Ranking Christopher Nolan

Tenet is open in parts of my country right now. Not parts anywhere near me, as the state of Victoria is still under Stage 4 lockdown, and will be for another 12 days. After that, who knows really.

But some people in the world, even elsewhere in Australia, have seen this movie. It even has scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. I really never thought the day would come.

In the past, the relase of a new movie from a major director like Christopher Nolan would have been the occasion for me to consider the director's whole career. The distant past, increasingly. According to my records, the last time I ranked a director's whole filmography on this blog was in October of 2014, when I put the films of David Fincher under the lens, tied to the release of Gone Girl. (Which remains Fincher's last feature to date, though Mank will finally end that drought later this year.)

I could have waited until I saw Tenet -- it will happen, eventually -- before writing the post you are currently reading. But there's a couple reasons I didn't do that, as follows:

1) Before Tenet, Nolan directed exactly ten feature films. I love round numbers, something I suspect I have in common with most listmakers. Really, I should have done this when Dunkirk came out in 2017.

2) The Filmspotting podcast has just recently finished their so-called "ouvre-view" of Nolan's films, the end of which was supposed to coincide with the release of Tenet. It did not, but they still continued on as planned, and recently revealed their own rankings of Nolan's ten films to date, having watched them all again. (It was a month ago, but I'm a bit behind.)

So I thought this made a good opportunity for me to do the same.

However, I will take a little bit of a different approach than on my previous times doing this exercise, as when I ranked all the extant films of Pixar, Wes Anderson, Joel and Ethan Coen, Danny Boyle, Star Trek, and the aforementioned Mr. Fincher. (I'm asking myself now how Tarantino has escaped me so far.)

In those instances, I organically chose which movies should occupy which spots on the list, without any input from outside sources. This time, it will be all outside sources.

See, I can tell, at any given time, exactly how I rank the films of any director I choose, simply by doing a filtered search on my Flickchart. But I find that takes all the fun out of it. What fun is making a list if someone else makes it for you?

This time, though, I thought I would consider a different goal. I thought it was time to figure out if I am more of an Adam or more of a Josh.

If you don't know, Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen are the hosts of Filmspotting. Adam has been the host since the begining in 2005, and Josh is his third co-host, having started his own tenure at the beginning of 2012. While previous co-hosts couldn't hang on for more than three years, Josh ain't giving up this gig any time soon.

I've had my suspicions over the years which host was more aligned with my personal tastes, based on individual opinions I wholeheartedly agreed or disagreed with. But there are just so many movies out there that all three of us have seen, and so many exceptions to so many rules, that it's hard to say for certain whether I've more regularly agreed with one than the other. There really has been no perfect litmus test to figure this out.

Until now.

Christopher Nolan has made enough of a variety of different films, in enough genres and tackling enough varieties of the human experience, that he certainly seems to function in the way we want him to for the current experiment. Given how he's risen to be among the most successful working directors today, someone embraced by Hollywood but with a consummately iconoclastic approach to making movies, he's also the greatest common ground for the modern cinephile. In short, he's probably the director whose films you can be most certain the people you discuss movies with will also see. Some people don't like Tarantino's violence, or Apatow's juvenile humor, or Anderson's arthouse pretensions -- either Anderson, really. But most everyone is okay with seeing the new Christopher Nolan movie.

But the key is, if I'm going to find out whether I'm really an Adam or really a Josh, I can't let my own unconscious biases enter into it. After all, I've listened to that episode of Filmspotting and I know what they've picked. Armed with this knowledge, I could skew my own list one way or another if I picked it organically.

Enter Flickchart.

Using the aformentioned Flickchart filter, I can immediately see how I have judged Nolan's ten films relative to each other -- which best, which worst, and everywhere in between. And while a person's Flickchart may not feel 100% accurate at any given time -- changing its course can feel like turning the Titanic -- it's going to be pretty close when you're considering only the relative positions of ten films out of the 5,000+ on my chart. And because Nolan hasn't made a film since Dunkirk in 2017 -- not one that I can currently see, anyway -- I don't have to worry about the fact that I'm way behind in adding the movies I've seen to my Flickchart. (I'm still stuck somewhere in early 2019.)

