*** Inception
** Daniel Deronda
** Public Enemies
*** Cowboy Bebop, The Movie

Inception was pretty good. It certainly was fun to look at, and it’s fun to think about the various theories afterward — who was incepting whom? which of the various things we saw was “reality”, if any? though honestly, the question of whether the top stopped spinning was I think the dumbest of the bunch. Nolan might as well have tacked “OR IS IT?!” onto “THE END”. I don’t really agree with people who thought it was one of the best movies evar, but nor do I agree with people who thought it was hard to follow or basically incoherent. It wasn’t that complicated, it has a fairly straightforward interpretation that mostly makes sense, and the basic premise is good, though some of the details are pretty sillier (than no sillier than many other decent science fiction movies).

I didn’t really know what to expect from Daniel Deronda having neither read it nor heard much about it. It goes some surprising places, like (spoilers) having Daniel turn out to be Jewish and decide to become some sort of proto-zionist and having him end up with the poor Jewish singer girl rather than the beautiful blonde who appears to be the lead character. Some of this was probably the fault of this production — Gwen (the blonde) seemed to be a more central character than Daniel himself, and the two of them seem to have a lot of chemistry, so it’s a bit surprising that they don’t end up together. I simply wasn’t that interested in the Jewish “I must find my roots!” stuff, partly because it seemed so grounded in the idea that your born race/religion/whatever is your destiny, a notion I find repugnant. I didn’t hate this, but I don’t recommend it very strongly and it doesn’t make me want to read the book.

Public Enemies should have been much better than it was. If there’s one thing I love about a crime drama, it’s the classic heist setup and all that, and that was basically absent here. The movie drifted around for a while without setting up much dramatic tension, and there are a lot of characters that sort of come and go. Plus, the whole movie is unbelievable dark — like, literally so, so that it’s hard to see what’s going on. So, snuh.

I have been reading the unbelievable series on Cowboy Bebop on Overthinking It (I love that blog), which gave me a craving to see it again. Unfortunately, there’s a very long wait on the TV series DVDs at netflix, so I rented the movie. And the movie somehow failed to live up to my overthinking-it-stoked expectations. It just didn’t feel that compelling. I still want to watch the TV series again, though I fear that, as with many pieces of pop culture that get relentlessly analyzed, it may just turn out to be a piece of pop culture on which some creative person has heaped a lot of meaning that maybe wasn’t there in the first place. Or maybe not.