![Inception (2010) D: Christopher Nolan S: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page
As was my wont in most screenings I had gone to, I walked into Inception carrying four fingers of Kit Kat and a tetra pack of Chuckie. In each of the past screenings where I brought them in lieu of the more common popcorn and soft drink tandem, I ended up consuming them less than fifteen minutes into the film. Inception ran for 148 minutes, and within that relatively long period neither taking a break with my chocolate-covered cream-filled wafers nor taking a choco-bursting sip of my chocolate drink crossed my mind. In retrospect, how could either act possible have done so? When your mind is being messed with by an unusually mind-bending film, there’s no room for such delicious chocolatey prospects. Inception is that rare film which makes even the most dedicated chocolate fiend forget about his sweet tooth even when a couple of chocolate snack items are within his reach while watching it. In other words, Inception is so damn good.
Now that my weak, but sensible, attempts at chocolate metaphors are thankfully done and over with, allow me to try a different sort and then elucidate: Inception is a matryoshka doll of a film, its primary conceit being one which evokes the Edgar Allan Poe poem, A Dream Within A Dream. Most of the scenes in the film take place, as one of its several taglines declares, in “the architecture of the mind,” and its protagonist, Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo Caprio with echoes of his tormented character in Shutter Island), must take advantage of this architecture, to wit, the very nature and design of dreams, to accomplish with a special team of “dream invaders” his eponymous mission: to implant a critical idea into a person’s subconscious—or more specifically, sub-sub-subconscious. Admittedly, this concept of multi-layered communal dreaming, not without its own set of rules, may be difficult to follow at first, giving rise to apparent plot inconsistencies, but for the attentive and perceptive viewer the rewards are extremely gratifying. Like a well-crafted nesting doll, Inception is a creation in which surprises abound.
Almost every twist and turn of Inception is fueled by references to Jorge Luis Borges’s works. The main setting itself, the universe of dreams and their labyrinthine confines (indeed, as writer and director Christopher Nolan named the “dream architect” after Ariadne, who, in classical mythology, helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur’s maze), is unmistakably Borgesian, practically begging the film’s viewers to consider questions about reality and choice while witnessing with pulses racing and jaws agape an entire city fold in upon itself and men in suits defy the laws of physics in the complex manner of M.C. Escher and Stanley Kubrick.
And yet for all its mirroring of other artists’ sensibilities, Inception is also obviously a film made by no less than Mr. Nolan. Insulated from its moral and philosophical leanings, Inception is still an excellently choreographed actioner, belonging to a category of movies that has been elevated to new heights by Nolan with The Dark Knight. Inception is essentially a heist film where the robbers stick up someone’s mind rather than someone’s vault, where their object of pursuit is abstract rather than material. Inception is a high-speed caper that really holds its audience’s intelligence in high regard.
At film’s end, surely the most effective cut-to-black flourish in years, members of the audience are made to realize they’ve just snapped out of a two-and-a-half-hour multileveled shared dream designed by Christopher Nolan, a true architect of the mind if ever I’ve seen one. And like any other dream that is particularly good and exciting, it’s one I imagine most people who’ve seen it will want to have again. I know I do. Next time, though, I won’t bother with the chocolates. Endorphin rush? The film, masterful and mind-blowing, already has that covered.
[image via Pelikula Tumblr]](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5pmcsxMNo1qzz7axo1_500.jpg)
Inception (2010)
D: Christopher Nolan
S: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page
As was my wont in most screenings I had gone to, I walked into Inception carrying four fingers of Kit Kat and a tetra pack of Chuckie. In each of the past screenings where I brought them in lieu of the more common popcorn and soft drink tandem, I ended up consuming them less than fifteen minutes into the film. Inception ran for 148 minutes, and within that relatively long period neither taking a break with my chocolate-covered cream-filled wafers nor taking a choco-bursting sip of my chocolate drink crossed my mind. In retrospect, how could either act possible have done so? When your mind is being messed with by an unusually mind-bending film, there’s no room for such delicious chocolatey prospects. Inception is that rare film which makes even the most dedicated chocolate fiend forget about his sweet tooth even when a couple of chocolate snack items are within his reach while watching it. In other words, Inception is so damn good.
