i have to watch this – Hanna

if i have a daughter, i will train her to fight and hunt. any boy tries to get fancy with her or them will have his balls literally cut off with a butterfly knife. awesome.

explaining the ending of Inception

I got the ending or believe i understood the ending of Chris Nolan’s masterpiece Inception at the first time of watching. To better explained what i understood, i perused several websites to give the explanation below. Tried to simplify it.

Let’s clear the air over Dream Levels and Dream Time

The dream within a dream process puts you into a deeper state of dreaming. Dream levels is the different levels that the protagonists go through in the movie whilst dream time is the time taken throughout the different levels.  The deeper you go in the dreams, the further removed your mind is from reality. By the time you reach the Limbo state it can be so difficult to wake, and the dream can feel so vividly real, that the mind stops trying to wake at all – the mind accepts the dream as its reality, like slipping into a coma. When you wake up in Limbo you don’t remember that there is such a thing as a “real world” – as in any dream, you wake up in the middle of  a scene and simply accept it for what it is. Breaking yourself out of this cycle is extremely difficult, which is why Cobb and his wife Mal were trapped in Limbo for what seemed like decades.

The deeper you go into a dream state, the faster your mind is able to imagine and perceive things within that dream state. We’re told the increase is exponential, so going deeper into dreams turns minutes into hours, into days, into years. This is why Cobb and his team are able to pull off the Fischer job while the van is still falling through the air, before the soldiers break into the snow fortress, before Arthur rigs the elevator, and all within the span of a flight from Sydney to LA.

In Limbo, the mind works so fast that actual minutes can be interpreted as years gone by. When Saito “dies” from the gunshot wound he received on level 1 of the dream, his mind falls into Limbo, and Saito remains there for the minutes it takes Cobb and Ariadne to follow him into Limbo – those minutes in one dream state feel like decades to Saito in his Limbo state.

Here’s a graphic explanation of the dream levels taken from a website:

The Ending

The question asked is whether Cobb was still in a dream or did he in fact return to his children in the “real world.” from the moment that Cobb and Saito (seem to) wake up from limbo, Chris Nolan very purposefully shifts the film into an ambiguous state that leaves it somewhat open to the viewer’s perception and interpretation of that perception – two big themes of the movie, coincidentally enough.

There are a few pieces of “evidence” that we can certainly address to figure out the ending:

• Was Saito truly powerful enough to make one phone call and end Cobb’s problems or was that just Cobb in limbo projecting his subconscious wish to go home? You can argue logistics all you want, but if it’s said that Saito is a powerful and wealthy man (he bought a whole airline on a whim), then there’s reason enough to infer that he could bend the legal system for Cobb. Rich powerful people bend laws all the time.
• Is there something up with that immigration agent or is he just an immigration agent? If he’s staring at Cobb, it’s because his job is to look people over and scrutinize them. Would you want immigration letting people through without face-to-face scrutiny?the immigration guy is just a guy.
• Did Cobb’s father (Michael Caine) arrange to meet him at the airport or is he there because he’s Cobb’s projection? At this point we’re reading way too much into things. There is a phone on the plane, so Cobb could’ve easily arranged for pickup. This was also an intricate plan they were hatching, so arranging for airport pickup would probably be on the to-do list.
• In early dream scenes Cobb is wearing a wedding band that doesn’t appear in the “real world” scenes or the end scenes in the airport – does that mean the ending is “reality?” Details like that are certainly strong evidence that there is a real world and that Cobb does live in it at times – such as when he isn’t wearing a wedding band.
• Does the fact that Cobb uses Mal’s totem mean it doesn’t work as a totem and therefore he never knows if he’s in reality or not? Again, we’re reading a little too deep into things. The only people who know the weight and feel of that totem are Mal and Cobb, and since Mal is dead, Cobb is the only one left who knows the totem’s tactile details. So yes, he could certainly use it as a measure of reality, the totem was not “ruined” by him using it.
• At the end, Cobb’s kids seem to be the same age and are seemingly wearing the same clothes as they were in his memory of them – is it “proof” he’s still dreaming? at the end of the film Cobb’s kids are wearing similar outfits to the ones he remembers, but their shoes are different.
• Will the spinning top keep spinning or was it about to fall over just before Nolan cut to black? Sorry, we will never know for sure, although it does start to wobble and it is never shown doing that in the dream world. Each of us will take away a guess – kind of the point of that final shot

My verdict? Cobb went back to reality. credit to screenrant / rottentomatoes for over-thinking on the movie.

Kick-Ass is a Kick Ass movie

the Tinseltown chose a good comic to make a movie from.

But at least this time they didn’t  massacre Mark Millar’s work like they horrifyingly did with Wanted. At least this time, they even stick to the storyline in the comic and the movie turned out to be decent unlike the abomination that was Wanted. Not even the sight of Angelina Jolie could save it.

That said, watching Kick-Ass was worth every single penny and time spent watching it. It has violence just like in the comic, a 10 year old wonder girl with foul language and an even feistier attitude, it tickles your funny bone every now and then with an added tinge of human drama. It’s just that  I would have liked the Kick-Ass character to be more spunkier towards the end. My verdict? go watch it.

and owh.. owh… getting excited waiting for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World to come out. Let’s hope it will be as decent as the trailer puts it out to be 🙂