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Inception: Dream A Little Dream In Me

I’m going to win this Dreidel game if it’s the last thing I ever do.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Everyone fears the sophomore curse, when you break out of the gate in any type of popular media with something so unique, so gripping and so monumentally accepted by the ravenous public that you set the bar high into the stratosphere, making it impossible for your second creative effort to even bask in the reflection of that initial glory. It frightens each and every person stepping out of the shadows and into the spotlight, but there is a misconception lingering making people feel safe after they are past their second credit. The cold, hard fact is each and every time you release something out to the public it is another audition to the world. If your newest effort becomes known as the best of your career, congratulations my friend, welcome back to the curse. It’s been right here waiting for you. Christopher Nolan felt the sting of the curse after his breakout indie darling, Memento, which he followed with a poorly timed remake of the chilly psychological thriller, Insomnia. Yet Nolan fought onward and grabbed hold of the frayed cape of the Batman franchise and resurfaced with a much more dark and gritty take on the legendary crusader in Batman Begins. This inevitably led to his crowning achievement in the comic book sequel, The Dark Knight, where the world witnessed the true beauty of a director and actor, in Heath Ledger, creating something that will be remembered and talked about for generations. As the accolades for The Dark Knight poured in, Nolan found himself right back in the lap of the curse, plotting his escape, scanning the horizons for a safe way out. Turns out, he found his escape not by looking outside, but by turning in.

Inception is the name given to a procedure where a person with incredibly specific skills and equipment can enter someone else’s dreams and gently plant the seed of an idea, which would then flourish and grow in that person naturally, culminating in the subject doing exactly what you wanted them to. Most believe it can’t be done, but one man, Cobb, says it is not just possible, but he’s done it before. Hired for one last job, Cobb builds a team of people to help him complete his mission and try to win his ticket home to his children.

The out and out winner here is the writing. While the directing and acting, which will be mentioned later, are both up to par, the writing of such an intricate, delicate and verbose script is an achievement worth high recognition. People are already talking Oscar race for this film, and while I might be on the fence right now in the Best Picture category (we still have quite a few months to go people), in the arena of Best Original Screenplay, this should be a shoe-in. Nolan is truly at his best when dealing with fragmented and fractured realities, achieving a tender balance between intrigue and confusion that makes the audience think, but not feel stupid if they all come up with different answers at the end. As for the ending, I’ll leave that for later, loudly hidden behind the spoiler warnings.

Moving onto the acting, Leonardo DiCaprio, who played our anti-hero Cobb, once again brims with sheer determination and builds layer upon layer into the role. The only fraction of a flaw in his performance in my eyes is it bordered on being too controlled. At times there felt perfect opportunities to let him fly off the handle or just peel back one more layer, showing his humanity, but the importance of the job and the need for sharp and complete focus kept him tightly wrapped up. Tom Hardy, playing Eames, the wise-cracking master thief of the group, steals many of the scenes not only due to his skill as an actor, but because he provides the only comic relief in the film. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as Aurthur, brings back a little bit of his steam-train determination and tunnel-vision drive that he perfected in Brick. Overall all the performances were on point, but in the minority there were two people that I felt were under used and under developed, Michael Caine and Ellen Page. Caine is a tremendous actor that felt totally wasted in a partially unexplained cameo part (he’s mentioned as the grandfather to Cobb’s children, but it is never illustrated whether he is Cobb’s father or his stepfather.) As for Page, while they try with one line of dialogue to cover over her rapid acceptance of the world of dreams and being able to control them, she still ends up feeling rushed into the story more as a person to move the plot than a full fledged character.

***SPOLIER ALERT – SPOILER ALERT – DO NOT READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM***

Now let’s talk about that ending. While I really do enjoy a nice ‘leave ‘em hanging’ closer, I think people are reading way too much into it. Yes, the top was still spinning, and yes the idea was to make you wonder if Cobb is still in a dream at the end of the film, but the theory that the entire movie was all a dream inside Cobb’s mind, showing his own journey to release himself of the guilt of pushing his wife to suicide, well, that just doesn’t sit right with me. The ‘whole dream’ theory robs the movie of all its importance and power and steals all the thunder from the other characters. I prefer to believe the top would have fallen in time; it was just really well balanced.

The End of the Page Recommendation: Nolan is on a hot streak that could see him crowned as one of the greatest directors in our generation, but let’s not pressure him too much, right? Inception is clever, intriguing and everything you want in a psychological drama, even if it draws a little long at the end. Worth seeing, if only for the ensuing discussion you will have immediately after.

What did you think of the ending? Does this top ‘Dark Knight’ for you?

