Rupert Epert Reviews: Inception

Christopher Nolan has done it again.

He's made another movie. He keeps doing this, and a warned public keeps buying tickets.

The warnings come because these aren't just popcorn pictures he's making. The public is fooled by a high concept, and Nolan's busy slipping vitamins into everybody's oatmeal. This is criminal, because you're just not supposed to be be able to make hundreds of millions of dollars making people think. We're being duped into accepting more than we paid for, and better than we expected.

"High-concept" is generally regarded as a disparagement. Films based on a large premise tend to be absent-mindedly executed. Nolan's particular skill, he takes this core idea and then winds plot, character, tone, and dialogue around it like a thread. Inception is totally a high-concept film: man invades dreams, blurring the lines between dream and reality. It's an old, old idea, and probably an easy sell.

Inception treats dream walking as a matter of course. There are well-defined rules to the dreamworld, which is some kind of pedestrian Matrix. There aren't any magical powers here--none of the freedom that lucid dreaming might normally afford. This is a terrific decision, because it constrains the narrative in a couple of important ways. First, characters can't just wish themselves out of predicaments. They have to accomplish objectives in linear and defeatable ways. Second, if dream is really indiscernible from reality, it has to be verisimilitudinous. Dream hasn't really been handled like this before.

The film is also terrifically cast. Leo DiCaprio. Ellen Page. Ken Wantanabe. Pete Postelwaite. Character actors all. This matters greatly, because characterization isn't Nolan's first strength. Characters don't live and breathe and evacuate bowels here--they're ciphers, types, archetypes. They're lips in service to a great idea, but because they're fleshed by great actors, you barely notice. Who *is* Cobb (DiCaprio) apart from his broken obsessiveness? Who cares? because Leo is just so broken.

Plot? Oh, it's sparse. Broken Leo wants to get home to his needy children, and his super Jedi dream skills can get him there. Assemble an ensemble, do one last mission impossible, ???, profit. Plot isn't important; it's another cypher that proves the central idea of this universe, that time and space are context-based fictions. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the movie's climax, which contains 4(!) nested dream universes that ostensibly occur in a few seconds but can, according to the rules of dream, last years. Trying to keep track of the same characters operating at different levels of dream in synchronicity bends the mind. It is an incredibly ambitious bit of filmmaking, and surely the thing to point to when talking about how great the film is.

But this, that reality is relative to the level on which you're currently existing, well--it's neat. It's not profound, exactly, but it's not platitudinous either. It doesn't resonate emotionally--it's no Toy Story 3--but apart from Pixar's annual and maddening high water mark, it's got to be the best movie of the year.

iPhone ad hoc Distribution Code Signing Issue

So I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why Mind Mountain's iPad distribution certificate wasn't being recognized by XCode during the build. I followed Apple's instructions on installing the provisioning profile, but found no joy.

Here's the solution: the Bundle Identifier (found in the app's plist) has to match the provisioning profile name exactly. It is case sensitive.

Figured this knowledge might save another developer an hour or two of her life.

Waiting For The UPS Guy

So my iPad is coming today. I can tell because last night I dreamed I had one already. I had one and it cracked diagonally on its face, and broke into diamonds when I tried to cradle it back to life.

That pad wasn't the iPad. It was bigger, and wider, and broken, which is something the iPad can't do.

I'm wandering the house now, checklisting places I'll want to do my iPadding when it comes. Which should be anytime now. It's hard to walk and type, but this thing I'm on is only a MacBook, and can be forgiven its trespasses--mainly, it's got a fat ass that wants to sit on the desk.

My iPad is assless. It wants to be held. To be beheld. I'll use in upright in bed, supine in bed, on the can, on the sofa, standing in the kitchen. It's a fucking magic screen.

Wow, I sound like a fanboy. Which I am, undoubtedly, but I generally mean to hide it behind some fair-minded rhetoric. The truth is, tech companies are balls, and tech itself is balls--all excepting Apple. Why is that?

