Review: Inception

Over the last few years, Leonardo DiCaprio has been slowly but surely climbing the rungs of my favorite actors. After earning my unrelenting disdain for his performance in Titanic, he's slowly been working his way back into my good graces with films like Catch Me If You Can, The Departed and more recently with Shutter Island. Inception is another film that elevates him on my list.

Inception is a thinker's film. (My favorite kind.) If you can wrap your head around the initial concepts going into the film, that being the plausibility of going into people's subconscious mind while they're sleeping, you're going to enjoy this film. There are Dreams, within Dreams, within Dreams, and with each increasing level of dreaming comes more action. You pretty much can't go wrong.

Christopher Nolan writes and directs a mean film as evidenced by Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, as well as The Prestige. This film created a world where there is a pandora's box of options. Dreams change person to person, night to night and in a world where people can share dreams it seems like there isn't anything that couldn't happen. But with so many options and variables, obviously there have to be rules. They like to tell you the rules, then proceed to bend them and break them, just because they can. Therein lies the big appeal of this movie. Nobody likes playing by the rules, and the outcome of skirting the rules set up is nothing short of fantastic.

The characters are smart, complex, and definitely likable. Though the film concentrates mostly on Leo's character of Cobb, there is definitely enough plot in there to fill the hundred and forty-eight minutes of screen time. The supporting cast is great, with names like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page and another favorite actor of mine, Michael Caine.

From Cast to Characters to Story, this film can't go wrong. At the end of the film you're going to be sitting in your seat uttering various one word phrases multiple times, be it, "Wow," "Damn," or "What?" If you can handle the thinking part of the film, then you shouldn't be thinking about it any more. Go see this movie. I'm going to give this one a 9/10.

Review: Shutter Island

There are some movies where you go and get so immersed in the plot that you forget you're in the theater. Shutter Island is not one of those movies. Indeed, this is the kind of movie where you spend the entire movie trying to soak up every detail, track every plot point, and uncover every hidden motive, all in a fruitless attempt to figure out what is going to happen next.

Directed by Martin Scorsese, you know that there is a plot twist or two down the line. But even knowing that,you're still going to get blindsided when the plot culminates. This is a masterpiece of the mind, playing sleight of hand with your cinematic experience, and operating at least 4 layers under the surface. If you don't like having to think when you go to the movies, this is not your kind of movie.

Even though the trailers make the movie look like some sort of psychological paranormal thriller, the movie falls more into line with psychological experience. The movie is littered with false leads and misleading dialogue making our pathetic attempts to predict what would happen next utterly pointless, and that was one of the things that made the movie so riveting. Though you might guess a plot point here or an action there, for every one time you guess right there are at least 5 things you won't see coming.

Going into this movie, I was pretty unenthused. I figured, this is just another film meant to mess with your head, ending with some twisted outcome that no one sees coming for some obtuse reason. And while it does mess with your head, the turnaround just works. Not works in the sense, "Oh yeah okay, I can see that," but more in the sense of, "Mother of God. THAT'S BRILLIANT!"

There are some movies where after the credits roll, you and your friends hop in the car, and you talk about the movie for about five minutes before changing the subject to where you want to stop for late night burgers. Shutter Island is not one of those movies. We talked about it all the way home, and most of the day today.

If you go and see this movie, you'll have something to talk about at the water cooler the next day, with friends when you're sitting around doing nothing or with all your buddies online. Whether you loved it, hated it, didn't get it, this movie does a great job of starting talk, which is probably why it evolved from a small release into number one at the box office. I'm going to go ahead and give this a 9/10.