Inception

Just saw it, finally, nearly two months after it came out. Also, please read no further if you want to avoid SPOILERS.

That said, if you're still reading there's no major particular spoiler - this is no Sixth Sense or Crying Game - there's no absolutely major how-did-you-not-realize-this-the-entire-movie twist that hearing would ruin the movie - which I might have thought there would be based on the hush-hush attitude I got from people mentioning the movie when they learned I hadn't seen it.

For a movie that I had absolutely no idea what the plot really was before seeing it, other than it involved going into people's dreams, it's actually pretty simple to summarize - In a world where (cue Don Lafontaine voice over) people can enter other people's dreams and extract information from deep within the person's subconscious, a wealthy japanese businessman wants to hire someone to do the opposite - plant an idea within a person's dreams - a very difficult but not impossible proposition. He hires Leonardo DiCaprio, an expert in the art of extraction whose only dream is to go back to his kids in the US, which he had to flea due to his alleged murder of his wife, in exchange for making the charges against him go away, as only a shady powerful businessman can. Leo, whose own dreams are haunted by guilt that he caused his wife to commit suicide, assembles a crack team of dream-invasion experts with different skills (sort of an A-team of planting ideas into one's subconscious) and they get to work planning on creating an idea in the head of Cillian Murphy, a dying energy leader's son, to get him to break up the company that will soon be his. To do this, they'll have to dig deeper within dreams than ever before - going recursive - a dream, within a dream, within a dream - and find off a number of militarized projections within Murphy's brain - he's been taught by other dream invaders how to protect his brain in case of attack. To be able to know when they're in a dream or reality, which can get quite confusing with all these recursive dreams, each dream invader is taught to carry around a totem - an item which lets them know if they're in a dream or not - Leo's is a top which continues spinning forever in a dream, but falls down in reality.

It's an innovative idea - the theme of what's dream and what's reality that pervades the movie is a rare combination of thought-provoking an action packed - a combination that Christopher Nolan has become maybe the undisputed king of after churning them out (both Batman movies, Prestige, Memento). The unquestionably long film (a solid two and a half hours) moves briskly - it didn't drag, which was certainly appreciated. The notion of the totems were one of my favorite points in the film - a solid connotation of an otherwise tricky difference between dream and reality - and I found myself by the end of the film trying to figure out when Leo spun his top, and when it fell down to make sure what was real.

There was a kind of throwaway scene when Leo was off collecting members of his team and found his chemist - the man responsible for putting everyone into such a sedate state that they could safely

There was a lot of technical dream talk - what was possible in a dream and what wasn't, what each member needed to do to ensure the dream invasion went smoothly, and some bits about some magically dream limbo - that didn't seem to necessarily make a whole lot of sense even relative to each other when given some thought - but I honestly had no problem with that - it was a case of necessarily acceptance of crazy ideas to let the movie take you where it wanted to go, and most of the specific rules in terms of dream invasion weren't particularly what the movie was about, except in terms of generating action scenes - it would have been a lot more boring if there was no resistance in Murphy's brain to the planting of the idea.

The worst part of the movie was by far the obvious and contrived ending - the team has just about pulled off the impossible mission, except for the loss of their wealthy businessman employer who has died within the dream sending him into some sort of dream limbo (normally dying wakes you up - but not when you're so sedated as they need to be to enter third order dreams - sure,whatever). Leo doesn't go back to the real world with the others in order to save the businessman - without him alive, he won't be able to get back to his kids - the only real point of doing this all, to him. Leo then appears to save the businessman's life in the dream - and kicks them back to reality - unnecessarily repeating a scene which was also the first scene in the movie in the process - only to discover that after he gets home to Michael Caine (either his father, or more likely his father-in-law who gets about three minutes of screen time) and his kid, his top keeps spinning after all - he never did make it out of that dream (Dreams more real than reality? What? Mirroring his wife's being convinced that the dream they were both stuck in was also real? Impossible!). I basically spent the last half hour hoping that, please, it wasn't just his dream after all. I would have been fine if that top had fallen and he made it home, or even if he died, or was in limbo, or, honestly whatever the fuck - anything but that - it was a serious cop out and minor M. Night Shyamalan move to an otherwise interesting and sensible film.

Overall, it was a very solid movie, and for the most part, worthy of the hype - a fine summer blockbuster, without necessarily being a seriously great movie. As mentioned before, it was unexpectedly straightforward - not necessarily a bad thing - but I actually might not have minded if there was a little more layering and mystery. Still, that's not really to complain, behind the asinine it was very solid.

Time for a fun sports rant.

