We finally went to see Inception yesterday. Fortunately, I’d remained largely spoiler-free for the whole thing. I mean, I knew there was something to do with being in other people’s dreams, but the previews told me that much.

I didn’t even know Michael Caine was in it. I can’t stand that guy. He doesn’t really ever act, he’s just shades of Michael Caine. Just like Jack Nicholson. I also put him in the “oily” category (with such big-name celebs as Matthew McConaughey, Shia LeBouef, Robert DiNero, and a host of others), because he grosses me out.

Anyhoo, what a thinker! A romance film, wrapped in an action/adventure film, wrapped in a sci-fi film, wrapped in a heist film, all smothered in the secret sauce of messing with your mind. With a perfectly timed closing shot, leaving you wondering whether the real world is real or not.

This was also the first complete movie I’d seen Ellen Page in. I tried to watch Whip It and only made it about 15 minutes in before shutting it off. Even more boring and plodding than the source book.

I had a couple of name issues, which may be nitpicky, but they preyed on my mind for most of the viewing. First off, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character: is he named Tom or Dom? Because it sounded about 50/50 each way. A couple of the layman summary-writers on IMDB say it’s Dom, but the listings only put his character as “Cobb”.

Next, Cobb’s wife. First I heard her name as “Maul”, which is totally not a name. Then I figured that it must be “Moll”, as a nickname for Molly or something. Although an elegant French woman doesn’t really seem like a Molly. The IMDB tells me her character is “Mal”, which in my mind is pronounced like “pal”, a.k.a. the captain’s name on Firefly.

The movie was also a festival of “where do I know that guy from”. Firstly, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was easy. I was pretty sure that a guy near the beginning was Lukas Haas (of Solarbabies fame), and I was right. So Solarbabies and Inception are one degree apart, and that delights me. The funny thing is, he’s been working steadily since the early ’80s, but I haven’t seen a single piece of his work since a craptacular sci-fi rollerskating movie made in 1986.

I had to look up Tom Hardy, who played Eames — he was Jean-Luc Picard’s pouty young clone in the terrible Star Trek: Nemesis. Not to mention Pete Postlethwaite and poor Tom Berenger — he always looks old and bloated to me, probably because my mind always expects him to look just like he did in 1985.

And speaking of bloated, I’m worried about Leonardo DiCaprio. His head is getting wider as he ages, and he’s sneaking up on potato-head territory. I’d hate for him to join the ranks of other potato-headed guys like Russell Crowe and Gerard Butler. Bleah.

My last thought of this bunch of barely-surface-scratching rambling: I bet The Matrix would give its left nut for everything that happened in the hotel hallway (and in that vein, Joseph Gordon-Levitt would make a much better Neo than Keanu Reeves [potato head] ever did). Effects have come so far in the last 10 years.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 6th, 2010 at 11:11 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.