I'm convinced that Nolan and maybe his brother listened to the Alan Watts lectures from the 60s - because there were several of them where he talks about the mechanics by which dreams within dreams would work as well as concepts describing the matrix

Didn’t think I could love you guys more! 😍 Inception sucks! It says so much about his lack of imagination that *THAT* is what he’d come up with when given the chance to play around in the dream realm. It’s all about “Paprika”!

What about The Prestige?

Agreed. I haven’t seen this since it was in the theater. When people ask about movies that explore dreams I recommend Paprika. I guess this is good for the action/sci-fi fans, but for me dreams are special and this was a bland take on them. I especially hated the “background characters as immune system attack” idea. You could do so many weirder things with that. People in my dreams are like robots, wandering around with a limited number responding to whatever is happening. Someone will attack by just walking up and grabbing me. It doesn’t hurt but it’s like they’re stuck to me and I can start yelling and tearing them apart and everyone else just walks around us uninterested. Mix it up. Make it unpredictable and bizarre instead of just a gun fight every time. The main problem for me was I couldn’t connect with any of the characters. The shaper woman’s curiosity and wonder at the dream world is the only positive element I remember. If I remember right the main guy is trying to take his children from their stable caregiver and use the dirty money to go on the run with them? I thought that was awful so I just kind of wanted to see the heist fail. I’ve seen people say the whole thing is supposed to still be in his dream but if that’s the intent it went so over my head it would just add a whole other layer of unsatisfying. Also watching Inception in the theater marks the first time I realized my hearing was degrading. Some characters mumbled so much I missed half their dialogue. I’ve heard that is a bad film-making style Nolan uses for “realism.” This is one of many reasons I’m happy to wait for most movies to come to streaming so I can watch at home with subtitles on.

Bro, I almost forgot to ask: Dreamscape. The screenplay was not written by Zelazny, but I think he did the story treatment. (And now I have to eat my words, b/c in another comment I requested you guys do more books and less movies). Dreamscape is awesome.

I agree, this whole film was really obviously a string of scenes they wanted to film and they wrote a story loosely around those scenes. The result is a muddled mess. And I'm 100% positive that's how it was written because he did the exact same thing with Tenet... he had a bunch of scenes in his head and he wrote a movie around them. The result is fun to look at, but makes absolutely no sense. These films seem determined to use real-world physics to attempt to tie them to the world we know, and then a second later the physics goes out the window and random things happen. And it just ends up being really frustrating to watch, because obviously a great deal of thought went into specific details, but then really important things like continuity are just fudged. And when you have films specifically about continuity and the continuity doesnt work... it's just mess.

yes, I agree 100% not _terrible_ but not quite even good. very mid 🖖

Just about every Christopher Nolan movie has something super dumb about it, but they're all still usually still worth watching. Batman Begins with the stupid steam gun that somehow doesn't vaporize everybody it touches, The Dark Knight with the crispy Two Face in the (what felt like) last few minutes of the movie. The Dark Knight Rises with the trapped cops and bad audio and open daylight punch fighting (uncharactistic of Batman), needlessly bad audio of Tenet, the weak nuke going off in Oppenheimer that would've benefitted from CGI. It's like Nolan needs more people on staff to call him out on dumb stuff before calling the movie done.

I completely get where you are coming from. Inception felt like I should like it as a sci fi fan but I didn't. Good Yang hat - wish he was running! I'd really like to hear your thoughts on the sci fi movie - The Keep.

I recently found your channel. An absolute gold. I don't know why KZfaq doesn't recommend channels such as yours. I found it only after searching about Zelazny.

I unabashedly love Inception but I get where you come from. Guess I could address some of your points, but you can keep on living perfectly without me writing them…rewatching the film 20 times clears most stuff you mention and I’m the kind of guy who likes to rewatch puzzle films 😅 Suffice to say, Inception is a film about filmmaking- movies are dream machines and a good movie does inception to the audience - when the film came out the tag was “your mind is the scene of the crime” which indeed it is. And yeah, the snow stuff is an obvious OHMSS homage!

The chair thing works, as you say, because of "dream logic" but the logic you explore is still too rooted in the real world. The dream logic should go something like this: a chair does not move so long as someone is sitting in it, so she can sit in the chair and keep it from moving even though the physics doesn't work out. As for her leaving the chair, the logic would be something like: a thing (or person) only exists in the dream while you are looking at them, so as soon as he climbs out the window, and loses sight of his wife, she can simply cease to exist, thus leaving the chair (in this cease, ceasing to exist is not the same as dying, she may cease to exist on the chair because the exists somewhere else, somewhere that the dreamer's attention is currently focused).

Ugh, Interstellar. Some cool stuff in there (loved the robot), but all the faux-deep BS really turned me off. Pretty much in agreement with you on Inception... a fun action flick, but so many inconsistencies.

15:00 _Chekhov's Gun_ is the name of that narrative principle. Based on the priciple that if something is given some kind of value or importance in the first acts, then it should be used and shown its importance in one of the following or final acts of the story.

I thought it was just me. I enjoyed interstellar, and the Prestige (not loved). But, Inception just pissed me off. I can't stand Dunkirk or Tenet...and saw an hour of Oppenheimer.

i think you're overselling how much action is in the movie. i have to wonder how many people would considered it a fun action movie.

Omg you should watch "synecdoche, new york" after this.. it's sooo good! And also quite dreamy

Why you gotta do my favorite movie like this :(

Inception was OK at best. Highly overrated pseudo-intellectual fluff. I feel like a lot of the love and praise for the film was an Emperor's got No Clothes kind of phenomena.

I find Christopher Nolan is so overhyped. This movie was a disappointing Hollywood rip off of the excellent Japanese film Paprika. You should watch that next and do a comparison.

I never watched Interstellar. Everything about it sounded dumb and fake scientific. Yes, it did something cool by figuring out what black holes look like, but everything else was Friendship Is Magic level intelligent. Memento sounds more interesting, but the channel Analyzing Evil demystified it and made it more horrifying than people indicate.

I completely agree. Christopher Nolan is so overrated. He's a bad story teller and his films are humourless and bombastic. He really likes to deliberately go over the audience's heads for no reason than just to make himself look clever. He ruined '2001, A Space Odyssey' by tinting it yellow. What a pretentious egomaniac. He should have given up after making videos for his mother's pop group. And why is Leonardo so miserable throughout this film? He has a permanent scowl on his face all the way through!

Ah. The ubiquity of opinions and certain body parts.

I prefer your brother... just kidding!😂

Too much hand-waving.

I’m not a Nolan or Villeneuve fan. They make pretty movies with little substance.

Thank you. Nolans Oppenheimer is a masterpiece. But the ones he writes with his Muppet brother are nonsense wrapped in a thin layer of pseudo-intelligence

It seems irrational (to me) to be hyper-rational about a dream (i.e., his impossibly relying upon his wife's weight to sustain his rappelling down the building). In that scene, at least, the film is not violating its own logic/reality.