In the wake of "The Decision" and Lebron bringing his much-desired talents to South Beach, there has been a slew of interviews with old athletes along with talk by sports radio blowhards about how rivalries today are not like rivalries in the old days - when players would never consider being friendly with their counterparts on a rival team, let alone joining up with some of their players on a team in the future. In regards to baseball, I recently heard a radio personality complain about how years ago, in the 1970s, the Yankees and Red Sox legitimately hated one another, but today even those fiercest of rivals are now friendly, chatting before and after games, and on the basepaths, and not displaying hate through their every facial tic and expression.

Sure, it's fine for fans to hate players - we're detached. We don't actually know any of these people. We don't hang out with them. And, yes, one of the great things about sports is that you can hate someone for absolutely no good reason, and within this sphere, it's totally okay, and even encouraged.

But players deal with each other every day, on the court (or field, or ice, or whatever) and off, and they actually hang out with each other - they're real people to each other - not just symbols or characters in a narrative. Why should they hate people they know just for your satisfaction as a fan? Should people not be friends with other people who work at rival companies? Because, really, that's what it is. Sure, they play against one another, but they work for two different companies, and they compete, and then afterwards, they're done.

It's absurd. Hang out. Be friends. It's their lives.

Maybe if we didn't have free agency, and the reserve clause, and owners could still keep players forever while paying them pennies, we wouldn't have players switching teams so often, so maybe we should go back to that too.

If I have to hear from some old-time athlete or some curmudgeonly fan again about how things were better in their days, when players on any opposing teams, let alone bitter rivals, bitterly and truly despised each other merely for the act of being on the other team, I'll, I don't know, punch them. Well, I probably won't. But I'll imagine it.

I've developed a current obsession with this Heineken Light series of commercials (of which there are two currently I believe), which seem to rely on the premise that a couple of younger men have struck it rich and moved to some sort of retirement community and developed a friendship with a couple of older men, in particular, the star of the commercials (or breakout character, if that can exist in commercials) is Maurice portrayed by Bill Cobb, a veteran character actor, recognized best (by me) for his role as Moses, the janitor in The Hudsucker Proxy. In the first ad (well first in that I put it first since I believe they came out at the same time), the young dudes (Jamie and Gavin are apparently their names, according to Heineken) are hanging out at Maurice's house, and notes that Maurice has led an "active social life" (he repeats this - emphasizing the fact - a "very active social life," based on the pictures of women covering his wall. He then digs through Maurice's record collection and discovers, to his surprise, a Peter Cetera record. Not supposing this would be the type of music Maurice would like, the young dude questions Maurice - "you like Cetera?." Maurice answers with a pronounced and elongated "No" (possibly the best individual line in the episode by itself, combined with his expression) and then goes on to teach a lesson - he doesn't like Cetera, but the ladies love Cetera, and if you love the ladies, by default, QED, you love Cetera - logic 101 (well he doesn't say QED, but you get the point.) Gavin (after watching both commercials again and reading some descriptions I think I've concluded that this young dude is Gavin) says, in part disbelief, "so I love Peter Cetera?"as Restless Heart by Peter Cetera comes on. I'm not sure how this makes me want a Heineken Light, but it's genius. Most Interesting Man in the World, you have a new rival for best beer commercial.

The second commercial is slightly inferior, but still clearly worth watching. The best Maurice line is the lack of a line - when the young dude points out that Maurice had dated a Pointer sister - Maurice merely holds up two fingers, correcting him, to which the young dude now correctly announces, "two pointer sisters." Maurice's only other line comes when he tells the other young dude ("Jamie") to mow his lawn. Brilliance.

I was watching the Met game today, as I often do, and play-by-play man Gary Cohen, commented that the Nationals, who the Mets were playing against, make no mention of their progenitors, the Montreal Expos, anywhere in their ballpark, instead playing homage to the previous teams in their city, the two American League versions of the Washington Senators. Cohen complained about this, siding with me on a rant I have often gone on about with friends. Namely, that when a franchise moves, its history is that of the franchise that it became, rather than a franchise that was in its city before but moved somewhere else.

The prime example of this in my mind is when the old Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens, and a couple years later the new Browns were formed. There was such outrage in the Cleveland area that somehow (and I'm not sure what the legal basis was for this (this ridiculous settlement which I will not acknowledge since it's pretty much changing history) the Ravens were forced to use old Baltimore Colts statistics (referencing the last move which created a cartoonishly villainous owner universally hated by the city from which the team was moving) in all of their media guide. This was, of course, patently ridiculous. Ignoring the fact that this left a gap between 1983 and 1996 where the team didn't exist, there was already another team with this history. And honestly, neither of these is the true point - this team was not the Colts - it was the damn Browns - they kept all the players, the coaches, the front office personnel, the owner - change of name and all, they were the Browns, and they have the Browns history.

