Antony and Cleopatra

Summary: A sequel of sorts to “Julius Caesar”—except not really—”Antony and Cleopatra” is the tragic tale of the power struggles that led to the historic Battle of Actium, where Octavian, later known as Augustus, famously squared off against our titular protagonists.

-Another winner for Shakespeare. “Antony and Cleopatra” is a page-turner full of intrigue, heartbreak, comedy, and rich characters. This is a massive, sprawling epic that captures the same sense of intrigue that “Caesar” pulled off, and then adds a malevolent, soap opera grandiosity.

It’s the best kind of tragedy: a gigantic one. Nothing is held back, the Bard swings for the fences here. “Julius Caesar” had a murder here and there, a couple land battles, and a couple of suicides at the end. AC (my shorthand for the play) almost doubles the number of murders and suicides, and ups the ante to sea battles instead of land. I don’t know if it’s “better” than “Caesar,” but it is more fun.

-My favorite scene transpires in Act II, Scene IV. An unfortunate messenger is tasked with telling Cleopatra that Antony has married Octavian’s sister while away in Rome, and so begins one of the purported origins of the expression “don’t kill/shoot the messenger.”

Now yes, I am updating this dialog. But the crazy thing is, not that much. The rhythm of the scene is incredibly modern, and while I’m going to change around the words, I’m not even touching the basic intent of each line. Get ready for this: (M is the Messenger, C is…well come on, you can figure it out)

So in walks the Messenger, and he knows he’s got to tell Cleo what happened, but he isn’t sure how. Cleo, meanwhile, has no idea this is coming, and is worried primarily about how things went in the negotiations between Octavian and her man:

M: Uh…hey.

C: Hey! You! What’s the word about Mark Antony? You look like a nice dude. Tell me everything is okay. I’ll seriously give you ten dollars if you say Antony’s okay.

M: Uh, he’s fine.

C: Yes! Yes! He’s fine! You are the MAN! I love you! You better not be lying, though. You better not be jerking me around. Are you jerking me around? Cause I’ll pour boiling metal down your throat in, like, two seconds if I find out you’re full of crap. We have a guy for that. That’s all he does.

M: Just hang on, I need to say something here.

C: I’m gonna murder you. I’m gonna seriously have you executed if you don’t shut up. You look like a mean person. You look like a person who says mean things.

M: Can I just say something here?

C: “Can I just say something here?” That’s what you sound like. Fine, whatever, say something. I hate you. I wish your mother was dead. Is Antony okay, though? Are things cool with Caesar? Look, I’m sorry about that thing about your mother, she sounds like a lovely person. Just say things are cool with Caesar…Say it! I’m gonna eat your soul for breakfast, I swear to the gods.

M: He’s totally fine, and things are cool with Caesar.

C: You and I are best friends. Let’s hang out later. You’re awesome. So everything went okay?

M: Well yeah, but…

C: “But?” Yeah I don’t like that even a little bit. Maybe you should just quit while you’re ahead. Can someone get the boiling metal guy on standby?

M: Look, he’s married, okay? He’s married to Octavia.

I imagine there’s a pause here.

C: (clears throat) Married, like, how?

M: Like…uh…they sleep in the same bed.

C: I don’t understand.

M: Um…they’ve had sex?

C: …I can’t breathe. I’m turning pale.

M: So anyway, yeah, Antony is married. I’ll just show myself out–

C: –I WANT YOU TO DIE!

Cleopatra then starts pistol-whipping this guy. I mean, she doesn’t have a gun obviously, but you know what I mean. She goes nuts on him.

C: TAKE IT BACK!

M: Ow! Ow!

C: TAKE IT BACK!

M: I can’t take it back, it happened!

C: Okay I’m not going to hit you again. But seriously, you should stop lying right now.

M: I’m not lyi–

She hits him.

M: Ow!

C: –Say that isn’t true and I’ll give you a really big house with a ton of slaves and I’m not kidding. Here’s the deed, I’m ready to sign it. Just tell me you were joshing me. Pullin’ one over on ol’ Queen of the Nile. Ha ha, very funny. Ya got me! Whew! Good one.

M: Uh…Antony is married to Octavia.

C: No he isn’t.

M: Yes he is.

C: Nope.

M: Uh…yes?

C: I was kidding before. I really am going to kill you now.

At this point, she pulls out a knife, and makes with the stabbing. The messenger survives by blind luck and runs for his freaking life. Cleopatra then claims she is all chilled out (“I’m cool, I’m cool!”), and invites him back. He returns, only to irk her ire again, so he runs away again. When he is finally brought back for a third time, it’s a later scene in Act III:

M: …Hello.

C: Yeah hi, listen, about last time…I mean, what can I say? I was out of line.

M:…It’s cool…

C: Anyway. I’m glad we’re past that. Now about this Octavia slut.

M: …Yes…?

And then, I kid you not, this is how great Shakespeare is, Cleopatra asks the following question (in slightly different words…but not as different as you’d think):

C: Is she hotter than me?

M: No.

C: Really?

M: Really. You’re way hotter.

C: Is she tall?

M: She’s totally short.

C: Yes! Yes! I knew it. What color hair does she have?

M: It’s like, brown.

C: Is it a pretty brown?

M: What? Noooo, of course not. It’s all…stringy.

C: He hates brunettes. He told me once. He’ll get sick of her, I know he will. Thin face or round?

M: Oh, round. Round as hell. She’s a fatty.

C: Ha! I’ll bet she is. She sounds fat. Octavia. What is she, an octagon? Hahahahaha!

Picture, like, the craziest laugh you can imagine right there.

M: …Ha…Ha Ha…Well, it’s  late…

C: Yeah sure, get out of here.

The messenger leaves, and permanently deletes “Egypt” from his GPS.

C: (to her handmaidens) Nice guy, I like that guy.

Like I said: I altered that, but not as much as you might assume. The basic rhythm and tone of the scene is completely intact. I think it’s one of the best, funniest, and most vibrant pieces of tragicomedy I’ve ever read.

-Our good friend Antony is back, and ever remains the perennial douche bag. Billy made a good point to me the other day: he’s not really a politician, he’s a rock star. His indulgent, neglectful, downward spiral behavior is not only compelling drama, it’s modern. By the play’s end, his behavior has gone from De Galle with a hangover to full-on Lindsay Lohan. He writes his own doom, and could have easily avoided it.

As the play opens, he is departing for Rome to deal with Sextus Pompey, a dangerous pirate whose attacks on the empire require the attention of all three members of the Triumvirate. Playing into the classic form of “hos in different area codes,” Antony tells Cleo to chill, girl, you know you is the only woman for me, then promptly marries Octavian’s sister.

I mean in fairness to him, wedding Octavia is the smartest thing he does in this play, and it’s all downhill from there. His mistake is going back to Egypt at all, and leaving a scheming, manipulative mini-Caesar was a massive inferiority complex tottering around the capital city by himself. He’s like, “Wow, my political rival is seriously cunning, I’d better keep an eye on him. On the other hand, these far-East desert hussies aren’t gonna bang themselves, so I’m out of here.”

From there, the mistakes roll in with the tide: everyone tells him to fight Octavian on land, but Antony refuses and makes it a sea battle, because—and I’m not kidding here—Octavian triple-dog-dared him. After their inevitable double-whammy defeat, which every human being within a hundred miles told him would happen, Antony gets word that Cleopatra has killed herself. Now rather than go see with his own eyes like a person with a brain, Antony decides to kill himself as well. And why? Because he can’t go on without her? No. Out of sheer competitiveness. She killed herself, and now he looks like a punk, so he’s got to kill himself.

