Tag Archives: Inception

I just had the craziest dream

I had this crazy dream last night. I’m just kidding. I’m not going to write about my dreams. That’s super boring. Every once in a while somebody will start talking about, “Oh my God I had the craziest dream last night,” in which case I prepare to be really unimpressed with the oncoming barrage of mostly nonsense sentences strung together back to back in no apparent order, all the while trying my best to maintain a look, a facial expression that says, I care about this story. I’m interested. Please continue. You telling me this dream is almost as good as me having it myself, which is impossible, but this is the next best thing.

There’s obviously one exception to this rule: Inception. If you haven’t seen Inception, well, you know, I don’t have to tell you what to do. Just go and do it. I hope they make an Inception 2, and the whole movie will start with Christopher Nolan waking up in the middle of the night, having dreamt the whole thing up, the whole movie, the whole release, the critical acclaim, that episode of South Park where they make fun of it, it’ll all have been a dream.

So he’ll wake up his wife and he’ll be like, “Honey! Honey, I just had the craziest dream!” and his wife will be like, Oh my God, what time is it? Three in the morning? Jesus Christ. These fucking Hollywood guys, they think they’re so important, so bloated with their own lame inflated sense of self. Seriously? He’s waking me up at three in the fucking morning for a dream?

This is still part of the movie, Inception 2 (Nolan: call me.) And we know that Nolan’s wife is thinking all of this because it’s one of those directorial tricks, like we see Nolan, then he’s like, “Honey! Honey!” and then it cuts to Nolan’s wife, and maybe she has one of those sleep masks on, and while Nolan is busy talking about his dream, about Inception, which, in this movie, Inception 2, it’ll all have been a dream. That was clear when I said it the first time, right?

And as the camera is on Nolan’s wife, you know, she’s pulling up her sleep mask to check what time it is, then you’ll hear her voice, her thoughts, like Nolan won’t hear it, and she won’t be talking, it’ll be like the audience is hearing her thoughts, and she’s making all of the appropriate facial responses as each thought pops up.

Her thought monologue will be like, “What time is it?” and her face will be puzzled, like she’s thinking hard, and then when she sees it and goes, “Three in the morning?” her face will be shocked, angry.

It gets better. It turns out that, in this movie, in Inception 2, not only did Inception never happen, but none of Nolan’s other movies happened either. He says to his wife, “Honey! Get DiCaprio on the phone! I don’t care who you have to wake up!” and his wife will be like, “DiCaprio? Leonardo DiCaprio? What are you high?”

Because it this movie, Christopher Nolan isn’t an award-winning director, he’s a furniture salesman. And he lives in Pittsburgh. Well, not in Pittsburgh proper, but like an hour and a half outside of Pittsburgh. And when reality sets in, when the dream starts to fade, even though it was all so clear in his head, even though he actually felt it, like he remembered watching that South Park episode where they made fun of Inception, he vividly recalls getting super pissed off, “How could those two bozos not understand my genius?” he looks in the mirror, in real life, and he’s not even close to being as handsome or as in shape as his dream persona.

He gets depressed. He has to be at the furniture store in like four hours, plus getting up and getting ready, plus driving an hour and a half to Pittsburgh. And that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. So far. I’m thinking eventually he’s going to have to wake up from that dream also, and that will have been a dream, and he wakes up and he’s the real Nolan again, but that dream of being a regular furniture salesman, it will have stuck with him. And so instead of making cool mind-bending reality-is-a-dream movies, he’s going to start making furniture commercials, and documentaries about Pittsburgh, even though he doesn’t live in Pittsburgh. Also, I thought that it would be cool if Nolan had another dream about being that regular Pittsburgh guy again, and he takes a day off and goes to see Inception in theaters. And he’s watching this movie about dreams within dreams within his own dream.

Yeah, you know what, this isn’t going to work. And this is why you don’t start off any story with, “I just had a crazy dream,” because it’s not crazy. It’s boring. It’s a dream. It’s nonsense, just like this blog post. Everybody has dreams. Nobody remembers them well enough to tell an interesting story the next day. Except Christopher Nolan. Seriously Inception was bad ass.

