Row, row, row your boat, Gently down the stream, Merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream.
That nursery rhyme is very apt for this movie. Inception means the beginning or creation of something. In the movie, inception is the microcosm of an idea that once planted to a person through a dream and accepted becomes the basis of that person’s thoughts, opinion, other ideas, and even his or her personality.
Cobb(Leonardo DiCaprio) is an “extractor”, someone who retrieves information from a person by going into that person’s consciousness and extracting the information. He is hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe) to attempt the heretofore untried inception on a competitor. As in a typical heist movie, he then assembles a crew to do the job and after the usual drama, set about doing it. Of course, since most of these happen in a dream, you definitely can’t expect the usual.
But it is a heist movie in the same vein as The Italian Job and The Thomas Crown Affair. That’s tough company but even if Inception is not one of the best heist movies, it’s certainly one of the more imaginative ones. It has action but it isn’t as edgy as The Matrix, to which it can and will be compared to. It has some twists but it doesn’t attempt to befuddle the user: Whenever things get a little bit complicated, the characters make sure to explain everything (sometimes a little too much). But put together, it’s a well-built, riveting movie.
Rating: 4/5
I finally watched Avatar. And since everyone has watched it already… twice even, I won’t get into too much detail. Due to scheduling issues, I wasn’t able to watch it in 3D and after watching, I was like what’s the big deal?!? It seems the big deal is the 3D and that’s about it.
There’s a recent spate of vampire movies brought on by the Twilight series (yeech!). Of course, this is nothing new, there’s the Lost Boys, the Blade Series, the Underworld series, etc. But Daybreakers is a vampire movie with a twist: Instead of humans being the majority, vampires are. It does make sense when you think of it. After all, vampires are vastly superior to humans in a fight. And humans are a dwindling food resource hunted and, eventually, farmed. And so in this, alternate world, an intrepid group of human rebels work to freeing humanity and creating a cure for vampirism. Aside from this unique twise, there’s some action and a bit of human (vampire?) drama injected in. The result is novel, entertaining, and fun (in a gory kind of way, if you’re into that kind of thing).