Inception

Going to make this one quick.

I liked the movie, but I feel like I'm still going to end up being a bit of a killjoy here because I'm going to mainly be talking about why I didn't like it that much. So let's first talk about why I liked the movie in a quick and dirty 1-2-3 list.

1) It's nice that Nolan trusts in the intelligence of his audience. The dream scenes got pretty complicated with the different time frames and time going slower in one scene than it is in the next. It was fun to keep track of all that without too many stupid visual clues with close ups of watches and shit.

2) The fight scenes were neat. I liked how the physics of the dreamworlds overlapped, with the van in freefall resulting in no gravity in the hotel and all that stuff. That was pretty unique and tense, although somewhat subverted by the fact that if the guy on the upper layers actually lost the other scenes would just collapse (and you knew it wouldn't end like that).

3) Witty banter, good music and a fairly original premise kept me interested. Little funny moments like the firefight that Eames ended abruptly with a grenade launcher helped piece this together.

So in other words, it was a popcorn flick. A few hours of good honest fun. If you want to see a movie that you can spend a few harmless hours enjoying, then Inception is a good pick.

Here's why it's nothing more than that:

1) Leonardo DiCaprio.

At no point in the movie did I find Cobb's character to be convincing. The story with his wife and kids, his emotional problems, his character as a smart dream spy guy... really everything about the guy just seemed so flat and artificial. I think he was a fine character on paper, but the problem is that Leonardo DiCaprio is a ham actor who had no business playing this kind of part.

The whole movie I was wondering why Nolan hadn't gotten Aaron Eckhart or raised Heath Ledger back from the dead or at least hired some sort of actor instead of a damn aging pretty boy that can read a script in an Acting Voice. It's especially weird since everyone else in the cast put on a fairly strong and convincing performance. Did Nolan think people wouldn't notice how fucking terrible DiCaprio is if he surrounded him with talent perhaps?

2) "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling" is a nice line, but the movie really did seem to be quite afraid to dream a little bigger.

Everyone has a different way of dreaming. When I dream (and remember it) it is usually a long tragic narrative, but other people just see images of sheep eating grass or something. What more or less everyone agrees upon, however, is that in a dream anything is possible. You can fly, you can breathe underwater, you can shoot lasers out of your eyes and lightning out of your fingers.

In Inception, everyone used guns. Nothing else. There's one instance where that one guy used dream magic to use those 'paradox' stairs to get the drop on a projection, but that's really just about it. You could argue that they can only use the things that the architect provides before they go in and that she isn't supposed to twist the world too much lest they attract the attention of the projections, but she's shown to have the ability to affect dreams on the fly. Why didn't she just manifest a fucking giant fire breathing robot dragon when things started getting ugly? What was stopping her? She could have hidden the thing when Fischer was around.

It feels to me that Nolan just wanted dream gun battles and nothing else and so nothing else was put in.

3)It was predictable.
I feared at the very beginning of the movie that it would end with some bullshit 'it was a dream the ENTIRE TIME and he was just trying to get the last secret from the Japanese guy' ending. I was relieved when it was apparent that that wasn't the case, but everything else was fairly predictable and straightforward. DiCaprio's wife being the first inception target and the entire story with her could really be traced twenty minutes in advanced.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when you combine it with the fact that I never gave a fuck about Cobb or anything related to Cobb thanks to the ham acting of Leo DiCaprio you get certain stretches of the movie that are really fucking boring. If I'd had control in the theater, I would have skipped a bunch of those fucking scenes and just gotten back to the people with funny accents shooting assholes.

And that's about all I've gotta say about that. There's more ...

The Gentlemen Bastard Sequence

Scott Lynch's The Lies of Lamora Locke and Red Seas Under Red Skies are a really good pair of books, which is surprising considering how much they do wrong.

The basic plot is that you have a Thief Priesthood preying on a fantasy city with a whole lot of alchemy and such cramed in. The main characters Locke and his gang, who are a group of con-artists that prey on the rich with elaborate confidence schemes who then get caught up in underworld politics and tangled in all manner of complications.

