I’ve read a lot of reviews of Inception (including the one here) and a lot of thoughts on Inception (including the one here just a little bit ago, which is quite a nice theory. Me, I tend to go for the straightforward ambiguity of “either the ending is entirely real, or else everything up to the ending is real and it’s only the last few minutes that are a dream”. But I do like the idea that Matthew Johnson put forward…and I like that the movie is more ambiguous than the heist flick it seems to be on the surface.)

But the most common negative I hear about the movie is summed up by one of the comments in Matthew Johnson’s post (thank you, Snap Wilson, for inspiring this post, by the way): “Yes, I suppose it’s thoroughly reasonable that a drab, uninteresting person would dream about other drab, uninteresting people taking place in drab, uninteresting environments (or risible Modern Warfare 2 levels, apparently). That doesn’t make it good storytelling. Dreams certainly are capable of being alternately exciting, wondrous, imaginative or terrifying things. Inception was too serious for that, and thus we’re stuck with sterile concrete, glass and steel cityscapes where everyone wears a suit. The dreams of an accountant.”

This is the big complaint most of the people who disliked Inception had, that the dreams didn’t feel like dreams. (In fairness to Wilson, he said he liked the film despite that.) But I think those people are…not missing the point, because I think that’s kind of mean. Perhaps they’re approaching it from the wrong angle, or approaching it without key knowledge. Nolan isn’t making a film about dreams. Nolan is making a film about lucid dreams.

Lucid dreaming is the phenomenon of experiencing a dream with the knowledge that you are experiencing a dream, and using that knowledge to “steer” the dream and control its contents. The result is something like an astonishingly vivid narrative, like living out a movie. (Yes, the parallels are obvious. Nolan is clearly fascinated with the subject; after all, he apparently worked on the screenplay to Inception for something like a decade. You don’t do that with something you’re not obsessed with.)

Lucid dreams feel very different from normal dreams; there’s less of the disconnected dream-logic, the bizarre and senseless structure that comes from synapses firing randomly. You feel like you’re in a real place, talking to real people. There’s a narrative to it…and it’s one you can control. Does this begin to sound familiar? Lucid dreamers even develop strategies to determine whether or not they’re dreaming, although not the same ones as in the movie. (They do things like look at a digital clock, look away, then quickly look back again. In a dream, the numbers don’t stay the same.)

That was where Nolan’s idea for Inception began. The film takes that initial, real-world idea of lucid dreaming, and asks, “What might happen if lucid dreamers could share their dreams?” And then takes it to the next step, “If a lucid dreamer controlled the dreams of a normal dreamer, how would they know it wasn’t their idea?” And then inserts gangsters, corporate espionage, and guys with machine guns and grenade launchers, which is never a bad direction to take a film. The people who point out that Inception doesn’t replicate a normal dream are right…but then again, it’s not trying to.

One of the things that I genuinely adore about writing for mightygodking.com instead of my own blog is that I get a lot of comments. People love to give feedback on what I’ve written (and ultimately, that’s what every writer really wants, to know that people are listening. Money is just a measurement of that, albeit one that can be used to pay your rent.)

But after a while writing for a high-traffic blog on the Internet, you do start to notice that no matter what you say, someone disagrees with it. I’m not complaining about it; you don’t get into writing, especially writing opinion pieces, if you don’t have enough confidence in your opinions to avoid taking disagreement personally. But I am curious. Is there really any opinion out there that everyone, absolutely everyone can agree on? Is there something we all like?

So, here’s the experiment. I’m going to name ten movies that I consider to be awesome. Not the ten best movies of all time, or the ten all-time classics; just ten movies that I love, and that I could sit down and watch at any time and enjoy them. And in the comments, you can either add movies to that list, or veto movies that someone has added. You don’t need to defend your choices, either to add or to subtract. In fact, I don’t want you to; I’d prefer that the comments not get bogged down in a big argument about whether or not “Buckaroo Banzai” sucks. I’ll try to go back and edit the list occasionally, so people can see at a glance what the current content is, and we’ll see if anything survives as something everyone on the Internet could sit down and watch together.