I've heard it said--a person is smart, but *people* are stupid. This is droll. Also, accurate. The democratization of technology tends to track closely with its craptasticitude. Because too many people want a say, and most of these have nothing good in the saying. But Apple has Real Steve Jobs. Which seems like guileless luck, for more than a few reasons. The confluence of adoption, LSD, and Cupertino, CA do not prima facie imply a sniff of greatness, sane or otherwise. I imagine Steve himself is incredulous some nights, water flowing underground.

I'm rambling now, but I'm ok with that. The future is coming on a brown truck, delivered by a permed guy in short shorts. Today is full of these little contradictions.

Reading Cormac McCarthy

I'm reading McCarthy's The Road while on a road trip with my family. McCarthy's prose here is achingly sparse, populated by lament and loss and the too-long onlingering of things. It reminds me of some work I've done before, specifically this one:

Somnambulist

We are walking wide-awake

we waking dead

Move across these landscape features

Across these stone foundations in the ground

These monoliths with a muted gaze

we pass.

At the turret we'll turn left

--Highway Sixty--

Before we forget the exit sounds

and all these things are gone

They will be gone amid dead cities

They will be gone amid the ash

of Apocalyptic visions

And ruinous--what is it--

Machinations

This is not the genre of the end

no Simple eschatology for the learning class.

We're looking at the sudden close of things,

The unwarned muting of color and sight

and physical approximations of forms

You say you want a recount,

A sad reckoning for the innocent.

That is the story of life

and what it's all about

Sometimes you just have to go; dissolve into

the hazy dream, the half-lit fire, leap

Atop the flat platforms of perfumed life

and go.

The welcome end! The world dissolved!

Not in Storm and fire but like a light

switch thrown, suddenly dark.

All innumerable patterns broken into elements

Everything at its own center Every

Flaw and perfection recognizing

its own heart.

This is the day

This is the reconciliation and the life

All the work was worth it, all the

indolence worth it,

Now we're waking up.

Mania

It's 1 am and I'm jazzed about solving some iPhone development problems. At this time of night these problems seem small beside the towering figure of my post-midnight genius.

As a younger man, I used to fetishize the cigarette box. The smoothness of a machine-rolled single. The Zippo. The small objects in people's pockets they fingered when getting off the bus. I had a fondness for key fobs, for complicated keyrings, and for moneyclips. I figured I could become the person I strove to be with the right accoutrements in my pants.

Over the years these things replaced one another. D-ring replaced Zippo, tiny cell phone replaced horking giant beast Motorola flip. Out with the Bic, in with the headset. Headphones superseded game cartridges, somebody invented wallet-thin tools, somebody else found them unwieldy. Gerber Multi-tool. Some cheapo pliers. A 3rd gen iPod. A nano.

I don't carry much anymore. A money clip that doubles as a utility knife, some keys, and my iPhone.

I used to run through PDAs like Forrest Gump through the end zone. 4 models of Sony Clie, 3 Palm Pilots of varying vintage, a Sharp Zaurus. These were among the dorkiest, clumsiest tools I've ever cringed at in later contemplation. The iPhone is like none of these. I'm going to develop the hell out of iPhone apps. Maybe a cigarette app.

Where Is The Walkman After The Apocalypse?

I am alkaline, the

Inexorable chase.

Moss-pitted, I sit unused,

Regal head slotted to one side

And in all the fantasy chase

Science;

I chase Science

With all the fury of darkness

With all the ease

With all the--

Oh, Science! I am

Alkaline

Antediluvian

Anthropomorphic--

Chemistry on two legs,

Sonorous note to the dim tide,

You listen!--

In Stockholm once

Did I writhe under your aim

Did I sit while you bore--

I long again to be held fast,

For water to pour out my side;

Tremendously used, I shall expire.

Science, what did you do those

Three days?

In the moment I blinked,

You were gone.

Left me--

Mephistopheles.

-Boulder

November 1996

The Viewless Wings of Poesy

I confess that I have a very great love for poetry. My most frequent method of expressing love for something being to mangle it, I have decided to post some of the poems I've attempted over the years. Most of these have never seen the light of another's eyes, nor were meant to, so they are most likely mealymouthed affairs that don't say much at all.

Still, I'm cleaning out my closet.