Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” is right around the corner on July 19 and the veil of secrecy behind the film is slowly being lifted and some of that might be because Warner Bros. is thinking some audiences have no clue what the movie is about and therefore might not be as interested as some of the geeks, cineastes and fanboys who are clearly obsessed (yes, we kind of include ourselves here, we’re not fronting).
Why do we believe this to a degree? Several factors. For one, the “Inception” junket has already happened (we were sadly left out) and most major publications have seen the film, but there’s been nary a peep out there. Yes, there are strict embargo rules out there that Tweetheads are likely abiding by, but that doesn’t mean word of mouth doesn’t filter through other critics usually breathless raves, even under embargo come our way. That’s not the cast so far. WB have released a pair of clips to Hitfix who couch them by saying to some, the picture can “look seriously confusing.” To help parse the story ahead of its July 16 release date, Warner Bros. Pictures has released a pair of feature clips.”
That’s potentially us reading into things too much, granted, but the feedback we have heard from “Inception” so far…isn’t negative, just not the gushing raves we expected (but it’s only a small sampling of voices we’ve heard from). Either way, the clip (one is the old character teaser) are below the jump further down.
Meanwhile, the real press campaign (and not just the viral one) has started and one of the main features out so far is a pretty in-depth and big piece in the New York Times. Interestingly enough is, it turns out most of us are more cinematically schooled than Christopher Nolan is as the filmmaker admits he hadn’t seen Alain Resnais’ 1961 elliptical classic, “Last Year at Marienbad” until very recently.
The Times asked rather incredulously, “You’re making a movie about dreams and you hadn’t seen [‘Marienbad]’?
“Everyone was accusing me of ripping it off, but I actually never got around to seeing it. Funnily enough, I saw it and I’m like, Oh, wow. There are bits of “Inception” that people are going to think I ripped that straight out of ‘Last Year at Marienbad.’ Basically, what it means is, I’m ripping off the movies that ripped off “Last Year at Marienbad,” without having seen the original. It’s that much a source of ideas, really, about the relationships between dream and memory and so forth, which is very much what ‘Inception’ deals with. But we have way more explosions.”
The opaque and hypnotic, which is its own kind of refracted, lost-inside-a-dream haze was released on the Criterion Collection last year, so you really have no excuse to not see it (Arthouse Cowboy did a great piece on the DVD which you should read).
Incidentally, Leonardo DiCaprio admits he didn’t even quite understand the “Inception’ script when he first read it. “It was a very well written, comprehensive script, but you really had to have Chris in person, to try to articulate some of the things that have been swirling around his head for the last eight years.” Here’s that clip.