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.

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.

I was watching an interesting documentary the other day that got me thinking that I really don’t get it anymore.  It was His Name Was Jason, a look at the long lived Friday the 13th franchise.  Being a teenager in the eighties, I of course watched them all on cable when in high school, and then in the theaters in college.  Was it for tense suspense scenes or interesting characters?  Not really.  Back then I watched the films for two reasons, to see what outrageously gory death scenes they would think of this time, and more importantly, somebody going topless.  As the nineties progressed my interest in gory effects has faded (have never seen a Saw movie and don’t plan on seeing one in the future), and as for gratuitous topless scenes, though still enjoyable, I can’t bring myself to sit though a film I have no interest in just to see a quick flash of nudity.  Must be something about being forty….and the internet (Wonder if Al Gore ever saw that coming when he “invented” the Web?).

Anyway, I have seen all of the films up through Freddy v. Jason, it’s the completist in me.  So I was curious about the back stage origins of the series.  It was interesting seeing interviews with producers, directors, make up effects artists, actors, and celebrity fans talking about the different films, what they enjoyed and didn’t.  And like a Friday the 13th movie there was a death scene from one of the films every ten minutes and gratuitous nude scenes sprinkled throughout.

But then everyone started really getting into this topic that pulled me out of the film and left me scratching my head for the rest of the interviews, feeling like a true outsider.  Everyone started going on and on about the subtle emotional nuances of the different actors who have portrayed Jason, one Jason portrayor comparing him to Frankenstein (though not specified, I assumed he meant Karloff’s interpretation).

Now no offense to Kane Hodder and the other actors who have slipped on the hockey mask, but I don’t think I ever saw Jason as a real character in the films, he was just the mechanism used to kill the characters in the film, an object as animated as the machete he usually carried.  All the talk about his psychological motivations ranging from abuse, abandonment and being ostiscized by society as a child had me wondering if I was missing something obvious right in front of me.

I never thought of the films as having depth of meaning or characterization.  They were just summer popcorn fare.  A quick ninety minutes of mindless action, you sat down, turned your mind off and just enjoyed the make up effects and brief nudity.  I guess that is the difference between beng a casual viewer intead of a die hard fan.