Inception

Dreamscapes contain valuable corporate secrets. Hidden within the depths of one's psyche lie descriptive vaults and tumultuous treasures which competitors ruthlessly seek to discover. In Christopher Nolan's Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb) and a team of elite surrealists are experts in the art of extraction, an architecturo-scientific technique which enables thieves to enter the dreams of their quarry and learn volatile and valuable information. Basically, chords, chemicals, and a mysterious brief case allow a group of individuals to share a dream. The dream's form is designed by Cobb's architect while its content is filled with the victim's experiences. After the individual bearing the sought after information falls into a drug induced sleep, everyone else joins his or her dream, doing their best to avoid being detected by her or his subconscious (many persons in prestigious positions have trained their subconscious to recognize extractors and fight back). Extraction's opposite is known as inception, the placing of an alien idea into someone's subconscious so that it appears as if it was self-generated. Inception is thought to be impossible, but when a Japanese businessperson (Ken Watanabe as Saito) intent on breaking up a global monopoly offers Cobb the chance to be forgiven for his American crimes and return home to see his family, he accepts, and begins placing the necessary mechanisms in order (the individual is granted the opportunity to rejoin his community if he can effectively shatter a universal).

Problems: while dreaming, Cobb's diseased ex-wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) consistently appears, takes sides with the victim's subconscious, and attempts to thwart his efforts. Usually when you die within a dream you wake up, but the drug used during inception operations is so potent that if your life ends while dreaming you are cast into limbo, and you may stay there for decades while only minutes pass in the real world. In order for inception to work, you need to suggest the idea to your prey at three different levels. Hence, in the real world you are sleeping. In the first stage of the dream world you wake up, find the individual to whom you are attached, make the requisite suggestion, and are then forced to enter a deeper level of dreaming in order to make the suggestion again. While in this secondary level, one member of your team must remain in the first level and prevent the primary dreamer's subconscious from ending your mission. The process repeats itself until you reach the third level at which point it is thought that the idea has been planted with enough cohesiveness to undoubtably produce results in the real world. Hence, you need to be able to militaristically maneuver within a tailored dreamscape wherein you must also execute a precise plan requiring the coordinated efforts of at most four groups of resolute individuals. The defences against which you contend are determined and hostile and the environment in which you are situated is an organized chaotic psychological cataclysm.

Inception's subject matter is deep and skillfully crafted. The execution of the plot contains several well-timed peaks and valleys which dextrously establish an energetic if not schizophrenic ambience. It's definitely dense. A significant portion of the film unreels like a slick lecture but some of the principle points could have still used some more elaboration (why do the different layers of the dreaming have distinct temporal coordinates for instance [it would have been outrageously cool if Neil Gaiman's Dream had somehow explained this!]) . Nevertheless, it's pretty stunning visually and demanding intellectually, not only in regards to the narrative's hefty overt dimension, but also in relation to its tantalizing and ambiguous ending (stop reading if you haven't seen it), which suggests that the entire film was simply Cobb's dream, and would explain why he's the only character whose personal experience is manifested while inhabiting 'someone else's.' To create a work that has at least two layers of critically motivational depth in an exciting fashion that directly deals with issues of individuality, corporate politics, marriage, family, scientific exploration, globalization, and so on, while indirectly interrogating any pedagogical institution (for me the film's dreamworld is that of an educational structure's relationship to a political agenda and the difficulties of ever successfully planting a dominant idea in the minds of its rebellious students [one level elementary, then secondary, then post-secondary]) is exceptional, and Inception is the best Sci-Fi Thriller I've seen in a long time. A shape-shifting analytical delineation of the synthetic, Inception multidimensionally interrogates what it means to dream, while efficiently disseminating its controversial characteristics.

Very real.