Now that my weak, but sensible, attempts at chocolate metaphors are thankfully done and over with, allow me to try a different sort and then elucidate: Inception is a matryoshka doll of a film, its primary conceit being one which evokes the Edgar Allan Poe poem, A Dream Within A Dream. Most of the scenes in the film take place, as one of its several taglines declares, in “the architecture of the mind,” and its protagonist, Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo Caprio with echoes of his tormented character in Shutter Island), must take advantage of this architecture, to wit, the very nature and design of dreams, to accomplish with a special team of “dream invaders” his eponymous mission: to implant a critical idea into a person’s subconscious—or more specifically, sub-sub-subconscious. Admittedly, this concept of multi-layered communal dreaming, not without its own set of rules, may be difficult to follow at first, giving rise to apparent plot inconsistencies, but for the attentive and perceptive viewer the rewards are extremely gratifying. Like a well-crafted nesting doll, Inception is a creation in which surprises abound.
Almost every twist and turn of Inception is fueled by references to Jorge Luis Borges’s works. The main setting itself, the universe of dreams and their labyrinthine confines (indeed, as writer and director Christopher Nolan named the “dream architect” after Ariadne, who, in classical mythology, helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur’s maze), is unmistakably Borgesian, practically begging the film’s viewers to consider questions about reality and choice while witnessing with pulses racing and jaws agape an entire city fold in upon itself and men in suits defy the laws of physics in the complex manner of M.C. Escher and Stanley Kubrick.
And yet for all its mirroring of other artists’ sensibilities, Inception is also obviously a film made by no less than Mr. Nolan. Insulated from its moral and philosophical leanings, Inception is still an excellently choreographed actioner, belonging to a category of movies that has been elevated to new heights by Nolan with The Dark Knight. Inception is essentially a heist film where the robbers stick up someone’s mind rather than someone’s vault, where their object of pursuit is abstract rather than material. Inception is a high-speed caper that really holds its audience’s intelligence in high regard.
At film’s end, surely the most effective cut-to-black flourish in years, members of the audience are made to realize they’ve just snapped out of a two-and-a-half-hour multileveled shared dream designed by Christopher Nolan, a true architect of the mind if ever I’ve seen one. And like any other dream that is particularly good and exciting, it’s one I imagine most people who’ve seen it will want to have again. I know I do. Next time, though, I won’t bother with the chocolates. Endorphin rush? The film, masterful and mind-blowing, already has that covered.
[image via Pelikula Tumblr]
18 July 2010 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/824346862
Not only is today the one day in David Nicholls’s bestselling novel, One Day, in which two star-crossed lovers (soon to be played by Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway in a film adaptation directed by An Education’s Lone Sherfig) meet every July 15 from 1988 through 2007, it is also the start of Powerbooks’s out-of-nowhere month-long Power Sale.
The promotional materials warn potential buyers of “blow-you-away prices.” Guess what. They’re not kidding. From now until August 15, customers of the specialty bookstore can avail of selected books with discounts of up to 80%, a fancy percentage which practically translates to a special “This copy only: P49.95” price tag on a number of titles, including these books I had the good fortune of finding not two hours ago.
- Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. I couldn’t find a copy of Mitchell’s most popular novel, Cloud Atlas, and at only 20% off, the hardcover edition of his latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is still too expensive for my purchasing power, so I settled for this paperback instead, which I gather is also among his best works.
- Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid by Lemony Snicket. “Life is a turbulent journey, fraught with confusion, heartbreak, and inconvenience. This book will not help.” Sold.
- Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus by Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot. I like that this is a satire of pseudo-intellectualism co-written by the author of the famous line, “Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind,” but not nearly as much as I like that its title is, at least to me, delightfully reminiscent of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
- End Zone and Valparaiso by Don DeLillo. I am not a huge fan of Mr. DeLillo. Heck, no.
- Bullet Points by Mark Watson. With a blurb by Stephen Fry (“Woody Allen and William Boyd have a bastard love-child and his name is Mark Watson.”) and a cover illustration by Tom Gauld (as recognizably quirky as any of his works on several books by the late Jose Saramago), this book earned its own bullet point in this post even before I read its title.
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. Lackluster title. Misleading name for a male author. One of TIME’s 100 Greatest Novels of All Time. I’ll be the judge of that.
- How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. I have never read a page written by Marcel Proust in my entire quarter-century of existence. Perhaps I never will. For one thing, his most famous work, In Search of Lost Time, reportedly has one-and-a-quarter-million words. I think I’d rather read Mr. Botton’s edifying words, which I guesstimate in this book are far fewer than in Mr. Proust’s masterpiece, for now.
- The Clothes They Stood Up In and The Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett. Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader was brilliant. This is simply me making like the protagonist of that book.
