Up & Coming Weekly

Nolan’s Inception Breaks the Chain of Reek Inception(Rated PG-13) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS You know what movie really reeked? Insomnia, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to the amazing Memento. You know what else reeked? The Prestige, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to Batman Begins. You know what movie didn’t reek? Inception (148 minutes), which Nolan wrote and directed. His lead actor is completely overrated and his two female leads are underutilized, but on overall thrills and head-scratchiness, Nolan delivers. If we could just get him to jumpstart a new X-Men franchise, I might finally be able to put my Singer vendetta to rest. The film opens on a beach, with Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) face down in the sand. He is detained by armed guards and taken inside a building. Puzzling dialogue takes us into the next scene so as to confuse the audience as early in the film as possible. The film’s focus is the creation and manipulation of dreams, and in a wonderfully crafted introduction to this central idea Cobb and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gorden- Levitt) submit a business proposal to Saito (Ken Watanabe). During their meeting with Saito, Cobb’s wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) appears and throws a wrench into their plans. This leads into the main plot. Cobb and his team are hired to target a man named Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). They are supposed to assist Saito in an act of industrial espionage, planting an idea to influence Fischer to break up his near monopoly in order to protect Saito’s business interests. Even though Cobb is experienced with stealing ideas, the rest of his team is convinced that planting an idea (inception) is impossible. At least they are until Cobb tells them a bedtime story about a dream within a dream. The only problem with “inception” is the potential damage to the subject and danger to the dreamer. Once the existing team (and the audience) understands the risks involved, Cobb meets with his father-in-law and teacher, Miles (Michael Caine). Miles offers his most brilliant student, Ariadne (Ellen Page) to work with the team. Despite her stupidly dramatic name she seems like a pretty good egg. Cobb and Company manage to recruit her as the dream’s architect and then set about filling out the rest of the team. A series of classic team building subplots follow. First Cobb hunts down expert forger Eames (Tom Hardy) to im- personate a key character inside the dream. Then he goes after Yusef (Dileep Rao) to prepare the carefully crafted chemicals necessary to induce the proper dream state. Back in the “A” plot, Ariadne and her stupidly dramatic name begin to discover some of Cobb’s better kept secrets, which reveal an even greater element of risk to the group. It is here that the concept of Limbo is explained, and those of you in the slow seats will probably want to take some notes, because it all gets a little hard to follow at this point. It is a major strength of the film that reality and the various levels of dreaming are so interchangeable, since the audience can keep guessing til the cows come home without ever really know- ing for sure where the characters are. While there are various ambigious clues offered throughout the movie, each viewer is allowed to decide at what point the dream ends and reality begins (if it ever does). HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing Writer COMMENTS? 484-6200 ext. 222 or editor@upandcomingweekly.com The Teen Choice Awards Lies! Young people, please resist this ceremony TV by DEAN ROBBINS The Teen Choice Awards (Monday, 8 p.m., Fox) is shiny and exciting on the outside, corrupt and evil on the inside. Teens are whipped up into a frenzy over their ability to “choose” their favorite movies, music and TV shows, not realizing that elderly marketing millionaires are actually foisting these choices on them. How else to explain the multiple nominations for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which no teen would choose unless under duress? How else to explain the fact that summer movies Twelve and Charlie St. Cloud were nominated before they even premiered? If you tried to point this out at the shiny and exciting cer- emony, of course, you’d be gagged and led out of the auditorium by muscle-bound security guards. If I went to the ceremony, the one truth I’d scream from the rafters is that the heavily nominated Twilight Saga: Eclipse is not the best Twilight movie yet, despite what all media outlets obediently proclaimed. THE FIRST ONE WAS THE BEST, AND THE NEW ONE IS AS BAD AS THE SECOND! THEY’RE JUST SAYING IT’S THE BEST TO TRICK US INTO BUYING TICKETS AND – gurgle – gag – help…! The Real Housewives of Washington, D.C. Thursday, 9 pm (Bravo) Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise premieres a new outlet in Washington, D.C., and you know what that means: more not-so-young narcissists grasping for men, money and social standing. As always, the women say nasty things to one another and to the camera, finding fault with everyone but themselves. And, as always, there’s one housewife who really makes your skin crawl. Here, the piece of work is Michaele, a relentlessly perky blond climber married to an older dude named Tareq who loves leeching onto important people as much as 20 UCW AUGUST 4-10, 2010 she does. With every new iteration of The Real Housewives, you wish these obnox- ious rich people could be jailed for behaving the way they do. But guess what — now they can! This isn’t just any old season, but the one where Michaele and Tareq crash a White House party. We all remember the headlines from last year: reality-series couple caught, subpoenaed by Congress and threat- ened with prosecution. It’s our wish come true, folks, and I can’t wait till the series covers the White House incident later in the season. Maybe there will even be a slow- motion prison sequence in season two. A guy can dream. The Devil’s Teardrop Sunday, 8 pm (Lifetime Movie Network) A sinister serial killer is loose in Washington, D.C., and an FBI agent with lustrous blond hair (Natasha Henstridge) can’t sort out the clues to his next murder. Apparently, there’s only one man on Earth who can interpret the physical evidence: handsome Parker Kincaid (Tom Everett Scott), an ex-agent nicknamed the Puzzle Master. But Parker has left the bureau to raise his two kids and absolutely won’t consider helping with the investigation. Well, okay, he’ll consider it, despite the fact that his alcoholic ex-wife is trying to get custody and probably will if Parker goes back to police work, leaving his kids vulnerable to sinister serial killers again. These killers have a tendency to break into the Puzzle Master’s house to keep him from solving their puzzles. Yes, we’re in Silly Land, but I have to admit that The Devil’s Teardrop hooked me. I wanted to see who the culprit was and how the good guys stopped him. Along the way, Parker saves all of Washington, D.C., and fights the sinister serial killer hand-to-hand in his home to keep the kids safe. To me, that’s a pretty decent argument for custody. WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM

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