Movie review: friggen’ awesome.
One of the good things about this part of Utah is that the theaters are cheap. So when today I found myself near one showing “Inception” for $4.50, I stopped in and watched it. Holy crap! An actually intelligent movie!
I’ll not dealve into the plot, as that can be found described elsewhere. I’ll just say that “Inception” assumes a technology that allows people to share dreams… and sometimes to go into a dream while already in a dream. A neat feature is that in a dream, you apparently think about 20 times faster than reality… three minutes worth of dreaming seems like an hour. And if you go into a dream while already in a dream, it’s 20 times faster still. And so on the further you go…
The result is that there are multiple layers of time rates in the movie, which was clearly confusing to the teenybopper girls sitting in the row ahead of me, but which I thought was neater’n hell. While there have been some justifiable comparisons to “The Matrix,” in that time is spent in fantasy worlds where the laws of physics are not quite fixed, “Inception” is not an action flick. There are a few extended dream sequences in zero gravity. These, to my mind, were the best and most effective zero-g scenes since “Apollo 13.”
If you step out of the theater for five minutes to take a leak or buy some corn… rest assured that you’ll probably be confused as hell when you try to pick up the plot when you get back. A lot happens in this movie… and for once the movie makers do not assume that the viewers are morons.
NOTE: Leonardo DiCaprio used to irritate the hell out of me (why? I assure you it had nothign to do woith him being a prettyboy who makes me look like a toad in comparison). This began to change with “The Aviator,” where he did an effective job as Howard Hughes. In “Inception,” he’s enterred the ranks of the non-irritating actors.
Secondary movie review: saw “Predators” a few days back. An entertaining bit of fluff, comparatively. IMO, the best of the Predator movies since the first one, which it is a lot like. And here again, the actor Adrian Brody goes from “scrawny nerdy goofball” to “effective action-movie badass,” much to my considerable surprise.