- How to Read a Novel: A User’s Guide by John Sutherland. Supposedly for optimum enjoyment of all of the above.
15 July 2010 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/815512523
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Halfway through the first chapter of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a character named Richard Enfield says, “I took the liberty of pointing out to my gentleman that the whole business looked apocryphal, and that a man does not, in real life, walk into a cellar door at four in the morning and come out with another man’s check for close upon a hundred pounds.” He conveys this to his lawyer cousin, Mr. Gabriel Utterson, as he recounts the odd story he has of the “gentleman,” a certain Mr. Edward Hyde, who one night deliberately trampled a little girl after she accidentally bumped into him. Several bystanders, including Mr. Enfield and the girl’s family, witnessed the incident and were quick to seize the offender. However, Mr. Hyde was just as quick to think up a way to appease them: he entered a nearby door and quickly produced a check for a substantial amount signed by one Dr. Henry Jekyll, a distinguished gentleman who, as it turns out, is one of Mr. Utterson’s clients.
I cite the above line of dialogue as I think that, as innocuous as it sounds, it is a near-perfect prefigurement of the essential characteristics of the excellent short novel where it is from. For one thing, it is spoken by a character in a burst of submission to gossip, thus itself qualifying as something of doubtful veracity, which in turn can also be said of the rest of the book. There’s the mention of a man apparently posing as another, claiming no less than the other’s signature as his own. However, it’s not the book’s subject, a man with a split personality, that lends an air of intriguing dubiousness to the narrative so much as the structure of the narrative itself. Stevenson’s authorial technique is one which allows for a spellbinding sense of mystery to hang relentlessly over his story. For the most part, the story is told by a narrator who only knows as much as the characters about what exactly is going on. But near the end Stevenson abandons the third-person narrative and transforms his novella into an epistolary tale, focusing on two revelatory letters, one written by Dr. Jekyll and the other by a colleague, addressed to Mr. Utterson, who I ought to point out is the real central character of the story, the fulcrum about which the two title characters move. But how much of the revelations contained in these letters, including Dr. Jekyll’s reflection on the duality of man (“Man is not truly one, but truly two.”), are true, when the circumstances under which they were created are already beyond Mr. Utterson’s (or indeed, anyone’s) belief?
What is not open to question, though, is Stevenson’s grace of style, as exemplified by the phrase, cellar door—arguably the most phonetically beautiful word combination in the English language—in Mr. Enfield’s quintessential line. Stevenson’s wife famously said that the story of Jekyll and Hyde came to her husband in a dream. It’s no wonder then that it reads like one, terrifying like a nightmare and at the same time exhilarating like a trance. His talent is particularly evident in his numerous, mostly gothic, dreamlike descriptions of unpleasant meteorological conditions the characters are forced to deal with. Following the murder of an old gentleman in the hands of Mr. Hyde, Stevenson writes:
“It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season. A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours…”
Then, when Mr. Utterson sets out to finally confront his client, the narrator observes:
“It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face.”
Like Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver’s Travels, and Moby Dick, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of those classic books whose stories most of us already know from somewhere, often from countless adaptations across various media and quick plot summaries stumbled upon while surfing Wikipedia, but haven’t actually read. We know it’s about a man who leads a double life, a man who oscillates between being the two title characters, one of whom is mostly good and the other downright evil, but how many of us, knowing full well that the entire text is available in the public domain, have actually gone out of our ways to experience the real deal?
I for one lament that my introduction to Stevenson’s landmark story was by way of Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde, a movie I remember watching on VHS with my family when I was in fourth grade. It starred Tim Daly as a descendant of Dr. Jekyll who, in a supposedly clever twist to the original story, transforms into a voluptuous woman played by Sean Young after an experiment gone awry. I was only ten then, naïve and easily pleased, and seeing a man metamorphose into a woman with long hair and ample breasts amused me to no end. It was not until fifteen years later, as I breezed through a Jon Gray-designed Headline Review “The Best Adventure Stories Ever” edition of the book which I found while rummaging through a bargain table in a secondhand book shop, that I realized what a travesty it was, even for a loose comedy film adaptation of this truly amazing short novel.
11 July 2010 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/794345042
![The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
During a recent visit to a branch of my favorite bookstore chain, less than a week after I finished reading Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, I saw three or four copies of the book displayed in the memoir/biography section. I couldn’t suppress a chuckle. It wasn’t because there were too few or too many books on display, a perceived indication of how well or how badly the book is selling or is expected to sell. Rather, it was because the book, whose content originally appeared in the pages of the London Review of Books, is actually neither a memoir nor a biography. It is, for the record, a work of prose fiction. I couldn’t blame the bookstore staff for putting copies of the book in the wrong aisle, though. They could have placed The Uncommon Reader in a section dedicated to another category of nonfiction, and I still would have understood their mistake. After all, The Uncommon Reader is about a person that has been the subject of many a nonfiction book. That person is none other than Her Majesty The Queen.