So ... before I lose you on endless preamble, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I will reveal my Nolan rankings according to Flickchart, and then I will figure out whether I have a greater absolute difference in my rankings from Adam's chart or from Josh's chart. So that means if, say, I rank Dunkirk #6 and Josh ranks it #3, that's an absolute difference of three. Of course, if he ranks it #9 that's also an absolute difference of three. The least absolute difference is the one who has more similar tastes to mine ... at least, using only this flawed Nolan litmus test.

Shall we begin?

Here's how Josh ranks the films:

10. The Dark Knight Rises
9. Insomnia
8. Following
7. Interstellar
6. Batman Begins
5. The Prestige
4. The Dark Knight
3. Memento
2. Inception
1. Dunkirk

And here are Adam's rankings:

10. Following
9. Batman Begins
8. Insomnia
7. Inception
6. The Dark Knight
5. The Dark Knight Rises
4. Dunkirk
3. The Prestige
2. Memento
1. Interstellar

And here's a bit more, but not too much, on my rankings and their order.

I should say, before I start, that even though I have not very recently rewatched any of these movies -- I saw Memento back when they started the ouvre-review in April, for probably the fourth time -- I've seen six of these movies more than once. That means that percentage-wise, I might have a greater familiarity with this filmography than with any of the others I've considered in this forum previously. Which just means this post has been longer overdue, and my thoughts are, for the most part, still fresh.

According to my Flickchart:

10. Dunkirk (2017). 3613/5249 (31%). Adam #4, Josh #1. The harshness of my response to Dunkirk is a residual of that first viewing, when my former editor said I was crazy to see it after a couple glasses of wine. I talked about that here. But my second viewing last year or the year before did not significantly improve my impression of this movie. It still feels like a frequently confusing experiment with a bombastic score and too little payoff, plus too little character development. The latter was the point, I guess, but not everyone wants the same from Nolan as I do.

9. Interstellar (2014). 2335/5249 (56%). Adam #1, Josh #7. Every time I tell myself I should like Interstellar a little more than I actually do, I remind myself that Matthew McConaughey spends the last 25 minutes of this movie yelling "Murph!! MURPH!!" Or at least it feels that way. However, there are also some totally blow-your-mind moments in this film, like when they lose all that time down on the wave planet. Damn, space-time can be a bitch.

8. The Dark Knight Rises (2012). 2251/5249 (57%). Adam #5, Josh #10. I like The Dark Knight Rises pretty well, but I don't take it very seriously -- certainly not as seriously as Nolan wants me to take it. The thing I like best about it, for example, is how fun it is to do an impersonation of Tom Hardy's ridiculous Grandfather Bane voice with its absurdly comical high pitch combined with muffled incoherence. But it's a decent conclusion to the trilogy. Anne Hathaway is the best part about it.

7. Insomnia (2002). 2209/5249 (58%). Adam #8, Josh #9. The first time the Flickchart rankings are letting me down a little bit. If I were making this list organically, I probably would have put Insomnia at #9, but what are you going to do -- these three movies are all within two percentage points of each other on the chart, so it's not that far off. Yeah nobody really loves Insomnia but it has its moments. I prefer villain Robin Williams in One Hour Photo from the same year.

6. Following (1998). 1582/5249 (70%). Adam #10, Josh #8. That this is this high up on my Flickchart tells me two things: 1) I've been pretty generous in this movie's duels over the years, and 2) I am by no means a diehard Nolan fan. This basically means that a full half of Nolan's films are a bit shrug-worthy to me. I do like Following and I remember thinking it demonstrated some real cleverness on Nolan's part, cleverness that would fully bloom over his coming films, but I have little interest in seeing it again.

5. Inception (2010). 1001/5249 (81%). Adam #7, Josh #2. And here's where we start getting to films I really like. I actually didn't love Inception on the first viewing, but the second and third have increased my appreciation significantly. I always thought it was a narrative mistake to have the movie introduce us to the world on an atypical and ultimately botched version of the core premise -- don't you know you have to demonstrate a successful incarnation before starting to throw curveballs? Of course, this complaint ultimately pales in comparison to Nolan's many ambitious concepts and their execution. It's really good.

4. The Dark Knight (2008). 725/5249 (86%). Adam #6, Josh #4. Taken in comparison to Batman Begins -- which you'll note you haven't yet seen on this list -- I found The Dark Knight to be a mild disappointment. By any other standards, it's a remarkable accomplishment with a truly frightening villain performance at its center and a genuinely dangerous tone of anarchy for such a mainstream film. It's probably telling that this is the only of the three Batman movies I've seen more than once. It gets under your skin.

