neighbours to a liquor store, one finds many drunk and passed out men strewn along the route to one's home. Usually, the drunk men have enough sense to pass out on the platform. Some do spill out to the road. Then there are those who are right in the middle of the road. When the head light in one's bike doesn't work, this can turn out to be quite a sticky situation. One is often required to swerve at the last moment, thereby either coming too close to the platform, or waking up a sleeping dog. The dog which was sleeping till one decided to wake it up then chooses to chase one down till it is satisfied that the noise of the bike's engine drowns its barks.

It is quite a different world out there when the normal folk sleep and insomniacs roam around clueless. It's a world that one must not miss.

"With the birds I share this lonely view"

A day of laxatives

What a day it was yesterday.

First, the old pint drinking men turned up in Red and played their hearts and dialysis machines out. It was agonizingly slow to watch them, but they seem to have found one of their balls and netted it. England won their first match 1-0, making it to the round of 16. All the barmen in England were financially secure for the rest of the year.

Second, the pipe munching, accent carrying, lip curling engineers from the fatherland threw a pie in their supporters face who lined themselves with White, Red and Gold by marching out in Black and Gold. With their oft repeated German Precision, they finally threw one back into the net well past the half way mark and made it through to the next round. To cap it, in the next channel, the Kangaroos defeated the Serbs, rejoiced and then cried as the news trickled in that they still didn't make it to the round of 16. It is back to bucketing kangaroo poop for them.

The best of all news though, came well into the night.

The Duracell bunnies now have names, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. They played the most epic match ever. The match went on for so long that someone hit a bright idea and created a Twitter account called GrassCourt_18 and started tweeting the pains of being a grass court at the Wimbledon where two men played on like they had nothing else to do. When Mahut finally won, erm - the appeal to call it a day thanks to the deteriorating light, the match was suspended at the last set being tied at 59 games a head.

Court no 18 lives to be stomped on by an angry Frenchman and a resilient American for another day.

My Ineptitude

When do we start distinguishing between a pain that is physical and one that is psychological? There are medicinal proofs that psychological pains can translate into physical pains. That, by any stretch of logic, means that either your brain can't quite distinguish between the two or your brain decides that this pain is worth crossing the line into the other.

Is this rewritable?

*****

It's been fun the past week. I managed to hoodwink my colleagues to think that I can write something and that it is worth publishing on a newspaper. It was interesting in the sense, I realised how much of a non-fit I still am in this job. There are obviously lessons that I learned and lessons that I didn't recognise. Honestly, a byline is over-rated. So you wrote something and it came on the paper, big deal! It doesn't affect the way you process things, does it? It still doesn't change the fact that you'll throw up a million masks to every single new person you meet. It has no bearing on the way you look at life, be it welcoming on cynical.

*****

It's funny how one single conversation can have heterogenous responses. It's funny how someone who you thought had half-a-decent idea of who you were says that they never expected some action from you.

*****

There are some people who bring a smile to my face. Then there's her. She's never failed to make me gleeful. She's never signed off without knowing that I've smiled. I try hard to do the same to her, but she's charming beyond compare. There's no one that compares with her.

It had been close to a year since we had a proper conversation, apart from the usual hi and bye on chat. It was a chat again and it was just for some twenty minutes. But even she would've been charmed.

It's not the things she says, it's not how she says it. It's not even how she puts it. She makes me stop. She makes it hard for me to think away from what she said. It's her, there's no arguing with the effects she has on me.

And the best part, she has no clue about all this.