INCEPTION (PG-13)

Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Tom Beringer

Director: Christopher Nolan

Genre: Action, Sci-fi thriller

Inception feels like it was adapted from a long and complicated novel--though it was, in fact, concocted inside the brain of Christopher Nolan, (Memento) who wrote, produced, and directed the film. Anyhoo, screen adaptations of long and complicated novels often have that feeling of being condensed and compacted--where each plot twist is given only sketchy attention because we have to move along at lightning speed and try to get all those myriad elements in during the allotted time--in this case, creating a two and a half hour, mile-a-minute thriller that's a real challenge to follow.

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Cobb, a guy who can enter someone else's dream and either extract information, or plant a seed in that person's mind that can trigger a change in his behavior in the real world. Cobb is hired by an Asian businessman (Ken Watanabe) to screw with the head of a dead rival's son, (Cillian Murphy) to implant the idea to disband his father's empire, and thus save the world from more corporate consolidation.

A subplot involves Cobb's deceased wife, (Marion Cotillard) with whom he has some major unresolved issues. She keeps showing up in the dreams, distracting him from his mission and potentially throwing a monkey wrench into the whole operation.

Inception's real fascination is its dream within a dream within a dream dreaminess, (ahem) and the fantasy--one that I suspect most of us have had--of forsaking "reality" to reside exclusively in the dream world.

While the film tries to present itself as a psychological thriller, its real appeal is going to be to action fans who revel in shoot-em-up and crap exploding all over the place. And even though the action is highly imaginative, with wowie-zowie special effects, (Paris folding in on itself, and other mind-bending images) the wild action is taken to the extent of overkill, and I found myself getting numbed out and just kind of bored with it after a while.

Hans Zimmer's soundtrack is one of the best things about Inception, but unfortunately, it's ceaselessly loud and overbearing. On top of that, there are times when you really can't make out what the actors are saying, and that's a bummer in a movie that needs your total unblinking concentration, or you are lost in a maze of WHA- WHA HAPPEN?.

Final analysis: Just like my geeky cousin Marvin, Inception has a lot of warts, but shows flashes of brilliance.

GRADE: C+

SPLICE (R)

Stars: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chaneac

Director: Vincenzo Natali

Genre: Sci-fi thriller

A mad scientist with too much time on his hands will eventually get around to creating Frankenstein. That's the premise of Splice, an independent Canadian production from Cube (1997) director Vincenzo Natali.

In this instance we have a couple, Clive and Elsa, (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) geneticists who don't seem to realize that they are mad--they just go about their gig of creating new animal life forms by splicing different genes together in service of the giant pharmaceutical company they work for--which, of course, only cares about making money off of their research.

Then one day Elsa decides WHAT THE HELL...let's mix a little human DNA in there, put it in the blender and see what comes out! What comes out is this blob that immediately starts bouncing off the walls and knocking crap over in the laboratory. Clive's impulse is to destroy it--but it's got an oversize chipmunk kind of head and Elsa thinks it's cute. (It's also female, and gals gotta stick together, right?)

Their "experiment," which Elsa has named Dren, ages more rapidly than normal. Dren (Delphine Chaneac) soon begins looking kind of pretty--sort of like a teenage Sinead O'Connor with kangaroo-ish legs and a tail. She also has the ability to sprout wings. Throughout, Clive and Elsa struggle with the moral implications of allowing Dren to survive--because, for one thing, they have to keep her under wraps. And when she gets cranky, it's not a pretty sight. A woman with raging hormones is one thing, but a woman with raging hormones and a stinger tail that can zap you and do you in is something else altogether!

I found Splice to be an uncomfortable, yet morbidly fascinating film to watch. A movie that keeps upping the ante in its bizarreness. To illustrate--and I don't think I'm giving too much of the plot away here because it's out of context--both Clive and Elsa will have sex with Dren (one consensual, one non-consensual) before Splice proceeds to its ominous-implications-for-the-world conclusion.

As for the performances, you've got two reputable actors in Brody and Polley, but they both seem to be taking the whole thing a bit too much in stride--not nearly as freaked out as you might expect people to be in Clive and Elsa's situation. Or maybe it's just because they're jaded scientists who've been playing God for too long.

You can make of Splice what you will, but for me it's ultimately about the amorality of the scientific community--which is filled with sociopaths when it comes to those who experiment on living creatures--believing that the end always justifies the means, no matter what lengths it drives them to.

GRADE: B-

SURROGATES (PG-13)

We're getting lazier all the time--relying on technology to do things for us that we used to do for ourselves. (I really think it was those veggie slice and dice devices you'd see on the late night infomercials that started the whole thing.) Surrogates takes this growing trend and runs with it--envisioning a world where people lay back on their dead asses and live vicariously through their surrogates: humanoid robots connected to a computer system, controlled by the operator's thoughts, and doing things the lard-butts wouldn't risk themselves in the real world. The operators' brains ostensibly experience everything the surrogates are doing, as if they themselves were out there drinking, dancing, and having wild, anonymous sex with good looking counterparts--whiling their lives away in a virtual reality twilight zone.

Naturally, there's a backlash to all of this: the humans who still want to engage life first hand and are having none of this robot crap. They live in segregated areas with revolution on their minds. When Dr. Lionel Canter, (James Cromwell) the man who created the surrogate phenomenon, is targeted and his son is accidently killed instead, it sends FBI agent Greer (Bruce Willis) and his partner Jennifer Peters, (Radha Mitchell) on a quest--via their own robot couterparts--to find the weapon that can fry the brains of operators when their surrogates are "assassinated."

Surrogates had the potential to be a more adult, cerebral kind of film if not for the obligatory smash-em-up car crashes and related mayhem--the kind of thing that's become such standard fare in movies that have nothing to say, that it's become boring and annoying. But Surrogates DOES have something to say. It's making a statement about the nature of addiction--specifically our growing addiction to the various ways in which we live--or try to live--vicariously: through the internet, (often lurking anonymously behind our on-line personalities--engaging others who may be doing the same) spectator sports, movies and television, and computer fantasy games, to name a few. All of which have their legions of addicted followers. And because people fall so easily into the trap of "acceptable" addiction--blathering away on their cell phones and texting while driving--it's not hard to imagine a world of the not too distant future where surrogates actually exist.

It's a film that gives one pause, and it's why I decided to post my real life photo here, to give Timmy's Noodle more of a human face--a photo which, no doubt, has been used by at least a few disgruntled females to throw darts at...but that's another story.

GRADE:   B