Date night!
Thanks to our wonderful au pair, who took over watching the children for the night (she gets Tuesday days off, so we didn't go over her hours), Jason and I had an honest to goodness Date Night. ::gasp!:: We'd found a couple of free-movie tickets for Regal Cinema, and managed to wrangle the evening so that we could go see Inception. Which was. Um. It was a movie.
[Not really spoilers, below.]
Ok, that's not quite fair. It was a good movie. It could have been a great movie, but it wasn't. The plot was worthwhile, for the most part. But... yeah, I blame the director. At first, I thought perhaps the painful "emotional" transistions of Cobb were because of DiCaprio. Then I noticed other characters were also being given short shrift. Their reactions weren't quite smooth, the transistions from one emotion/reaction to another were jerky, everything characterwise felt rushed. But I didn't know the other actors' work very well, so I tried to withhold judgement... until I saw the exact same short shrift with Michael Caine. Michael. Bloody. Caine. Was jerky and ill formed. Yeah, that was the director, mucking it all up. Good one, Christopher Nolan!
This from the man who wrote and directed Memento. How is this even possible?
Ok, honestly, I think he got a great wad more money for Inception than he did for Memento, and he tried to go all Michael Bay on it. There were so many action sequences that could have been shaved, just to allow for the time for the characters to be cleaner. Instead, he focused too much on action and explosions, and left his characters wooden and lurching. ::sigh::
And the "twist", which I won't spell out... I wasn't feeling it. Halfway through the movie, of course, I knew it was coming. But I found so many reasons to nitpick the "was it, or wasn't it?" that I feel pretty solid in my interpretation. I also have a serious problem with a few of the kicks (term used in the movie; you have to watch it to understand), but Jason and I are arguing about them, so I'll hold off for a second watching.
So I didn't get the depth of the human psyche, like from Dark City. Or the what-is-reality, like from The Matrix. Or even the (and this hurts me) fun of rolling the timeline back and forth to match the seams, like with The Butterfly Effect (believe me, immediately after we matched seams, we set out finding all of the paradoxes).
Overall, a good effort. But meh. I see what it could have been, and it didn't make it. So sad. Thankfully, nowhere near as bad as The Thirteenth Floor. LOL Thus far, that one wins on "completely not living up to its potential".
[Not really spoilers, below.]
Ok, that's not quite fair. It was a good movie. It could have been a great movie, but it wasn't. The plot was worthwhile, for the most part. But... yeah, I blame the director. At first, I thought perhaps the painful "emotional" transistions of Cobb were because of DiCaprio. Then I noticed other characters were also being given short shrift. Their reactions weren't quite smooth, the transistions from one emotion/reaction to another were jerky, everything characterwise felt rushed. But I didn't know the other actors' work very well, so I tried to withhold judgement... until I saw the exact same short shrift with Michael Caine. Michael. Bloody. Caine. Was jerky and ill formed. Yeah, that was the director, mucking it all up. Good one, Christopher Nolan!
This from the man who wrote and directed Memento. How is this even possible?
Ok, honestly, I think he got a great wad more money for Inception than he did for Memento, and he tried to go all Michael Bay on it. There were so many action sequences that could have been shaved, just to allow for the time for the characters to be cleaner. Instead, he focused too much on action and explosions, and left his characters wooden and lurching. ::sigh::
And the "twist", which I won't spell out... I wasn't feeling it. Halfway through the movie, of course, I knew it was coming. But I found so many reasons to nitpick the "was it, or wasn't it?" that I feel pretty solid in my interpretation. I also have a serious problem with a few of the kicks (term used in the movie; you have to watch it to understand), but Jason and I are arguing about them, so I'll hold off for a second watching.
So I didn't get the depth of the human psyche, like from Dark City. Or the what-is-reality, like from The Matrix. Or even the (and this hurts me) fun of rolling the timeline back and forth to match the seams, like with The Butterfly Effect (believe me, immediately after we matched seams, we set out finding all of the paradoxes).
Overall, a good effort. But meh. I see what it could have been, and it didn't make it. So sad. Thankfully, nowhere near as bad as The Thirteenth Floor. LOL Thus far, that one wins on "completely not living up to its potential".