Available here.

Sometimes the difference between a C+ and a C- is whether I left the theater cheered by a movie’s foolishness or annoyed by it. Salt got crazy enough to put a smile on my face. That, along with Angelina Jolie’s vengeful gynoid demeanor, made me happy.

But no, it wasn’t very good.

So, yes, spoilers will follow.

As a movie about dreams where the dreamer frequently doesn’t know he’s asleep, Inception naturally lends itself to paranoia. That Christopher Nolan’s final shot says “Hey, maybe this isn’t what you think it is” demands that we reexamine the whole thing until internet forums everywhere are awash with theories about what’s going on that range from the reasonable to the “spinning the cat over the head by its tail” insane.

There are, as far as I’m aware, four major theories about the ending:

1) DiCaprio isn’t dreaming, he’s back in reality, and he’s finally reunited with his kids.

2) DiCaprio never escaped the nested dreamworlds; the rest of the movie’s to be taken at face value, but the reunion is a dream.

3) Mal was right, DiCaprio’s been stuck in a dream the whole time, none of this is reality.

4) The whole movie’s a dream and WHARGHLBLARGGLLL pet theory with no real supporting evidence whatsoever.

Just going with my gut, I think 1) is correct. It’s the most satisfying narrative conclusion. 2) is also an all right way to end Inception, but unless Nolan is doing something much crazier and less interesting than normal, 3) or 4) are just off the wall. I believe he deliberately plants seeds to mislead us that way, but that’s part of the point; for these characters, it’s very, very hard to know what’s real and what’s a dream, and Nolan wants his audience to feel the same way.

Speaking of–the final shot of the spinning top.

Here’s my take: it’s spinning, spinning, spinning–OH SHIT THIS IS A DREAM! OH NO! OH–wait, it’s wobbling! This is real! Yay, he’s back with his–

Cut to black before it falls down.

The top wobbles. We are back in reality. But it took a long, long time to do so, and it cut away before it conclusively fell. We’re supposed to feel that this is real, probably.. but, like DiCaprio, we can’t ever be sure.

I’ve read a lot of arguments that his kids are the same age, wearing the same clothes, doing the same things as from his memories, etc., meaning it is a dream after all. But we don’t know they’re the same age–we don’t see their faces until the very end, and the credits list two sets of kids, the second of which is about 18 months older. I’ve read that the clothes are actually different–very similar, which I’m sure was no accident on Nolan’s part, but different. DiCaprio is not walking back into the exact moment that’s haunted him this whole time, the moment he left his children and went on the run.

One more piece of evidence: he’s not wearing a wedding ring in that last scene. In all his dreams, he wears his ring. In reality, it’s gone.

I’ve still only seen it once, and I can’t say with absolute certainty this is the correct take. But, again, I think that’s how Nolan wants us to feel about Inception. The evidence fits that it’s real, but he’s planted just enough false leads to keep us unsure.

UPDATE: So according to the man in charge of costumes, DiCaprio’s kids were wearing different clothes at the end of the movie. What does this mean? Well, it weakens any arguments for theories that he is conclusively still within a dream. But it doesn’t destroy them. It makes a lot of sense, to me, that DiCaprio’s subconscious would alter his kids’ appearance to allow himself to continue believing he’s been reunited with them. The mind protects itself.

But the gymnastics needed to execute these arguments just got a little tougher. At the same time, there’s still no way to prove he’s back in the 100%, no-doubt-real world. Inception remains crafted to deny comprehensive proof for either conclusion. That the kids’ clothes change does nothing but cement that ambiguity as the only real answer.

I absolutely loved it.

I intend to do a big spoilery detailed piece on Inception here later, but for now I’ve got another review to tend to.

Available here.

When heading to the theater, I normally restrict my knowledge of the movie I’m about to see to a) its title and b) where it’s playing. Even then, I get the theater wrong about once a year. I don’t like reading other reviews beforehand; I don’t even like having a general idea of what other people thought of it. I want my reaction to be as uninfluenced as possible. There are downsides to this–it’s much easier to over- or underrate something when your only perspective is the one from inside your own bug-riddled head–but I think it’s also much easier to see things about a movie the consensus overlooked, whether for good or bad.

The Last Airbender released on a Wednesday, meaning by the time I saw it Friday, my consciousness had been permeated by a general understanding it sucked things man was never meant to suck. As the credits opened, my approach was “Okay, let’s see if this is really as bad as everyone says.”

“Nope,” I thought after the first ten or fifteen minutes, “this is all right.” Another ten minutes after that, I thought “Oh, right. This does blow.” The blowitude increased steadily from there until I expected the whole audience to be whisked away to go help a scarecrow find his brain and a lion find his courage.

Two good things came of the experience: I finally watched The Sixth Sense, the only one of The Last Airbender director M. Night Shyamalan’s movies I hadn’t seen, oddly enough. It was pretty good, but after what we’ve all seen of Shyamalan since then, its flaws are probably a lot more obvious than they were at the time.

