I'm half an hour in and... Teague: Damn you and your pronounciation of Mal!!! My headphones have nearly caught on fire dammit.

It's MAL. M-A-L. Mal, as in Malcolm. As in Mal, Bad...in the latin.

MAAAAAAAAAL.

Fuck.

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2011-08-15 10:12:39)

Well fuck them, they're wrong.

On a side note, since you guys were talking about it, any recommendations for good mind fucky/ what inception was supposed to be type movies?

In Latin, and Latin-based languages -- like French -- it's pronounced "mahl." The Firefly pronunciation is the incorrect/Anglicized one.

I thought it was Molly as well, but in the credits and subtitles it's spelled Mal so apparently not. Apparently that's just a name.

It's funny, actually, that we noted Ariadne the maze builder as being a bit on the nose and Mal the villain escaped mention as far as I recall.

So in other words. I was right.

...Teague, replace the H with a U, and see why my my ears are burning.

/thethingsIdoforafuckingjoke

I'm just gonna bow out of this one, obviously you're hopeless.

"Mal" as a woman's name is usually short for "Malory" or "Malinda". I couldn't figure out why Leo wasn't Anglicizing the pronunciation to rhyme with "pal" and "shall" in his American twang. He certainly wouldn't have corrected her if she had pronounced his name—Dom—as "dome" rather than "dahm". That's what accents are: the way you pronounce stuff.

Dumb name. But Teague is right.

I think you guys are right. This film is really good, but if there had been a fresh set of eyes to come in and remove anything that wasn't really needed - combine the architect and the host, use dream physics more often, drop the subplot involving the guys who are after DiCaprio (the movie drops them as well, so... yeah...)and limit the amount of explainy bits in the movie, then go through the whole thing with a fine-tooth comb and add lots of cool touches that you'd only get on a second viewing, then yeah. Masterpiece.

The scene that bothers me a bit is the dream coffee scene. It's Cobb's dream and she's populating it, but when Cobb tells her it's a dream, none of her subconscious people react. They just sit there drinking their coffee. It would have been cooler if they had stopped and started looking at DiCaprio for a couple of shots and then he started blowing shit up.

The idea of a chase sequence where they start fucking with the architecture in order to escape, or the idea of needing to keep the guy from waking up, so they can't fuck with the dream too much is a much better explanation for the lack of cool dream shit than anything.

You guys talk for a while about the sequence where Ellen Page is changing shit left and right and Cobb's subconscious people aren't really reacting that strongly, and you point that out as a flaw in the film. I dunno, tho. I think maybe Cobb's subconscious is more trained to accept weird shit in dreams due to his job, the same way that some people's subconscious is trained to react more violently and militarily to weird shit in dreams.

But that said, I think what they SHOULD have done is gotten away with a ton of shit in the dream and had it be perfectly fine with the dreamer. When you're dreaming, absolutely crazy shit can happen and you take it in stride - including just teleporting to some random new location. The clash of reality and dreamworld is the thing that would kick you out, so the intruders not acting all weird and fitting in with the dream would be what fucks it all up. In that sense, I think your idea of the 'dreams' being more of a virtual reality rather than an actual dream is a better way to look at the movie.

The limbo thing is the biggest problem I have with the movie. Cobb and Juno go to limbo at the end to get Scarecrow. Juno kills Scarecrow and he goes up one level. Juno then kills herself and goes up one level. However, Cobb and Mal went to limbo and created a huge world there, and when they killed themselves they went all the way up. At the end of the film, Cobb and Ken Watanabi kill themselves and also go all the way up. The fact that limbo behaves however the plot needs it to behave is the only thing in the movie that breaks for me. I can forgive everything else. Perhaps there is something I'm missing, tho?

EDIT - NM, I think the reason they go all the way up is because there are no levels of dreams going on above them...  but if that's the case how did Cobb and Mal get to limbo in the first place? Hrmm...

Last edited by Squiggly_P (2011-08-17 19:00:22)

Because you forget it's a dream and waste decades there.

Like Los Angeles.

Again?