3. The Prestige (2006). 530/5249 (90%). Adam #3, Josh #5. I've been on the Prestige train since the beginning, as each of the remaining films on this list cracked my top ten of the year they were released. I might even like it better than my #2, but more on that in a moment. This is the most pleasurable type of puzzle box, the one that rewards repeat viewings and isn't afraid to go off the rails a bit in terms of your expectations. Adam and Josh described it in a way as the ultimate Nolan film, and that may still be true nearly 15 years later.

2. Batman Begins (2005). 288/5249 (95%). Adam #9, Josh #6. This ranking may be very problematic as for some reason, I have only seen this film once, the only one in my top five of which this can be said. I guess that first viewing really made an impression on me -- and I don't think it was just the circumstances, seeing it in Paris on a day of rest after a lot of walking. I got on board with Nolan's Batman right from the start and found the ensuing films to be a case of diminishing returns, though not significantly. I'll watch it again sometime to see if it truly deserves to be ahead of The Prestige.

1. Memento (2000). 119/5249 (98%). Adam #2, Josh #3. Nolan has never been better for me than when he first came out of the chute -- and though he actually came out of the chute with Following, I hadn't seen that so it was coming out of the chute for me. Even if Nolan makes another ten films I doubt he will have a chance of eclipsing one of the most ambitiously structured, faithfully adhered to, and philosophically rich narratives I have ever seen. (Just don't ask the premise to stand up to much nitpicking.) This is also the Nolan film I've seen the most, probably four times all the way through.

So I mentioned diminishing returns in terms of the Batman movies. It seems I also have diminishing returns in terms of Nolan on the whole. My top seven films are the first seven films he made, with the last three, chronologically, occupying the eighth, ninth and tenth spots on this list, in that order. I'd blame a reverse recency bias, but I've seen both my #9 and my #10 twice, to give them a chance to move up. They didn't.

Still, I wouldn't say this means I'm down on Nolan. I'm just as eager to see any new movie he makes as when I saw Insomnia after Memento. I know there's the opportunity for my mind to be blown any time out.

Now, the important question -- how do I compare to Adam and Josh?

I won't bore you with a film breakdown, but here were the absolute differences:

Adam = 6 + 8 + 3 + 1 + 4 + 2 + 2 + 0 + 7 + 1 = 34

Josh = 9 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 0 + 2 + 4 + 2 = 28

So I am more of a Josh, I guess!

How do I feel about this?

Well, a friend of mine, the friend who introduced me to the podcast, doesn't like Josh very much as a Filmspotting host, in part because he's never really forgiven him for replacing the host he liked best, Matty Ballgame. Plus, Josh is capable of some very eccentric preferences, the kind that sometimes go so far as to undermine his credibility. Adam, on the other hand, tends to hew slightly more to the critical mainstream in his views on films, though his tastes skew a little more independent as well.

Because of my friend, I've thought I'm not supposed to want to be a Josh, but I don't mind it. I have always liked a critic who will go out on a limb and champion something he loves that others don't, and Josh does that. So I'm okay with it.

Interestingly, though, I did have my biggest difference on any Nolan film with Josh. He worships Dunkirk, having it as his #1, while I've got it entirely on the other end of the spectrum. Outside of that, though, we are very much in sync, having no greater than a four-ranking difference on any film. Whereas with Adam, we've got three different films with a ranking difference of six places or more.

If you'd care to do your own Nolan rankings, I'd love to hear them in the comments. Whether they make you an Adam or a Josh is optional.

Christopher Nolan bombs, and other Dunkirk thoughts

There are plenty of times I have been out of sync with the Metascore for a movie. That probably goes without saying. I'll come home, go to the site, and think "Huh." Baby Driver is one very recent example, as 86 seems extraordinarily generous for a film that is entertaining but quite flawed. Then again, I knew its Metascore before I even entered the theater.

I can't remember a time feeling as shocked by this disconnect, though, as when I came home from Dunkirk last night.

Dunkirk has a 94 on Metacritic. I think it deserves less than half that.

In fact, the one score of 38 on there -- and I sighed in relief that at least one person agrees with me -- might even be too generous.

I ended up giving the movie two stars on Letterboxd, but I wanted to give it 1.5.

