Movie Review: Inception

Director: Christopher Nolan

Somehow, I managed to drag somebody to see the latest and greatest movie release last Friday. Dad and I saw it in its Ultra Screen glory, and it was beautiful.

It’s a fairly simple movie. In terms of characters and their goals, everything is announced at the beginning. Corporate big shot Saito (Ken Watanabe) wants an idea planted in his competitor’s head. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) wants to return to his family and see his children’s faces. Ariadne (Ellen Page) wants to help Cobb get over the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). And everyone else wants to get the job done without a hitch.

This is not a movie where you can leave to refill your popcorn bowl. You miss a scene, you’ll be lost for about an hour. Each line of dialogue is carefully placed at exactly the right moment. There won’t be entire scenes explaining a simple piece of technology; it’ll be a sentence or two and then the movie moves on. I recognize this trick in a few televisions shows I’ve seen such as Angel and Doctor Who. You have to pay attention in those too.

The movie isn’t trying to outsmart you with complicated twists. Instead, it’s leading you through a plot reminiscent of the old films of yore. It does have that old-time movie feel. Here is the character, here is his trouble, this is his goal, now watch as he attempts to accomplish that goal.

It’s amazing how Nolan managed to fit some pretty sweet action and a really cool story into one two-and-a-half hour movie. My only qualm against it was the seeming lack of an arc with nearly all the characters. Cobb and Mal were the only ones who started at point A and ended up at point B in terms of character development. But other than that, this movie is great!

My favorite scene (and this would be my favorite scene) was when Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Ariadne were sitting a building with the projections looking at them. Arthur attempts to fit into the crowd with a kiss from Ariadne, but it didn’t work. His comment was “Yeah, it was worth a shot.”

The favorite character was Eames (Tom Hardy). His sense of humor and light-heartedness was a great addition to the cast.

Overall grade: A+

This Week at The Library:

 

Checked out two books.

- 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clark

- American Gods by Neil Gaiman

 

Placed on hold two books:

- Faeries of Dreamdark: Blackbringer by Laini Taylor

- Grave Peril by Jim Butcher

 

I expect to see Inception this weekend, so keep a watch for my thoughts or what it made me think of.  According to the reviews, this movie is really good, well-made, well-written, directed with a sharp eye.  Based on these, I am super excited to see this movie. 

 

That is all.

2001: The last time I saw that movie

 

This blog has been on haitus since I started questioning the nature of it.  But now I’m back.  And I’m going to talk about something that terrified me as a child:

 

2001:  A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick

 

When I was a kid, I was scared of regular scary things like monsters and things that didn’t look natural.  There used to be a tree outside my window with branches that grew long enough to touch the house.  One night, I was sitting in my room, minding my own business, probably lost in a writing project somewhere, when something tapped my window.  I looked up and jumped because I saw something reaching towards my window.  It bounced like it was a live.  An adrenaline shot later, I realized it was the tree outside my window.  I never really liked that tree.  I thought it was an alien.

 

When I say I believe in aliens, I mean that I believe in the aliens you come across on Doctor Who, the kind of beings that leave Earth alone for the most part.  They can live at the same time we’re living, and maybe hover in orbit from time to time, but I don’t believe in aliens abducting humans for their own experiments.  I don’t see the point in that because we’re an advanced life form not so different than those guys in flying saucers.  We’re just grounded for a bit.

 

But what if aliens helped to shape our current society and technology?  What if they just had a hand in pushing us towards the right path of evolution?  And what if they did it with slabs of rock holding an unknown nature?  Of all the things that scared me as a child, those giant monoliths and HAL scared me most of all.

 

First off, those monoliths were accompanied by some creepy music.  Giant slabs of rock or no, the right music to a generic something makes a world of a difference.  Case in point:

Normal chipmunk, right?  No!  This little guy is dramatic!

 

Normal piece of rock?  No.  The music tells you otherwise.

 

The second thing that scared the living lights out of me was HAL 9000, supercomputer on board the space ship Discovery.  What was so scary about him?  He had a calming voice and interacted nicely with the crew.  And then he started to go crazy, but he kept that calming voice.  But you couldn’t trust the calming voice of the supercomputer.  Nope.  Can’t trust the system that runs the entire ship.  A supercomputer goes crazy.  Growing up where computers don’t even think for themselves, it’s a scary thought.  [I continue to be frightened of this during The Matrix and iRobot, who explore robots taking over humanity further.  Don’t ask me about  The Animatrix, I never got through it.] 

 

I managed an attempt to get over the fear of the movie by reading the book.  It made sense if you could follow along.  Now I think I’m ready to try watching the movie again after ten years of avoidance.  Let’s hope I can still get to bed the same night.

 

*Fun Fact*

Both Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick wrote the screenplay, but Arthur C. Clark wrote the novel as an explanation for the movie.  I call this the first book/movie pair in history to have the movie before the book.

 

Other things that frighten me:

- rotating helicopter blades

- popping helium balloons

- being in the ER alone

Writer’s Block . . . or lack thereof

 

I read an interesting phrase yesterday.  While surfing around some book lists of authors I want to read, I came across the website of Jodi Picoult.  While I’ve never read anything of hers, I did surf around her site because it seemed interesting.  And because she’s said to be one of the greatest authors of the day. 

 

Did you know Jodi Picoult doesn’t believe in writer’s block?

