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Reviews
All the Pretty Horses (2000)
Harvey Weinstein screwed it up
The book is great and Billy Bob was a good fit for it, but producer Harvey Weinstein screwed it all up. He wanted a two hour cut, even though from the offset it was clear the story needed a three hour epic sweep.
So you really shouldn't watch this obviously truncated version (35% was cut). Scenes are rushed and a film that was supposed to capture the feel and romance of the landscape falls flat. Apparently Billy Bob has the correct edit on VHS in his home. Matt Damon says this cut is the best film he's ever been involved in. Eventually this film will be released, so you all should just wait for it. Billy Bob talks humorously about all this on cinemablend.
The Weinsteins of this world are by no means villains, it takes a lot of hard work and guts to get where they have. But the same brute force that makes them successful can prove fatal where artistry is involved. Producers can be right - sometimes directors do need reigning in. Just not in this case. Harvey wasn't dealing with a wayward, self-indulgent director, and the story really did demand more time in its telling.
Inception (2010)
Less intriguing than a set of of matroyshka dolls
I've heard the word visionary thrown Nolan's way, but this film was the work of a rather sterile imagination. Yes, it had a few layers of narrative cleverly interweaved with each other, but there was little to compel me at its core. The root cause of Cobb's state of mind just didn't grab me - partly as this relationship was never given the chance to develop to a tangible level. The elements of subconscious displayed were dull and the approach to the dreamworld rather banal - focusing as it did mainly on bland designs, bendy gimmicks and exploding things. There was little edge to Nolan's vision, he seemed quite happy to drown us in relentless exposition and unimaginative slow-mo shots. Scenes were very quick and at no point approached the atmosphere and intrigue of a real dream. A shame, because at their best, this is what films can do - engineer the quality of a waking dream. Compare Inception to the more intriguing work of Lynch, where scenes seduce with the perfect balance of the real and surreal, and whose images and ideas tend to linger in the mind. On top of this, Nolan is simply not a very good director of action; he is quite loose with the camera, and I yearned for more flair and invention in these scenes. Instead, he relied on an incredibly insistent score to give the action some punch.
For a film about dreams and the subconscious, it was curiously impersonal and mechanical. Certainly, the real danger and sexuality of the subconscious might scare off mainstream audiences, but Nolan was given free reign to do what he wanted - so why not do something more interesting? The film is less concerned with psychology and more with the narrative possibilities afforded by a convoluted dreamworld fiction. Perhaps Nolan does dream of corporate worlds and Bond fortresses. Unfortunately, such things don't interest me.