Something new is happening: Drawing Club!

Birthed from the brain of Nicole MacNeill (who makes these really great drawings that straddle the borders between cute/scary/funny/deep…I really really like them…), it’s a thing where we all send out a drawing each week for eight weeks.

What I made for Week 1 (and sent to illustrator Becca Stadtlander [check out this one!]):

What I made for Week 2 (and sent to founder Nicole MacNeill herself):

Sorry about all those links. When I get excited, I make a lot of links. You know how it is. “Look HERE! And look at THIS, too!”

I’ll post Week 3′s drawing when I decide what it is. I have a few things made, and can’t decide if I want to send one of those, or make something else.

OK, let’s complain about movies for a minute! I saw Inception, the new Christopher Nolan movie, and I’m still a bit pissed off about it. It takes place in an alternate present where people can enter each other’s dreams in order to steal secrets and implant thoughts in their minds. Leo DiCaprio leads a team of dream-crackers who are trying to convince a young heir to dissolve his father’s corporate empire. So they enter his mind and create a scheme of dreams-within-dreams to try to make him do it.

I thought this was going to be a movie full of over-the-top, imaginative visuals, bizarro physics, and fantastical situations. But a lot of it was just military/spy-esque men running around shooting at each other and downhill skiing with guns and having car chases and sneaking around fancy hotels. UGH! These characters have some really boring dreams! Yeah, there were some nice moments–ones not included in the trailer, which made me eager to see the film but also spoiled the surprise of the majority of the inventive visuals–but for a movie taking place almost entirely (or completely? dun dun DUN!) within dreams, very little of it felt dreamlike to me. A lot of the “hey, only in the wacky world of dreams could this happen!” stuff felt weak and kitschy. Maybe kitschy isn’t the right word, but…I wanted weird, queasy, unsettling, quick-changing, dreamlike quality, goddarn it! Not just, “ooh, a trick staircase like in an M.C. Escher drawing! ‘Cuz you know how weird those things are! Remember Labyrinth?”

I could go on. Sorry about how I’m staring to froth. I just want to complain about the movie’s “rules” for a little bit. A great deal of time and attention is paid to the supposed rules of the dream-time. If you’re in someone’s dream, you can’t change things much, or all these people in the dream who are figments of the dreamer’s subconscious will begin to attack you. Time in dreams passes more slowly than in real life, but at a regular rate; if you have 5 minutes of sleep time, you have an hour in the dream, and if you go into dreams-within-dreams, the conversion rate still applies, so you can calculate exact relative times in different dream levels. (How convenient!) If you are killed in a dream, you wake up, but if you are under heavy sedation in real life and die in your dream, your mind goes to an infinite limbo-land. Etc etc.

Basically, all this and more makes dreamwork very limiting and constrained. Oh, you wanted to do fantastical things in the dream? Nope, sorry, that would be changing the dream, and we can’t have that! Because the subconscious-figment-people will attack you! And THAT is certainly a necessary plot contrivance for a movie about dreams! Ugh.

Also, the music sucks and the whole thing lacks “atmosphere.”

For a better version of a related idea, see Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, which is, I think, far more dream-like and evocative.

But, who knows…maybe I would like it more if I saw it again.

Also, I think I’m fixating on the “dream” aspect of it too much, because really, a lot of what the movie is about is memory, not dreams. And a lot of the situations felt dull and conventional in a way that seems more memory-like than dream-like (and, quite a few scenes were actually of memories accessed lucidly during dreams, not pure, straight-up dreams). I think if I’d gone into this movie feeling like it was about tampering with memories, I wouldn’t have been so harsh on it.