A quick and easy hundred-plus-page novella, The Uncommon Reader opens in medias res. Her Majesty, hosting a state dinner for the government of France, accosts the French president and asks him about his opinion on Jean Genet. But the president, having little to no knowledge about the French writer, can only respond to the Queen’s earnest interrogation with inward oligosyllables. “Bien sûr.” “Vraiment?”
Then, a section break brings the reader to the real beginning of the story. It’s a Wednesday, and Her Majesty’s prized corgis are all wrought up, barking madly at something outside the Buckingham Palace. She comes out to investigate the noise and sees that the object of her pets’ hostile behavior is a van, the Westminster mobile library that stops by the palace every week. She approaches the vehicle, apologizes to the driver-cum-librarian, and lest she be thought of as ill-mannered, asks if she may borrow a book. She returns to the palace clutching a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and although a week later it proves to be a less than satisfying book, she nonetheless feels obligated to get another one, preferably by a different author, from the traveling library. And then she gets another, and another…
Her Majesty declares herself an opsimath, one who learns (or in her case, reads) late in life, and assigns Norman Seakins, a kitchen boy with a predilection for books (especially those written by the likes of E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, and the previously mentioned Genet, i.e., gay authors) as her amanuensis, her secretary in affairs relating to her casual reading. Her real private secretary, Sir Kevin Scatchard, on the other hand, declares war against the Queen’s newfound obsession. He believes that her constant preoccupation is taking its toll on her sworn duties as head of the British monarchy, and he conspires with the equerries and servants to thwart the Queen’s bibliophilic pursuits. In one of the crusade’s numerous attempts—and doubtless one of the more memorable scenes in The Uncommon Reader—security confiscates a book that she leaves behind in the royal coach as she opens Parliament.
“When they arrived at the palace, she had a word with […] the young footman in charge, who said […] security may have thought it was a device. The Queen said: ‘Yes. That is exactly what it is. A book is a device to ignite the imagination.’”
She remains unencumbered, even by his beloved dogs, who seem to be in on the plot as well, growling at poor Norman every time they see him and chewing apart novels by Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt that are left unattended.
Apart from creating a hilarious and entertaining book that culminates in a remarkable surprise ending after much poking fun at various protocols of monarchy and interesting facets of royal life by positing an alternate history where the sovereign becomes oblivious to her responsibilities to the public as she pursues the hobby of reading, Alan Bennett, who also wrote the Tony Award-winning The History Boys, may have come up with one of the finest books about books ever written. The Uncommon Reader is a short but rewarding book that speaks to all passionate readers from all walks of life. It stresses, among other things, the implications of embracing the apparent hypertextuality that arises between books when one submits to the unique pleasures of reading.
Indeed, not since Italo Calvino’s superb If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler has the line, “one book leads to another,” been made to ring so true. In The Uncommon Reader, after a rather disappointing experience with Compton-Burnett’s novel, the Queen selects Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love for her sophomore book. Mitford’s choice of title and engaging prose augur well for the Queen as she finds the book quite enjoyable. And being the first in a trilogy, it sets off a search for its sequels, which in turn leads to more similar quests to find, discover, and stumble upon the Queen’s next big read. Already The Uncommon Reader ceases to be solely a genuinely funny situation comedy and manifests itself as a portrait of the pursuit of literature, one that every common reader, that is, one who reads for pleasure as well as a reader without noble rank, can easily relate to and perhaps even consider as a prototype for one’s own memoir.](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l558prl0PK1qzz7axo1_500.jpg)
The Uncommon Reader
by Alan Bennett
During a recent visit to a branch of my favorite bookstore chain, less than a week after I finished reading Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, I saw three or four copies of the book displayed in the memoir/biography section. I couldn’t suppress a chuckle. It wasn’t because there were too few or too many books on display, a perceived indication of how well or how badly the book is selling or is expected to sell. Rather, it was because the book, whose content originally appeared in the pages of the London Review of Books, is actually neither a memoir nor a biography. It is, for the record, a work of prose fiction. I couldn’t blame the bookstore staff for putting copies of the book in the wrong aisle, though. They could have placed The Uncommon Reader in a section dedicated to another category of nonfiction, and I still would have understood their mistake. After all, The Uncommon Reader is about a person that has been the subject of many a nonfiction book. That person is none other than Her Majesty The Queen.
