The most exciting moment during an otherwise expendable trip to the movies the other day came when the trailer for David Fincher's "The Social Network" was played. This was an inspired bit of moviemaking, especially the touch of having a choir sing a cover of Radiohead's "Creep." The audience was rapt -- an emotional connection that was not continued, by the way, when "Inception" began.
Fincher is like the Kubrick for his generation. There are very few directors around that make you actually look forward to their next film, and his vocabulary is indelible. "Zodiac", for me, is one of the finest movies in the past decade, easily, and a very beautiful movie, too, in its own way. It's still galling that Robert Downey Jr. didn't win an Oscar for his performance (he wasn't even nominated)
But anyway, if "The Social Network", which is about the founding of Facebook, is as good as the trailer, it will be quite an experience. It's quite beautiful. Check the trailer out.
A word or two about "Inception." I once had a book about dream interpretation that boiled the meaning of every dream down to just one thing: sex. Apparently all we ever dream about is sex. Except, of course, in "Inception", even with the presence of the gorgeous Marion Cotillard, where nothing is about sex. It is definitely not about sex. It's the most sexless movie ever made, I bet.
It also sets some sort of record, in terms of the script. Every word spoken in this movie (with the exception, by my count, of two very lame jokes) is about plot. In the theater, this is called "speaking plot", where you move the story along through dialogue.
Each word in this movie is about what is supposedly happening. "We're going down three layers!" "Wait for the kick!" "Whose dream are we going in to anyway?"
Things like that. The guy a few seats over fell asleep, even during the Alistair McLean "Ice Station Zebra" finale among all that snow and skiing and shooting.
"Inception" was like listening to a 2 1/2 hour treatise on a subject that doesn't exist.
See the trailer for "The Social Network" below:
