Let's tax the exclamation marks

Rating: Null/10 (27 August 2010)

For someone used to - literally - jack-in-the-box (to joker-in-the-box) films, Nolan is peculiarly, inhumanly humorless. And for people - one hopes - with cinematic experience, as some of us are, he must be the industry's greatest fraud, for his films suffer from a complete innate lack of what filmic composition, rhythm, angle, and framing is: the guy is unable to truly engage the gaze; instead, he tries to compensate this lack with solipsistic gimmicks, cold and badly informed.
Ah, so many people rave for the intricacies of the plot and the ingenuity of the creator while what they actually do is congratulate themselves for being clever. Has any of them people read any serious stuff on dreams, on the technology of the brain? Freud, lacanian psychoanalysis? Apparently not. What shows it? Exactly this. Show against tell in this case fails: too much blah blah monopolizes the screen and obfuscates any sense of build-up, suggestion, mood, nightmarish entanglements, or what you will, unless one goes for cardboard intensities. And one may say that "the Matrix", as this film is so easily compared to, may be called a film of pseudo- or not philosophical aspirations with cardboard intensities, but, at least the first one had the zest to be Baudrillard for cheerleaders.
When Hemingway just beginning went to visit the catalyst called Gertrude Stein and showed her some of his writings, she told him this: Description is not literature. Hemingway, begin allover again, and be concentrated.
What she meant by this was too much description is not what makes literature literature. I would transcribe it into too much talking in a film does not make it a filmic experience, which goes us back to show me against tell me, more so for telling being in this case explaining away and exhaustingly pap the actors are oddly embarrassed to pronounce, as if unable to find the proper stance.
Relentless subterfuge, said the critic Armond White, is what characterizes this film. I would add that this does not signify cinematic enjoyment, but rather too much sound and fury that struts and frets its hours upon the screen, let alone shaping aesthetic subjects.
I was glad to discover that the audience, in the provincial cinema in Crete where I saw it, of college boys and girls booed the family reunion pap in the end, and the supposedly grand question one is left with, as if they recognized the film's serious lack of spin, if you know what I mean.
PS Kubrick, you said? That is mistaking a rabbi for a mere technician. Supreme juggling? Juggling is all about transforming mechanics into gusto. This does not happen in the film. Rip offs and then rip offs, is the film's offering: the way the children are filmed is an exact copy paste from Roegg's "Don't look now," and the dream-within-dream expansion of time is a footnote to Antonioni's procedure in "Blow up," to add an example or two. Steal and integrate in what you do what you will, I am perfectly OK with that, however botched your creation is. But if you are informed by a rip-off sensibility, your final creation won't even be Frankenstein's monster, but its stitches.