Відео

I agree, this whole film was really obviously a string of scenes they wanted to film and they wrote a story loosely around those scenes. The result is a muddled mess. And I'm 100% positive that's how it was written because he did the exact same thing with Tenet... he had a bunch of scenes in his head and he wrote a movie around them. The result is fun to look at, but makes absolutely no sense. These films seem determined to use real-world physics to attempt to tie them to the world we know, and then a second later the physics goes out the window and random things happen. And it just ends up being really frustrating to watch, because obviously a great deal of thought went into specific details, but then really important things like continuity are just fudged. And when you have films specifically about continuity and the continuity doesnt work... it's just mess.

I recently found your channel. An absolute gold. I don't know why UA-cam doesn't recommend channels such as yours. I found it only after searching about Zelazny.

I find Christopher Nolan is so overhyped. This movie was a disappointing Hollywood rip off of the excellent Japanese film Paprika. You should watch that next and do a comparison.

I unabashedly love Inception but I get where you come from. Guess I could address some of your points, but you can keep on living perfectly without me writing them…rewatching the film 20 times clears most stuff you mention and I’m the kind of guy who likes to rewatch puzzle films 😅 Suffice to say, Inception is a film about filmmaking- movies are dream machines and a good movie does inception to the audience - when the film came out the tag was “your mind is the scene of the crime” which indeed it is. And yeah, the snow stuff is an obvious OHMSS homage!

I’m not a Nolan or Villeneuve fan. They make pretty movies with little substance.

There's a chapter in the fourth Tournament of Psionic Murder novel where a psionic assassin places people into guided dreams where he tries to make them kill each other, while they think they're killing different people- it's just one chapter, not a whole novel about that but I guess it fits the trope. A really great series too

Agreed. I haven’t seen this since it was in the theater. When people ask about movies that explore dreams I recommend Paprika. I guess this is good for the action/sci-fi fans, but for me dreams are special and this was a bland take on them. I especially hated the “background characters as immune system attack” idea. You could do so many weirder things with that. People in my dreams are like robots, wandering around with a limited number responding to whatever is happening. Someone will attack by just walking up and grabbing me. It doesn’t hurt but it’s like they’re stuck to me and I can start yelling and tearing them apart and everyone else just walks around us uninterested. Mix it up. Make it unpredictable and bizarre instead of just a gun fight every time. The main problem for me was I couldn’t connect with any of the characters. The shaper woman’s curiosity and wonder at the dream world is the only positive element I remember. If I remember right the main guy is trying to take his children from their stable caregiver and use the dirty money to go on the run with them? I thought that was awful so I just kind of wanted to see the heist fail. I’ve seen people say the whole thing is supposed to still be in his dream but if that’s the intent it went so over my head it would just add a whole other layer of unsatisfying. Also watching Inception in the theater marks the first time I realized my hearing was degrading. Some characters mumbled so much I missed half their dialogue. I’ve heard that is a bad film-making style Nolan uses for “realism.” This is one of many reasons I’m happy to wait for most movies to come to streaming so I can watch at home with subtitles on.

Ugh, Interstellar. Some cool stuff in there (loved the robot), but all the faux-deep BS really turned me off. Pretty much in agreement with you on Inception... a fun action flick, but so many inconsistencies.

15:00 _Chekhov's Gun_ is the name of that narrative principle. Based on the priciple that if something is given some kind of value or importance in the first acts, then it should be used and shown its importance in one of the following or final acts of the story.

Inception was OK at best. Highly overrated pseudo-intellectual fluff. I feel like a lot of the love and praise for the film was an Emperor's got No Clothes kind of phenomena.

Just about every Christopher Nolan movie has something super dumb about it, but they're all still usually still worth watching. Batman Begins with the stupid steam gun that somehow doesn't vaporize everybody it touches, The Dark Knight with the crispy Two Face in the (what felt like) last few minutes of the movie. The Dark Knight Rises with the trapped cops and bad audio and open daylight punch fighting (uncharactistic of Batman), needlessly bad audio of Tenet, the weak nuke going off in Oppenheimer that would've benefitted from CGI. It's like Nolan needs more people on staff to call him out on dumb stuff before calling the movie done.

It seems irrational (to me) to be hyper-rational about a dream (i.e., his impossibly relying upon his wife's weight to sustain his rappelling down the building). In that scene, at least, the film is not violating its own logic/reality.

