South-Park-inception-sheep

Inception is easily the artsiest movie I’ve ever seen and still thought, “Hey, this could totally work as a video game.” (Though I do enjoy a round of Pin the Scarf on Wes Anderson). Christopher Nolan recently reiterated what we’ve known for a while now, that an Inception video game is in the works.  Up up down down left right left right B A select (*BRAAAAAAHM*)

Inception-kiss-joseph-gordon-levitt is contagiousThere will be a videogame: “I always imagined Inception to be a world where a lot of other stories could take place,” says Nolan. “At the moment, the only direction we’re channeling that is by developing a videogame set in the world.” He declined to elaborate on details or time table, only to say that he was developing the game with a team of collaborators and that it was “a longer-term proposition.”

My prediction?  A first-person shooter in which you control a guy playing a first-person shooter in which he has to control a guy playing a first-person shooter.  …I hate myself for typing that. I hope this is a dream.  But since Chris Nolan can’t take a leak at an Arby’s without the guy in the next urinal demanding he explain the Inception ending, he got asked that too.

But let’s get to the question we’ve been asking since Inception premiered last July and promptly cooked our noodle [guuuhhh. -Ed.]: Did the top stop spinning or what? “I’ve been asked the question more times than I’ve ever been asked any other question about any other film I’ve made,” Nolan laughs. “That’s definitely the question. It keeps coming back to that. What’s funny to me is that people really do expect me to answer it.”

“Haha, but seriously,” Nolan added, “you’re an imbecile.”  [Spoiler Alert, etc.]

“With this film, though, people really think I’m going to tell, ” he says. “I get a lot of questions like, ‘Okay, did this thing earlier in the film mean that it’s all true, or does this other thing at another point in the film mean that it’s all a dream?’” Nolan says there’s no definitive answer to that question, because then his choice at the end of the movie to cut away from the spinning top — used by lead character Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) to know whether he’s in the real world (the top falls) or the dream world (the top doesn’t) — would have been an error on his part. “There can’t be anything in the film that tells you one way or another because then the ambiguity at the end of the film would just be a mistake,” he says. “It would represent a failure of the film to communicate something. But it’s not a mistake. I put that cut there at the end, imposing an ambiguity from outside the film. That always felt the right ending to me — it always felt like the appropriate ‘kick’ to me….The real point of the scene — and this is what I tell people — is that Cobb isn’t looking at the top. He’s looking at his kids. He’s left it behind. That’s the emotional significance of the thing.”

It always amazes me that in 2010, you still have to explain to grown adults that fictional characters don’t have a secret life outside the works in which they appear.  Air Bud spiked the ball and won the game dude, we both saw it.  He didn’t become a longshoreman or start an optometry practice in Poughkeepsie.