What's wrong with Dunkirk? Where to start. This is one of the most dramatically inert films in recent memory. For all the somber energy invested in meticulously recreating a famous World War II battle -- is it even a battle? -- Nolan couldn't give a whip about character development or even mounting tension. Hans Zimmer's bludgeoning score -- seriously, it's even worse than the one for Interstellar -- tells us that every moment is overloaded with dread, but otherwise we'd have no idea that anything was at stake. Images are disconnected from consequences, things are happening for apparently no reason, and the little character arcs that are meant to occur make no impression whatsoever. Oh, it's not that Nolan disregards the notion of human drama altogether in opting for something more abstract and expressionistic -- it's that the dramas he chooses are utterly uncompelling.

What went so wrong? Nothing, according to most of you. When I went on Letterboxd to log my two-star rating, I saw a five-star rating from a person I trust on the landing page. Of the film's 50 positive reviews on Metacritic, 29 are grades of a perfect 100, including three critics whose opinions I've held dear throughout my career: Joe Morgenstern, Dana Stevens and Richard Roeper, all three of whom I've spoken to, and the last two of whom I've had my picture taken with (including Dana Stevens just in May).

Why did I see such a different movie than most of these people? It's hard to say. When you are in the minority on a film, the inclination is of course to view it as a "you problem." You figure you must lack some essential component of your critical faculties that allows you to appreciate what the film is doing. Or, you demand a film to fit into a certain conventional box, the inability to fit into that box being what makes it great. Maybe that is indeed the case with me and Dunkirk.

But I don't think so. This film is a fucking bore. Christopher Nolan is so impressed with his ability to film fighter planes moving in space -- an undeniable strength of the film -- that he doesn't seem to care whether he gave us any characters to relate to. I don't mind that we don't know their names, as there are some great films out there where we never learn any names. I mind the fact that they don't have names or personalities. They are just pawns in Nolan's desire to mount a moving Life magazine photograph. And that's all he's done.

And that's not enough.

I look forward to engaging with other people on this, figuring out the deficits in my character that led me to have so totally missed the boat, so to speak, on this film. But I can't do that for now. In fact, I can't even read Dunkirk's one mixed review -- thank you, Rex Reed -- or Dunkirk's one negative review -- thank you, Jake Cole -- for now. The reason for this is that I'm recording a podcast about this tomorrow night, and I want my bile to be untainted by the bile a few others have already spewed on the topic.

A very few others.

Drunk-kirk

On this podcast, my fellow podcaster will insist that the reason I didn't like it was that I was drunk when I saw it. And the reason he will say this is that I told him I was drunk in a text message about 20 minutes before the movie started. And the reason I know he liked it, even though we don't usually share our opinions on the films before we meet for the recording, is because he pleaded with me to go the next day to an IMAX screening when I was sober, rather than seeing it on Friday night with four glasses of wine in me, at a theater that has no really big screens.

The four glasses of wine -- and a beer -- were courtesy of a volunteer thank you party for my contributions to the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (HRAFF) earlier this year (though mostly last year, when most of the heavy screening occurred). I had expected this to be a tame little affair that I could quickly skip out of -- it had been held in the organization's tiny office the year before -- and I planned to stay no longer than 30 minutes, leaving in time to watch a 6:40 showing of The Beguiled before my 9:20 Dunkirk.

But this year the party was held in a private room at a pretty cool bar, and when 6:30 rolled around and I was still enjoying myself, I gave Sofia Coppola's film with the middling reviews (at least among my friends) a pass. And got into one of those rambling, animated cinephile discussions with two women about films we love and hate, using the thinnest of connective tissue to jump from one film to the next -- the kind of discussions that are especially well lubricated by wine. I became so engrossed that I nearly didn't leave in time for Dunkirk.

Given my thoughts on the film, I am immensely glad I did not sacrifice that experience for the movie, and also that I did not shift around a Saturday with my family in order to see Dunkirk on IMAX (and pay for it out of my own pocket, something I wasn't having to do on Friday night on the smaller screen).

But the question is, did being "drunk" -- how far along on that spectrum I was is debatable -- impact my enjoyment of the film?

As I am biased here and predisposed to endorse my own decision making, I'm going to say "no." But I guess I can't really say for sure, because I can't see it for the first time sober as a point of comparison.