So, he hands his sword to his buddy Eros and says, “Make it happen!” And then Shakespeare performs one of the most delicious turns of events I’ve yet encountered. Eros winds up for the kill, but can’t bring himself to do it, so he kills himself instead. And now, in another genius burst of tragicomedy, Antony turns around, sees Eros lying dead, and says, “Damn it! Now they’ve both outdone me!” So he jumps on his own sword, but by now we’ve established that Antony fails at everything, and his wound leaves him alive and miserable.

But it just keeps getting better. Cleopatra sends word that she isn’t dead, but had sent word that she was to make Antony stop blaming her for their losses. Now that’s a psychotic thing to do by any measure, and by doing it Cleo single-handedly enters the pantheon of all-time nutcase girlfriends, but that’s not the point. The point is, now we discover the reason that most people verify things with their eyes before making life-or-death decisions based on second-hand information. Antony, on the verge of death, is brought to see Cleopatra, who somehow resists punching him in his stupid moron face. He dies, and ends a long stream of cowardice and idiocy that it took Shakespeare two whole plays to fully describe. Goodnight, sweet prince. Sniffle. He’s up there blaming angels for his incompetence now.

-Cleopatra, despite my evisceration of her sanity in the dialog above, is the most interesting character here. Critics have long debated, for lack of a better way to put it, “her angle” in all of this. Does she really love Antony as madly as she claims? There are several instances in the play where Antony’s moronic escapades drive her to feel out other political options; she’s even receptive to Octavian after Antony’s death, until she gets wind that he plans to parade her around Rome as a trophy of war. And Shakespeare doesn’t let us forget that she pulled this same song and dance on Caesar, and a few characters ponder aloud how sincere she is. She reacts viciously against this, in much the same way Mark Wahlberg reacts when you call him “Marky Mark.”

Others could argue that her undying, unyielding love is totally genuine, and certainly there are ample tirades and lovesick monologues to back that assertion. She’s insane with jealousy all the time, takes his reproaches way too personally, and seems helpless to contain his bull-headed will. The question, therefore, is “Which is it?” Is she a lovesick queen who seals her doom with her heart, or a savvy political manipulator who loses a hard-fought game of diplomatic chess?

Both, I think.

I don’t think it’s possible to deny she is enchanted by Antony: he’s a handsome soldier with brutish strength, and a hot-headed jerk who needs “fixing.” He plays to her maternal instincts and her basic lust. So yeah, she loved the guy, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t also working him over. Her temper tantrums, of which there are many, were all calculated to achieve control of his behavior, a fact she freely admits in the beginning of the play. And she’s constantly on him to play smarter against Octavian, keep up better appearances with the men, etc. She’s trying to make this guy a winner by any and all means necessary, because he is her only meal ticket into Rome.

Although Cleo is soundly beaten, I’m not sure how much I can fairly chastise her. She lost, no doubt, but she played the game about as well as her situation would allow. It’s just bad luck that her only in-road to the Empire was a drunken idiot. Of course, the prudent thing to do would have been to desert Antony, but A) I can understand why she’d never do that, and B) there’s no way she could have truly known it was a good idea.

-So anyway, there’s lots of great stuff here. My criticisms of Antony’s behavior should not come off as marks against Shakespeare: I love how boneheaded the character is, it makes for awesome, page-turning tragicomedy. And Cleopatra is a fascinating black box of a character. She’s an intelligent woman who is stupidly in love, and the reader must puzzle out where one ends and the other begins. Which of her actions were for desire, and which were political? You can never know for certain. Such complexity and depth is what makes Shakespeare last as long as he has.

-Quick side note: Sextus Pompey, the dread pirate out to get Rome for killing his father, is an awesome character. Although only a minor role, he has a shining dramatic moment during a scene where he invites Antony, Lepidus (the other member of the Triumvirate) and Octavian onto his barge for peace talks. While at sea, one of Pompey’s men pulls him aside and says, “Dude, we’ve got them. All three rulers of the known world. Let’s kill them!”

Pompey’s response is amazing: he seems to smile sadly, and with a sigh tells his comrade, “Why the hell didn’t you just do it without my permission? Now I have to forbid you, for the sake of my honor. Damn it, dude.” The portrait of a man cunning enough to wish for an unscrupulous rise to power, but too decent to actually enact it, is brilliant. That right there is why Shakespeare lives forever.

RATING: 10 out of 10

And yet, Shakespeare is painfully absent from my knowledge base. I’m only strong on “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Macbeth,” “Richard III,” and “Romeo and Juliet,” and that last one barely counts. More than that, though, I’ve never really understood the depths of what his work means. When it comes to Hitchcock, I can tell you all about his obsessions: cosmic indifference, doppelganger, the dark night of the soul, and moral cynicism. Shakespeare is a different story. I can feel that this guy’s work matters, but I want more than that. I want to personally connect to the themes. I want to know this stuff.

So, I’m going to read Shakespeare’s plays. As many of them as I can, that I haven’t read before. I’ll watch a performance of them, as well, if I can. And I thought you’d appreciate coming along for the ride. So let’s begin!

First up is…

Julius Caesar.

Summary: “Julius Caesar” is the story of Caesar’s assassination and the political and military fallout resulting from it. Its principals are Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Mark Antony, and Octavian.

-Overall, I adored this thing. It flew by. The first three acts are like a great Hitchcockian thriller, wrapped up by a tragic war film. Also, do you realize how many timeless lines come from this thing? “Et tu, Brute?” “Friends, Romans, Countrymen!” “Beware the ides of March,” “The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves,” “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” And in case you doubt that last one, I just heard Eminem quote it in “Cold Wind Blows,” off of his most recent album. For any one work of fiction to achieve that much recognition hundreds of years later is a miracle. Only Shakespeare could pull this kind of thing off.

-Curiously for a play called “Julius Caesar,” Julius Caesar is not the protagonist. Some debate this, but in my opinion there can be no question about it. Caesar is only in a handful of scenes, and he’s offed in the third act (note: Shakespeare works on the five act structure). The guy who gets more stage time—and the one with the real conflict—is Brutus, Caesar’s most famous assassin.

Brutus is a great character, one that strikes me almost immediately. The basics of his conflict are heart-rending: the love of his friend comes directly at odds with his patriotism and belief in republic. Brutus has gotten, shall we say, a poor shake from the annals of history; Dante consigned him to the lowest possible level of Hell in the “Inferno,” and placed him—I kid you not— inside Satan’s mouth. More on that later.

-A key theme here is the distinction between the same act perpetrated for different reasons. Cassius, who sort of represents the rest of the conspirators, is a jealous douche bag, and his motives for the assassination are suspect as hell. When pressed by Brutus early in the play, Cassius launches off on some song and dance about how he saved Caesar’s life once, and that proves he isn’t so tough, and blah blah blah. Brutus dumb-foundedly ignores him, almost blown away by the ridiculousness of what he’s saying. Shakespeare is making a deft point here: Brutus and Cassius both killed Caesar, but only one of them murdered him.

-And then there’s Mark Antony, who could not receive a worse treatment. He’s depicted (I think) as sniveling, manipulative, and almost cowardly. When Caesar is first killed, Antony is supplicant to the assassins to the point of discomfort; you can almost hear Brutus furrowing his brow and saying, “No, seriously, we’re cool.” Then, quite conveniently, when Brutus leaves him to handle an angry mob, Antony spins on his heels and drops the famous “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech, rallying the people to avenge Caesar’s memory. Antony would have you believe the sight of Caesar’s body just overwhelmed him and he couldn’t help himself. I say he’s full of crap, and he was planning a reversal all along.

