Monday, July 19, 2010

incepted

This "review" is probably only a tiny bit pertinent, and only to people who don't know about Inception yet.

I was an intern at Warner Brothers, and I worked on the lot for this little (as in...six employees) production company, Weed Road.  Sometimes, when they were getting too many scripts in, they'd send me home with a couple, and I was supposed to write coverage. 
A big part of it was saying that Movie A (which you'd be reading, and hadn't been made  yet, and would probably never be made) was a mix of Movie B and C.  Like, for instance, "Dog Cop" is a mix of "Kindergarten Cop" and "All Dogs Go to Heaven" or whatever, and then you'd write a page or two about why it was ridiculous for a dead cop's body to enter a dog, who could then talk, but only to his dead partner, and that no one should produce the movie and no one will see it, and there's no chance of fixing it: pass.  Or sometimes, it would seem really good, and you'd give it the a-ok and pass it on to the next person.
So, kind of like that, I'll say Inception was a mix of Matrix and Waking Life.  And Vanilla Sky? And Shutter Island.  And Titanic (just kidding). Thankfully it's missing whatever made the Matrix's action sequences so boring, and whatever made every character in Waking Life so irritating.
It's a heisty plot (which I love), but the heist is a vehicle for all these ideas about dreaming, and the giant philosophical question of "What Is Real?".   It was way more intellectually stimulating than some other dream movies that you see - I think because they didn't take the annoying hippie or horror route.   I mean, I didn't see the new Freddy movie, but that's the whole thing right?  Something about him getting you through your dreams?  Boring.
In Inception, we've got a whole team of super smart people who lay it out simple enough for us to understand (nevermind the technology part, which we're just meant to assume is totally possible).  There's a few different ideas - you can share dreams, dreams are architecturally malleable,  you can choose if you want to stay in it, and then, this up-in-the-air ending jawn that we've seen from Leo most recently in Shutter Island.  There's all these maze-y historical and art references that are a little gimmicky but fun to look for. 
It was great.  The CGI was great.  I had pretzel bites, and they too were great.  This is getting rambly.
I'd see it again in a second.  


Also I saw Despicable Me, which was better than most other kid's movies I've seen in a long time, including Snow Dogs.  Two trips to the Riverview, but as you all know: it was so hot.

1 comment:

kamper part deux said...

You forgot to mention brad pitts mails and keanue's (?) window entering, in this post; and the part about the script evaluating in real life, years ago.
Ball dropper.