Lancemc
Blue Crack Addict
Stoker's got a really spectacular match-dissolve if nothing else.
Inception is the exact opposite: dour, constantly gray, boring bullshit.
Inception is maybe my second favorite Nolan film actually, though it is in fact dour grey bullshit for the most part (The Prestige still holds up pretty well... I genuinely like that one quite a bit), but I am at a complete loss to imagine what about it could excite one of "the possibilities of the medium" so thoroughly. It's inventive, but only insofar as cross-cutting several different concurrent narratives (that itself is a technique almost 100 years old) which have vastly different relationships to one another in terms of rate and time within the story, where their duration on screen to us plays out equitably, but take place within ever expanding amounts of real-world time within one another. That's the exciting thing about the film, and it's a really great feat of logistics to execute properly, but even then it's still just a twist on fundamental film grammar with very little else going on around it.
Looper on the other hand, I haven't actually gone back to revisit though I'd like to, has just about as many interesting things to do with narrative logic, but actually has a lot of fun doing it, and embraces the batshit turns it takes along the way for what they're worth.
In one of his last articles for the Voice, J. Hoberman said that if you mashed up the action scenes in TRON: Legacy with the last 40 minutes of Inception you'd have a perfect B-movie. It's tough to disagree with him for the reasons that you mention: the cross-cutting between the varying levels of dreams in conjunction with Zimmer's booming sonic paint job create an overbearing immediacy. You're bowled over by the enormity of the spectacle since Nolan's films power through with a strong forward momentum (except when they're punctuated by characters reminding each other & the audience of the "stakes").
My biggest issue that the Nolan-powered strum and drang rarely amount to anything as formally exciting from what I look forward to in a blockbuster or as engaging intellectually as the "high-minded" flicks he strives toward. The dude is middle-brow personified. Even if there's an setpiece in his flicks worth watching or a performance or two that works, what's it in service of? I agree that The Prestige comes together well, but I'd like to see a heist film made by someone fun, a superhero film made by someone with a visual sense, or a detective story made by someone with a regard for storytelling mechanics, or any regard for humanity (let alone women) in any of his work.
In short, Nolan sucks. Interstellar will be a tremendous waste of acting talent. Give Shane Carruth 1/10th of the budget and you may get an amazing science fiction story.
Rian Johnson is the anti-Nolan to the point where I'd like to assume the universe created him as a counterpoint. If they're in the same room together, watch the fabric of space/time begin to unravel.
YLB, do you wish you could go back in time and incept yourself against this:
http://www.u2interference.com/forums/f293/inception-206784-16.html#post6846009
This discussion reminded me of:
http://www.u2interference.com/forums/f293/inception-206784-15.html#post6845696