His monologue, I feel, is wrongly commemorated as a great moment of stirring oration. It’s great writing, no doubt, but there’s nothing classically noble about it. As I read the thing, I wretched back in disgust, especially when contrasted with Brutus’ speech to the mob that preceded it. Brutus appealed with reason, and asked the people to digest an uncomfortable, unpleasant truth that was necessary for the betterment of all (I’m paraphrasing and colloquial-izing here):

“He was a great man, and no one loved him more than I, but we can’t let anyone rob us of our freedom. Sometimes our personal feelings must come second.”

Antony screams rhetoric, pressing nostalgia wrapped in guilt-tripping nonsense:

“Caesar…remember how nice he was? Remember that time he was a cool dude? He always thanked the janitor for doing a nice job. One time he rescued a puppy from a burning building. It seriously happened. Now he’s dead. He’s DEAD, damn it!”

It’s a moment of utter falsehood, a callow brigand’s clever little self-serving ploy. There’s more Richard III than Henry V in Mark Antony, I think.

But more than anything else we’ve considered here, I think there’s one lingering issue in this work…

-How does Shakespeare, the man, really feel about Caesar’s assassination? It’s hard for us to appreciate this now, but Caesar’s death was a sore subject, especially in Italy, for hundreds of years. Dante saw it as the act that permanently destabilized Italy’s government, and led to decade after decade of infighting and eventually the decline of the Roman empire. I would argue that these things happened in spite of Brutus’ attempt to stop them, but I digress.

I think Shakespeare found himself in league with Brutus. That he is portrayed as noble and self-sacrificing is inarguable, so at least the Bard was sympathetic to his protagonist’s dilemma. True, the play is vague in addressing how sound his reasoning was in killing his friend, and you could argue Brutus made an irretrievably rash decision. If you treat him as a guy who got tricked by jealous schemers—an Othello of sorts—then the assassination was a horrid blunder made for the right reasons. That is certainly dramatically satisfying enough.

But I don’t agree with this interpretation. I think Shakespeare saw Caesar’s death as a necessary evil, and in writing “Julius Caesar,” he sought to examine the terrible weight that statesmen take on themselves when they dive in front of harm’s way to protect their people. In striking down his best friend, Brutus attempted to safeguard the Roman people from tyranny. He failed, and this is why Octavian exists in the play: to remind us that Caesars are like weeds. Nonetheless, I think it’s nonsense to suggest that Brutus’ fears were incorrect, or that his decision was rash. He killed Julius because he was afraid the man wanted to rule Rome, and he was right.

Unfortunately, and this may be the crux of the play, being right can’t always save you.

RATING: 10 out of 10

LEADING ACTOR

Jeff Bridges (True Grit)–certainly worthy, but won’t get it. Remember “Crazy Heart,” people?

Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network)–incredibly likely, although in my opinion not overwhelmingly deserving. Eisenberg was good, but he was out-classed by newcomer Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake.

Colin Firth (The King’s Speech)–the winner. Let’s just be honest, he’s going to win. A challenging performance without being “I Am Sam” cloying, and a well-respected actor who built up good will in the critical community last year.

James Franco (127 Hours)–in the old days, he’d be the shoe-in. But showy roles don’t win you the same prestige they used to. I’m not saying he won’t win for sure, and I’m definitely not saying he’s unworthy, but times have changed. As a side note, when I first heard Franco turned down a role in “Inception” to do “127 Hours,” I scoffed ginger ale all over my keyboard. “What a fool,” I blithely commented. Turns out it was a smart move…or as smart as not working with Chris Nolan can be.

SUPPORTING ACTOR

Christian Bale (The Fighter)–winner. For so many reasons. A potent trifecta of stored-up respect, dynamite acting, and a vanilla movie surrounding him which only highlights his excellence more.

Jeremy Renner (The Town)–first of all, “The Town” was not that great. It was a freshman’s attempt to make the Boston “Heat,” and it failed (never step to Michael Mann unless you know what in the hell you’re doing). Second of all, this was a sleepwalk performance from Renner, of a character he has done many times. He did fine, but I didn’t get the sense it was challenging for him, so I don’t think this is such a great choice.

Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are All Right)–Not going to happen. Ruffalo’s acting is of a particular quality: he’s kind of mush-mouthed, his cadence and pronunciation is unusual, and he’s got a soft-eyed quality to him. Sometimes it gets played to perfection, sometimes it misses.

Geoffery Rush (The King’s Speech)–A strong, strong contender. I wouldn’t be shocked in the slightest if he won. Still, I count it less likely, because Firth feels so solid to me in Lead Actor, and the Academy is very stingy with acting nods in one film.

LEAD ACTRESS

Natalie Portman (Black Swan)–my personal favorite, although I think she might be a shade too popular to actually win, if that makes any sense. Sometimes the Academy likes to kid itself and pretend it’s not a trend-mongering whore. In this case, though, the trend is valid: Portman was incindiary, and should win.

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Amy Adams (The Fighter)–beautiful, classy, and good in absolutely any role, Amy Adams should win everything. Ever. But she won’t, especially not for this. I applaud the Academy for noticing how deft her turn was, it could easily be missed because it’s so authentic, but with Bale taking the Supporting Actor without breaking a sweat, the old stinginess factors in again.

Helena Bonham Carter (The King’s Speech)–deserving as hell, and if she wins go with God. A subtle role, but executed masterfully. Carter plays every part like she’s spent a career getting typecast in it.

Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit)–the best performance here. And that’s ridiculous considering her age and experience, and the talent competing with her, but it’s true. If we’re running on a strict meritocracy, it’s all her.

ANIMATED FEATURE

How To Train Your Dragon–no.

The Illusionist–no.

Toy Story 3–the winner. Moving on.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Matthew Libatique (Black Swan)–actually no. “Black Swan’s” weakest attribute was it’s mostly effective, but sometimes hazy and annoying camera style.

Wally Pfister (Inception)–could not possibly deserve it more, and has been snubbed twice now for his world-class work on “Begins” and “Dark Knight.” It’s time, damn it.

Danny Cohen (The King’s Speech)–I absolutely loathed the camera work on this film, so it goes without saying I find this nomination distasteful. Every frame smacked of attention-drawing insecurity. Low-angle, fish-eyed wide lenses dominated the picture, to say nothing of bizarre eye lines and distractingly ugly lighting and framing. Whatever gritty realism they hoped for was not achieved; instead, I was distracted and annoyed.

Jeff Cronenweth (The Social Network)–made the RED camera sing, no question there. Gorgeous but not showy. I felt that the movie smacked of over-color-correcting in places, but it’s a minor quibble designed mostly to impress you.

Roger Deakins (True Grit)–gorgeous, damn it. As always.

DIRECTING

No Christopher Nolan. Fine. No wait, it’s not fine, it’s ridiculous. I’m sure David O. Russell is more deserving for manhandling a formulaic boxing picture, sitting behind the monitors letting Christian Bale do all the work. And Tom Hooper, the man who fails to grasp eye lines, certainly he bests a $200 million sci fi epic juggling multiple storylines and realities with cutting edge special and visual effects. I see we’re still not over the weepy drama thing in Hollywood.

Hitchcock and Kubrick never got one, either. Ever heard of them?

Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan)–deserves it.

David Fincher (The Social Network)–has deserved it for years.

Joel and Ethan Coen (True Grit)–has deserved it for years, won it, and deserved it again.