 

I find that interesting.  And I encourage you to stop believing in writer’s block.  Even if you feel you can’t write, write anyway.  It’s better to edit something that’s horrible than completely write something else entirely.  So go ahead and write a piece of crap.  Edit, cut, revise, cut, edit --- like crazy!!  And when you’re done, the worst thing in the world will be a the prettiest diamond you’ve ever written.

 

Stop believing in writer’s block.  It does not exist.

Paradise Lost in summer reading

 

Yes, I’ve been gone.  No, I haven’t been particularly busy --- I just a). kept forgetting about blogging, b). did not find anything worth blogging about since Spring Break, and c). had to deal with reading Paradise Lost for a class.  And now I’m writing a paper on that same poem.

 

As an epic poem read by the literary, I can appreciate Paradise Lost for its beautiful prose, marvelous phrasing, and the subtle hints and references throughout all twelve books.  I can appreciate it as the only epic poem written in the conventions of Homer and Vergil and quite possibly Chaucer and Spenser, but in a language that does not require translation into the modern vernacular . . . yet.  The subtle language, the references to itself, to previous written epics, to the Bible . . . it’s all amazing to have been written by a blind man in hiding from the government.  Can you imagine?

 

And yet, as with Homer, it’s quite boring.

 

Seriously, I attempted to read it.  But to read nine hundred (!!!) lines of intense poetry where little if anything happens in a large amount of space is so trying, especially in these modern times where it’s “direct language or bust!”  You really have to enter another mindset to read it.  My way of dealing with that mindset is patience, which takes quite a bit of time, which is not allotted in class.  So I would try, fail, try again, and still fail.  And now I’m writing a paper on it (not my failing, the paper is about Eve). 

 

This week is finals week, and I’m getting through the week with the promise of television shows, books, and a to-do list for the summer.  Here is my list:

 

(to watch)

- Buffy the Vampire Slayer

- Pushing Daisies

- FullMetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

- Avatar the Last Airbender

- Lost

- The Tudors

- Carnivale (though I’ve seen more than half of it already)

-

(to read)

- Neil Gaiman

- Ray Bradbury

- Arthur C. Clark

- Laini Taylor

- Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (this may prove to be harder than it sounds)

- Y: The Last Man (books 3 – end)

- Astonishing X-Men (part 3 – end)

- graphic novels in general

-

 

I always add an extra point just in case.  If you have any suggestions for things I might enjoy, please leave a comment below and I’ll look into it.  Wish me luck on my paper! 

FlashForward has returned!

 

Which means I’m very excited.  This show caught my interest when I first went to college and I’ve been keeping up with it until it was put on haitus.  I am very unhappy about this haitus because the original creators stated in an interview that they were planning for the series finale to mesh-up with the date of the flash forwards.  I do hope they keep that up.  It’s a very interesting concept.

 

This is not a review, this is just me being excited.

 

Someone on the Hulu reviews mentioned that the character arcs seemed kind of cliche, which made me think that Flash Florward can be a bit of a cheese ball, which made me fall for it all over again.  I am an uber fan of the Cheese Ball for reasons unbeknownst to me.  If it can pull off corny and bad-ass-ery, I’m liable to like it.

 

Like Transformers and Speed Racer.  Both are awesomely entertaining, but they are giant Cheese Balls.  But they are entertaining, thus, I like them.

 

This is the kind of thing I’d like to work on someday.

Where Did I Go? Comments from a Web Surfer

 

No where, really.  But every time I think about this blog, I think about how few things I actually do outside schoolwork and writing.  I don’t read as much as other people, and I have to admit, looking at things with a critical eye takes the fun out of it.  So I’ve decided to also litter this blog with other things – like the cool videos I find on YouTube!  And other things.

 

Laini Taylor is a fun blog to follow.  She finds awesome writing advice including this pretty neat speech by Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat Pray Love.  Check it out, my roommate loves it.

 

I am also a fan of The Big Bang Theory.  I’ve been watching that whenever I have to eat alone.

 

And when I’m not really doing anything else, I find random YouTube videos.  Like this one.  Check that out too because it’s awesome.  I almost want to go on Chat Roulette to find him, but I don’t want to see a quarter of the people I meet doing inappropriate things to their webcam. 

 

And then when that is done, I feel like listening to Owl City’s Fireflies, so that’s what I do.  And my surfing goes from there.

 

Internet surfing makes me think of the old 90s cartoon Reboot, which I watched last year and inadvertently found this Reboot revival movement.  That was also interesting.  But the show features a web surfer for a few episodes who uses a surf board and talks with a slight Aussie accent. 

 

But Reboot was made in the 90s when the Internet and its potential was just speculation.  Which makes me wonder what Reboot would be like if it were revamped with today’s technology and ideologies.  To prevent copyrighting, there will have to be new characters.  But they’ll still feature some sort of Anti-Spyware character, the main programming character, a character for each major program on the computer, and so forth.  I say we keep the binomial characters because they’re cute, personally, but that’s just me.

 

A friend of mine mentioned something once.  He said that we’ve now gotten to the point where, if a person is smart, you don’t have to hunt for a software problem at all.  If a program goes bad, just uninstall it and then reinstall it – simple fix without the hassle.  And any other problems you had would also disappear.  So now the common folk don’t even know how computers are run, we just know how to work them.  Does that scare you?  Because if computers die, a lot of people's lives will die with them (mine included). 

 

Inevitably, I end up picturing myself in a cool-looking protective suit with a surf board and wishing that whole thing was real.  Damn, that’d be fun.