Inthepthion

Warning: If you think you want to see Inception, you’re wrong. No. Wait. Sorry. If you want to see Inception, don’t read this ‘review’.

I’ve heard and read things about this film like, “Four and a half out of 5”. Or, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god it’s so complicated I should see it again but my head might explode”. Or, “…near genius”. That’s always a warning, right there. Near genius. How near? Like, having a rear-end accident near?

It’s simple. It’s a heist film inside someone’s head. But without the payoff.

To quote the magnificent Peter Cook in The Princess Bride, there’s a dweam within a dweam. (And then another one inside that one.) It’s like a pass-the-parcel game at a kids’ party - with more guns but the same amount of snivelling.

Plot holes. You want plot holes? I’ll give you plot holes. I’m pandering to my own pedantry, but I will say again - if you are going to sink that amount of money into something, why don’t you shore up the leaky bits to make sure it doesn’t get inundated by the flood of its own stupidity. It’s a needlessly complicated plot anyway, so why not cut back on the layers and cut back on the dumb?

From the little ,“wouldn’t he recognise them when he wakes up?” to the “Where’s the technology that links them while they’re under, ’cause all I saw was anaesthetic?” -  there are holes and inconsistencies everywhere.

There are larger questions, too. Like why do I care if this immoral industrial spy gets the golden fleece, anyway? In fact, I want him to fail. The reason for the heist is entirely unjustifiable.

Of particular disappointment,  however, was the bog-ordinary dreariness of the dreamscapes. I was looking forward to lush, changing and imaginative environments, but you should see where our two main characters call home in mental town. It’s at the intersection of Ugly and Boring Streets.

Everyone’s internal landscapes are filled with gun toting baddies. The idea is that the projections of the subconscious try to defend the mind of the invadee with an endless stream of canon fodder. So we know why they're carrying guns, but it could’ve been so much more fun. It’s dull. Who chases bad ideas around with a car and shoots at them? When I have chase scenes in my sub conscious, it’s over giant cat paws onto glass plains that stretch off into infinity and marshmallows. I’m not even recognisably human half the time in my dreams and neither are most other people.. Why not have chocolate mousse fall on the bad guys… followed by sprinkles? I’m pretty sure that Freudians would look at it and wonder where all the sex went, too. For interesting mental landscapes,  The Cell was far more engaging.

There are some cool bits. The little kid from Third Rock From the Sun (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a very pleasant surprise and there are some nice suspenseful bits - but with the limitless possibilities open to film makers now, they should’ve gone for the full nightmare.

Mmmmmm. Pi

This week a couple of guys finished a bit of maths and felt pleased with themselves because they had produced a result that was nearly twice the size of the previous effort. They calculated Pi to five trillion places. (What dream dinner dates...) To put that number in perspective, that’s 17 times the estimated number of stars in our galaxy. Or, nearly 50 times the number of people who have ever lived. It’s a big number. It’s 5, with 12 noughts after it.

Pi is a transcendental number, which to mathematicians means that it’s not a root of a non-constant polynomial equation with rational co-efficients. It also has other properties. I'll sum up the highlights for you.

Against all the odds, nowhere does the sequence 8675309 appear.

Your address appears in it 180 times. As predicted by Nostril Damus.

At the 4 trillionth number, it counts down from 999 and then lifts its head up from the tree and yells “coming ready or not”.

After the 4, 382, 904, 663, 821st number, there’s a small dog. He just sits there.

You can do all the calculations you need with 3.14.

The other 4, 999, 999, 999, 998 are a bit overkill.

Like A Cat On A Cold Wooden Floor

My friends, Gooby and Goobarella, have a broken cat. I’m not saying that as a sort of value judgement, it really is a bit wrong. I think they got it at Animal Seconds World. (Today only, bent dogs and straight camels. Buy nine, get the tenth one free!) The little thing was supposed to be called Ziggy, but it never really stuck quite as much as Mong.

It has a delightful… no wait. It has a hilarious combination of fearlessness mixed with lack of coordination. It can fall off a flight of stairs while sitting perfectly still. Its rear-wheel-drive mechanism is a bit buggered and when it takes off, the tail-end comes out and around in a different alignment to the front-end. It’s like the diff’s gone. The tail is all crumpled up in a ball, like a nose-to-tail accident where the chassis wasn't straightened properly. It has no interest in food.

It’s actually a very sweet thing and Emergency Contact and I are cat-sitting for a few days. This is where one of its quirks is not going to be so charming. It can’t withdraw its claws. They’re not sharp and there isn’t much damage done, but, we have hardwood floors. If you are a cat owner, you will probably be dimly aware of the nocturnal activities of your felines. A bump here, a mew there. Well, little spazzimodo doesn’t leave anything to the imagination. Permanently extended claws on wood. It’s like trying to sleep while a liquored-up Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers practice a complicated routine.

Rate Yourself, Then Buy Tickets

A colleague posted me the below link.

I Write Like

What you do, is you put a chunk of your writing in there and it “analyses” it and tells you who you write like.

I think scientifically it’s as meaningful as generating your porn name, but it does have that self importance factor that all rampant egotists can’t avoid.

I gave it three goes before posting this blog.

About Shanghai Ball, it told me I write like J.K Rowling (show me the money)

On All Roads Lead to Pollution, it thought I sounded like Isaac Asimov (show me the money)

On Long Way to The Mop, it accused me of sounding like Jack London (show me the… morphine)

I gave it a passage of Oscar Wilde, and it decided he could've made a passable living as a ghost writer for James Joyce.
 
Good one.

Political Balance

Kevin Rudd is in hospital having his gall removed.

I'm fairly sure for this removal, the knives go in the front.

Arts And Crafts For The Paranoid

I found this block of wood and couldn't work out what it was for. It's been shaped, with bevelled edges, but not to a high finish. In other words, it's a bit sloppy but it obviously has a purpose.

None of the furniture is falling over. Nothing's out of place. Everything is working and this piece of wood just appeared. It's like the one extra bolt left over after rebuilding an engine... except it just arrived in my life with no rebuilding having gone on. What's its caper? Where does it belong?

So I did the only logical thing I could. I gave it some added features and now it's just a square pig looking for a round hole.

Yes, Catchy

I found myself listening to a commercial radio station recently and was amused to hear that a certain bank is referring to itself simply by saying what the acronym spells. I don’t know if this has been going on for a long time and I’m just very late to hear it, but I just need to point something out:

Nab: verb. To snatch or steal.

Wake Me When It's Over

Joe Hockey pleaded with the crowd at a public address yesterday not to trivialise Australian politics by preferring to watch the MasterChef finale, to the debate between the two political leaders. (This comes from a man who raised his political profile by appearing on Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation.)

I want to have a quick glance at cause and effect here, Joe (or even 'affect' in this case). Are you accusing me of trivialising Australian politics to the point that I’d prefer to keep a dinner-date than listen to more vacuous, sound-bite drivel? Pull your giant, empty head in. And talking of empty, I’m not reserving my distaste just for you. A whole bunch of people might be really pleased that Gillard’s in, but has she actually said anything concrete yet? I might have missed it, but all I’ve heard so far is carefully managed nothings.

The one small mercy is that the election isn’t too far away.