Todd’s Movie Blog

Saw Inception last night and it was awesome.  Kudos to Warners Brothers for releasing such a complex and thought provoking film in the midst of the summer season.  Basically the overall plot is that in the near future people have discovered how to share dreams.  Leonardo Dicaprio runs a corporate espioonage business invading people’s dreams and stealing secrets.  After screwing up one such extraction, he is approached by the victim to do the opposite, invade a mind and insert an idea that will look like the person thought of it themselves, an inception. After the crew is assembled and the mission started, they discover that the victim has been trained to recognize and combat such invasions, manifested by hit squads, and a malevolent manifestation of Dicaprio’s guilt over his dead wife keeps popping up to try and sabotage the mission.

There are a lot of things going on with everyone having to drop deeper and deeper into dream states that elongate time the farther you go, so you have cross cutting in which a quick scene takes forver while the other scene seems to play in regular time.  There is a highly suspenseful scene in which one character has to bring everyone out of a deeper dream state while the dream state he is in has no gravity due to what’s having in a higher dream state.  Like I said, a complex movie.

Some have complained online that the dream worlds are too realistic and linnear, which I think is missing the point.  If one world looks the same as the next, which one is real?  it’s that very ambiguity that caused most of the people in the audience at the showing I went to, to groan at the last shot of the film, which is open to many intrepretations.

If you go by all of the critics, M. Night Shymalan’s career is over, the final nail in the coffin being his new film The Last Airbender, which garnered a Rotten Tomato rating of 7% (Ouch!).  I haven’t seen reviews this scathing since Freddie Got Fingered.  On the other hand, according to Box Office Mojo, it’s weekend gross was over $40 million, putting it at number two behind the new Twilight movie for the weekend.  Whether or not this will turn out to be Shymalan’s third and final strike out at the box office depends on how the film produces over the long haul.  $40 million is a good start, but it has to do over $157 million just to break even.  Word of mouth isn’t good right now.

Seth Rogen seems to have actually completed The Green Hornet and put out a trailer for a January release.  I caught it on You Tube and it leaves me with mixed feelings. If the trailer is any indication the film has a very mixed tone.  Serious, a scene of Britt Reid being informed of his fathers death by gangsters.  Action, Kato kicking ass, literally, and the Black Beauty firing a massive amount of bullets at a gangster’s car.  Comedy, Reid gassing himself with his own gas gun and Kato blowing up a trafic camera after running a red light.  It all has the feeling being more of a buddy action comedy than a serious superhero movie.  I also have some concerns about Rogen’s performance.  Part of the key to the character is that he is passing himself off as a mobster muscling in on the the established criminals’ territory. The previous Green Hornets; Al Hodge on the radio, Alan Jones and Warren Hull in the serials and Van Williams on TV; were all able to project an aura of true menace when in the guise of the Hornet and dealing with the bad guys.  I get none of that from Rogen in the trailer.  Rotten Tomatos put it best during the Anticipatron, It’s like Iron Man if he had been a stoner.