“Inception”

OK…I know we’ve only seen like three of this year’s big award-season contenders (“Toy Story 3”, “Hereafter” and “The Social Network”, which were all awesome, by the way) and therefore, we probably shouldn’t be making any broad, sweeping predictions yet, but, mark my words, amigos, Christopher Nolan will win an Oscar for “Inception”.

Whether it’s for writing, directing or producing is still to be determined, but, the mad genius behind “Memento”, “The Prestige” and the Christian Bale “Batman” movies has really outdone himself with “Inception”, and for that reason alone, I see many gold statues in Nolan’s future. And boy does he deserve them!

Taut, suspenseful, positively gorgeous to look at, and populated by the coolest indie cast this side of Sundance, “Inception” is the best movie we’ve seen this year. Yep, I said it, the best. Of course, most of you probably already know this since you saw the movie when it came out, you know, last summer.

But, babysitters being increasingly hard to come by, Christine and I didn’t get to see “Inception” on the big screen until last week at Warner Brothers and lemme tell ya, it blew us away. To say that our heads were swimming (in the best way!) for days afterwards is a serious understatement.

This was no mere movie, amigos, it was total immersion in a completely original and boldly realized new world. And we loved every crazy second of it!

I know I geek out over things a lot, and tend to overhype stuff that I really love, but, I kid you not, I haven’t felt this way about a sci-fi movie since we saw the first “Matrix” or “Terminator” flick way back when.

The dazzling technical elements aside, “Inception” is that rare breed of totally game-changing screen stories that will inspire whole generations of nerdy kids to wanna make movies. For me, it was “Star Wars”, for Generation Whatever, it’ll be Christopher Nolan’s “Inception”. Again, mark my words.

Anyway, I don’t wanna give anything away by going too much into the plot or anything, but, trust me, you don’t have to love sci-fi or even Leo DiCaprio to love this mind-bending little jewel of a movie. Simply put, if you like movies, “Inception” will knock you flat on your movie-loving ass. You have never seen anything like it. EVER.

So, you best get busy on that acceptance speech, Mr. Nolan. The clock is ticking…

Trailer Thursday: “Never Let Me Go”

Thanks to a certain video clip that our friend Danielle recommended for Greta, I have been spending a lot of time on YouTube these days and…wow, there are some cool-ass movie trailers out there! So, starting today, I am going to share my favorite new movie trailers with you every Thursday. Pretty exciting, huh?

To launch this bold, new venture I’ve chosen a trailer for the upcoming Oscar-bait drama, “Never Let Me Go”. Based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro — one of Christine’s favorite novelists, Ishiguro is probably most famous for writing “The Remains of the Day” — “Never Let Me Go” follows three characters from childhood to young adulthood in a mildly futuristic England where human clones are “grown” to adulthood and then harvested for their parts.

Most of that stuff is hinted at in the trailer, so, I hope I’m not giving too much away, but, wow, this book absolutely floored me! Yes, Wendy, I read a book, and it was beautiful. I actually dreamt about  this one several times while reading it and even now, I am totally haunted by the strange, delicate beauty of this novel. Seriously, if you haven’t read it, amigos, you gotta check it out. Amazing…

Or, you could just wait for the movie, which, judging by this awesome trailer, seems to capture at least some of the wistfulness of the book. My only concern about the movie is that it’s directed by Mark Romanek, who is a former music video guy and that always scares me a bit.

But when you have Oscar-nominees Carey Mulligan and Kiera Knightley starring alongside the dude who will be the next “Spiderman”, and a script from “The Beach” and “28 Days Later” scribe, Alex Garland, it’d be pretty hard for Romanek to screw this one up. That said, great books become horrible movies everyday in this town — um, hello, “Atonement” anyone? — so, you never know.

Either way, this trailer rocks. So, enjoy!