Halexandre

Since I got a Kindle, I've read Steve Jobs, The Cranberry Hush, The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay, Great Expectations, Treasure Island, The Painting of Porcupine City and hundreds of articles.

All I can say is: BEST. SUMMER BREAK. EVER.

If you have the chance to read any of these books, by all means, DO.

by Ben Monopoli.

Stop and go read it. Just do it.

So I finished Persona 3 yesterday (the regular one, not the FES edition). It was touching and liberating, specially because this game sucked all my spare time for the last couple of months. P3 is everything I wished that FFXIII were, with good characters, engrossing story and ass-kicking design. Oh, and there's Shoji Meguro's astounding job at the OST, with "Memories of You" figuring now on my Top 10 videogame themes.

I wish there were more games like this one. Oh, wait, there's Persona 4! Well, I guess I'll have no spare time for the next couple of months… but first I must kick Elizabeth's pretty little ass and complete the Compendium — yeah, I'm obsessive with these things.

Thank God I never played Pokémon.

After what seems like an eternity, I finally watched Black Swan, and it was rapturing. Natalie Portman's Nina Sayer was completely nuts, in a good and bad sense, and the special effects team worked tremendously well into making the Black Swan take over.

Also, the drama behind the pursuit of perfection was moving, having truly touched me in a personal level. I kinda feel like Nina, in a crazy journey to become an idealized version of myself.

If you haven't seen Black Swan, by all means DO. It's a great flick, and it has Mila Kunis on it… getting it on with Natalie Portman… *brainsplodes* SO SEXY.

Do I need to mention the incredible soundtrack and ballet performances? Swan Lake is so good it's bad, it's depressing, it's beautiful, I wish there were more dance.

But enough of Black Swan, and let's talk about Inim. Yes, it's still underway… somehow. I've been on a hiatus, but it gave me lots of time to think about many of the themes that Inim undertakes. I even conceived a really, really crazy alternate ending — I like to think of it as a 'plan B', in case of no publisher wanting to print it as is.

But I'm digressing.

Taking a look at the whole thing, I come to think that MUSIC is one of the central themes running. The mythology of Inim revolves around sound and music, magic is performed by singing, sound is in everything. That gave way to the number seven being of great importance. Seven musical notes, seven colors (don't forget that light is nothing more than a badass sound), seven ethnies, seven kinds of magic… the list goes on.

A creation myth is already written and I decided to turn the 10 parts structure into a 7 part… or rather 7 movements. There's also a Prologue (or should it be an Intro?) and a Coda (formerly and Epilogue). There's a little problem with balance, since Movement 3 is absurdly LONG and I have no idea of how to deal with it.

My current plan is to re-read the whole thing from the beginning, keep a book bible at hand and change some minor things (for instance, Mary Sue's name started to bug me dearly, so I gave her a proper one; Jeanine was also unnecessarily complicated with the additional E, so it is now Janine — or Jane, for short).

All in all, I think I still can finish it, just don't ask me when. It will come to fruition, eventually. Somehow.

So I finally saw Inception and now I'm going to do what I always do and try to review it. Actually, I watched the movie thrice, so I would get well prepared for this.

And a not on spoilers: from now on, there will be plenty of them.


SPOILERS

Still with me? The we have to go deeper.

I guess everyone already gave the praise the movie deserved — or, actually, they didn't give enough praise, but a lot nonetheless. The cast is fantastic, the script is superb (depite several flaws), the visual effects are stunning and the music is far above most soundtracks nowadays. That said, I'd like to linger on the matters that struck me most while I went through the 2hs28min of pure WIN that Inception is.

First of all, there are inconsistencies. Oh, there are plenty! Totems, for instance: what are they good for? No, really. It's like a gratuitous plot device intended just to turn the ending into a cliffhanger. We see just one person using a totem and, despite the fact that everyone should have one, absolutely no one cares about them. It's not like they are actually needed, it seems, because they always know they are in a dream. Maybe Fischer should have one — he was dream-trained, after all — but he doesn't. Isn't it odd that the one person who should absolutely have a totem and be prepared to detect dreams doesn't have one? Wouldn't it be much more efficient that having an army of poor-sighted thugs?

"Oh, noes! I'm in distress!" *checks totem* "Ha! It's just a dream: you're busted!" *movie ends*

And then, there's the spinning top: it was Mal's totem. How come Dom uses it? I mean, he was supposed to have one. That said, the spinning top is the least reliable totem EVER: its property can be detected just by looking at it, it belongs to another person and it is handled by Saito in the beginning (or end, whatever). No wonder it would mess with everyone's heads in the end.

And what is the role of an Architect supposed to be? I mean, at first I though the Architect is the person who dreams, so everyone should have at least some skills in dream building. But no, Ariadne designs the levels and each dreamer has to come up with the buildings and structures. It doesn't make much sense.