UPDATE: I went through the first sixty-two comments and updated the list based on everyone’s new picks and vetoes. A few points I want to clarify for future commenters: You do not, I repeat not need to take something off the list in order to put something on. The list can be as long as it needs to be. Comments that said “replace X with Y” were treated as “Veto X, Add Y”. Also, there is no need to re-nominate or re-veto a movie. I won’t take anything off unless it’s vetoed, and once it’s vetoed, it can’t go back on even if someone nominates it again. The whole point is finding films everyone wants to watch! (If you want to make my life easier, you can just make your comments: “Veto: A, B, C, D” and “Add: E, F, G, H” so that it’s easy to figure out what you want me to add and remove. Also, it’d help if you mentioned whether you meant the original or the remake. I assumed the original unless otherwise specified.) Oh, and sorry, but if you nominated a film specifically to watch the Rifftrax version of it, that doesn’t count.

The current list:

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Alien, Aliens, Animal House, Apocalypse Now, Army of Darkness, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Better Off Dead, The Big Lebowski, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, The Blues Brothers, Das Boot, Bringing Up Baby, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Chinatown, City Lights, A Clockwork Orange, Dawn of the Dead, Death to Smoochy, Doctor Strangelove, Donnie Darko, Empire Records, The Empire Strikes Back, Enter the Dragon, Fargo, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fight Club, Forbidden Planet, The Full Monty, Ghostbusters, The Godfather, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, High Society, Highlander, The Hudsucker Proxy, Hunt for Red October, In Bruges, It’s a Wonderful Life, It’s My Party, Jaws, Juno, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, LA Confidential, Last Night, Last of the Mohicans, Latter Days, Little Miss Sunshine, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Lone Star, Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings, Memento, Metropolis, Miller’s Crossing, MirrorMask, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Moon, Muppet Christmas Carol, The Muppet Movie, Murder by Death, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, Night of the Living Dead, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Perseopolis, The Princess Bride, The Producers, The Professional, Pulp Fiction, The Quiet Earth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ransom, Rebecca, The Right Stuff, Ronin, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Rushmore, Ruthless People, The Shining, Silver Streak, Snatch, Sneakers, The Specials, Spider-Man 2, Star Trek (2009), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Sting, The Terminator, Thank You For Smoking, The Thing, The Third Man, Throne of Blood, Time Bandits, Unforgiven, The Untouchables, Watership Down, Willow, The Wizard of Oz, Used Cars, The Valet, X-Men 2, Yellowbeard, Young Frankenstein

The Vetoed List (remember, once it goes on this list, it can’t come off):

Airplane, Amelie, Avatar, Back to the Future, Big Trouble in Little China, Blade Runner, Blazing Saddles, Brazil, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Bug’s Life, Caddyshack, Chasing Amy, Children of Men, Clue, Contact, Cowboy Bebop, Dangerous Liasons, The Dark Crystal, Dogma, Drunken Master 2, Evil Dead II, The Fifth Element, Finding Nemo, (500) Days of Summer, The Goonies, Groundhog Day, Happy Gilmore, Hot Fuzz, Hudson Hawk, The Incredibles, Iron Man, Jacob’s Ladder, The Jerk, Jurassic Park, Labyrinth, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Love Actually, The Matrix, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Monsters, Inc., Pan’s Labyrinth, The Patriot, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, The Philadelphia Story, Police Story 3, Ratatouille, Repo Man, Schindler’s List, Serenity, Sexy Beast, Shaun of the Dead, The Shawshank Redemption, Shrek, Silverado, Sin City, Star Wars, Stargate, Starsky and Hutch, Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny, The 13th Warrior, 30 Days of Night, This Is Spinal Tap, Tombstone, Tommy Boy, Toy Story, Toy Story 2, 12 Monkeys, 28 Days Later, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Unbreakable, Up, The Usual Suspects, WALL-E, When Harry Met Sally, Zombieland, Zoolander

There we go; let the consensus-building continue!

Rande asked:

Are you seriously not going to comment on Paul Levitz returning to Legion? I have no concept of whether this is good news or bad news and need you to tell me what to think (I actually no very little about the Legion at all aside from that period of time I was a Chris Sprouse fan and your own interesting storylines).

And then Lister Sage followed that up with

I would like to know what you thought of the Mark Waid Strange mini that just finished this week.

I mostly avoid talking about the current status quo on these titles – for reasons that I think should be obvious – but since people asked, fair is fair I guess.

On Legion, I am guardedly optimistic but only to a certain extent. The reason to be somewhat optimistic is that Levitz did, after all, write one of the best runs of any superhero comic ever when he was writing Legion – all this time later, it’s still remarkably bold and mature in its outlook, which is a combination that doesn’t happen often. If Levitz can write half as well as he did, it should be a great comic.

