Hasta La Ideas

Back in mid-June, we asked if the now-blockbuster Inception would be this year’s 500 Days of Summer in terms of being the movie that’s vaguely about architecture of the season (strangely, both star Joseph Gordon Levitt, which we just realized now — maybe a connection there?). This writer hasn’t seen the film yet, though feels as if he has given all the incessant yapping about it, but as far as we’ve been able to gather, it does sound like it definitely is vaguely about architecture. But if so, how good are the buildings in it? That’s the question raised by LA Times critic Christopher Hawthorne, who comes to the conclusion that it’s all pretty lousy. Or better put via his own words: “Why is a movie that puts mind-bending architecture so squarely at the center of its story so architecturally underwhelming?” He adds other questions, like why the locations are so Hollywood hackneyed throughout the film. If you read one Inception review today, make sure it’s this one. Hawthorne manages to channel his inner Anthony Lane and come up with a stellar, very funny piece. Here’s one of our favorites:

If an architecture student at UCLA or Sci-Arc stepped before a thesis review panel at the end of the school year, announced that his primary goal was to invent “new places” and then unveiled that Bunker Hill fantasia, he’d be roundly called out for wallowing in a peculiar, druggy kind of midcentury nostalgia and sent back to the drawing board. Sorry, to the computer.

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