Inception

Inception is a very, very good movie, but that can’t hide the fact that it doesn’t live up to the high potential that it sets for itself.
Great efforts have been made to keep the story of the film a secret, but it really isn’t possible to discuss the film much without going into at least the outline. If you want to see the film completely untainted by potential spoilers, then don’t read any further and just go see it because, whatever problems I have, this is still a great movie, probably the best of this year’s summer blockbusters, and almost guaranteed for a best picture nomination.
Still here? Well, the setting of Inception involves talented psychics who can use shared dreams to enter other people’s minds to steal secrets. Leonardo Dicaprio plays Cobb, a master agent who takes a job to perform an “Inception”, the supposedly impossible task of planting an idea in someone’s head. To accomplish this, he assembles a team in classic heist movie sense, including Ariadne, a young prodigy played by Ellen Page, who Dicaprio’s character tasks with building the dream world. The one problem, however, is that Cobb’s emotional baggage is starting to pollute their operations.
All of this is delivered in a very long opening sequence which goes into great detail explaining the principles and rules of dream diving and setting up the pattern of the heist. Then, the team enters the actual dream heist, and three different layers of dreaming are created. At this point, the movie shifts somewhat radically into enter action-thriller mode, with each layer containing a different action set-piece. This is where the film starts to get disappointing.
Not enough is done with the original premise that all of this is happening in dreamscapes. The premise of the action is that human manifestations of the victim’s subconscious attack the invaders like white blood cells. It works in theory, but unfortunately it is kind of a let down since the result is an intentionally generic army of spy-movie mooks pouring gunfire on the almost inexplicably action oriented agents. The third layer, in which agents assault a snow fortress (for some reason), could have been put in a Bond movie without a single alteration. Nowhere can you find symbolic representations of the subject's mind or unusual or illogical dream architecture like in Satoshi Kon's much, much better dreamscape action movie Paprika.

There are great moments, particularly in an exhilarating and visually stunning scene in which shifts in gravity on one layer cause gravity to change in a deeper layer, leading to a spectacular shifting aerial duel, but unfortunately these moments are in the minority. In an expository scene, Ariadne plays with the dreamscape by literally folding a city onto itself, but in the actual heist the environments are rigidly static and not really that dreamy.

There are glimpses of greatness here, and the film does touch on questions of reality and subconscious psychology, but unfortunately it really only touches on them. Still, though, the action scenes are executed beautifully and cast is stellar, and when the film does get surreal the effects are visually stunning.
Ultimately, I wouldn’t be noticing how much greater Inception could have been if it wasn’t already so good that I didn’t feel the need to compromise to enjoy it.

What Does Your Bad Product Teach Us?

I like talking about movies and series (Serieses? Serii?) that I watch, and I've noticed that there are two different methods of discussing things.

When you talk positively about things you are dismissed as a fanboy and people find you neither informative nor entertaining. In order to find concurrence, you must seek out other fanboys. Before long, you are talking about pairings and...*ugh*...canon.

The alternative, being negative, is well-liked and entertaining, but the very people who praise your belittling prowess secretly dismiss you as an evil troll who wants to bring them all down because girls don't like you.

Ideally, you can also be honest and review things as both good and bad based on what they deserve, but people will still assume you're doing one of the two and treat you as such. In fact, if you're being completely honest, people will universally assume you're a mean-spirited ogre and complain about how mean you are to all their favorite movies, because 90% of everything is crap and deserves to be mocked, and even good stuff has flaws that should be corrected.

I was musing on this controversy while being disappointed by "The Big Lebowski", which I watched for the first time recently, and I thought...as long as I talk about movies I will probably be dissapointing others and thought of negatively...and yet I still want to do it.

So, I'm joining the millions of others in the world by jumping into the world of amateur. By the way, I know that being an online amateur critic is incredibly unoriginal but I really don't care, trying to make it original would just end up making it gimmicky. This will probably only please me...which is good enough.