MUSIC (ORIGINAL SCORE)

Hans Zimmer (Inception)–his best work with Chris Nolan yet, I think. And still, Chris is not a guy who inspires great music. He demands written stuff ahead of shooting, he seems to push composers towards monosyllabic musical phrasings, and he shies away from music that might stand on its own. Have you ever listened to the “Batman Begins” score? It’s a snooze-fest of glacial strings and pulsing basses with no trajectory whatsoever. “The Dark Knight” is better, having more texture thanks to the Joker, but it’s still icy stuff. “Inception” managed to breed a few genuine classics: the pulsing action piece “Mombassa,” the tear-jerker “Time,” and the blaring brass tones that make up the film’s unofficial theme. Still, I think the winner must fairly be…

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network)–has everything you want: stands on its own marvelously, yet works in the picture and is perhaps the most distinctly Fincher touch of the entire movie. This score is how the director made his mark on the genre; it’s how he told the world this would be a different film. A definitive musical statement.

BEST PICTURE

Black Swan–A great picture.

The Fighter–a piece of crap with great acting.

Inception–should win, but it won’t win. They consider it consolation enough for last year that it was nominated. And everyone knows those action movies are just…less than the “real” films.

The King’s Speech–probably the winner. They’ve been building steam EXACTLY when you want to. Still, I think it’s a very good but slightly flawed movie overall.

The Social Network–the “old” shoe-in, so to speak; the movie they said would win all last year. But those have a way of expiring before the actual voting.

Toy Story 3–as deserving as any live action picture. A tender and emotional journey.

True Grit–nah. I mean it’s a good movie, but “No Country” hit harder, and the Coens have had their day in the sun.

So many of you balked at this that I went and saw the movie again. Yes, I’ve watched it twice. It’s still bad. Get ready for a bullet point list:

1. “But Christian Bale was awesome! He’s going to win an Oscar!” Yeah, I know he was, but that proves nothing. Christian Bale would be “awesome” in the title role of a Dolly Pardon biopic. The man is good in any role, any time, anywhere. He was a better actor at nine years old than the entire cast of “Twilight” combined.

What I don’t understand is how a good performance equals a good movie. Christian Bale has starred in many bad films: “Equilibrium,” “Terminator: Salvation,” “Public Enemies,” the “Shaft” remake, the list keeps going. He was great in all of them, and the movies still sank like the Titanic. Great acting is necessary for a great film, but it is not sufficient.

2. “But Mark Wahlberg was…pretty good!” The halting, back-handed nature of that compliment—which I have heard in almost every discourse on this movie—should tell you all you need to know.

3. Script. My biggest problem with “The Fighter” is its weak, exposition-heavy, tone-deaf script. Now these are not literal transcriptions, but they’re pretty close. Check out these paragons of deftness, these subtle gems:

“I’m embarrassed. I told everyone I was going to win this fight and move into a bigger apartment so I could see my daughter more. I’m sick of being a disappointment.”

“Well, there’s a guy in Las Vegas who wants to train you, but you’re too afraid to go and see him.”

“You went ten rounds and he couldn’t touch you. You were the pride of Lowell. You were my hero.”

“Doing crack cocaine…mmmm…doing crack cocaine…”

“That is my son. He’s crying, he needs me, and I’m stuck in here.”

“Yay! A bigger apartment!”–(played completely straight by a nine year old girl)

“There he is, officer! He did it to me and now he is doing it again!”

Notice how the characters spell out their position in the plot; no subtlety, no incongruity, it’s like they’re lining up for a freaking dance. This is called “bad writing.” Some good improvs from the talented cast aside, this was the order of business all the way through.

4. Predictability. I know nothing about boxing, or Micky Ward, and yet I knew the outcome of every fight in this movie before the first bell rang. In a boxing movie, I feel that this is a problem. There should be some degree of suspense, and there was never any.

5. Bad Boxing. The choreography of the boxing was awful, or maybe just how they edited it. Every fight had two speeds: Micky is getting crushed and not throwing a single punch, and Micky wins. Nothing else. This made the matches tedious and frustrating. Now some will tell me this is just how Micky fights. I find that hard to believe. If that is literally true, exactly the way they depicted it in the film, that Micky Ward should never have had a boxing drama made about him, because he’s boring as hell to watch in the ring.

6. Absent Protagonist. As good as Mark is in the title role, and he is quite good, there’s no character here. His only flaws are BS flaws like “he works too hard” or “he’s too nice of a guy.” Yawn. Now when you’re stacked against Christian Bale playing a drug addict, you’re always going to come off as vanilla, but it’s still a problem. Ward is simply a passive character, and the audience is always way ahead of him.

7. Shallow Finale. The boxer Ward fights in the climax is a Cockney jerk with nothing even bordering on believable motivations. This kind of two-dimensional nonsense is not acceptable at the climax of a serious, mature drama. You don’t get to make shortcuts like that in this genre. Why didn’t you just give him a moustache to twiddle while you’re at it?

8. Inexplicable Decisions. Why exactly does Charlene unceremoniously dump Micky Ward for getting unfairly arrested while nonviolently trying to prevent his defenseless brother from getting beaten to a pulp? Is that grounds for a scornful dismissal?

Oh right, I remember, she spelled it out for me in case I didn’t get it: “I’m not going to let you or your family drag me down” (really subtle writing by the way). Wow. What a douche bag this girl is. Of course, she decides to come back when she sees a documentary on HBO about what a crack-head Micky’s brother is.

What?

So she leaves because his family is going to drag her down (from her lofty career as a bartender), then returns because she sees some stuff on TV about Dickie that she already knew. Never mind the fact that if she really was concerned about the Ward/Ecklund family being a moral quagmire, this would be excellent proof.

Blegh. That’s all the scorning of this film I can do right now. I’m going to go watch “Rocky” and pretend this thing never happened.

Robyn

One Line: high end pop music with a strong electronica influence, as welcome in your earphones as it is on the dance floor.

How did I miss this one? This is seriously one of most exciting musicians I’ve come across in some time. Robyn is a Swedish pop star who grew up in the music industry, then rebelled against it. The story goes that she was signed to Jive in the late 90s when she discovered a love for electronic music, especially the type made by her fellow Swedes The Knife. When she started incorporating it into her sound, her label balked, and she eventually bought herself out of her contract and started up “Konichiwa,” a label where she could make whatever she damn well pleased. The result was the eponymous “Robyn,” which, for all intents and purposes, is a debut album. Yes, she had put out many before, but this was a rebirth.

For me, the appeal of Robyn is obvious: I love electronica (not techno, mind you, there’s a difference). I love distorted synths, 808s, computerized noises, and so forth. Robyn takes this sound and marries it to pop; a feat often tried, very rarely achieved without being annoying as hell. Many American artists have tried this—Justin Timberlake most famously—but none of them worked for me. In most cases, the musicians who try to go electronic don’t take the music seriously, and do so with a wink and a grain of salt. Robyn works because she’s passionate about the sound she’s crafting.

Very few people can sing on top of synthesizers and make it work. It’s not even about technical skill, it’s about the quality of your voice, and how you respond to what the computers are giving you. You can’t just belt like you’re singing to an electric guitar, you’ll sound disconnected from the clean mechanical feel of the music, but refusing to emote won’t work either. It’s a fine line, and if you don’t believe me, go try and sit through Chris Cornell’s “Scream.”

