" INCEPTION " - Suddenly this summer, the yardstick movie of the year

" INCEPTION " - Suddenly this summer, the yardstick movie of the year

Author: Cristobal Labog

From his pre-summer movie "Shutter Island," Leonardo DiCaprio now takes us to "Inception," certainly not just this season's but also this year's (and next year's and next's) most challenging and thrilling film. And that's largely thanks, too, to director Christopher Nolan who spent 10 years writing and rewriting what surely will become his magnum opus. (And we all thought his "Dark Knight" had taken him to the zenith of his career.) But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) rules the industrial espionage business, handsomely paid to extract the most valuable, innermost secrets of modern-day corporate honchos - through the medium of dreams. Like the hero of the Martin Scorsese-directed "Shutter Island," Cobb is also a flawed character - a widower haunted by feelings of guilt that are fuelled by recurrent memories of a dead wife and missing children, even as he pursues both real and imagined antagonists.

Ariadne (Ellen Page) creates the architecture of Cobb's dreams to enable him to weave in and out of this semiconscious state before the omnipresent danger gets out of hand and takes him to "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns." In non-Shakespearean parlance, that means death, because in Nolan's created universe, when one dies during an induced dream... but that's probably giving away too much (or too little).

"Inception" literally propels the film's central action: Instead of exacting secrets via dream invasion, what if you could plant an idea in the adversary's mind that would eventually result in the fall of his corporate dominion?

The adversary here is taipan Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), Cobb's client, the Japanese Saito's pugnacious, if suave, rival. Cobb's brilliant co-conspirators in this heist of heists include organization man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), skilled forger Eames (Tom Hardy) and Yusuf (Dileep Rao), the expert in charge of the drugs that induce this dream collective into a collective dream.

By nature, movies blur the line between reality and the moviegoer's perception of this reality - that's the secret behind their power to transport the public somewhere other than their normal habitat. In "Inception," multiply this blur tenfold, and you get the tip of an iceberg of pure entertainment that, we promise, will last you a lifetime, or at least until the next Leonardo/Nolan film comes along.

The ravishing Marion Cotillard plays Cobb's late wife Mal. She is by turns Cobb's sultry and menacing phantasm. What a rich supporting cast: Tom Berenger as Browning, Pete Postlewaite as Maurice Fischer and, yes, Michael Caine - auteur Nolan's regular - as Miles.

Hans Zimmer wrote a fevered, pulsing musical score that could out-Valkyrie venerable Wagner himself. He counterpoints this gravitas with an Edith Piaf song that wittily reminds us of Cotillard's Oscar-winning role and that rightfully proclaims to this year's Academy voters that this is Leonardi DiCaprio's year.

Wally Pfister should also win for his amazing camera work, along with film editor Lee Smith. If Guy Hendrix Dyas doesn't get nominated for his production design, perhaps an inception can be arranged for him. Paul Franklin supervised the visual effects, about which nothing but superlatives can be said, but the film belongs totally and with finality to writer-director Christopher Nolan.

"Inception" runs for 148 minutes and is rated PG 13.

Cristobal Labog has worked as a copywriter for advertising agencies in Manila, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Brussels and Amsterdam. He divides his time between Mandaluyong and Trabzon in the Black Sea. For comments and questions, e-mail crlabog@gmail.com [1].

Source: The Manila Bulletin