If he can write half as well as he did. Noteworthy creators returning to write comics after a lengthy break have a track record that is, shall we say, not good.

If editorial control on the title manages to not be hamhanded, and regardless of the power shakeup at DC I’m not very confident about that, especially with the way the Legion is seemingly being shoved firmly back into the “supporting characters in the Superman mythos” camp.

If he can make this ersatz fanboy’s wish version of the Legion compelling.

I mean, if anybody can do all those ifs, it’s Levitz. But that’s why I’m only guardedly optimistic.

As for Strange, I thought Waid captured the voice and character of Strange reasonably well and up until the final issue it felt like I’d like to see a Dr. Strange series go, more or less. (Ignoring the whole Dr. Voodoo thing, the less said about which, frankly the better.) However, that final issue – eeeeuuuurgh. Giving Casey a Morton’s fork dilemma and then having her actually take a fork rather than solve her way out of it (which is what superheroes are traditionally supposed to do, after all) was irritating, but more irritating than that was writing three issues of “Dr. Strange can barely do magic any more” and then having him heal the fabric of the universe with fucking magic in the fourth issue. I think Doc as “magical sensei who relies on students to do magical heavy lifting” is as good an engine as Doc being the Sorcerer Supreme or equivalently powerful, but you can’t actually do both at the same time, you know?

On the bright side, Waid didn’t actually kill off Casey, but instead consigned her to a distant dimension of some sort, so at least she’s not a girl-in-refrigerator. And other than that fourth issue, the series genuinely was pretty decent. Why do we need Brother Doctor Voodoo again, exactly?

Anyhow. Thok also wanted to know what I thought about Legion of Three Worlds (for which I will delay until I write something about Blackest Night next month) and Stig asked:

Batman is soon to be shunted through time by Grant Morrison in a miniseries where he dons several variant Bat-lawmaker costumes. Given that Batman is a big, popular character who is often in the spotlight, and given that you have shown a healthy interest in forgotten-and-yet awesome classic DC characters…which one would you have take Batman’s place in the trek across the ages?

That story doesn’t work with anybody other than Batman, frankly. Superman doesn’t era-analogize as well as Batman does for a horde of reasons (many of which involve power level) and nobody else in DC’s stable really merits the “myriad multiple versions of self across time and space” storyline because they’re not important enough to merit the treatment. If you did this with, say, Green Arrow it would just come across as wanking. It doesn’t with Batman. Is this fair to lesser-known characters? No, but then again they’re lesser-known for a reason.

I would love to see a variant on the “Why I should write …” series. Specifically, “Why I shouldn’t write …” and give us your worst idea, with the aid of Photoshop, on various comic properties.

It’s not funny or anything, but: the X-Men. The Avengers. The Fantastic Four. Most of Marvel’s major properties interest me not at all in a writerly sense, and I think that’s the only disqualifier for “should I write this.” If you’re not interested in writing the book you’re not going to write it well. This doesn’t mean that being interested in a property is enough to make you write it well (god knows that’s not the case) but it’s the first requirement and I don’t satisfy it for any of those books. (On the DC side? Justice League: barely. Teen Titans: not at all.)

Finally, Thok also asked

I’d like to see MGK’s take on “Why I should write Hitman Jr.”

As someone else once noticed, I had a distinct idea as to what happened to Maggie Lorenzo’s kid.

Lister Sage asks:

The Jason Todd post had me thinking: Does this DC Universe need a Punisher?

Not really. The DC Universe has had Punishers before: Mad Dog, the second Vigilante, the latest iteration of Manhunter to an extent, and you can even make a case for Tommy Monoghan. Almost universally they just don’t work in the long run (Chris Sims’ odd love for Mad Dog aside) unless the story is closed off (IE, the end of Hitman). Partially it’s because the idea of a Punisher in a universe with Superman in it is ludicrous. Partially it’s a matter of tone. And partially it’s because the Punisher concept is pretty wack to begin with unless you go the Garth Ennis route and decide on either dark comedy or ultradark violent noir, and neither of those modes can work longterm within the DC Universe, which has two settings: bright adventure and dark melodrama.

In email:

My request is that you actually tell people what G20 is actually about. If you want people to send you over there, it’s only fair. It’s not just a trip to London they’re nominating you for. (Maybe, given that you are generally pretty pro-labor, you could talk about how the Labour Representation Committee are strongly opposed to G20. Or you could talk about how G20 protesters have been systematically targeted for violence and unlawful arrest.)(/soapbox)

I’m pro-labour, but that’s different from being for the Labour Representation Committee, who are real honest-to-god hardcore socialists (as opposed to American “socialists”) in the old-school “ideology before practicality” mold.