But what makes even less sense is how they barely use dream powers. In one scene, a girl is folding Paris in a whim. When something BIG is needed, the pros can barely summon guns! Impossible things are actually employed ONCE during the whole movie. "But they can't alert the subject about the dream", you might say. Well, then let's ask why the poster make such a big deal of city folding and the movie never puts it to good use. Really, there's a lot of wasted potential, there. It's like if the only megajumps in Matrix were done during training sessions.

My favorite character is Eames, by far: the illiterate bastard that keeps teasing Arthur. Their interactions are adorable, and Eames is so charming and funny that I can't help but love him. Joseph Gordon-Levitt did an awesome job as the Pointman, and Tom Hardy turned Eames into a truly irritating Forger. I wish I knew more about those two, as they seem to have a long (LONG) story. Really, every interaction between them is full of some sort of (sexual?) tension, even in the little things, like when Yusuf pushes Athur's chair and Eames stands smiling. It lasts half a second, but it's just so… argh, it's so ADORABLE.

But let's go back to the plot holes.

Sedation. How is that supposed to work? I mean, you ingest some chemicals in reality, then all your dream bodies are affected? Why freefalling in level one affects gravity in level two, but floating in level two does nothing to level three? Are the kicks supposed to wake you up inside out or outside in? I mean, what made Ariadne wake up, in the end, jumping from the skyscraper or falling with the hospital? The order is all messed up: sometimes a kick in a dream (being thrown from the top of building) has to be syncronous with something outside the dream (defibrilating), sometimes it's just outside (falling chair into bathtub)… And all that considering that the real inner ear is safe and sound in a plane/train. If the real inner ear is never exposed to any sort of kick, why does it need to be functional at all? Doesn't the dream override sensation? If it doesn't, then why zero G has absolutely no effect in level three?

Dreams have no logic, but once you try to draw some rules for them, you have to abide by your own laws. That doesn't seem to be the case: I can't imagine how those guys knew what to do at all, given that there's absolutely no consistency in their actions. And what made them wake up in the plane, the timer? Did they spend a week inside Fischer's securely guarded mind?

I imagine that the best way to go deeper should be making a quasi-real situation in level one, then going trippy in level two and, in level three, making a replica of level one — much harder to know you are still sleeping, and not inside another dream, so a totem would be essential. Do they try to emulate another dream reality, in the movie? No, not once. Why? Bites me.

Speaking of reality, I firmly believe Cobb is dreaming and the top doesn't fall in the end. There are signs during the whole movie, like little lines of speech. His father-in-law, for instance, pledges that he "must go back to reality", then the old man at Yusuf's say that Cobb should know about the dream becoming his reality. Mal also makes a point about the Cobol Engineering acting like sub cons — and, you know what?, Cobb » Cobol… it's like the thugs are all Cobb. Another take is that the spinning top only falls when Cobb is focusing on it: it falls because he WANTS it to fall. He doesn't want to know he's in a dream. Then, when he puts it to spin and forgets about it, the damn thing just won't stop.

Wouldn't it be much easier for Cobb to tell Mal about the inception? "Look, honey, you're thinking these things because I planted them there. Sorry, let's go back and I will get it out of your head." "No, I'll ask another extractor… and I want a divorce." BAM! End of movie.

Ever notice how only Cobb has issues? I mean, nobody else has any kind of manifestation inside dreams. Isn't it reasonable that there should be some kind of battle between dreamers' projections? Maybe only the subject can project in a dream… then how can Cobb?… I mean, argh, Arthur and Eames could have a badass army, maybe even a Terminator in there, but only Cobb has a projection, and it's a hostile one. Why doesn't Mal appear in the hotel? And why does Mr. Professional keep derping whenever he sees her? I mean, it's not like shooting a projection would hurt too much, specially when such projection is trying to kill everybody.

Why no projections in Limbo? Why just Mal? And how come that the newbie is the one who has the idea that following a dead man (Fischer) into Limbo can save him? Why didn't they do it with Saito? And how come Ariadne is so at home with all the dream thing, when people say that "it takes years of practice to remember reality when you're in a dream"? Shouldn't they have to make plans and prepare for a different heist in every dream level? Like, in the raining metropolis, they should gather, find Fischer, plan, make preparations, create chemicals and ONLY THEN go deeper? Rinse and repeat in the hotel, but in a much thougher setting (six months). Rinse and repeat in the mountains — speaking of which, why not a tropical beach? Really, Ariadne or Eames could have done better than a militar hospital in the freezing mountains.

Inception is a great movie, but when you think too much about it, it falls apart like a dream. But that doesn't change the fact that it is one of the greatest action flicks ever made.