I’ve also started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, the cartoon the movie was derived from. It’s not knocking my socks off yet, but I’m liking it pretty well, and I’m excited to see how it develops its supposedly epic story.

I, like many others, loved The Matrix. Then I saw the sequels.

Like fewer others, I didn’t outright hate them, or see them as a destructive waste of a brilliant first entry. They were obviously–I thought–mishandled, and seemed to lose the unbreakable grip the Wachowskis had on the first film. Still, I liked chunks of them, and appreciated moments, like the Cave Rave, others hated. I thought they stumbled hard, but still crossed the finish line with some semblance of being satisfying, if nowhere near as gracefully or as swiftly as we all thought they would.

I just finished this thematic interpretation/apology for Reloaded, and, as soon as I finish this post, will dive right into the followup for Revolutions. It’s…amazing. Suddenly the sequels are entirely coherent. Even the bits that made no sense at all, or made sense, but felt like philosophical wankery.

At the very worst, given this dude’s read on them, you can accuse them of being thematically satisfying while remaining narratively unsatisfying. (Unsatisfying as a modern Hollywood blockbuster, anyway; as myth, well…) It’s brilliant.

Best of all, it feels like a web throwback, like something from 1996 (or earlier–that’s just as far back as my firsthand web usage goes; this kind of reads like old Usenet stuff, too), when the tech geeks Neal Stephenson writes about would post essay-length, intelligent analyses to their personal sites with no motivation beyond “Hey, this is interesting, and here’s why.” Sometimes, I miss that internet. With absolutely every aspect of the internet commercialized at this point, this reminder of the past is deeply refreshing.

And fucking brilliant.

Here is an example of a movie I imagined could not possibly be good. Tom Cruise doing the spy thing again. Cameron Diaz doing.. whatever it is she does. Possess breasts separated by about two yards, I guess. On the other hand, it’s directed by James Mangold, who did 3:10 to Yuma, Cop Land, and others, but still. I don’t give a damn about the Scientology and the couch-jumping, but Cruise does nothing for me. Except in Top Gun. Even then, I’m probably just transferring my unending love for Val Kilmer.

But Knight and Day is kind of awesome. It has some very, very funny scenes and some pretty good dialogue. Parts of it even satirize the “Tom Cruise kicks ass until no unbruised asses remain on planet Earth” thing. A couple moments are a little sitcommy, like when Diaz screeches around machinegunning the entire set, but the missteps are rare. Somehow, impossibly, this movie entertained me really hard.

About 3 times out of 4, my read on a movie (given its cast, crew, trailers, etc.) prior to seeing it is pretty much on the mark. Of the remaining quarter, I usually just have my doubts moderately overcome, or my expectations moderately dashed–what I thought would be at best a C movie ends up a B-, say, or something I thought would pull at least a B could only manage a C+.

Once in a while–somewhere between 5-10% of the time–my pre-judgment is just totally, totally wrong. Most of the time, something I thought would blow turns out to rock. Knight and Day is one of those times.

Because, genital-smashing aside, of scenes like this.

I alluded to this in the review, but The A-Team was much stronger than I expected it to be. It’s big, dumb, and overblown, but in a funny, anarchic way that caught me by surprise.

Reminds me a lot of stuff like Con Air and The Rock, which I expect were widely panned at the time but are recognized, these days, for their very high Good Times factor. I think time will treat The A-Team the same way; my B+ might be a + too high, but I really enjoyed myself with it, so what can you do.

Available here. Some spoilery content to follow.

About halfway through Splice, I wrote in my notes “There is something seriously wrong with this.” Little did I know just how much more wrongness was yet in store. You want monstery semi-incest? Oh, Splice has got monstery semi-incest. For me, that actually improved the movie, which till that point had been one long slog of unpleasant characters doing fairly insane things.

This appears to be one of those “critics love it, audiences hate it” movies. It’s pulling a 73% at Rottentomatoes; Keith Phipps of the AV Club gave it a B+. Meanwhile, the reader reviews peg it a full grade lower, at a C+.

I just never connected with it at all. The characters are bozos. As for the plot, I’ve seen more rising action in matzo bread. The creature struck me as silly, overacted and cliched. By the climax, I had my full-on clinical detachment going strong. What could have been a creepy, shuddersome finale just looked cat-swingingly crazy.

This is a case where the grade scale needs some context. At a D+, it may look like I thought Splice was worse than Transformers 2 (C-) or The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (C). Au contraire! Those movies failed in very boring, average, unentertaining ways. Splice failed in fun, messed-up ways. If you’re gonna fail, fail big.

Available, as usual, here.

I really have very little else to say about this one. It was a summer action blockbuster that did nothing impressive yet had no glaring points of suckage, either. I’ve been calling it “barely good,” and I think that sums it up best.

My girlfriend later confessed to me she went with me because it had Jake Gyllenhaal. That’s fine. I got to watch Gemma Arterton.