Didn’t think I could love you guys more! 😍 Inception sucks! It says so much about his lack of imagination that *THAT* is what he’d come up with when given the chance to play around in the dream realm. It’s all about “Paprika”!

yes, I agree 100% not _terrible_ but not quite even good. very mid 🖖

I completely agree. Christopher Nolan is so overrated. He's a bad story teller and his films are humourless and bombastic. He really likes to deliberately go over the audience's heads for no reason than just to make himself look clever. He ruined '2001, A Space Odyssey' by tinting it yellow. What a pretentious egomaniac. He should have given up after making videos for his mother's pop group. And why is Leonardo so miserable throughout this film? He has a permanent scowl on his face all the way through!

Too much hand-waving.

Thank you. Nolans Oppenheimer is a masterpiece. But the ones he writes with his Muppet brother are nonsense wrapped in a thin layer of pseudo-intelligence

I'm convinced that Nolan and maybe his brother listened to the Alan Watts lectures from the 60s - because there were several of them where he talks about the mechanics by which dreams within dreams would work as well as concepts describing the matrix

I prefer your brother... just kidding!😂

Why you gotta do my favorite movie like this :(

I thought it was just me. I enjoyed interstellar, and the Prestige (not loved). But, Inception just pissed me off. I can't stand Dunkirk or Tenet...and saw an hour of Oppenheimer.

I love Murakami, and HBWSTEOTW sits in my memory as one of his best, though it is many years since I read it. I suppose we all have our subjective sub-categories, but I always connected that book with Iain Banks’s Walking On Glass. Lathe of Heaven is also a favourite. Love what you are doing with this channel. I have always enjoyed the weird books which sit in these liminal spaces.

i think you're overselling how much action is in the movie. i have to wonder how many people would considered it a fun action movie.

What about The Prestige?

A precursor of the trope, albeit without the maschine, instead relying on a being with supernatural powers who induces guided dreams in a neurotic artist: Alfred Bester's The Starcomber/ 5271009.

What are dreams? Psychological processes of the "mind"? Material processes of the brain? Now there are, supposedly, people who can control their actions in a dream - "lucid dreamers". I am not certain if these people can control their dreams. It doesn't seem possible that people who can't control their own real life can, somehow, control who and what they dream about. Like flying or visiting different planets or chasing a bear instead of being chased by a bear. If there are people who can control what they dream about, would they be having dreams? I don't think so. I think their dream life would be just like their real life. Instead of their real life being mostly boring and "rational", and their dream life being "incoherent" emotions and settings; their dream life would be rational, like directing a movie. A movie with nothing original. The conceit of a dream master requires the unsaid knowledge that there is someone not only familiar about the "unconscious", but actually knows what it is. Makes the unconscious rational. In other words it takes the mystery out of consciousness. Now how would you do that? Consciousness is a vehicle for "reality", but it is not a complete vehicle: we don't know everything. We don't know if there are other planets with alien life, a spiritual realm with angels, demons and gods, what will be discovered or done tomorrow, and a host of other rational considerations. If we don't know everything, then what makes us sure that what we do know is "completely" safe? It seems to me that history teaches us that the "mark of civilization" is the neurotic belief that we know what its all about. Even our fantasies or sci-fi imaginings of our future never posit epistemological omniscience. It's always about some schmo going through some unexpected process he/she has to deal with. Deal with as best they can with imperfect knowledge. Beware anyone or thing that tells you they know what it's all about!

The Cell definitely is in this category then, the protagonist is a psychiatrist that uses a machine to enter the dreams of her patients and deal with their subconscious. A serial killers gets in a coma while one of his victims is still alive and the FBI contacts the protagonist to enter the dreams of the serial killer and find clues regarding the location of the victim.

This is probably not going to fit into your definition (and I am very much a proponent of tight definitions) but there is a movie, called "Project X" from 1968, based on a novel "The Artificial Man" by L. P. Davies. It is more of a science fiction political thriller in which they are able to study a man's dreams to retrieve some vital information. Overall it might help you to create a list of features or qualities that a story must have in order to belong to this sub-genre, and maybe a second list of features or qualities that it can not have in order to belong. It might help refine your thinking (if you feel that you need to refine it, you seem to have a decent handle on the concept already).