The Trilogy: Part four of three

Please, I hope nobody tries to tell me that they saw this one coming, because nobody did. I’m catching everybody completely off guard here. I’m pretty sure that this was already the world’s first ever blog post trilogy. Don’t quote me on that. I’m not saying that, I’m just throwing it out there, that I’m pretty sure. Well now I also have the distinct honor of writing history’s first ever four-part trilogy. Right here on my blog. It’s incredible. I just feel so special, writing it, putting it up on my web site for dozens of people to read. I can only imagine what you are all going through as readers, staring at this block of text, reading it, leading the charge with me right here at the frontlines of the Internet.

I’ve talked all about the roles of each part of a trilogy. It’s all very formulaic. Part one: setup. Part two: action. And part three: the inevitable disappointment (again, I’m not talking about Batman here, the Dark Knight Rises is obviously the only exception. And you know what? I’m wondering if they might not make an Inception trilogy. I’m going to call that as not applicable either. Inception was sick. Avatar, on the other hand, is almost definitely going to follow the trilogy formula to a T. I wouldn’t be surprised if the N’avi also wind up having to get rescued by Ewoks at the end.)

I was so excited about my blog trilogy, but looking it over, I realize all too well that even I am susceptible to the limits of the genre. I’m no Chris Nolan. How do you do it Chris? Tell me the secret to your powers! Just as things got going, I looked back at my part three and thought … eh. So I do what I always do when I look back at something that I’ve written and I’m not happy with: I cry a little on the inside but just put it up anyway, because trying to get one of these things out every day has pushed my standards super, super low. And I thought to myself, how can I fix this? Specifically, how can I fix this without having to go back and rewrite anything? And part four seemed like the perfect solution.

I’m considering this part four to be like a cast for the broken leg that were my parts one through three. We’ll just leave it on and six weeks later, yeah it’ll smell a little funny, but … yeah, I don’t know where I was going with this whole cast metaphor either. Is it metaphor or analogy? I always get those two confused. And by always, I mean only when I had to take that one English test in high school where one of the multiple-choice questions asked the difference between a metaphor and an analogy. I think I got it right. I can’t remember.

The thing is, I keep writing sentences, but I don’t feel like anything’s really happening. I was so excited by my idea of a trilogy, excited that I would call it Trilogy, capital T, excited about this part four nonsense. Haha! Trilogies don’t have four parts! Haha! But the further along that I get, I come to see that all I’ve done is taken an idea for one everyday blog post, thrown in a ton of filler sentences, like this one right here, with a lot of commas, unnecessary words, more words, a few more, and I’ve stretched it out for four days straight. I think I could have actually and more appropriately condensed all four of these posts into one paragraph:

I love trilogies. Trilogies are made up of three parts. Remember Star Wars? I liked Empire the best. Remember Back to the Future? I liked Part II the best. I don’t like Ewoks. I did like Inception, but I didn’t like Avatar. Actually, that’s not true, I loved Avatar, I’m just anticipating not liking their sequels. But I’ll probably see them anyway. And I like Batman.

Man, that wasn’t even a full paragraph. I mean, I guess technically it met all of the requirements of a paragraph, but my paragraphs are never that short. And it’s not even that well written. But what can I do? That’s basically all that I’ve been talking about for the past three days straight. Man, this is going to ruin me. I’m trying to ground everything I write here based on universal appeal, but I feel like I’ve somehow sunk myself lower than some sort of Internet fanboy.

I’m so screwed. I’ve already invested three days in this. You know what? I’m not that screwed. This can’t be that big a deal. I’ll just put something up even funnier tomorrow, funnier than anything I’ve ever done before. A five-part trilogy. Is that funny? No, no, forget it, it’s not going to happen. Unless … No, I can’t allow myself to even think about this any further. Wait, unless …