What I can say is that falling asleep was not a problem as I watched the film, which I always figure to be the biggest danger in a film starting at 9:20, whether you're drunk or not. As I said, I was bored, but it was not because the alcohol was making me distractable. It's because Christopher Nolan made a boring film.

I don't even think IMAX would have helped. I was able to appreciate this film's visual accomplishments just fine on the screen where I saw it, and I honestly don't think this is a case where those accomplishments, given a proper showcase, would have rendered some of the film's shortcomings less important. In fact, even in a state of somewhat compromised perceptions, I was glad to feel clear-headed enough not to be swayed by the sweet persuasions of impressive visuals. A film needs to either have a compelling story to be a success, or if not that, then just be a straight art film with no story whatsoever. Nolan's middle ground in Dunkirk is a bad place to be.

July 20th -- again

Methinks Christopher Nolan needs to concentrate more on making a good movie and less on making sure that movie comes out on July 20th.

And incidentally, how can July 20th fall on a Friday every single year?

July 20th was of course a Thursday this year, but movies get released on Thursdays in Australia, so the 20th was its release date indeed.

It may be a Warner Brothers thing, but Nolan's movies have long been perceived as a late-summer sort of counterprogramming, or maybe just a delayed infusion of prestige to a season that has already included its share of Pirates of the Caribbeans and Transformerses.

The July 20th trend got started in 2008 -- on July 18th. That's when The Dark Knight hit theaters. Its predecessor, Batman Begins, was a June release, but I guess The Dark Knight felt right in late July.

So right, in fact, that they duplicated the release strategy for Inception in 2010. It being two years later and without the benefit of any leap years in between, Inception could not land exactly on July 20th either. So July 16th was the chosen release date.

We finally get to an exact July 20th release date, with the benefit of a leap year, two years later for The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. That date may of course be etched into your memory for being the night of the horrific theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

Warner Brothers deviated from the strategy with a November 2014 release for Interstellar, but it's back with Dunkirk -- a film whose awards aspirations might have more logically dictated a November release date than Interstellar. Though I suppose some of these things have to do with when a film is actually ready to go to print.

What relationship does the release date have to the quality of the film?

None, of course. And I'm sure my criticisms of Dunkirk don't seem very substantive, since I haven't delved in to why I dislike it so much.

I could. Believe me, I could. But I guess I already feel like enough of a grinch for raining on the parades of readers who may have already bought their tickets for a screening at some point later in the weekend, but happened to do their Friday check-in with my blog before then.

But as a wise friend told me last night when I texted him my initial reactions and then apologized for shitting on a movie he was excited to see, "Maybe I will love it, maybe not. It will have nothing to do with you. When any movie comes out, there will be people who don't like it."

In the case of Dunkirk, just not very many of us.

The spoiler beginning to Interstellar

There are some movies you expect to see a second time, and there are some you don't, even if you generally liked watching them. Interstellar fell into that latter category for me.

Yet I ended up rewatching it because my wife had never seen it, and it was the 99 cent rental on iTunes a couple weeks back. If I'm going to rewatch a movie about which I was lukewarm to positive, better that it be for 99 cents than for the price that was once envisioned for it, when there was talk of getting out to the rooftop cinema to watch it. That starts at $25 a ticket, then you have to factor in all the other costs of an evening out, including, potentially, a babysitter.

But I was certainly happy enough to watch it again at home, even though I didn't necessarily think it would contain enough on a second viewing to make me like it significantly more. Significantly less was a possibility, but significantly more didn't seem like one.

In fact, I did like it a little bit less, but my reason for writing today is a positive one. And it has everything to do with the ways Christopher Nolan has continued to be kind of a magician as a filmmaker.

We know that the magic of the movies is one of the things that specifically interests Nolan, as he has actually made a movie about magicians (The Prestige, one of my favorites of his). The Prestige in fact deals with the idea of showing you how the trick is done and then distracting you, though I'm sure that's a bit of a paraphrase. However, it's a method Nolan uses in Interstellar.

The key to the tension of the movie is that it leaves us in doubt about whether Earth -- or more specifically, human beings -- will survive, right? We don't know until the very end whether Dr. Brand's Plan A or Dr. Brand's Plan B will be the method of saving humanity that gets enacted, right? Or possibly, "none of the above."

Except that Nolan tells us with the first line of dialogue in the movie that humanity gets saved. Or if not that, definitively, then at least that Coop's daughter Murph ages into an elderly woman and appears in a video looking back upon the harder times of the past.