The characters are well-realized and human. The plot twists and turns in surprising ways and the books are most certainly page turners. I read the second one cover to cover in one sitting. But unfortunately, Lynch suffers from an affliction that many Fantasy authors suffer from. Mainly: the guy loves his fucking world building and refuses to put that shit down.



World building is an exercise that every bit of speculative fiction needs to go through. Readers need some context if they aren't going to be in some form of Earth that they're roughly familiar with. If Earth has been enslaved by alien crabs you need to establish that much before starting the rebellion against the crabs. But the problem of the last decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy is that world building was been placed at the forefront when it's supposed to be in the background.

In my opinion, nothing illustrates this trend better than Lynch. Every three chapters or so, the man would call a halt to his actual story and do some world building. He'll literally leave the real plot on a coathanger somewhere and go on for twenty pages about a random world building detail that he apparently feels is more important than his actual fucking story. It's almost always unnecessary and breaks the immersion like a crying baby in the middle of the Dark Knight.

Some examples of the shit Lynch foists on the reader in the middle of his narrative:

- The cruel aristocratic Chess-with-peasants-as-pieces game of some obscure palace
- How a bunch of hookers rebelled against their pimps
- The rituals of the freaky death goddess cult

There was one part of the second book where Locke and his friend Jean are getting trained to be seamen. The first worldbuilding detail Lynch put into that sequence was something that I liked... a seaman superstition that it was deathly bad luck to go out to sea without a cat aboard the ship, lest you offend the Iono the Lord of the Grasping Waters who apparently is very fond of cats. That was a cool detail that I thought was hilarious at the same time. I mean it's not often you see a Fantasy author taking inspiration from lolcats



But nevertheless, that one good moment was soured somewhat by the fifty fucking pages of fantasy sailor jargon ("Hard to Larsboard!") that followed it. Fuck.

Don't get me wrong, the world that Lynch has put together is pretty cool. It's got a really interesting set of political institutions, a nuanced criminal underworld, a well-realized religious angle, alchemy, clockwork machines, elaborate poisons and even a bit of diplomatic intrigue. Lynch even knows when to hold things back and keep them mysterious, as he does with a certain society of sorcerers for instance.

And fuck, he has cats in pirate ships:



But world building should be context. World building should be background. World building should be subordinate to everything else that's in the fucking story. World building should never be the story itself.

That said, the book has many virtues to make make up for this flaw. Let me go through them quickly so that I'm not just writing a negative review for a pair of books that I actually liked.

#1: Strong characters.

I'm a big fan of trickster protagonists and as the title of the first book suggests, Locke sort of embodies that. Trying to guess when he's lying and when he's not is what keeps the pages turning for me. As you read along and get a feel for his value system and personality it becomes easier to tell (which takes a bit of the joy out of it) but well-told and surprising lies are still in great abundance.

Unfortunately his world building mania does cloud into some of the more minor characters in the story. Like the Pirates (Plural! More than one!) who love Poetry and have long discussions about it. But fortunately that shit is minimized

[Note to Lynch: I get it, by the way. Lucarno is Seneca/Roman poets. The other guys were Sophocles/Greek poets. Thank you for inserting the discussion you had in a first year Classic seminar into your book. That was a very necessary thing for you to do.]

#2: Good planning.

The first two books have all manner of references to a girl that broke Locke's heart and left him, with no details or explanation. One thing that kept me reading so quickly was my curiosity about who the hell she is and why/how she did that and where she is now. In two books, Lynch avoids giving any tangible details. That tells me that he has the next five books in the series tightly planned and I strongly approve of that.

#3: Excellent fight scenes.

This one speaks for itself. Dirty thief fighting is full of quick movements, with dodges and distractions and feints. Often a fight in fantasy will rely on a character's gimmick or feel DnDish. Lynch's fights on the other hand seemed very real, with good accounts of pain, fear, hesitation and rage. I always like an author who pays attention to the physical nature of combat.

#4: Pirate cats.



Seriously. There's more ...