Eagle Eye: I Think I’ve Gone Blind (SPOLIERS)

What do you mean those Indy fans are still pissed off? Man, they are persistent.

Shia LeBeouf is the boy with the golden ticket. We’ve watched him rise from talent on the TV screen in Even Stevens, make a breakthrough performance in The Battle of Shaker Heights (one of the winning films from the ambitious Project Greenlight) and land squarely in the middle of some of the biggest blockbusters of all time, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls and Transformers. His star is shining bright in the Hollywood skyline and nothing seems to be slowing him down…

except for the fact his acting skills are getting completely lost in terrible, and I mean truly terrible, scripts. Let’s give his newest visual extravaganza a look see.

Eagle Eye is the story of Jerry Shaw (LeBeouf), a young, brilliant son who never applied himself to anything and is scraping by in a droll existence dodging his landlady and bluffing money in poker games in the back room of his copy store job. This is also the story of Rachel Holloman (played by Michelle Monaghan), a pretty, young and bitterly divorced woman who’s trying to vicariously live out her wild youth through her friends, while dedicating her only strength and passion to her young son. These two seemingly total opposites are “activated” and sent kicking and screaming through a dangerous series of hoops by an unknown voice on their phones, who can seemingly track them absolutely anywhere. Jerry is forced into it because he’s been framed as a terrorist, while Rachel runs the gambit to save the life of her son. Together they try to stay alive long enough to figure out what it is they are supposed to accomplish.

*There you have the basic set up. From this point on, there are spoilers because it is impossible to write about the issues with this film without giving away the plot twists. You’ve been warned.*

There is no person on the other end of the phone. It’s a computer called Aria who was designed and built by the Department of Defense and is now on the warpath to eradicate the chain of command, all the way up to the President, because they disobeyed a tactical recommendation she gave them. So after all the hype and excitement around the movie, it turns out to be nothing more than a poor remake of WarGames. This is only made more offensive by the fact that I loved WarGames as a kid and amazingly enough the film still holds up today, which many from that time period don’t, especially when they have to do with computer technology.

The film pretty much unravels from the moment you are told everything is being run and designed by a rogue artificial intelligence. The trailers were specifically designed to hide this fact, giving off more of a “big brother” fright tactic, and I applaud that marketing plan, except the only time that works is when the true plot twist in the theater is more interesting than the one we already imagined. This is not the case with Eagle Eye. No computer system would ever create such a convoluted and hole-ridden assassination plot. Computer systems are based on logic, even the ones we give personalities to, but Aria decides to make Shia and Michelle run rampant through downtown streets in numerous cities, dodging death and destruction at every turn, only so they can get into Aria’s control panel and undo a biometric lock put in place by…wait for it…wait for it…Shia’s twin brother, Ethan Shaw. We’re supposed to believe that once this lock is removed, Aria can proceed with her plan to destroy the chain of command. Not bad, as long as the audience chooses to notice that by this point in the movie the plan had no way of stopping, even if the lock was still in place. All the pieces were already in motion and Aria was pretty much unnecessary to the assassination.

Seriously, I could go on and on about the plot holes and logical misfires in this script. They range from a cell phone which can be triggered to only light up in short bursts and used to relay Morse code (I don’t know about you, but one click on mine and it stays lit for at least three seconds, no matter what) to the fact that only one mini-mart shop in all of Washington D.C. has a security camera not hooked up to any external network. The amount of disbelief needed in this film to make it enjoyable is staggering, almost more than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Transparent Ego Issues. No one actually tried to make sense of anything in the film and it runs on the belief if you move the camera around fast enough no one will notice. Well I noticed and I’m nowhere near the only one.

D.J. Caruso, the director of this silver screen misfit, is teetering on the brink of becoming Michael Bay, which I’m sure to some people is not a bad thing. He could follow this path and keep making bigger and bigger movies with less and less attention paid to the story or plot, but there’s a certain amount of respect traded to the devil of special effects and deep pocket budgets. He won a ton of people to his side with his Rear Window homage, Disturbia, and gained Shia as his modern male muse, but this recent visual splatterstorm of nonsense has brought him back to square one. The cast of the movie, which also included Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson, kept up their end of the bargain, but no one could perform their way into anything meaningful inside the web of failed logic and shark jumping. The blame firmly rests on the shoulders of screenwriters John Glenn and Travis Wright, which is frightening since these two are currently writing the remakes of Clash of the Titans and The Warriors. If there is justice in the film world, let their directors know how to rewrite on set.

Recommendation: If you’ve read the whole review to this point, this part should be fairly clear. Feel free to make up your own mind, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m a writer myself and I know this review was rather harsh, but I call it like I see it, what I saw was a total mess.

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