Crude

An oil company moves into your jungle home, sets up shop for 26 years, leaves, and your environment's polluted to hell. You dig beneath the ground and instead of soil you find toxic sludge. Your iridescent drinking water stinks like petrol and tastes rancid. Cancer rates in your village are through the roof and you can't afford medical treatment. Your culture and associated way of life has been drastically destabilized by industrial runoff and you've been seeking financial retribution from a dismissive multinational for a seemingly endless period of time. Joe Berlinger's well-rounded documentary Crude provides an intricate examination of the infamous Amazon Chernobyl case, wherein 30,000 Indigenous inhabitants of Ecuador have taken Chevron to court. Berlinger presents viewpoints from both sides, the Chevron reps claiming they cleaned up their mess (to the tune of 40 million) and that PetroEcuador (the company who took over production in the 90s) is to blame. The Indigenous plaintiffs recognize PetroEcuador's crimes and have a separate lawsuit on the back burner quietly steeping. But for now it's Chevron on the hook, sued for 27 billion, trying to justify their position by blaming the sharp increase in cancer rates on poor sewage treatment, claiming there are acceptable levels of hydrocarbons in the water, and boasting that their environmental record is spic and span. If you ask me, based upon Berlinger's filmic evidence as well as the testimony of Steve Donziger, Pablo Fajardo, and several local residents, Chevron must think we're drinking volcanic glasses of idiot juice if we're to believe their side of the story. They definitely cleaned up something, and drawing the line where Chevron's guilt ends and PetroEcuador's begins is complicated to say the least. But these people are suffering, they weren't suffering before Chevron (or Texaco) showed up, and they're living and breathing the effects of Chevron's environmental degradation day in and day out, period. Hopefully the international attention surrounding the case will help speed up the legal process so that these people can be justly compensated for the scurrilous and foul way they've been treated.

Avatar

James Cameron's Avatar is a science fiction treat for both environmentalists and epic film lovers alike. On the far off planet of Pandora, a greedy corporation is mining a precious mineral known as unobtainium, many deposits of which lie beneath sacred portions of the planet's lush forest. The indigenous Na'vi take none to kindly to the intrusion but have learned to live somewhat peacefully with their militaristic human neighbours. Until those neighbours decide it's time to destroy their revered Hometree, a scurrilous act which unites the Na'vi tribes for a final showdown around their venerated Tree of Souls. Leading them is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic marine who, thanks to a remarkable scientific development, is able to inhabit and navigate a Na'vi body while sleeping in a special tank. Is his leadership divine? Has he been chosen by Eywa, the Na'vi's most prominent deity, to restore balance to the planet? Will his relationship with Na'vi beauty Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) bear forbidden fruit? Or will Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) and his bombastic military commando sidekick Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephan Lang) wipe out the Na'vi and have their way with Pandora's plunder?

The ending appealed to me although it's somewhat frustrating insofar as it's only a movie. It's a lot of fun and I probably would have rated it much higher if I was still fourteen. Nothing really that new presented and honestly, I preferred Avatar's prototype, Dune. Solid reimagining of Herbert's classic novel, nonetheless, which should find a massive, enthusiastic audience.

No End in Sight

Charles Ferguson's new documentary No End in Sight presents a coherent explanation for the chaotic situation in Iraq. Ferguson explores how bureaucratic incompetence, managerial inexperience, naive idealism, and short-sighted decision making have turned Iraq into a bloody, vicious war zone. With an estimated 600, 000 Iraqi citizens dead, the future of the Iraq conflict looks grim, and Ferguson places the blame on a relatively small number of high ranking members of the Bush administration who theorized a strategy to maintain order in Iraq without reference to any sense of practical detail. The most notable mistakes were the dismissal of the Iraqi army, taking away the jobs of 500, 000 skilled military personnel and replacing them with rhetoric, the disbanding of the government, taking away another 50, 000 jobs from people well versed in the intricate details of governing the Iraqi people (replacing them with recently graduated students with no knowledge of Arabic), and the fact that the American Army permitted the citizen's of Baghdad to loot the city from top to bottom, leaving the American occupational bureaucracy with little to no infrastructure to begin the extremely complicated business of administering a foreign country. Ferguson's interview's skillfully illustrate the disastrous consequences of acting before planning, of making split-second decisions affecting millions of lives without forethought. It's as if a small proportion of the Bush Administration decided to invade a country over breakfast, made up their plan for the invasion over lunch, stopped for a quick nap, and then executed their plan over dinner. The future for Iraq looks interminably grim, and, according to Ferguson’s presentation, it seems as if stability is something generations of innocent Iraqis will never have the pleasure of experiencing.

Immortal

Watched the Enki Bilal film Immortal this evening and was thoroughly impressed. Its uniformly moderate pace was aptly complemented by its multi-dimensional plot which contains a huge cast of monsters (one of whom looks like he swam out of The Last Starfighter), confused lovers, curious scientists, and Egyptian Gods. The plot unravels as follows: its 2095 in New York City and a blue-skinned girl is kidnapped by Eugenics Corporation who hopes to perform experiments on her body in exchange for official identification. A cryotube malfunctions and frees a prisoner responsible for leading an alien rights movement some thirty years in the past (who holds all kinds of nasty secrets in his head concerning the degenerate practices of Eugenics Corporation). Concurrently, the Egyptian God Horis arrives in town with some of his fellow deities and is granted one week by Anubis to travel around in the pursuit of finding someone with whom to procreate. Great sci-fi romance which would go well with wine, cheese and pomegranate.