I thought this was garbage. I expected it to be a really twisty, mindfuck movie along the lines of Memento, which it wasn’t at all. I also expected the kind of insane, reality altering visuals they were pushing so hard in the trailer, but those are more or less confined to a couple scenes. So what’s left is a pretty nifty concept with which Nolan does nothing more than make a heist movie. And a shitty heist movie at that. I mean, what makes a heist movie worth watching? A team of well-drawn characters interacting, shifting loyalties, a complex plot littered with surprises, and you know, obstacles, generally obstacles to the heist being carried out, that’s a good idea. But Inception isn’t especially good at any of these things.

Some people are comparing this to The Matrix, but it’s really more like Ocean’s Eleven if it took place in some dude’s dream. Except Ocean’s Eleven was a quality, solidly entertaining movie. This isn’t.

I rate this as worth consuming for one reason only, and that reason is Tim Sale’s incomparable art. The compositions he creates in tandem with Gregory Wright’s colors here are beautiful, shadowy, noir concoctions that must be seen to be believed, and place him among the finest artists ever to work in superhero comics.

But man, never has a superlative artist ever been in almost exclusive partnership with such a hacky, insistently mediocre writer. Jeph Loeb’s work basically ranges from unreadably bad [Hush, Batman/Superman] to tolerable [this], and it’s a damn shame that the Loeb/Sale partnership continues to this day. The premise of the book is actually pretty compelling, as is revelation of the mystery and the bloodbath that concludes the story, but the litany of villains parading through the book just stretches the story on for-fucking-ever without really advancing the plot.

And that’s not even starting on the flat, almost nonexistent characters, and saving the worst for last, Loeb’s fucking dialogue. I guess this could be read as ‘terse’, but it’s really just underwritten, expository, and fucking unimaginative. What’s really criminal, though, is the internal narration that plagues this thing. Seriously, I dare you, count how many times Batman says or thinks “I made a promise to my parents.” Marvel at how every fucking time the name Carmine Falcone comes up it’s followed by “Gotham’s untouchable crime lord.” Note how in chapters nine and ten, in the sections where we see the Mad Hatter and Scarecrow together, we see the exact same narration recapping the Scarecrow’s escape from the Asylum: “On Mother’s Day, Jonathan Crane, psychologist turned psychopath, escaped from Arkham Asylum. Unleashing the Scarecrow on my city. He did not do this alone. He had help.” I realize this work was originally serialized, and maybe the audience needs to be reminded of a couple things, but it’s not like these are densely packed chapters. Barely anything happens from one to the next, you can breeze through ’em in a couple minutes flat, and trotting out the same narration in the same exact words is just loathesomely lazy writing, and it gives us as readers absolutely no credit.

In conclusion, <3 Tim Sale, fuck you Jeph Loeb.

gee zack, you made a movie with only five colours! what up

i am on a mission to read through all of philip k. dick’s work, because when he’s on, the man is untouchable. most of these stories though, written at the beginning of his career, are pretty weak sauce. predictable, clumsy, and written with a decided lack of style.

there’s a handful of good stories: paycheck contains one of the most brilliant plot mechanisms in any short story, and there’s a general upwards tick in quality in the last quarter, but most of these stories are pretty forgettable.

i really wanted to dig this, but i just don’t get it. the covers of this book are practically painted with pull-quotes lauding its rich, original satire, and it’s a great idea and all (corporate re-branding of the iraq war (an analogue in this case) as the ultimate sexy peak life experience) but for the occasional chuckle and good bits, there’s a shit load of soap operatics that i ultimately really didn’t care about.

nice enough, but pretty superfluous. i don’t really see the point of this existing in the long run. is anyone going to watch this again over re-reading the book?

(if you are, hate. hate and death to you.)

i keep falling asleep after the first three songs. normally i’ll fall asleep a couple times when i’m first starting to listen to something, but i don’t think i’ve ever listened to something so many times and covered so little. too relaxing i guess?

this is not very good!

i liked the first volume in a shallow entertainment sort of way… it didn’t really add up to much in terms of characters, etc. (they’re quirky! woah) but i was interested to see where the master plot was headed.

this one just kind of drove me over the line, though. the art is all gorgeous, but the obnoxious writing tics here drove me nuts, especially the dialogue. i don’t mind cleverness, but this is pretentious, clumsy bullshit that doesn’t pass muster for cleverness. and man, i am not afeared of the profanity (i adore the big lebowski), but i have never enjoyed overuse of the f-bomb less. on top of that: those dreadful monologues that open most every issue attempting to offer some deep observations (wow, thanks for educating us about the compelling drama of class struggle, immigrants and the dark secrets of america wrapped up in the convenience store there), in tangent with that the fact that the writer seems to think he’s producing something important with things to say when he’s barely capable of writing a decent thriller, and the lack of story! really that’s what killed it for me. i like spooky mythologies that slowly unravel, but that really only works if you have actual stories to tell in the meantime, here things just happen, in a spectacularly meandering fashion at that, and don’t tell me that’s life, because this book has nothing to do with life what-so-ever.

I think it will maybe take me a couple more viewings to absorb the actual content of the movie, but god DAMN is this movie ever gorgeous.

a little bit of a slog, sometimes, through a bunch of superhero fighting bullshit and extended, vaguely uninteresting plot threads, but there’s a reasonable amount of amusement and ideas to be had. when travis charest draws, it’s pretty — he seems like a more refined and european jim lee (and therefore is better than jim lee, ha).

tao is the best, though. you maybe should read it just for tao.

i wouldn’t buy it or read it again unless it was for some kind of analysis of alan moore’s work.