Robyn joins the ranks of the masters, like Reznor or Imogen Heap. The icy timbre of her voice melds with the clanking machines behind her perfectly, and yet she never goes mechanical (even on a song called “Fembot”). She seems to understand what the music needs from her implicitly, and she answers the call with great finesse. The emotional range she achieves is impressive: somber maturity on “Cry When You Get Older,” sexy rebelliousness on “Konichiwa B*****s,” and dangerous, maybe even psychotic edge in “Don’t F**king Tell Me What To Do.”

And, of course, “Dancing On My Own,” your standard club-ready track about jealousy on the dance floor (I’m so sick of songs about the dance floor). Except it’s not. For one thing, the melody is sharp as a tack, perfectly constructed. Secondly, the wall of synths behind her don’t sit quietly where they belong. They’re loud, aggressive, and they’re mixed way in the front, assaulting your ears and vying with Robyn for control of the song. When her voice peaks through them, it’s more like a sliver of light than a controlling force. She’s being drowned in the sound, struggling against the tide that is overwhelming her, much like her character in the song. If you’re going to approach this genre, this is how to do it.

Anyway, enjoy these tracks.

Four Tet

One Line: gorgeous instrumental music that blends real and synthetic instruments perfectly.

The next act I want to tell you about is a guy who records under the moniker “Four Tet.” His actual name Kieran Hebden, and he’s in some post-rock band I don’t care about. Apparently all that moaning about his feelings made him want to produce some real music, so he decided to start experimenting with electronic song structure and organic instrumentation. Four Tet produces gorgeous instrumental music with a heavy instrumental and post-classical influence.

It often gets billed as “folktronica,” a slyly derivative name that implies it’s techno made with acoustic guitars. Blegh. The very thought kept me away for a while. But rest assured, Dear Reader, that this is not the case. The only name for what Four Tet does is “instrumental.” It’s not electronica, because there’s too much actual instrumentation; and it’s certainly not folk or rock, because the song structures center around dynamics, movements, and builds instead of verse chorus verse. Oh, and it’s not prog or math rock, because it’s…you know…pleasant to listen to (I kid because I love, Battles).

No, what we have here is something quite other. Four Tet employs a wide range of real and synthetic instruments, to the point that your brain doesn’t bother telling them apart. I think Hebden’s goal here is to muddle the battle lines between guys with computers and guys with guitars. They’re all sounds, weapons in his arsenal, colors on his palette, and he blends them effortlessly. Nothing clangs, or stands out, or dominates the audio space; guitars and synths and drums all work happily together, none of them hogging the ball.

Hebden has a serious ear for melody, which brings us to Four Tet’s greatest strength: the sheer beauty of it. This is music that deliberately intends to be gorgeous. It’s emotional, even poetic, but somehow avoids being prissy or boring. It’s light but never thin. Transcendent but always grounded.

I hate most musicians who sit on one emotion all the time, and I especially can’t stand stuff that’s happy all the time. That was another reservation I had about Four Tet, it sounded like gag-inducing sunshine music. It’s not. There’s real joy in these notes, but it’s an honest joy, and the mood it sets is complex and elastic. I’ve found myself connecting to it in moments of deep sadness, as well as when I feel like I’m on top of the world. It seems to work for almost anything.

Anyway, enough babbling, try out these tracks:

I really did want to save this one for its own post, because I take such pleasure in answering it. Yes, it’s true, most dreams are not like the ones in “Inception.” You don’t wear a killer suit with no tie, unbuttoned at the collar, and run around folding cities on themselves. But I have a question for the people who raise this objection:

What in the hell do you got to movies for?

I never understand this compulsion to sit down in a theater and watch the closest carbon copy of the exact world you’re paying to escape. Yes, you’re right, these are not like real dreams. Have you ever had a real dream? Real dreams suck. You’re in your bedroom, only it’s not your bedroom at all, and then you remember that your cat just died in a fire. Then your mother comes in and tells you you’re a penguin, and your face falls off. I would not pay ten dollars to experience a real dream in a theater.

“Inception” takes the two percent of dreams that are bangin’ and expands them. You know the type I mean: the one where you win the lottery, and then a resurrected Grace Kelly at the age of 24 begs you to marry her, and you ride off together in the Batmobile to begin your life studying Great White Sharks in a mansion next to Denzel Washington, who’s your buddy. Okay maybe only I have that one. Stop looking at me like that, Dear Reader.

Also, I don’t suppose the words “science fiction” mean anything to you? If the human mind can dream, than I can accept the concept of a machine that induces particularly lucid, lifelike dreams. I’ve certainly had such dreams, as I think most people have. If you accept the concept of a dream that fools you into thinking you’re awake, then sprinkle a little sci-fi suspension of disbelief in there, you’re home free.

And be fair, it’s not like the dreams were just literally Bond films. They folded a city on itself, damn it! A hotel hallway spun like the inside of a drier! A restaurant tipped on its side! Rain storms, avalanches, and flash floods exploded into existence out of nowhere! People changed into other people, then back again! I’m pretty sure the fabric of reality was good and violated. All that was missing was my good friend and neighbor Denzel…and Grace Kelly. Especially Grace Kelly.

I’m going to go ahead and stop here. I can feel this entry about to spiral off into a lustful diatribe about Grace Kelly…or Denzel, I’m not really sure. Neither one is going to work out well for whatever shred of respect you might have had for me when this blog post began. I bid you good day.

“Inception” is that movie for Chris Nolan. For better or for worse, the thing is divisive. There are certainly people who haven’t liked his previous films, but they’ve been a suffocated minority, and I imagine it’s no fun to play on their team. “Memento” was too brainy for some, but those people tend to see the appeal it might have to someone else. “Insomnia” is not seen often enough, but for those who do, a negative reaction is nearly impossible unless you simply couldn’t get past the original. And look, I’ll just come right out with it: about ninety percent of the people I’ve encountered who didn’t like “The Dark Knight” had stupid reasons. I’m not trying to be mean, I’m stating a fact. Most of them were angry because Nolan “changed” things they had grown accustomed to in Tim Burton’s rendition, unaware that the latter was filled to the brim with blasphemous heresies against the basics of the character (I will always love those films, but it’s still true).

The opposition on “Inception” is a heartier army, and they swing a much heavier axe. I see them in all age groups (although they definitely trend older), sexes (slight trend female), and backgrounds. Some of them were as excited for the film as I was, some had never even given it a second thought.

And so, for that reason, I feel that the movie needs defending in the public forum. It’s strange to do this, because to me “Inception” speaks for itself the way all of Chris’ movies do, but the people have spoken, and now I’d like to reply. Below I will address the most common criticisms I have heard about the movie. If I miss yours, post it in a comment and I’ll get to it ASAP. You know I’m not kidding.

Criticisms of “Inception”

1. It’s Confusing.

Don’t read that title as dismissive on my part; being accused of incoherence is no joke for science fiction, and it’s definitely not for a director for a guy who prides himself on making multiple time-lines, realities, and perspectives intelligible; indeed, he pushes the idea farther in each film, seeing how far down the rabbit hole you can go with him. To say a Chris Nolan film was impenetrable or dense is like telling Houdini you saw him put the key in his mouth. It is the exact opposite of the reaction he’s hoping for.

Now to the heart of the matter: is “Inception” confusing? I must insist that it is not. It is dense, absolutely, and maybe even a bit dizzying, but “confusing” implies that Nolan led you in circles, failed to explain himself properly, or contradicted his own rules. He does none of these things. The film drops a heavy payload of exposition on you, but it does so both clearly and gradually. Everything is spelled out, and usually repeated whenever reapplied. Visual representation is heavily utilized, everything is demonstrated for you. Information is spaced out to give us time to get our bearings. Every possible rule of good conceptualization is heeded.

