Inception

Fire. This was way better than I remembered. It's been haunting my watchlists for 15 years, my subconscious must have known it was a true classic of my generation. I watched it I believe twice in high school. I saw it in theaters; I was annoyed how everyone was calling it deep. I thought it was cheesy, perhaps deep in plot but shallow in substance. Shockingly I remembered very little of it. All the better -- thus it became a fresh thrill this time around.

This has all of the elements of a good Nolan movie: it's mind-bending and epic while blending straightforward action with psychological mining. Oppenheimer has the last bit; Tenet a couple of the others; Inception joins Interstellar in striking every key.

It also features the standard stupidity of a Nolan movie. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is insufferable, and every other actor puts on some flavor of the same dumb suave. I blame Nolan more than I blame the actors. His idea of cool is fading with his generation -- it's overdone and cringey now.

Cotillard's character is provocative, though I regret her overarching affect is like a clingy witch: she can't let her husband live his real life, she must haunt him with wide wicked eyes, beckoning him back in her cauldron of id. She ended up being a sensible choice for Lady Macbeth, years later.

The top definitely wobbles at the end. Not as ambiguous as I remember it being.

Am I saying I love Inception? No, but I'm storing it in my memory as not only a meme of my generation (saying "inception" is to younger millennials what saying "the matrix" is to older millennials) but a classic of my generation. I couldn't see it at the time, but this movie did what it needed to do. I'll double down on the Matrix comparison: it planted philosophy in many minds, not an easy thing to do. It thrilled those inclined to the sensory and those inclined to the cerebral alike. It may have even turned the sensory cerebral and re-grounded the cerebral in the sensory. It missed me... I must have been just out of sync, in fact just joining the cerebral, therefore too proud of my new status. Inception would have been a regression at the moment I needed nothing but advancement, so I rejected it. It was too overtly cerebral and too unapologetically sensory at a time I needed actual sophistication. The funny thing is, for my sophistication, I'm sure I didn't understand the movie. I think that's one reason I don't remember much of it -- I must have been lost. It took full adulthood before I started keeping up with intricate plots. But I needed subtler art and secret intellect, and this movie was too gaping and gawking and obvious... and popular.