"My dad was a farmer," come the first words of the movie, spoken by Ellen Burstyn with extra aging makeup. "Like everybody else back then. Of course he didn't start out that way." And then a smash cut to our hero, Coop (Matthew McConaughey), in some kind of high-speed aircraft.

Of course, we don't actually know the characters at this point, the movie having just started. But if you had chosen to retain the movie's first words, you would have then remembered that McConaughey's daughter (who we meet as a young girl only moments later) has enough of a future ahead of her to age a good 80 years and then be telling her story to a documentary crew. You could then surmise that this would mean the Earth, or wherever they lived, would be in good enough shape to enjoy the luxury of a crew of filmmakers reflecting on humanity's history.

It's a credit to Nolan, then, that you almost immediately forget about this. You wouldn't ordinarily think that any information a filmmaker provides you should just be discarded, yet you do kind of discard the documentary bookends of this movie as soon as the story gets started. You really do feel like humanity could perish from the Earth, and from space as well. You really do wonder if it will all get sorted, or if human beings do indeed die in a cloud of dust on the Earth's surface.

I guess I don't entirely understand the point of Nolan's little trick, but I can vouch for its efficacy.

I don't really have many other thoughts from a second viewing of Interstellar, except to note that the score is indeed quite overbearing (I focused on it this time, having heard the criticisms of the score after I got out of my viewing last November), and to grimace at just how on-the-nose much of the dialogue really is. That said, the relativity stuff still cooked my noodle a little bit, which is ultimately why my feelings about this movie remain positive.

The Savior has arrived

I can't remember a recent movie that's been quite as anticipated as Inception.

Oh, there are movies people get excited about -- your Iron Man 2s, your next Harry Potter movies. But they don't use the kind of language of reverence that's been reserved for Christopher Nolan's latest movie.

Today, we'll all finally get to find out if Inception lives up to our expectations -- even though it doesn't seem like there's any way it possibly could.

We're dealing with a fairly small sample size here, but The Dark Knight seems to have turned its director into commonly being described as a "visionary." I've been on board with seeing Nolan through that lens long before then -- Memento was my second-favorite movie of 2001 at the time (since surpassed by several films I didn't see until later), and I also had above-average affection for The Prestige, ranking that midway through my top ten of 2006. And people sometimes tend to forget there was even a movie called Batman Begins, which laid the groundwork for the worldwide phenomenon that was The Dark Knight (and which I argue was actually a better film, but let's not get into that right now). Just to round out his CV, Following and Insomnia are both interesting movies that don't require special mention here.

Now, with Inception, we're expecting The Matrix meets Dark City meets the best ten other movies you can think of that might have the capacity to blow your mind in a commonly accessible way. And not only are there the expectations we would ordinarily have for the movie, but given the way this summer has unfolded (with a few exceptions, like Toy Story 3), we're also expecting Inception to save the summer of 2010 -- to give us something, at long last, to sink our teeth into.

Because in this small sample size, that seems to be the genius of Christopher Nolan -- he gives us films that exist simultaneously as heavy, thought-provoking art, and popcorn movies that speak to a wide range of people. His Batman movies were superhero movies we didn't need to categorize as guilty pleasures. They didn't need to wink at us and be filled with wisecracks in order to rake in tons of dough. They created a new superhero template that has yet to be repeated successfully, though I argue that Watchmen, a personal favorite, was a pretty damn good attempt.

So now there's Inception. It seems to again be the thinking person's action movie -- incredibly high concept, demanding of some kind of intellectual commitment on the viewer's part, yet not the slightest bit alienating to even the least mentally astute viewer. We'll see if the box office numbers back it up, but it seems to represent proof that all audiences want to have a movie credit them with a certain intelligence level. Even if they would never consciously list that as a factor in why they go to the movies, the excitement for Inception seems to provide ample evidence of it.

Inception is almost certainly among the most blogged about movies of 2010, so I don't need to contribute any more to that phenomenon than I already have. But I'll finish by saying this: As excited as I have been for July 16th to arrive -- downright impatient at times -- there's also that small part of me that's been worried about the coming of Inception. Because what if it isn't as good as we're all expecting? What then?

Well, then there's always Untitled Batman Project, a.k.a. Batman 3, scheduled to be the savior of a disappointing summer on July 20, 2012.