So why do so many people insist the film is a tangled web? I think it has to do with audience preconceptions. There is a certain threshold of new conceptual data that modern audiences are used to absorbing during a science fiction film, and the vast majority they see go well under that line. “Star Wars” spells out the idea of the Force, “The Terminator” needs you to grasp some needling particulars of time travel, but they’re careful to only give you so much to absorb and comprehend. “The Matrix” danced very close to this limit, but with time the grumbling has ceased as the basics of the story permeated popular culture.

I have no quantitative measurement for where this threshold lies, but I know one thing for certain: “Inception” blows right past it. Comprehending this thing makes “The Matrix” look like “See Spot Run.” Chris and Warner Bros. both knew this going in, and they gambled on it. What happens if you simply demand more, much more? Some people go giddy for it, and others begin to squirm in their seat, their internal gyroscope telling them they’re simply biting off more than can be chewed. And then, at that precise moment, they give up and stop paying attention. They begin missing things the movie is clearly articulating, and of course grow even more confused. By the time the credits roll, they’re completely outside the movie.

And this is the root of my point: if you call “Inception” confusing, I can document proof that disagrees. I can point out lines in the script clearly explaining, then re-explaining, then demonstrating every relevant concept. “Confusing” is simply not the appropriate adjective, in my view. You are welcome to use it anyway, but I am welcome to think you’re wrong. What the movie really is is “dense.” No, scratch that, the perfect term is really “saturated.” It’s brimming with ideas and concepts, all of them clear and consistent, but stuffed to the gills nonetheless.

Now you may choose to not like that, and that’s totally cool. But your disapproval is more akin to putting down “The Pillars of the Earth” because it’s too damned long than a fault in the movie’s construction. You have identified a quality the film willingly adopts, and you find it unappealing. Not everyone enjoys a dizzy spell of high philosophy and existential psychology, nor should they. But let’s be clear about what we’re talking about: that is not “confusing,” that is simply “saturated.”

2. It’s Too Long

A constant complaint about Chris Nolan films. I don’t see how any of it could have been shaved. I don’t have a good retort for this, because I wish all of his movies were six hours long without intermissions. I get so intoxicated on the worlds he creates, the complexity of his characters, and the deftness of his directorial touch, that I never want to leave.

You’re on your own for that one.

3. Ariadne Isn’t A Real Character

Ah…yes. Well. Now you may be onto something. She does have a glaringly functional presence in the story, doesn’t she? Mostly she exists to sucker information out of Cobb, grill him on details, and get kissed by Joseph Gordon Levitt. When she’s first introduced to Cobb by his father-in-law (played by Michael Caine), she appears out of a crowd of graduate students. She doesn’t appear to know any of them, and it’s almost like they don’t even see her. She never discusses any kind of social life, nor does she suggest a deliberate lack of one. She’s too pretty and friendly not to have friends, especially in Paris. There don’t appear to be any relatives or family who need notifying before she joins up with some international fugitives twice her age to make mazes in a billionaire’s brain. She has an obnoxiously cute, inside-joke first name, and absolutely no last or middle name whatsoever. Who the hell is this girl?

If this was a big problem for you during the film, congratulations: you’ve landed on a point I willingly concede. Ariadne is a function character, and has no trace of depth to her in the least. For the life of me, I couldn’t discern a single thing from her behavior about her home life, her family, country of origin, or anything. She’s a genius architect, but aren’t geniuses normally fascinatingly complex people? When has such a talented young woman been such a Jane Doe? True, some interesting angles are explored vis a vis her sexual rivalry with Mal, but they’re sublimated for lack of time. And frankly, had they been pushed farther, it would have been creepy and off-focus.

Yes, I concede that Ariadne is a blank character, and this is an unusual move for Chris. Coming from a heavy noir tradition, he doesn’t do blank; he does anything but blank. I think his motive was simple: someone’s got to get Cobb to explain this crap, and there’s just no time for him to do so in an orderly fashion and also get to, “Yeah, I was raised in Minnesota, my father was a welder, blah blah blah.”

And yet this is one of those flaws I only notice when I’m not watching the film, and those barely count in my mind. While “Inception” runs, I couldn’t care less. I think this speaks volumes about Ariadne’s importance, or lack thereof. If they had gone into her back-story, it would have been dead weight (the way some of Cobb’s actually is). At the end of the day, she just doesn’t matter that bloody much. She has tons of screen time, but her emotional journey is not of consequence. If I didn’t miss its inclusion in the film, it’s hard for me to fault it for not being there.

Still, characters aren’t supposed to be blank slates in theory, so enjoy this one while it lasts, Dear Reader. Grumble grumble.

4. The Dialog

…I mean, yeah. “I can’t imagine you with all your perfection, all your imperfection” is one of the worst lines Chris has ever written. It’s technically quite true, but he couldn’t find a way to express it in a way that a human would talk ever.

Most of the crummy dialog crops up in that damn living room domestic dispute scene at the end. It’s a truly weak scene, and those are quite rare for Nolan. Cobb and Mal sit down for a nice little marital spat, only they babble incoherently about reality and melodramatic conceptions of love, and then one of them “reveals” something to the other that they both knew before the scene began. Then you remember the whole scene is really just a crazy dude talking to his bloody self, and soon enough you’re checking your watch. To boot, it’s visually dry as a bone, shot on an unappealingly cramped set with no blocking, no movement, no energy. Inter-cutting it with an awesome snow fort and a van falling off a bridge and a dude blowing up an elevator just makes it sting more.

That it comes at the climax of the film would be disastrous, except Chris had two superior climaxes waiting in the wings: Robert Fischer’s, and Cobb’s right before the credits roll. The scene is almost completely forgotten, and we move right along to the good stuff. Whew, that was too close. The first time I saw it, I thought it was the movie’s swan song, and I was seriously worried.

Still, that scene aside, I think most of the dialog works very well. And you have to admit, this is not an easy piece to write. These characters have to drop a lot of knowledge on you in a relatively organic fashion, and they do so pretty well. Completely documentary style, ultra-real dialog would be maddening in a film like this, because you need this crap slow and deliberate and not at all like it would really be said. At the same time, it never loses touch with the ground, and that’s probably thanks to the actors fighting hard to keep it emotional and relatable.

(To Be Continued…)

1. The Dark Knight. His crown jewel.

2. Memento. A movie whose legacy as one of the great mind-benders has only increased with time.

3. Batman Begins. The film that saved Batman. And Warner Bros.

4. Insomnia. Often overlooked because it’s his most straightforward affair, but an incredibly deft thriller whose sturdiness was proof that Nolan had mastered the fundamentals of good storytelling. He didn’t need to hide behind tricks.

5. Following. His debut picture. An adorable little lo-fi gem, and almost the cerebral cousin to “Clerks.” Like Kevin Smith’s debut, it’s a daringly flawed film that is lovable for its refusal to apologize.

6. The Prestige. An engrossing battle of wits between 19th century magicians that is nearly brought down by a surprise ending too easy to see coming. Nearly. Fortunately, “The Prestige” is imminently re-watchable, one of those movies that blossoms as the viewer searches for the layers of meaning in each pass.

Now that “Inception” is out, we have a new member in the family. The first question is: does it meet Nolan’s high standards of quality? Does it get to enter the pantheon? Because make no mistake, even “The Prestige” in dead last place stands head and shoulders above the best films most other directors will ever make. That’s quite a high bar to jump over, and I can’t fathom that Chris won’t someday fail to make the leap.

