Ketchup

This weekend, Diana and I ran off for a rare, childless, errands-and-sushi-and-a-movie date.  We hadn’t read any reviews because we’re always pressed for time and because reviews are so often wrong.

My favorite example is when we went to National Treasure 2, which was the only thing playing we wanted to see that weekend. We’d liked the first National Treasure, which was a good fun adventure full of twists and turns… but when we got online to check the schedules, the movie theater site had posted major thumbs-down reviews from the L.A. Times and other big names.  That’s great marketing, right?  “Don’t come see this movie,” said the movie theater.  We went to NT2 anyway and it was worth the price of admission.  It wasn’t meant to be profound cinema.  It was Indiana Jones.  The critics had savaged it, but we were happy, so the lesson learned was don’t bother too much with the literarti.

Inception has mostly received positive reviews, I think, but we were ready to see either Salt or Inception depending on how our chores and lunch worked out.  My wife is awesome.  If we’re going to the big screen, she wants to see things blowing up.  Chick flicks we can watch on DVD.

Salt looked like a straightforward Bourne/Bond spy chase.  Inception seemed more high concept, so we went with it, especially because we thought the 6pm Saturday showing would be lightly attended.  You know, everyone else would be going to dinner.  It was the 5:15 and 6:45 showings we’d expected to be crowded.

We smuggled a purse full of chocolate and water bottles into the theater at 5:40.  That’s right.  Diana and I are like the Han Solos of movie-going.  We’re freedom fighters against overpricing.  $3.50 for a bottle of water?  $4.25 for a box of Junior Mints!?!  That is horse puckey, man.

The main thing is we walked in before the previews started and the room was PACKED.  We were lucky to find two seats together dead-center eighth row, which is almost the ideal spot.

“Who are all these people?” I whispered.  “Doesn’t anybody need to eat dinner?”

The guy next to me had his meal with him — a  $10.50 mega-bucket of popcorn.  Like me, he was there with his wife.  They were mid-fifties and seemed nice, chatting amiably about other movies they’d seen.

I won’t write any spoilers here, but, well, Inception has a layered storyline that begins with a flashback, then moves on to multiple scenes within scenes with a lot of potent, spooky, slow-building dialogue.  I loved it.  I’m a paranoid freak and twenty minutes into the film I murmured three predictions to Diana (I expected one more big reveal at the end, but was proved wrong) while the poor bastard next to me said, to his wife, “Something better start happening soon.”

He didn’t get it.  What he saw was a disjointed series of obscure actions and places.

Thirty minutes in, he was shifting restlessly… and by the fifty minute mark, he was asleep!  He felt no connection to the characters or story whatsoever.

The irony of course is that Inception is about a crew of Matrix Jedi thieves who invade people’s dreams.  Due to various complications, they pass ever farther into the subconscious.  The more levels down they go, the more quickly time passes in their subjective time frame even as they remain simultaneously in each level.  The film keeps returning to one action sequence at a mid-level of subconsciousness while other sequences play out at deeper levels.

After snoring through an hour of gunfights and freak-out creep-outs, the guy next to me finally woke up with about 10 minutes left.  He must have been confused as hell, because the action sequence on the mid-level was still happening even as our characters were in myriad of other guises, places, and times.

Before the climax, one character turns to another as they’re preparing to make yet another jump and says, almost desperately, something like: “But then where will we be?”  A good part of the audience laughed, inappropriately, because by then everyone was straining to keep up with the plot.

The guy who’d been sitting next to me bitched the whole way out of the theater, too.  “That was just dumb,” he said while the rest of the crowd was excitedly comparing notes.

“What did you think?” they said.

“How about that one part where—?” they said.

You can’t reach all of the people all of the time.  More importantly, as a writer, it’s exciting for me to see a film like this at the #1 slot for multiple weeks.

I like to think people like to be challenged.  The audience enjoyed having puzzles and complications to talk about.  Inception had a few minor holes and weaknesses, but it was definitely great entertainment, and twisty, involving, high concept scripts are exactly the kind of movie I’d like to be writing myself.