The Top, and beyond

A very interesting "young" author is the director of

Inception by C. Nolan (2010)
☻☻

of whom I like to remember the intriguing Memento and The prestige; now he deals with the real thing, that is, dream, and dreaming.

I'm disappointed (and that would be my last word to Nolan, if I were his agonizing father) for the movie betraying the very essence of the matter: chaos, the absolutely unpredictable, the utterly fantastic, and the quality of "strangeness" that we (now) suppose could be staged just only in "author's cinema". This blockbuster, with all the means (money) to build a great dream ends up to be some kind of a cinematic pastiche with a good balance between the genres -mostly action, thriller, psychological romance- and even the right dose of confusion, but it is more or less totally short of dream.

It's so easy to lose track of the plot that I'd wish to forgive all the meta-oniric mumbo-jumbo -above all, the ludicrous "time conversion"- to dive into an adrenalinic trip in Slumberland and just be entertained, but apart from being a well-directed-and-starred movie with an interesting twist, it is as far from the most ordinary oniric experience as Hollywood is from Rigel; what is lacking here is magic, and I guess you just can't stage that, that has to be there in the first place. In the script, maybe.

With Di Caprio as the professional dreamer

(they should use his surname alone, like the Valli case) and his father

Michael Caine, which makes Leo brother of Austin Powers, I guess.

Some times ago I saw realized the gloomy opening gag of Last Night in Summer (1987) in the latest australian movie Animal Kingdom (See)

In Nolan's movie tonight I've found the missing bit of that very scene, the object that was supposed to fill the screen in the opening of "my movie", just before the sitting dead mother, and in front of her:

the (spinning) top. Perhaps this is ironic, it is the last scene of this movie.

So, here we go again.

Director Cristopher Nolan (from London) is younger than me and I'm watching the same scene I wrote some 23 years ago, which he actually realized for the screen.

I'm spending the most of my time watching films that I've already seen, where the same goddamned old story loops forever with he, she, and so on and on. Again, and again.

It could be an archetype, memories of a forgotten dream, or the ugly truth about any possible world of any possible "past", like the one haunting the protagonist; here lies the greatest clue I was able to infer from this movie about dreams that anywhere else seems to simply snub any oniric implication:

that worlds may end in the blink of an eye.

That it's happening right here and now, so as it has always happened, and always will; because only an eye could ever see such a thing as a wor(l)d.

Addendum Jan. 2014: the scene is quite obviously inspired by François de Nomé's painful painting "Ruins with the legend of St. Augustin"

(http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/thumbnail/207548/1/Ruins-With-The-Legend-Of-St-Augustine.jpg)

which was painted in the late 1500-early 1600s... What a novelty.--

This is one of the most emotional sequence I've ever experienced (along with a Fellini still unidentified oniric scene and the descent in Russian Ark - see) and even though I just couldn't say why -or because of this- this fistful of secs alone worth the watching of the whole thing.

Leo included.

This top is another place where nobody goes.