Inception

And then the street just stops and things start exploding, but not real explosions with fireballs and stuff like that, but disintegrations upon disintegrations as the very fabric of the universe comes apart. Yet noone gets hurt and noone seems to notice, except for the ones doing the dreaming and building and destroying the world and trying to figure out what’s real and what isn’t.

The girl from JUNO and the guy from “Third Rock” who did that great SNL monologue last season and the dude who played the medium in DRAG ME TO HELL and Cillian Murphy and some underwear model and that Watanabe cat from LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA and even the guy who played the good sergeant in PLATOON jump from one dream to the next, from dreams to dreams within dreams, reality shifting and colliding and rules changing. Some of them work for Leonardo DiCaprio, who has transformed into a Consequential Actor, and DiCaprio works for at least one of them, in a way, and then there’s this French woman whose character is named Mal (which either means Bad or that Christopher Nolan is a Browncoat) and she screws everything up, as French women are known to do, but we can’t know if she’s alive or dead because Nolan has written and directed his film with ambiguity in mind.

In an interview, DiCaprio likened the film to 8½, and I can see what he’s going for, because the last time my bride and I saw 8½, we had to call the sitter for extra time while we went to a café and had coffee and hashed it out again and again and again, as I imagine we will do from time to time until one of us dies. Since this film is more overtly a puzzle, however, I don’t know how much staying power the proposition has because at some point you just say, “Nolan is screwing with us” and leave it at that.

That’s the problem with ambiguity, at least in terms of plot. You, as the audience member, walk out of the film with these amazing images burning in your mind and the story you’ve just experienced coalescing to a digestible narrative, visions and characters and actors and ideas all jumbled together but slowly, as you digest them, smoothing out.

Once things do smooth out, you’re left with a puzzle, but not a thematic puzzle or a character development puzzle. You’re left with an analytic puzzle, trying to put together pieces that have been created to not quite fit. And you feel at bit let down, like there wasn’t as much there as you’d thought.

And you go on and see the next picture or go back to work and the movie subsides into your subconscious and, perhaps, into your dreams. And you think that you’ll try to see it again on the big screen and you may see it on DVD when it hits there and you’re glad you’ve kept up with the zeitgeist but the monologue keeps unspooling and there wasn’t enough there to merit night after night of consideration, nothing like a WOMAN IN THE DUNES that stick with you and reappears in your imagination even when you’re not necessarily even thinking about movies because it’s that damn good.

But you keep coming back to that exploding streetcorner and those cobblestones and chairs breaking into smaller and smaller pieces and you think, “Wow, that’s big-time summer filmmaking” and you think about the fact that even as you dismiss INCEPTION you’re still thinking about it and you respect it enough to try something completely different even though it probably won’t work and hey, maybe you’re wrong.

Maybe you’ve just seen Real Art.

Zombieland

We’ve seen the zombie horror film, the zombie action film, even the zombie romantic comedy.  What’s next?  With ZOMBIELAND, it’s the zombie coming of age film.

I’ve gotta tell ya – I like zombies.  They’re great monsters, defying all logic (How does zombie metabolism work?  What do they eat when they run out of brains?  Why don’t we ever see Harryhausenesque skeleton zombies?  Ok, that last one’s easy – because then they’d be scary skeletons, not zombies.  Work with me here, people.).  Like great monsters, artists can adapt them to nearly any kind of story.  And they’re cheap to make – get a bunch of college kids together, buy ‘em thrift store clothes, cover them in corn starch and licorice (for that dried blood look), and feed ‘em chicken wings and beer for a day, and you’ve got half your cast right there.  And I like coming of age stories.  It’s hard to find one’s place in life, and it’s easy to relate to other who are trying to do so.  Put the two together, and you have a win on concept alone.

Fortunately, ZOMBIELAND works not just in concept, but execution.  Jesse Eisenberg (also known as Michael Cera’s Michael Cera), desperately needs to find his place in the world.  Yeah, he needs to find his place in a world filled with zombies, but still.  He needs a role model, a girl friend, and someone to look up to him.  Can he do it?  Well, will college kids work for chicken wings and beer?  There you go.  The story bops along from one episode to the next, maintaining its sardonic sense of humor and its joy of zombie smashing throughout.  It never stops being fun, it never stops having fun, and it never ceases to entertain.

Yeah, SHAUN OF THE DEAD covered much of the same territory and, frankly, did much of it better.  But ZOMBIELAND does fine.  If you like zombies and you like coming of age stories, you’re sure to like ZOMBIELAND.