This week, Christopher Nolan and company released 14 new stills from his sci-fi thriller Inception.

These photos might require a spoiler warning, but honestly, it’s not as if we’d know. Nolan has been tight-lipped about the project from the beginning. For months after its announcement, he would say only it was set “within the architecture of the mind.” Early promotional material was equally vague.

More recently, a set of character posters have given us a lineup straight out of a film-noir caper (with titles like Point Man, Shade, Forger, and Mark), and theatrical trailers have inevitably begun to give hints as to the plot.

We now know for sure that Inception is about this guy, and there are dreams, and a girl who is maybe dreaming or not, and you can take ideas out or put them in, and lobbies, and guys wearing suits well, and Marion Cotillard has expressive eyes, and also there are lots of hallways, and people sitting looking at each other, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt signed up for a lot of wire work, and some other stuff happens.

The thing is, in a movie landscape that’s been slowly starved of anything mildly cerebral, this movie is in a pretty precarious spot. It has a power director behind it, and an A-list cast, and what we’ve seen of the effects has been well-done and unexpected. However, part of the reason the plot is being kept vague is because Nolan has pitched this from the beginning as a cerebral film (literally and figuratively), and in the wake of grinding comic-book franchises, sequels to sequels, 80s-toy adaptations, and 80s-monster reboots, Hollywood is holding its breath.

It’s up to Inception to prove that there’s still room in the multiplex for smart sci-fi.

Of course, this is not a particularly fair position for this movie to be in. Nolan is a solid director with a good track record, but many a director with a good track record makes the occasional bomb (lookin’ at you, Ridley Scott), and without a strong trend of downward spiral (…Ridley), if a movie doesn’t do well, then it’s technically just a data point on a larger graph with invisible juggernauts like Eclipse and Toy Story 3 affecting results.

However, in a Hollywood with a memory so short it’s already rebooting a franchise that had its last installment three years ago, even one underperforming movie is enough to put the red light on half a dozen other concepts. (That cerebral-sci-fi standby Michael Gondry is directing this summer’s Green Hornet movie speaks volumes about what the current movie market will support.)

And even if the movie does well, there are no guarantees that much will come of it. I’m not sure how many smart spec scripts have been stamped “Greenlit, Pending Inception’s First-Weekend Numbers.” But this is the industry that has declared, based on Jonah Hex’s opening box-office and her release from Transformers, that Megan Fox’s career is already over, and her franchise has only been around for three years. If Inception rakes it in opening weekend, six people in LA will ask for something just like it, and six smart-spec scripts will turn their conceptual little faces to the sun and bloom. (Also an angel will get its wings. Also there are dreams with restaurants.)

Christopher Nolan’s box-office record is that of a director who knows how to make a smart, noirish action flick that occasionally goes gangbusters at the box office. Let’s hope this is one of those times.

(A recent trailer for Inception is below. Look, hallways!)

[This piece originally appeared on Tor.com.]

If this year’s speculative-cinema offerings have taught us anything, it’s that many speculative movies are bad. Many of them are very bad. But every once in a while, a movie comes along that is so gleefully bad, so delightfully awful, so surreally self-serious, that it transcends every rubric of quality and ascends in the camp canon as unintentional comedy gold.

In completely unrelated news, let’s talk about Jonah Hex.

The plot of the film can be boiled down as cleanly as any focus group could wish: Jonah Hex, grizzled bounty hunter with distinctive facial burns, rides through the Weird West kicking ass and taking names on his quest to kill Quentin Turnbull, the Confederate general who killed Jonah’s family. Turnbull and his henchmen are attempting to construct a nation-killer machine to ruin the tenuous post-Civil-War United States; after the Army recruits him, it’s officially up to Jonah to stop Turnbull for good.

On paper, this is a standard action Western. In execution, it becomes a thing of beauty. Take, for example, the early scene in which Jonah brings the bodies of four outlaw brothers to a grimy sheriff and his hygienically-challenged deputies to receive his bounty.

Ever since TheOneRing.net dropped the newsbomb that Guillermo del Toro was departing The Hobbit (citing production delays that have hamstrung the epic two-parter for nearly a year), speculation has raged. With budget problems, studio delays, and a three-year schedule that’s stretched to six, things don’t sound like they’re going to get any easier.

Who’s going to direct this thing now?

The Hobbit camp has not put forth any names for del Toro’s suggested replacement. As fans, clearly that’s our job.

Below the cut, nine ways this train wreck can go.

1. Christopher Nolan

A dark thriller in which Bilbo the hobbit is conscripted into a shadowy gang of inscrutable dwarves, and a sorcerer who seems both fair and foul. In a desperate attempt to free himself, he tumbles down a mountain and will use every ounce of his courage to obtain a golden ring. Is it what he needs to save himself, or a trap from which there’s no escape? And you won’t believe the third-act twist about Bofur and Bombur.

Not that it will matter either way; we won’t hear another word about the movie until it comes out.

2. George Lucas

Bilbo is a lonely young hobbit trapped in his house under the hill in a remote Shire, waiting desperately for adventure to find him. When wise and supernaturally-gifted Gandalf appears, Bilbo isn’t about to miss his chance. Along with the grouchy and in-it-for-the-money Thorin and his hirsute/hard-to-decipher backup dwarves, Bilbo will enter a world full of alien beings he’s never dreamed of, and will have to learn how to harness a magical gift in order to survive a coming war.

