When I'd woken up in the morning, I stumbled into the kitchen to see a resplendent masterpiece by J.: it is his annual gingerbread house. This year it is a stave church made of gingerbread walls, cappuccino chocolate sticks as the roof poles, Mikado chocolate-dipped biscuit sticks as the roof joists, and thin slices of candied ginger and Turkish delight as the roof tiles. Dark cranberries and paler candied fruits have been added to brighten the colour scheme, and he has also sprinkled coconut for snow and crumbled gingerbread for a path to the front door. It took him several days to make it. Supportive sister that I am, I looked at his intricate architectural plans sketched on a piece of baking paper and at the delicate process of making things stay in place using the egg-white-and-icing-sugar frosting; and I kept inwardly thinking, 'It'll never work!' It was wrong of me!
*
In the evening, my work team had its holiday event.
The coordination fell into place with surprising success.
We had all received a vegetarian snack box to eat while watching the film. — (Except, sadly, our Californian colleague. She had received a kind special exemption from the Finance department, and an office manager and I had collaborated to find and send an American snack parcel on behalf of the company 'to arrive from December 17 to 22.' ... But she didn't get it in time.) — It had a bottle of Austrian red wine, a carton of tea bags made of an Ayurvedic blend, a chocolate-covered almond paste bar, chocolate-covered freeze-dried Amaretto cherries, a coconut bar, chocolate-coated almonds, and an orangey chocolate chip cookie. I didn't open it until just before the film, and it was so lovely to have the surprise.
As for the film itself: we surprisingly settled which one to watch in ~30 seconds, at least a week ago, as M. suggested Inception and no one had strong objections.
And everyone was able to attend, our Californian colleague and our shyest teammates and a colleague who recently transferred to another team included, which was a great pleasure.
***
A colleague who has gone to film school theorizes that Inception is based on jottings in an ideas journal that you are encouraged to fill out when you study to be a director. The scenes were all lovingly put together but a jumble: ideas that the director was passionate about but that weren't terribly coherent as a whole, and patched together by the excuse that these are all dreams anyway.
To be brutal, I hadn't made it into the film five minutes before I thought that it was incredibly self-indulgent.
Leonardo di Caprio had his moments of good acting (an accolade because I am a Caprio-skeptic). I also 'believed' Michael Caine as a professor and Elliot Page as a brainy student. But I felt that none of the characters had a personality that sticks in one's mind after the film is over. The psychology was unrealistic and underdeveloped. And wherever I looked I saw a famous actor (Ken Watanabe, Lukas Haas, Marion Cotillard) and it always took me a few minutes to get past it.
Altogether to me, the film was aesthetically handled like a comic book. Really quick cuts between scenes just like frames in a comic book; and execution and mood and drama, and a creative satisfaction on the part of the artist, mattered most. Exaggerated reactions defined the characterization (e.g. a dramatic eyebrow raise where a look of mild confusion would be a normal reaction, or a straightforward murderous glare to express hatred). The clothing badly pinpointed any kind of timeframe or continuity: it would shift between a grey shirt without a black blazer, grey shirt with a black blazer, maroon shirt, etc..
In my view this treatment would have been more appropriate for a superhero movie or another comic book or graphic novel adaptation.
And altogether I felt that the film was intended to be about deep themes but it wasn't; it really was just an exercise in transferring mental images to film.
The ideal world that di Caprio's and Cotillard's characters were in was creepy and I could not understand why one would be nostalgic about it. And I felt that a few home videos and a photo album or two would have been a fine replacement for eternal reminders of a lost beloved. So the film failed as an embodiment of, or meditation on, nostalgia in my point of view.
If it was supposed to be a metaphor for an addiction to computer games, book series, television, or comic books, or whatever, then that's not really what came across.
I also didn't think that the way the children were depicted was compelling. In reality a parent would be worrying about all kinds of details (their diet, if they're getting along, etc. etc.) if they were suddenly separated from a child. And the children would have specific needs and personalities. Instead, we just got generic photo studio portraits of towheaded little angels gambolling about. For realism, the screenwriter(s) should also have lined up child therapists by the end of the film to help them cope with the sudden disappearances of both parents. The 'Eh... They'll sort it out' approach to childhood psychological development adopted instead by the screenwriter(s) made me want to bang my head against a desk.
In the end I felt that the children were McGuffins.
The 'searching for the children' aspect of the film might be logical to people whose children are raised by nannies, governesses, boarding schools, or their other parent. But I think it is emblematic of the emotional immaturity and navel-gazing quality of the film that parenthood is so unconvincingly portrayed. Although to be honest I am just judging by the way my siblings and I were raised, so 'your mileage may vary.'
Then there were a few other logical contradictions:
For one thing, if we're working with dreams: are they ever as clear-cut and precise as the scenes in this film? I'd say that they're far more often vague and swimmy like a Salvador Dali painting. There was so much creative work done on subconsciousness and dreams in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Spellbound with Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, for example — that this glib version is a big letdown.
For another: I also complained to the team when a van drove off a bridge. The van was properly nosediving off a bridge at first, 'properly' because of course the engine is toward the front of the van and is the heaviest part. Then — and this is what I object to — suddenly it flipped upside down and parallel to the water before sinking. But maybe I just fail to appreciate dream physics.
In the end, a high school English teacher whom my sister T. and I both appreciated taking classes from in Canada said many years ago that 'books need to be real, even if they are about dragons.' Let's apply the same standard to films. I do very much appreciate the special effects in Inception, which are cleanly and finely executed, and I guess they do pay respect to reality because the director recognized that they needed to be pretty convincing. But otherwise, by this metric, Inception has very little to say.
*
In any case, the film night was so nice that we hope to have it again. Next time we'll order pizza. And next time I hopefully won't write such an ungrateful critique!
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