Film 
The Business of Designing Dreams: Christopher Nolan’s Inception(0)
Inception, Christopher Nolan’s new film, could be considered a film about architecture. Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays an agent skilled at invading and manipulating the dreams of others, finds it easy to recruit a star architecture student (Ellen Page) to design the space in which the film’s climactic dream takes place. If architectural ideas have intrinsic value, then why not design dreams, especially if someone’s willing to pay? For Page’s character, as for Koolhaas, the invitation to produce ideas without buildings is an invitation to unburden. When she runs from DiCaprio’s initial offer, he knows she will come back. For an architect with ideas the opportunity to design a dream is itself a dream, or at least an opportunity to shoot a kind of mega-Imax movie without time, physics, or money between those ideas and their realization (DiCaprio does provide a design brief for the dream, a constraint essential to architectural creativity). Among other things, Inception is a rare film which takes architecture seriously, as process rather than just backdrop, and anyone with an interest in the subject will find themselves with some fascinating questions to ponder. For example, just what does it say about someone if Robert Moses-style tower slabs constitute the deepest level of their architectural dreaming?
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Wake in Fright’s Aggressive Hospitality
Wake in Fright is not a film about the 2010 Australian federal election (that one might be called Lie Awake in Despair), but it is a film which says uncomfortable things about Australia, and therefore is not entirely unrelated to this winter of political discontent. It lays waste to the cherished Australian ideal of mateship and beyond that specific cultural provocation, it can be seen as a film about friendliness in general. Many places are described as friendly, without the further interrogation which might reveal the differences between, say, the way people are friendly in northeast Ohio, and they way they are friendly in Istanbul. The study of friendliness is rich territory for art and the fact that nearly everyone in Wake in Fright could be described as friendly is disturbing indeed.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? By Werner Herzog (with David Lynch’s name attached)
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? had its Gala UK Premier at the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival. So far it has screened exclusively at festivals and popular distribution is uncertain. It is scheduled to be released on DVD in the USA on 14 September 2010.
Vacation! Summertime in America, in CinemaScope!
No matter the flippant, large black-on-white titling, which straight-off foreshadows one central character’s impending death; everything about Zach Clark’s second film is as spontaneous as the girls’ reunion. It was shot quickly in late summer, 2009, on location at Clark’s father’s freshly painted pink beach house on Hatteras Island, North Carolina. The narrative not only introduces multiple twists in plot, but twists in genre – from buddy movie to sleazy holiday horror to music video to experimentation in acid-induced, surrealistic psychedelia and more.
