The top totally fell over and you know it: I finally saw "Inception"

Here's one more weird thing about me to add to the list: I prefer reading reviews of movies after I've seen them, not before. I like reading what other people thought of a film and to what degree it gibes with what I thought. Strangely, I seek out the negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I can't explain it. I think it's because my default is "OMG this was the best movie ever made!" and I need someone to punch a hole in that balloon. Sometimes I disagree with those bad reviews, and that's how I know I like a movie.

All that is a long way of explaining how I know that more than one professional critic referred to "Inception" as "Matrix-y." And that's how I know that "Inception," while being a very, very good movie, probably isn't going to be as ground-breaking or game-changing as the movie that jumped to top-of-mind when professional critics on deadline needed to describe it. Who knows, though. In five or 10 years, it's entirely possible that we'll see movies called "Inception-y." (Which is why they should wait five years to hand out Oscars.)

And "Inception" is an excellent movie. The Academy should be embarassed that Christopher Nolan didn't get a Best Director nomination, and that the film didn't get a nomination for editing (though Nolan did get a nod for writing the screenplay). It takes an awful lot for a movie lasting over two hours that isn't either "GoodFellas," "The Wild Bunch" or a "Godfather" movie to keep me interested.

But it's also unusual for me to notice flaws while I'm watching something for the first time. I had two big ones. First, Ellen Page's character could've been replaced by an interrogating robot and no one would've noticed. I'm not knocking Page, she's fabulous. She did a great job with a character that didn't exist. (Actually, almost all of the characters were blanks. Make that three flaws.) The problem is that roughly 90 percent of her dialogue was asking questions that the audience conveniently needed answered, and the other 10 percent was saying things that I really didn't need to hear at all. Because I'm 30 years old and fairly capable of figuring things out for myself. But whatever.

My absolute biggest problem with "Inception" was that the stakes weren't high enough. As A.O. Scott wrote in the New York Times review (told ya, I read 'em all), "The conceit that they're all dreaming takes some of the edge off the movie's violence..." It's not just that, though. Why are our hero and his crew bothering with all this dream-diving anyway?

***Here be Spoilers!!!***

To help one energy conglomerate beat another energy conglomerate. That's pretty much it. Now, if only the story had included some big discussion about how the Bad Energy Company was going to pollute something and deprive someone else and millions of people (and possibly polar bears) would die as a result, And also the real likelihood of the planet being knocked off its axis and spiraling into the sun. See, THAT would justify a 50-50 shot of driving oneself insane to keep it from happening. But a Japanese guy bilking an Australian guy out of a few dollars? Yeah, I didn't get it.

*** spoilers are back in their cages ***

The more I think about it, the more I appreciate the actors in this movie. Except for Leonardo DiCaprio and Marin Cotillard, none of the other actors had a single thing to work with. But they all made me believe that they understood the words coming out of their mouths, and that's nothing to sneeze at. Shortcomings of the story aside, I cared what happened to them.

Also, the last scene was really cool.