I don't have another book ATM, but I was reading some about Greek cults last night and I ran into the Athenian cult of Dionysos Limnaios, who is so named because in this regional variation he was supposed to have been born in the nearby marshes. The book includes a short quote about the 2nd day of their cult festival, with a fictional etymology for his name (the Greeks loved making up etymologies!): Phanodemus, in Athenaeus, Deipnosophists XI: ‘At the temple of Dionysus in Limnai the Athenians bring the new wine from the jars and mix it in honor of the god and then they drink it themselves. Because of this custom Dionysus is called Limnaios, because the wine was mixed with water and then for the first time drunk diluted.’ So in this case we have several different kinds of liminality blending together: the marshes between land and sea, and the ritualistic act of blending of water and wine, the altered state of consciousness reached through drinking of the wine, and the spiritual transformation attained through the cult rituals. Dionysian cults are typically centered around liberation and the pursuit of states of frenzy bordering on madness, which represent possession by Dionysos, ultimately all in the pursuit of spiritual purification. Like an ancient divine Ken Kesey. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting to run into while thinking about your previous videos! These are so great, I need to dig into these books.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch may qualify more so than Ubiq. Not exactly a dream machine but drug-induced virtual reality. I guess I wouldn’t be too concerned with keeping it super narrow about it. Manipulating the subconscious seems about right.

Not sure, but I think Paprika is based on a Japanese novel. Can't wait to see what new finds get added to this list; I hope, though, you spend more time on literature than film. I think it's awesome when a group comes together and joins in the labor (and it is a form of labor) of finding books and stories in this subgenre. And it's just fun. I never would have found (K)night of Delusions had it not been for this channel. Cheers.

All of Gene Wolfe's book are like fever dreams to me. I'm pretty sure I did read through one while sick and feverish once, and then again later while healthy: same experience.

It might fit, wanna recommend the German film World On A Wire. Great trailer ua-cam.com/video/13dhEgvniTg/v-deo.htmlsi=1cyKXI_YE5l0tM6L

Cool shirt!

U should try Bioy Casares “Morel Invention”

Loved this book!

Great music, is it yours?

"it is enough to have the strength and knowledge to raise our dream machines into the sky" :) I was reminded of Laibach's rendition of B Mashina. Also, in Planescape: Torment (the video game) I think there is a dream machine somewhere. The mere concept of a dream machine is evocative, I think.

Now that I've subscribed to your channel I'm gonna dig thru and see if you did a video on The Man Who Folded Himself, I read it like 40 years ago at the public library when I was 12, I don't remember who wrote it but it was the guy who created Land of the Lost, a great kid's TV show that "snuck in" a buncha great adult sci-fi concepts to little kids in the 70's.

There's the truly dystopic This Perfect Day by Ira Levin. Not so much for therapy, but total societal control.

Falling water is worth a watch, dreamers cults around the dreaming, green sneakers. Only watched the first series. But they are charging for it now on prime. Maybe free in the states.

Great video. Curious: Have you seen the 80s film 'Dreamscape'? It definitely touches on the idea of using dreams in a therapeutic manner, specifically with a young boy who has nightmares about a snake man, although that's a subplot. Tarsem Singh's 'The Cell' seems almost like an extension of that very subplot, and Singh's visuals are just insane. It was his first full-length film. His second film, 'The Fall', is one of my all-time favorite fantasy films as well, though it has nothing to do with this concept.

Fascinating story subject and recommendations.

I also highly recommend Donnerjack (VR cyberpunk) another Zelazny collaboration

A couple of early books by Dean Koontz which might fit the trope: The first is A Darkness in My Soul. I have not read the second, but the title makes it a promising prospect. The title is, The Fall of the Dream Machine.

Have you ever seen the made for TV movie version of Lathe of Heaven that came on PBS back in the 80s? It's pretty good, especially considering what TV budgets were back then. Also, you should check out this video game called The Dream Machine. It's a point and click game for PC. All the characters and sets are made out of clay and cardboard and like cotton and stuff. It's pretty cool. I bought it on Steam about 5 or 6 years ago. It comes in chapters you could buy separately or you can buy the game as a whole. And the first chapter was available for free as a demo. I'd assume it's still available. The art style is really cool and it's got a trippy surreal story.

Love the artwork and music at the end!

I'll add a recommend for: 🕯 Pan Sagittarius by Ian Wallace which is book 3 in a series, "croyd spacetime maneuvres" might be more Mind Expanding than Bending, your millage may vary ;-)

The Thirteenth Floor.

Lathe of Heaven seems to be Le Guin's closest approach to the world of PKD. An early novel by Dick which might be of interest is Eye in the Sky.