A quick and easy hundred-plus-page novella, The Uncommon Reader opens in medias res. Her Majesty, hosting a state dinner for the government of France, accosts the French president and asks him about his opinion on Jean Genet. But the president, having little to no knowledge about the French writer, can only respond to the Queen’s earnest interrogation with inward oligosyllables. “Bien sûr.” “Vraiment?”
Then, a section break brings the reader to the real beginning of the story. It’s a Wednesday, and Her Majesty’s prized corgis are all wrought up, barking madly at something outside the Buckingham Palace. She comes out to investigate the noise and sees that the object of her pets’ hostile behavior is a van, the Westminster mobile library that stops by the palace every week. She approaches the vehicle, apologizes to the driver-cum-librarian, and lest she be thought of as ill-mannered, asks if she may borrow a book. She returns to the palace clutching a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and although a week later it proves to be a less than satisfying book, she nonetheless feels obligated to get another one, preferably by a different author, from the traveling library. And then she gets another, and another…
Her Majesty declares herself an opsimath, one who learns (or in her case, reads) late in life, and assigns Norman Seakins, a kitchen boy with a predilection for books (especially those written by the likes of E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, and the previously mentioned Genet, i.e., gay authors) as her amanuensis, her secretary in affairs relating to her casual reading. Her real private secretary, Sir Kevin Scatchard, on the other hand, declares war against the Queen’s newfound obsession. He believes that her constant preoccupation is taking its toll on her sworn duties as head of the British monarchy, and he conspires with the equerries and servants to thwart the Queen’s bibliophilic pursuits. In one of the crusade’s numerous attempts—and doubtless one of the more memorable scenes in The Uncommon Reader—security confiscates a book that she leaves behind in the royal coach as she opens Parliament.
“When they arrived at the palace, she had a word with […] the young footman in charge, who said […] security may have thought it was a device. The Queen said: ‘Yes. That is exactly what it is. A book is a device to ignite the imagination.’”
She remains unencumbered, even by his beloved dogs, who seem to be in on the plot as well, growling at poor Norman every time they see him and chewing apart novels by Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt that are left unattended.
Apart from creating a hilarious and entertaining book that culminates in a remarkable surprise ending after much poking fun at various protocols of monarchy and interesting facets of royal life by positing an alternate history where the sovereign becomes oblivious to her responsibilities to the public as she pursues the hobby of reading, Alan Bennett, who also wrote the Tony Award-winning The History Boys, may have come up with one of the finest books about books ever written. The Uncommon Reader is a short but rewarding book that speaks to all passionate readers from all walks of life. It stresses, among other things, the implications of embracing the apparent hypertextuality that arises between books when one submits to the unique pleasures of reading.
Indeed, not since Italo Calvino’s superb If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler has the line, “one book leads to another,” been made to ring so true. In The Uncommon Reader, after a rather disappointing experience with Compton-Burnett’s novel, the Queen selects Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love for her sophomore book. Mitford’s choice of title and engaging prose augur well for the Queen as she finds the book quite enjoyable. And being the first in a trilogy, it sets off a search for its sequels, which in turn leads to more similar quests to find, discover, and stumble upon the Queen’s next big read. Already The Uncommon Reader ceases to be solely a genuinely funny situation comedy and manifests itself as a portrait of the pursuit of literature, one that every common reader, that is, one who reads for pleasure as well as a reader without noble rank, can easily relate to and perhaps even consider as a prototype for one’s own memoir.
7 July 2010 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/777278442
We’re currently reading (and posting lovely pictures of ourselves with our copies of) The Great Gatsby for Read Hard. Care to join us?
My copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby features a detail of The Evening, a painting by Delphin Enjolras, on its front cover. (I know that because the book says so on the back.) The book is one of the “budget editions” from the Penguin Popular Classics series of “the greatest works of literature.”
When Penguin declared the books in the series as “budget editions,” they weren’t kidding. I bought The Great Gatsby for only P99 (roughly $2). And when Penguin referred to the books in the series as “the greatest works of literature,” they also weren’t kidding. Aside from The Great Gatsby, among the many novels released in the Penguin Popular Classics line are Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Fryodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, all of which I have graciously bought (each costs only P99, remember?) but have not yet read. I’m starting with The Great Gatsby.
4 July 2010 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/768697801
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