Whenever I see Verizon's "Rule the Air" signature TV commercial, which transforms city objects -- including the side of a tall building -- into cool, complicated antennae, it sets me wondering about "Inception." Why has director Christopher Nolan roused so much applause for folding up a Parisian city block when the Verizon commercial turns equally nifty effects into clever throwaway gags, without all the huffing and puffing? The answer, I think, is reassuring, whether you're a fan of "Inception" or a skeptic like me: it's the impact of watching these effects in the dark, on a huge screen, with a big crowd ooohing and aaahing along with you.
Peter Bogdanovich once wrote that he saw Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," a vastly greater game-like summer movie, five times in theaters between 1959 (when it opened) and 1966. "Since the start of the home-video era," he continued, "I had seen the movie a couple of times and still enjoyed it, but not until seeing it again on the big screen did I recognize conclusively what a gigantic different screen size does make. I was instantly reminded of my dear mother's remark that the difference between seeing a film on a theater screen as opposed to television was the difference between seeing a painting on a wall and looking at a reproduction of it in a book."
Of course, for core "Inception" fans, the difference is between mastering video games on computer monitors or figuring one out on a screen that, in comparison, is the size of a football field.
"North by Northwest" opened in mid-July, just as "Inception" did, and also, at 131 minutes, was considered long for an escapist thriller. But Hitchcock, with the help of production designer Robert Boyle (who died Sunday), gave his game of cross-country Chutes and Ladders an inexorable sweep, taking us from the skin of the United Nations building in New York to the top of Mt. Rushmore. And with the help of screenwriter Ernest Lehman, he gave it moral and human dimensions, peopling it with characters who bristled with mystery and romance and aggressive wit, turning even exposition into statements of personality.
"I'm an advertising man, not a red herring," says Cary Grant, at one point. "I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself 'slightly' killed." (Take that for dramatic speed and thump, o ye "Mad Men.")
Admit it: don't you long for taut dialogue and humor and personalities like Grant's in "Inception?" On the other hand, even if, like me, you're not a fan of "Inception," doesn't it earn points for bringing people into what Bogdanovich called "the wonderfully dreamlike, yet communal, experience of a theater screening?"