When the Browns started up again in 1999, they laid claim, by legal settlement and popular sentiment, to the legacy of the old Browns which was AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT TEAM. Jim Brown did not play for the new Cleveland Browns - he played for the team that is now the Baltimore Ravens. Same with Bernie Koser and Ozzie Newsome and Otto Graham. They're not part of the new Cleveland Browns legacy. It would be like if the Nationals started claiming Walter Johnson was part of their history, or if the Mets claimed Pee Wee Reese or Christy Mathewson (the Mets already come too close with their Jackie Robinson shrine, but I'm willing to cut them some slack because of his off-the-field importance (I also know the Mets took their colors from the old teams but that's a far cry from stealing their history), or is the Kansas City Royals claimed...well there weren't really any good Kansas City Athletics (and if they were, they were traded to the Yankees anyway). History follows the franchise, not the city - when a team moves the players and personnel stay the same - it's only logical.

Now, I'm not saying if you're a Browns fan you have to follow the team to Baltimore - you have full rights to both have rooted for the old Browns, take pride in their history that you rooted for, and then switch to the new Browns if you'd like - that's entirely reasonable. But just recognize - it's not the same team.

Yesterday, I nailed down the three games that aired - New Zealand-Slovakia, Ivory Coast-Portugal, and Brazil-North Korea.

The day was highlighted by the last minute goal by New Zealand to secure the draw and the intrigue and excitement of the Brazil-North Korea match - the second Brazil goal, by Elano was the best goal of the day, and the general mysteriousness of the North Koreans plus their surprisingly (to me) good play. Also by how relatively boring the Ivory Coast-Portugal was. Even when (albeit still injured) Didier Drogba entered the pitch, did the excitement level barely improve.

Alas, more matches.

Backlog: 5 matches

As of after June 15, 2010: 9/63 total matches watched.

I was out of the US for some time, but now I'm back and it's World Cup season. I'm going to attempt (I'm not yet sure if I will actually be able to do it yet) to watch every match of the World Cup. This doesn't mean I have to watch them live - that would be impossible - I can DV-R them, and I don't have to watch them in order. If I am actually going to do it, I'm going to say that I need to finish all the games before the final. That sets an actual end date, but gives me some leeway if I fall behind in these opening rounds, since, seriously, there's three matches a day, it's a lot of football (soccer, whatever, either way). Also, since I'm watching out of order, yes, I'm going to find out some scores before I see the matches, but honestly it's just impossible to not - I've managed to hold off for a few more important games to me, and ones I'm going to watch very soon after they aired.

I was unable to watch anything on Friday or Saturday so those matches are all logged on the DV-R.

On Sunday, I woke up early and watched my recorded US-England manage, which I miraculously managed to not have ruined for me.

I then went to Loreley on the Lower East Side and watched Serbia-Ghana and Germany Australia there.

After Sunday June 13 - 3/63 total matches

Monday June 14:

Woke up and watched Netherlands-Denmark

Watched Japan-Cameroon in the afternoon and Italy-Paraguay at night

After Monday June 14 - 6/63 total matches watched.

More thoughts tomorrow after matches and sleep.

Even from abroad, it's time for my annual horrific attempt to predict the year's MLB standings. Let's have at it, shall we:

American League
AL East
Yankees 98 64
Red Sox 94 68
Rays 91 73
Orioles 75 87
Blue Jays 73 91

AL Central
Twins 84 78
White Sox 83 79
Tigers 78 84
Indians 77 85
Royals 72 90

AL West
Rangers 83 79
Mariners 81 81
Angels 80 82
Athletics 77 85

National League

NL East
Phillies 89 73
Braves 87 75
Mets 80 82
Marlins 79 83
Nationals 72 90

NL Central
Cardinals 89 73
Cubs 82 80
Brewers 80 82
Reds 79 83
Pirates 74 88
Astros 67 95

NL West
Dodgers 88 74
Rockies 87 75
Diamondbacks 84 78
Giants 81 81
Padres 66 96

Hopefully the math is right - it should be, but sometimes I realize I don't know how to add or use a calculator - let's see if this works out better than previous years - I feel like I've gone less out on a limb for the most part, with the exception of maybe picking the Angels to not win the AL West again, which seems like always happens anyway. But maybe this is the year...