Inception

2010 cerebral action movie

Rating: 15/20 (Jen: 13/20)

Plot: Loosely based on Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, this involves Leonardo Dicaprio busting into people's dreams to steal their ideas. It's a confusing job, but somebody's got to do it. The work's cost him. His wife's dead, and for various reasons, he can't return to the United States and be with his children. An Asian guy offers him a job, but instead of the extraction he's used to performing, he's given the task of planting an idea in a guy's brain. That's called inception. He gathers together a team and meticulously plans this reverse heist. It won't be easy, and there will be a lot of explosions.

While watching this movie, I fell asleep and had my own tri-level dream. I don't remember my dream details often, but I know this one had something to do with trying to warn a dog that my friend Don's hot older sister who liked The Doors had put dynamite under his bowl. Then Lionel Richie broke into my dream and sang that "I had a dream; I had an awesome dream" song, but I couldn't pay attention to lyrics because his pants were too bright. Suddenly, I'm shooting at gypsies. Blam blam blam blam! Explosion! It was a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within Christopher Nolan's jism. And Shooby Leboof (he's in all of my dreams) taps me on the shoulder and says that we've only got thirteen third level dream days remaining before we'll have to clean up dog guts from the first level dream. I had enough of that sort of thing on my honeymoon, so Shooby and I walk arm in arm so that we can push my cousin off a ladder so that he can pop balloons in close proximity to our faces. When I woke up, Roger Ebert was standing by my bed (this is not unusual lately) calling me a genius. And he knew the lyrics to that Lionel Richie song, but he couldn't sing them.

The general idea behind this movie is pretty cool, and the special effects are dazzling. But all that razzle-dazzle is really just hiding the fact that this is a big, dumb action movie covered in layers and layers of intellectual mumbo-jumbo. It's a simple story packed in multicolored packing peanuts, surrounded by shimmering baubles, and scrambled by the world's most expensive spatula. It's not nearly as masturbatory as the worst parts of the Matrix movies, but it has more than a little bit in common with them. After the intriguing premise and the rules of the movie unfold with Dicarprio explaining things to that girl from Juno, you get a solid hour and fifteen minutes or so of car chases, shoot 'em ups, and those aforementioned 'splosions. I didn't just have a headache because I already developed a headache from trying to think too much. It was a double headache, a headache that folded over on top of itself like the city in that dream. Boredom set in. I give credit to Nolan for coming up with a very original idea and for allowing the story to unfold in an interesting way. The performances are fine, maybe better than you'd expect from a movie with more special effects than non-special ones. It's really a pretty good movie, but it could have been a whole lot shorter. I had heard that the ending is ambiguous, but it seemed self explanatory to me. I think the fact that I don't really care to think about it all that much shows my true feelings about Inception.

The Man in the Iron Mask

1998 Three Musketeers movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: King Leonardo the XIV isn't a very good king. In fact, he's an asshole, and nobody in France likes him except for one of the four musketeers who is sleeping with the queen mother. When King Leonardo makes a military decision based only on his sexual desires (a move he must have learned from reading about King David and Bathsheba), Musketeer Malcovich's son is killed in battle. The three musketeers who aren't sleeping with the queen mother decide to bust the man in the iron mask, Leonardo's brother Leonardo, out of prison and pull an ol' switcheroo.

If you were magically transported via a magical remote control and a time machine into this movie and asked anybody in France, "Hey, how's King Leonardo XIV working out for ya?" you would fall to sleep before the answer was finished because the Frenchman or Frenchwoman answering your question would deliver a verbose answer so monotonously that you'd think, "Oh, man. Is this answer ever going to get to an endmark?" and then decide to close your eyes for a little bit, just a little bit like you do sometimes when you're driving, but then fall fast asleep. The Man in the Iron Mask needed some of that bumpy pavement they put on the shoulders of highways so that the bumbabra-bumbabra-bumbabra noise wakes you up before you hit a tree, a ditch, or a hobo. I don't know whether to blame the dialogue, the bland music, or the acting, but this was just so stuffy. I normally like John Malcovich, but his uninspired performance here typifies what's wrong with this. He always performs his dialogue in a very deliberate Malcovichian way that ends up making the movie a lot longer, but here, it just seems like his character is struggling to get the words out, almost like he can't believe he used to be a musketeer but now has to say such boring things. He and the other musketeers (Irons, Depardieu, Byrne) each have moments where they shine, but more often than not, they overtheatricize and get all actor-y and make me think I'm watching performances instead of characters. And the biggest problem of all? I might be able to tolerate a single Leonardo Dicaprio in a movie, but this one has two. He plays two characters who not only look identical but act identical even though the story would seem to require that they don't have that much in common. I don't even know if Leonardo Dicaprio is a good actor or not, but I don't like him here one bit. I don't think the part(s) suit him, and I thought his face was tedious. This movie did get better as it went along, but it unfortunately went along a little too much. Or maybe a lot too much.