About Inception...

I have a really hard time keeping track of character's names in films.

I'll get to why I'm mentioning this in a bit, but the crucial bit where a character introduces the name of another character always seems to elude me somehow. So in this movie, I just refer to Ellen Page as "Ellen Page," Joseph Gordon-Levitt as "Joseph Gordon-Levitt", and the Indian guy who looked like the Indian guy from "Drag Me To Hell" as "the Indian guy who looked like the Indian guy from "Drag Me To Hell". It usually works, but when another character exclaims something like "dammit *character name*, he took my VCR!" in what seems to be a crucial part of the plot, I get super confused and suddenly wish I would pay attention to small little details... like character names. You know that Ellen Page's name in this is Ariadne? What the hell kind of name is that?

Anyway, the reason why I mention that is because THE ENTIRE MOVIE makes me feel like a huge idiot.

Reading all the various recaps of what went down in the movie has made me forget exactly everything I was confused about, and I don't want to say anything in case anyone actually reads this and might get upset by a little bit of spoilers, but let's just say the movie is dense. And I wasn't trying to key in on every single detail, but rather just go along for the ride, but that backfired multiple times as something happened and left me confused as hell. It's not necessarily a bad thing, and I appreciate the fact that Nolan decided to pen a very dense script for an action blockbuster. But yeah... I'm not going to pretend that I'm someone who necessarily "got" the movie. Cause I didn't.

What I liked:
-Again, very audacious to make a film that pretty much demanded repeat viewings. Also liked that they didn't spend 20 minutes explaining all the characters and what their jobs were and just dropped the viewer right in. It's probably because they needed to spend a lot of time setting up the "inception", but still.
-That it essentially boiled down to a heist movie, except that it took place in the subconscious instead of a... museum, or whatever.
-The performances were pretty good, even though only about 4 characters had any sort of depth to them. And despite the fact that it's a huge action summer movie, it felt small, since there was pretty much only 8 characters through the entire film.
-Last shot = kind of brilliant.
-It kept me entertained.... (which is an incredibly astute thing to say, I know. But, I mean... I liked it, despite its flaws. And it was decidedly better than The Dark Knight for that matter as well. Just saying this before I talk about how much it SUCKED.)

What I wasn't crazy about:
-The point of the heist is sort of... well, it doesn't really pay off in any sort of way. I was kind of expecting that we'd get a bit more on whether or not inception is acceptable after a key plot point introduces this question, but no... it just sort of concludes. Also, the stakes of the inception didn't really get you invested. It was all for some dickhead businessman... which may have been the point, but they didn't really accentuate it very well. Or maybe they did... I could have missed it. (I feel really stupid trying to criticize this movie, for the record.)
-Any sort of thematic weight the film had seemed to be overshadowed by the complexities of the plot. Meaning, at the point where Leo DiCaprio reveals a crucial bit of information to Marion Cotillard, my reaction was "oh, so that's why this and that happened" instead of "oh, so that's why DiCaprio has been so angsty and crap." I don't know.

Anyway, to recap: Cool movie, better than guys in superhero outfits pretending to be in a "real crime drama" all while reciting some of the most amazingly stupid dialogue one would ever muster for a "serious" film, I didn't understand what the hell was going on, this post suffers because of it.