But not today. Today he gets to put another notch on the metaphorical belt. “Inception” is a classic, one of the most distinct and original films I’ve ever seen. Like all of Chris’ work, its chief victory is its ability to fuse the intellectual with the visceral, to bring ideas to spectacle. And because the project is something of a victory lap for him after the runaway success of “The Dark Knight,” Nolan shifts into high gear and slams down the pedal as hard as he can. He reaches, as always, for the highest things he can possibly grab, constantly competing with himself to come up with bigger action and bigger ideas. This is the headiest intellectual stuff he’s ever attempted, it makes “Memento” look almost straightforward. It’s also the grandest spectacle of his career. “Inception” is Chris doing what any artist at this stage in his career should be doing: pushing himself.

Still, it doesn’t quite ascend the heights of his Bat-Flicks, and I’ll get into why later. For now, assume my new hierarchy is:

1. The Dark Knight

2. Memento

3. Batman Begins

4. Inception

5. Insomnia

6. The Following

7. The Prestige

Leading Man

Leonardo DiCaprio is perhaps the most natural leading man Chris has ever gotten his hands on, and it’s something of a miracle they didn’t work together sooner; the two even look alike. DiCaprio specializes in precisely the kind of intellectual angst that Nolan is obsessed with, he is the quintessential striving man. Bale had the same drive, but it was more carnal, more beast-like, rooted in the physical. Guy Pearce’s masterful work in “Memento” was almost detached, he was a man who had learned not to look into the abyss too deeply. And Pacino was Pacino, Nolan’s greatest achievement with him was bringing his tremendous abilities back down to Earth. All of them answered the call successfully, and yet each was borrowing some piece from Chris’ own psyche, not the entire thing.

DiCaprio is different, he feels almost like a stand-in for Nolan. His mannerisms, his way of thinking and behaving, have a quality to them that seems more personal than anything Chris has put on the screen before. In truth, Dom Cobb (Leo’s character) has more in common with Nolan than any of his other leading men: he is a husband and a father (or was), a highly intelligent weaver of fantasy, and a man perpetually in love with mazes and paradoxes. He is not an object of wrath like Bruce Wayne, or barely clinging to sanity like Leonard Shelby–he’s a philosopher, an intellectual, and a prisoner of the need to know.

It’s no coincidence that “Cobb” is a name Nolan has used for another one of his characters: the original Cobb was the sharply dressed, malevolent Mephistopheles to the nameless protagonist’s Faust in “Following.” This cyclical nomenclature is meant to bring the attentive viewer back to “Following” in more ways than one. That film, being Chris’ first, was an intensely personal war between two sides of the same coin. Cobb (the original) and the protagonist were two characters pulled from the inside of Nolan’s mind, where they had likely been battling for supremacy long before. Consider the two Cobbs Chris has given us:

Dom Cobb (DiCaprio): an extractor, a man who sneaks into other people’s dreams and acquires information they don’t want anyone to have access to.

Cobb (Alex Haw): a thief who makes a habit out of breaking into peoples’ homes when they’re away, and learning who they are by examining their personal belongings.

Do you see the similarity? Both are thieves, both penetrate the private spaces of other people while they are unaware, and both are looking to take primarily from the mind, not the body. DiCaprio and Haw both played characters who invade the lives of strangers. They use theft almost as an excuse, because what they really want is a reason to pry open the existence of another human being. Rooted at the core of this is a borderline neurosis, a compulsive fascination with the minds of other people. The reasons for this interest go deeper than there are words for, but it’s worth mentioning that there are several mental handicaps characterized by an inability to transpose a duplicate of the “self” onto other people. A person with autism is almost defined by the fact that their minds do not look at other people and see “another me, just different looking.” They do not see other agents comparable to themselves. Philosophy and existentialism stumbles backwards into the same conclusion: how are we so sure people with autism are wrong? How can we look at one another and know there is another me inside of there? There is plenty of proof, but nothing that couldn’t be faked by the mind. I think Chris Nolan is fascinated by the greatest question mark in human existence: other people.

Kubrick, a director Chris is increasingly mentioned in the same sentence with, was also fascinated with this, but in a different way: he wound his characters up like clocks, looking for the mechanical in them, trying to find the line between human and organic machine. Nolan does not accuse people of being machines, he seems willing to grant basic humanity to others, but in doing so he finds himself at a much more frightening conclusion: if we really are human, we are fundamentally unpredictable. If I was forced to sum up every Nolan film ever made, I might (and I stress “might”) consider using the phrase, “A human being is a maze.”

The two Cobbs are also commemorative landmarks, ways for Chris to look at himself. When he wrote the original Cobb, he was a man of relatively limited means, making movies on a shoestring budget armed with nothing besides the drive to do it. Haw’s Cobb is the same, we have the impression that his financial resources are constricted by his effervescent lifestyle, and he surrounds himself with people of a similar disposition. Now we arrive at DiCaprio’s Cobb, a man who is wealthy even in forced exile, and who rubs elbows with CEOs and multi-billionaires. This is much like Chris’ ascension from independent filmmaker to Warner Bros’ go-to hit-maker.

So Cobb is autobiographical in more ways than one, and Leonardo DiCaprio is the perfect choice to essay that role. He brings a streamlined, Hollywood version of Chris Nolan’s presence to the screen, letting us experience the man’s mind in a singular way. DiCaprio also brings another vital asset to the table: selling exposition. His character is forced through some pretty heinous dialog passages in a desperate scramble to force “Inception” to make sense. This is stuff you just don’t say in real life: “I can’t create you in all your perfection, in all your imperfection.” It’s an uphill battle to make that crap stick, but he’s on it like white on rice. Leo’s gift as an actor is angst, you can give him the most preposterous things in the world to say, but if his character is tormented by existential burdens, they’ll sound fine. The shivering timbre of his voice and the restless, piecing character of his face makes us accept him as haunted automatically.

Whew.

Okay, that’s enough for now. There’s much, much more, but I don’t want to overwhelm you here, so let’s do this in pieces.

So Trent Reznor formed a band with his new wife Mariqueen Something or other (can’t remember her last name, sorry!), and also longtime collaborator Atticus Ross called “How to Destroy Angels.” That’s a slightly terrible title, but Reznor has always gotten away with pretentiousness. Anyway, they released their debut EP for free over the internet a little while back, but it’s only hitting stores now. I’ve been listening to it for a few weeks, and it’s been an interesting experience. It’s not bad music, but it suffers from being too similar to Nine Inch Nails. Perhaps that’s only fair, Reznor has been recording under that name for two decades now, but it’s still the case. The instrumentation is literally impossible to discern from a NIN record.

Of course, the big change from NIN to HTDA is Reznor’s wife, Mariqueen, is now on vocals. I’m all for a chick leading Trent’s music, but I think they have a little more work to do first. Someone pointed out in a review recently that HTDA teaches you just how much you underestimated Trent’s singing abilities, and it’s quite true. I had always assumed that his voice broke even at best; it’s thin-sounding, lacks diaphragm support, and doesn’t take to a wide emotional range very well. But even if all of those things are true, I was still wrong. It turns out, Trent’s voice has been a crucial anchor in his music, in ways far deeper than any of us ever appreciated. Something about the character of his voice bridges the gap between man and machine. Even the thinness is actually an asset, because it allows him to avoid boisterousness when his lyrics go kind of dorky. The man evolved his sound in step with his voice, and when you replace it, it’s surprising how much of the formula falls apart.