Honestly, G20 protestation – much like WTO protestation – is frequently ridiculous because it’s so undefined. One of my great dislikes about liberal activism is cause-collation, or as people commonly recognize it, “when Free Mumia signs show up at a gay rights rally.” G20 and WTO protests, in my experience (and I’ve seen/attended a few) inevitably end up being colossal wankfests because they’re not really about anything, they’re just a giant chorus of “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” and while that’s not untrue it’s also completely unhelpful.

I know I am going all Toby from West Wing here, but if you’re going to protest labour policies or climate change policies or poverty policies, great, but pick one at a time because the inevitable message class just gives the appearance of a group of disorganized, clueless hippies and/or “in it for the experience” protestors. (Go figure that a campaign to go in-city camping to protest carbon trading regulation would be considered unserious!)

And why I want to go to G20? From their site:

We are inviting 50 influential and knowledgeable bloggers to attend the G20 Summit on April 2nd in London, UK, where they will get unprecedented access to world leaders and thinkers and the chance to ask questions about the issues important to them. 20 of those bloggers will be nominated by you.

I’ve had the chance to put questions to Jim Flaherty and Stephane Dion already, so I consider that practice for something such as this. Rest assured, if I go, the questions I’ll be asking will be about international climate change policy – and I’ll have consulted with several of the leading environmental law and international law professors in Canada before I go because I’ll want to do it right. (Also, the whole Jon Stewart “only the court jester can really ask such of the king” sort of deal.)

Addendum: those of you following me on Twitter, feel free to direct a tweet to “G20Voice,” because they have decided to make themselves accessible via Twitter because, I dunno, politicians love Twitter now for some reason, and talk me up.

Most people don’t get to see recent comments to much older posts for obvious reasons, but I thought this, from Nina, on this post, was hilarious:

I could really do with a “fuck this shit” button on my browser. You know, one I could click every time I come across something so mediocre that I never, ever want to see anything that is even associated with it ever again. Like, I would press the button on Megatokyo.com and then everything that Fred has ever scribbled or written will be magically blocked and I can just pretend that this abomination of a comic never happened.

Regarding this post and comments made about Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon:

Oort sez: According to snopes and wikipedia, you’re wrong what she says about about the rape thing.

Snopes and Wikipedia are frankly buying into Dworkin’s attempt to walk back statements she made which were fucking retarded.

Yes, she never explicitly said “all sex is rape.” She did, however, say that women who enjoy heterosexual sex are “collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been, experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority, calling intercourse freedom.” Or “intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior.” Or, my personal fave, “Romance is rape embellished with meaningful looks.”

Mackinnon on sex: “If there is no inequality, no violation, no dominance, no force, there is no sexual arousal.” And “women share… degradation in intimacy.”

Is Cal Thomas a douchebag for directly attributing things to Mackinnon which she never outright said? Sure, but we all knew Cal Thomas was a douchebag already. But that doesn’t mean that there was a logical extension of Dworkin and Mackinnon’s arguments to be made that they equate sex with rape, and it’s not exactly a precarious extension either. Mackinnon, for example, routinely argues that it is impossible for a woman to reasonably consent to producing pornography. Not difficult – impossible. And she repeatedly suggests that this inability to consent might be systematic to women as a whole, and without consent, guess what – all sex is by definition rape.

As time went on, a lot of feminists found this position to be offensive, because (as Nadine Strossen, among others, point out) if you say “no means no,” then the logical collorary of that is “yes means yes,” and just because women might consent to things that aren’t in their best interest doesn’t vitiate that consent, and arguing otherwise threatens to infantilize women. That position marked the rise of “pro-porn” feminism (or “anti-censorship” feminism, if you prefer, because most feminists of this stripe aren’t adopting the position that most porn is awesome), and the beginning of Dworkin and Mackinnon’s steady marginalization.

Blackmage: Seriously, though, what are your thoughts on MacKinnon?

She’s very intelligent and very strident. The latter in particular is something I can sympathize with, because my law profs are always telling me to dial down my rhetoric in my research papers (“you realize someone important might read this some day, right? Right? That the legal community is actually pretty small and you don’t want to offend people, especially sitting Supreme Court justices, Chris?”). I haven’t been exposed to her greater body of work outside of a few pieces on feminist legal theory here and there, but her writing on pornography and obscenity is unfortunately very bad – laced with ad hominem arguments cloaked in righteous outrage and with a lot of things that just don’t make any sense. But reading her, I never get the idea that she’s stupid for writing things that are nonsensical. “Dishonest” isn’t quite the right word either, nor “deluded.” Somewhere in between the two on this topic, anyway.

