Independent Student Newspaper for the University of Texas at San Antonio

The Paisano

Independent Student Newspaper for the University of Texas at San Antonio

The Paisano

Independent Student Newspaper for the University of Texas at San Antonio

The Paisano

Paisano Road to the Oscars

True Grit

With eight Academy Award nominations, “Inception” is last year’s masterpiece from mastermind Christopher Nolan. When Inception hit the screens in July, anticipation was sky high for the director of “The Dark Knight’s” newest film. Secrecy surrounded it, details about it were scarce, all we had to go by was the tagline “Your mind is the scene of the crime.” When “Inception” opened, it was clear that Nolan had delivered yet another masterpiece of cinema.

When Nolan made Warner Brothers 1 billion dollars back in 2008, after the release of “The Dark Knight,” the studio gave him permission to make anything he wanted. He chose to dust off an old script he wrote back in 2001 about dream stealers and make it a big budget movie about the human mind. The idea didn’t exactly look like a huge mainstream hit, but such was Nolan’s reputation that he decided to go ahead with the project.

“Inception” is a combination of a movie with art house sensibilities, backed up by blockbuster ambition. Over the years, Hollywood stood by their stance that big blockbuster movies had to be dumb, loud and action packed (e.g: Transformers) in order to be successful. Well, Inception proved Hollywood wrong! Inception treated its audience like intelligent human beings who would be able to follow the plot, relate to the characters and thoroughly enjoy a big budget movie without the presence of aliens or robots hitting each other. If anything, “Inception’s” ability to confuse its audience was one of the most attractive things about it. People weren’t able to figure it out the first time round, so people went to go see it a second time.

The movie is also in beautiful 2-D, after Chris Nolan wisely decided that 3-D was not right for his film.

The ending of “Inception” had people talking for hours. Did it fall? Or didn’t it? There’s evidence for both, but it doesn’t really matter since in either case it’s a happy ending for Leonardo DiCaprio.

“Inception” lived up to the hype and continued Chris Nolan’s streak of never making a bad movie. (In fact 5 of his 7 films are on the imbd top 250 list). It proved that if you treat an audience with respect, then they will come, and in huge numbers! “Inception” has got my vote for the most successful and brilliant film of the year. Good luck at the Oscars!

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