I had begun to wonder if that wasn’t the case when he released “The Slip,” the last NIN record. The thing was free, so you’ll never hear me complain about it, but I could never shake the sensation that it was tossed off. The songwriting was solid but unremarkable, and the record lacked those meteoric highs that NIN albums almost always achieve. The production was clean but kind of small, especially when compared to the epic scope of most of Trent’s work.

And yet, “The Slip” is a great album. Actually, it may be one of NIN’s best. How these two truths could exist together bothered me for quite some time. I admit I’m not positive I understand it even now, but there are at least two factors involved: first, “The Slip’s” casual nature was actually a refreshing change of pace. NIN has never made a sub-par album, but especially on “The Fragile,” he can get a little bogged down in ambition. These LPs become almost exhausting because of how hard Trent pushes himself, and how obsessively he checks and re-checks every note. It gets to the point that you end up with records that are grand, and deep, and satisfying, but also heavy, and laborious, and exhausting.

“The Slip” is like a sports car, it zips around effortlessly. It’s the closest the band may ever come to punk. And, because Reznor actually slacks off a bit and relaxes, it actually feels fun. These uncluttered, stripped down little beasts let you get right to the candy center of what makes Nine Inch Nails so compelling. They’re like shot glasses full of industrial pop. It also helps that the record features two of Reznor’s finest instrumental pieces ever, “The Four of us are Dying” and “Demon Seed” (not technically an instrumental since he keeps chanting things, but come on).

And the second reason, circling back to HTDA, is Trent himself. Some assume that Reznor’s gift is to bring depth to the music with his voice, but I think it’s actually the exact opposite: he brings lightness. His touch is deft, skipping over the depths of the notes like a stone over water. You might almost consider his singing as some kind of musical grammar, creating sequences and order out of walls of noise. That he can do this while never feeling invisible or unimportant means that Trent is a master of tonal control. When a song is corny, it’s corny in the right way. When it’s over the top, it gets away with it. It’s no small thing to maintain this kind of precision over twenty years.

The point is, by removing this essential ingredient, HTDA suffers. “The Spaces in Between” is a menacing, low-key ballad that would have scored a touchdown with Trent on the mic, but with Mariqueen it goes flat. That’s not because she’s a bad singer, she’s actually quite good, but the music that the band is writing is firmly, unavoidably NIN. It’s just going to take them time to shake that off. “Parasite” fairs a little better, but the vocals are more submerged there, so it’s hard to count that as a victory.

But hope is not lost. There are two tracks that really score victories: “Fur Lined” and “The Believers.” The latter is pretty much a winner because, again, the vocals are in more of a supporting role, but it’s still a great song. “Fur Lined,” on the other hand, is all Mariqueen, and it’s a giant success. The trick here is that the music is tonally distinct from anything NIN would do. It’s not only spunky, it’s actually feminine, and that’s the trick to making HTDA a good band. They must, must, must write vocal parts that Trent cannot and would not do. The high point of the song comes midway through the second verse, when Mariqueen suddenly pops up into a semi-squeal on, “I don’t want to lose control!” In this moment, I can see where this band should go, and they need more like it. Their lead singer is wasted on “A Drowning” because she’s forced to keep her voice down in the basement, where it does not want to be. The song is an utter snooze fest, and runs about three minutes too long. “The Spaces in Between” fares better because the chorus is solid, but the opening line of “All our blood lying on the floor” is a dud. The song really starts off on a bad foot, but manages to save itself. And really, Mariqueen has a good voice for this kind of music: it’s unpretentious, elegant, and she has great control of it. But it must be implemented correctly to really soar.

In conclusion, “How to Destroy Angels” is a perfectly good EP, especially for NIN fans. It’s a more mellow take on Trent’s style, which a lot of people may find appealing, and all of the songs are sturdily written and constructed. However, I fear that many people are going to wink wink nudge nudge think of this as an unofficial NIN release, and they may continue to do so until HTDA asserts itself. “Fur Lined” is a great first step, it almost felt like a blend of NIN and Tegan and Sara (and I adore both, so bring it on). Keep on pushing in that direction.

But it’s okay! Because I’m back.

I recently had a chance to attend the “Hero Complex” Film Festival, which was a great little three-day event held at the Chinese Theater. Each day, a couple of movies are shown, and then a VIP guest is brought in for a Q and A with the audience. I attended the second day, where they screened “Insomnia” and “The Dark Knight,” and then…gasp…they had Christopher Nolan. Now I’ve seen this man several times now in person, some of you may recall that I broke onto the set of “Inception” and even got to work on the flick a little, but it’s still great to see him again. Here are some bullet points from the conversation:

-He’s not thrilled with 3-D yet. He’s very cautious and put it gently, but he pointed out that calling a traditional movie “2-D” is a misnomer, since there’s not really much difference between the simulated depth cues of a normal film and the actual objects we encounter in day-to-day life. He also pointed out that 3-D makes an image incredibly dim, which he intensely dislikes. Wally Pfister, his DP, has pointed out before that Chris is one of the more knowledgeable directors when it comes to cinematography and things of the sort. Sounds like he was right.

-Nolan talked a little about Robin Williams in “Insomnia.” He said that it was one of the few performances he ever got which never wore down in the editing room. He also pointed out that Williams actually shot “One Hour Photo” before “Insomnia,” and many were worried about the two coming out too near each other. In general, Chris shruggingly conceded that he’s often in the situation where another movie is stepping on his toes. The obvious example is “The Prestige” and “The Illusionist.” His attitude is, there’s nothing you can do, you just have to focus on your movie.

-I didn’t actually know this, but Nolan revealed that he wrote the last draft of “Insomnia” before they shot it. He gave lots of credit to the credited screenwriter, and made it sound like his version was just a polish/tweak kind of thing.

-Nolan discussed a little bit what it’s like to shoot a movie. He admitted that directing, while exciting, is also pretty exhausting, and by the end of a shoot you’re just desperate for it to be over. He also revealed he has a particular fondness for the editing stage.

-Chris claims that he has neither email nor a cell phone. I literally refuse to believe that. It cannot possibly be true. His assistant’s job must be a living hell.

-Comic writer Ed Brubaker was in the crowd, and asked Chris to discuss his writing method. Chris responded that he does not actually outline his scripts, and even with non-sequential things like “Memento,” he writes the scenes in the order they appear on screen. His reason for this is that his first film, “Following,” was written in chronological order and then sliced up, and he found that this made the pacing and flow of the movie hard to control.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Ridley Scott attended and answered questions after a screening of “Alien” and “Blade Runner.” Be still, my beating heart. Here’s some of his highlights:

-He insists that his on-set tensions with Harrison Ford on “Blade Runner” have been overstated. He didn’t make a convincing case, though.

-He is doing an “Alien” prequel, and is actually hoping to make two of them. He wants to get into the Space Jockey from the original. In case you don’t recall, that was the corpse in that giant telescope-type chair that they come across in the U-shaped space ship. Ridley postulated that the gigantic body we see in that suit is actually some kind of mechanical suit, and the alien being died while wearing it.

-He staunchly defends even his bad movies, claiming he enjoyed making every single one of them, and does not regret any of them.

-I’ve heard him point this out several times, but Ridley re-emphasized his belief that directors should be autonomous, and make decisions that are sovereign on set. Directing “by committee” leads to confusion and chaos. I agree.

-Claimed that he cast Sigourney Weaver as Ripley because she was tall and physically impressive, giving off an air that was right for the part.

Anywho, that’s all for now, but there will be more soon!