To all those people emailing me to complain that the political Magic cards post was “too biased for the Democrats,” my response is thus:

(image via Weasel King)

UPDATE: Quixim, in comments on the previous post:

Do I detect a hint of scorn at the prospects of nuclear power?

I know that you’re aware it’s perfectly clean, and even less radioactive than coal power, not as damaging to ecosystems as hydroelectric, and more feasible than tidal or wind… So… for something that can essentially hold us indefinitely until we find a permanently sustainable form of energy, it’s sure getting a lot of flak here…

There are a multitude of reasons not to seriously consider nuclear power (beyond those installations already in place). Here are some of the major ones, and I’m not even going to address the issue of waste.

1.) Nuclear power is expensive. It has never, ever been cost-efficient on a private-sector basis; Mr. Burns is a fictional character, and there is no nuclear plant in the entire world capable of operating without very large government subsidy. This does not apply to solar (particularly so) or wind or any renewable energy source worth considering. On a cents per kilowatt-hour scale, nuclear right now tends to linger around 12 to 15 cents. Compare that to wind (4-7 cents) or tidal (2-3 cents) and it’s a joke. Solar energy two years ago was at 15-20 cents, and with the recent advances in solar technology making them vastly more efficient and with cheap fuel cell technology essentially perfected allowing us to more or less store solar energy overnight, solar’s costs are going to drop exponentially in the very near future.

(If we got fusion running, it would still be better than solar in many respects, but the two are essentially complementary technologies anyhow.)

2.) Nuclear power is a mature technology and it doesn’t work with economies of scale. More bluntly: it’s not going to get any cheaper because of scientific advances (pebblebed reactors are still going to cost buckets of money), and it’s not going to get cheaper if we make a lot of them. (Actually, all evidence points to the fact that nuclear plants actually get more expensive the more of them you build.) On top of that, nuclear plants represent massive infrastructure investments that just don’t exist for the likes of solar and wind.

3.) Nuclear plants are not like solar panels or windmills, which you basically just set up and then check on every once in a while. Nuclear plants are gigantic complicated fucking things that require continuous expert staffing, and for good reasons (most of which involve the word “radioactivity”). And we want safer nuclear plants, but the problem is that safer nuclear plants means more oversight, complicated devices, and staffing – meaning that the safer you want the plant, the more expensive it is to operate.

4.) Nuclear plants need enriched uranium to use as fuel. Nuke-fans, when discussing the prospects for nuclear fuel, typically point out that there is shitloads of uranium left on the planet. The problem is that we’ve already used up most of the naturally occurring enriched uranium in nuclear plants already, and most of what’s left isn’t easily accessible. This means for the long term, we have two options: 1.) strip-mining to get at the last naturally enriched uranium and 2.) refining the raw, low-grade uranium that is most of our planet’s supply into fuel-grade uranium. Either of these skyrockets the cost of nuclear power.

5.) The new “safer” reactors nuke-fans love to talk about barely exist. Pebble-bed reactors are still an experimental technology. We are decades away from mass installation of pebble-bed reactors.

Now let’s take that pin out of the meltdown and waste issues and discuss it rationally without talking about two-headed mutant babies. We don’t have a foolproof way of burying nuclear waste that can prevent it from seeping into groundwater; even if we did, what you’re then talking about is yet another additional cost assigned to nuclear power that solar and wind do not have in any meaningful context. Likewise, the necessity of preventing meltdowns greatly increases nuclear energy’s cost. Even before we consider things like radioactive risk, nuclear energy is just a bad deal.

Now, the nuke-fan might respond by saying “well it doesn’t matter if it’s expensive or not – wind and solar can’t do the job themselves.” Wind can’t do the job itself, that’s true (it can probably do a good chunk of it, say twenty percent or so, but that’s probably about it at present). Solar, however, can. If you don’t believe me, go ask Popular Mechanics, who used a very conservative plan (which, incidentally, is already outdated less than a year later as scientific advances have rendered solar collection more efficient) and determined that the USA could be fully solar-powered by 2050 for an investment cost of about $1 billion per year.

And that is why I dismiss nuclear power.