Bonus: in 2032, Lucas will release a version in which Smaug shoots first.



3. Kathryn Bigelow

A taut, atmospheric movie about a hobbit in over his head, the flawed but compelling dwarf king that leads his quest, the glory-hungry Bard of Laketown who will come through in a clinch, and the morally-ambiguous wizard who will save them all from danger after twenty minutes of slow-motion tension about it. No need for a second movie, even, since she’d wrap it up in about eighty minutes. Frankly, it sounds good to me.

Potential downside: previous casting of Bill Paxton makes her taste in actors suspect. Just because someone is letting James McAvoy play Professor X doesn’t mean he should be Bilbo, too. Don’t let him into EVERY franchise, for crying out loud.



4. Chris Weitz

After the money New Moon made, this dude could probably leverage his way into the short list. Result: a movie about Gollum sitting in a cave for two hours with a camera circling him as indie rock plays in the background, and then fifteen hours of deleted scenes about Bilbo and the dwarves that will be available on the DVD release. (At least he already has all the CGI wargs ready to go.)



5. Michael Bay

RUN! THE TROLLS ARE RIGHT BEHIND YOU, RUN, DAMMIT! RUN! I SAID RUN!

6. Alex Proyas

A moody character study of a man on a quest to discover the dark beast that’s haunted his dreams, with memorable supporting players, a monster in every shadow, and a few moments of beautiful filmmaking…just before Will Smith shows up. No lie, I’d like to see if Alex Proyas could do to the countryside what he did for cities in The Crow and Dark City, but since then he’s put out I, Robot and Knowing, which does not exactly inspire cinematic confidence. (Good news: he’s in pre-production hell on Dracula: Year One, so it’s not like he’s a stranger to the waiting-around rigmarole.)

7. Ridley Scott

His movies are seriously hit-or-miss, but when the script is solid he can certainly produce the rich visuals an epic requires. Sure, it would end up as a movie about the tortured Thorin’s search for redemption, and nearly all the supporting dwarves would kick the bucket, but he can film battle scenes in his sleep, and if there’s anyone who knows how to drive home the quest theme, it’s him. (Bonus: it will keep him from making the Monopoly movie he keeps threatening us all with.)

8. Tim Burton

Bilbo Baggins is the very loneliest hobbit of them all, until some CGI-enhanced dwarves come to take him to a magical land filled with trilling songs and a vaguely-effeminate wizard (Johnny Depp) who doesn’t like messes but, deep down, just wants to be loved by a hobbit he can look on as a son. Helena Bonham-Carter voices Smaug, who spends the second half of the movie delivering a darling series of quips on what it’s like to be stuck in a cave full of gold.

9. Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin, Jr.

Stealth “the one from the 70s is perfectly fine” sentiment!

What say you, film fans? Now that del Toro’s out of the running, what monstrous directorial visions do you fear?

[This piece originally appeared on Tor.com]

[This is the first of three movie reviews that were won in the auction, which assists fans of color who want to attend SFF conventions, principally WisCon.]

So, when won one of my movie reviews, I can only assume she picked Hong Kong action flick Vampire Effect (aka Twins Effect, for reasons unknown to me) because she thought it was the worst movie ever and she wished, more than anything else in her whole entire life, to make me suffer.

She must not have been aware that I have been working on getting “shitmazing” into wide usage, as the word to use when something is so spectacularly bad that it passes all descriptions of “awful” and eventually becomes its own sort of surrealist masterpiece that makes you question an objective universe.

With this word in hand, I was more than ready to tackle Vampire Effect: The Twins Effect (even the title’s shitmazing). It’s a breathtaking kaleidoscope of wonder about a mysterious world in which defeating vampires requires liberal application of banana extract.

For serious.

This is vampire prince Kazaf and his vampire butler Prada (for serious). Here, Prince Kazaf wants this movie to promise something it just cannot promise.

There is, in fact, endless sucking in this movie.
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Over the weekend, I saw Clash of the Titans. As you might be able to tell from my review, things did not go so well!

Here’s the thing about Clash of the Titans and all associated B-movies: I don’t demand that they be something other than they are. I watch The Mummy whenever it’s on TV, because it’s a perfectly decent pulp film, and I don’t require anything more from it.

However, I DO require of a B-movie what I require of most movies: that something, at some point, makes a modicum of sense, or is engaging, or is so over-the-top it’s comedy gold, or something. It’s not much to ask in theory, but it’s really baffling how many movies march grimly through the motions, throwing in video-game-standard CGI and half-baked thematic elements and hoping no one will notice the lack of excellence in either. Clash of the Titans is a supreme example of this.

They did succeed, however, in taking one of the few Greek myths that didn’t involve rape and adding rape to it. That’s something to be proud of, I guess!*

However, Hans Matheson was in it, which was amusing for the duration of whatever cumulative milliseconds the camera accidentally caught him while panning over to Sam Worthington’s single facial expression, so that was nice! (Bonus: he wasn’t evil! Color me surprised! First time for everything, I guess. You go, Hans. Hope this helps you get a better role elsewhere.)

* It is not something to be proud of.