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Warner Bros.

Theaters. Theaters Everywhere.

148 minutes

Director Christopher Nolan’s last film outside of his rebooted Batman franchise was 2006’s “The Prestige,” a mystery on the mortal rivalry between two Victorian-era magicians. It opened and closed with the same question: “Are you watching closely?” That question has been the motto of Nolan’s filmmaking career since he debuted the expanses of his intellect with 2000’s “Memento.” Above all other sensory engagements, Nolan requires his audience’s undivided attention. Never has this been truer than with “Inception.” Because so much of his directorial work has been adapted from existing sources, Nolan’s ability to make his audience expand the boundaries of their perception has been only partially showcased. With “Inception,” an original work wholly his own, Nolan has the audience all to himself, and he doesn’t waste the opportunity.

The plot of Inception is too dense to encapsulate and too polished to spoil. In Nolan’s world exists the technology to invade, populate, and manipulate the human subconscious through dreams. Leonardo DiCaprio (“Shutter Island”) is Cobb, an expert practitioner of this invasion and fugitive for reasons unknown. He has a chance to clear his besmirched name via one last impossible job.

As a heist film, “Inception” relies on an ensemble of thieves; they even have titles that reflect their responsibilities. Ariadne is the Architect. Eames is the Forger. Yusuf is the Chemist. Arthur, well, shoot, he’s just Arthur. But he’s no less important than the rest of the gang. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (“500 Days of Summer”) fills the role with a clenched jaw, cherishing efficiency and precision above all. He steals the film with a fight scene, perhaps the best — and certainly the most creative — in years. It’s the technical centerpiece of the film and may not be topped in a lifetime.

Tom Hardy is Eames, a charmer. The mad glint in Hardy’s eye might be a spot of leftover psychopathy from his murderous performance in “Bronson,” a maniacal indie drama about Britain’s most violent criminal. In his big budget debut, Hardy belies no anxiety. His levity and argumentative rapport with Gordon-Levitt are welcome in a film that would otherwise detonate the audience’s adrenal glands. Until, that is, he abandons his smile and outshines even Leo in combat.

But Leo’s Cobb is incontrovertibly the emotional core of the film. It’s not difficult to feel the weight on his shoulders. He’s wracked with guilt, and he’s losing control over the one thing we’d all like to think is always safe: his memories. They betray him at every turn. While the whole team rises above the mere requirements of their duties, Cobb’s stakes are highest.

It’s no surprise that a brain like Nolan’s would deliver such spotless production. Disregard the exposition—“Inception” is viscerally thrilling beyond what many of Nolan’s contemporaries might have thought possible. How he and his cinematographer, fellow genius Wally Pfister, created some of the shots are anyone’s guess. In an age of endless digital shortcuts, when films spend more of their lives on hard drives than in the can, Nolan’s best work is physical. His vision for action photography is not merely to be respected; it is an awesome talent, in the most elemental sense of the word.

David Cronenberg’s films are notorious for their graphic violence. The director received particularly pointed commentary for his lingering shot on a close-range bullet wound in “A History of Violence.” Blood flowed from a mushy hole while bits of smoky bone swam in the plasma gathering on the linoleum floor and some unidentifiable chunk of flesh remained hanging delicately from what was once a face. The victim wasn’t even dead; he sputtered and gagged and blew bubbles in his own blood. Surely this imagery would indicate Cronenberg’s relative comfort with all things gruesome. Yet the director insists that he abhors bloodshed. Cronenberg claims he shows the bullet wound as closely as he can so as not to glamorize the weapon that creates it. He wields his fake violence as a deterrent to those who would commit it in the real world by safely and non-lethally demonstrating its consequences.

In contrast, Christopher Nolan is clearly a lifelong fan of action cinema. That’s not to say that he’s a misanthrope hell-bent on turning the viewer’s stomach, but he doesn’t employ car chases and fight scenes and gunplay as a necessity to appease the mindless box office contributors; he has a genuine appreciation for the ballet of exhilarating and purposeful action. No other filmmaker can assault the audience’s endocrine system quite like Nolan, not even at the expense of the narrative. “Inception” only solidifies Nolan’s status as an aesthetic genius. He’s making a pretty strong case as a literary one, too.

Inception is at once thrilling and meditative. Nolan presents his material neither lightly nor mortally; there’s no cheese to his art. He doesn’t demand that the viewer question reality or ponder the meaning of life, nor does he inhibit it; the viewer is free to interpret the film however he wants. Nolan’s contribution is an honest hypothesis on the strata of human consciousness. Nolan – at considerable risk – respects the intelligence of his audience. He makes films for people who cannot leave their crosswords unfinished. Ariadne’s job in the film is to construct mazes. Nolan does the same for his audience.

If there’s one word to describe Hollywood these days, it’s derivative. Nothing that can’t be packaged and sold in Burger King gets the green light. Successful foreign films get reshot in English with a bigger budget and bigger stars with more collagen in their lips after the original taps the European box office. But, once upon a time, at least a year or two passed before a film got reheated and tossed on our placemat. “Inception” shared its opening weekend with “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the CGI-laden sugary crotch-punch raped corpse of a Disney classic starring Nicolas Cage’s forehead and the human sinus cavity, Jay Baruchel. “Inception,” by some miracle, exists. That it might thrive in this ever-slackening jaw of an industry is a dream we can only pray becomes reality.

600 Communities who want Google internet. Only one of them deserves it, MINE.

1 Week until Austin Jackson has to become Curtis Granderson. No pressure. (Also, what a terrible website.)

15 I just have a good feeling about this one.

73 Days until the world invades Africa.

4 Awesome teams left playing in some sort of rounded ball tournament. Have you heard?

.5 Seconds is about how long I can stand to see these people on TV.

Tomorrow marks the four-month anniversary of Patrick Swayze’s death at the hands of Willy Lopez pancreatic cancer. In the time since, basic cable stalwarts like AMC and and TNT have accordingly paid their limited commercial interruption tributes to 1991′s Sexiest Man Alive.

Between 1984 and 1991, Swayze couldn’t miss at the box office or in the cotton panties of young schoolmarms, but his turn as Sam Wheat in 1990′s Academy Award-winning Ghost stands out.

That’s right, the Academy Award-winning Ghost. Actress Whoopi Goldberg took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, while screenwriter and obvious gentile Bruce Joel Rubin won Best Original Screenplay. The film was further nominated for Best Original Score and Best Picture, losing the latter to Avatar: The Prequel. In all, Ghost received 16 awards from various cinematic governing bodies, including Vincent Schiavelli’s upset of Harry Dean Stanton in a heated battle for the Danny Trejo Memorial Wheel of Cheese for Ugliest Character Actor.

We certainly all love Ghost; I’ve seen it bake ziti to perfection, mend broken hearts, and even patch up gunshot wounds like the Holy Grail’s scalding hot Jesus Water in Last Crusade. But as we blindly pound dick-first into 2010, it’s worth asking: How many of those 16 awards would go to Ghost today?

Consider the Best Picture winners of the decade we’ve left behind. Slumdog Millionaire blinded children with acid. No Country for Old Men murdered an innocent widow. The Departed killed just about everyone. Million Dollar Baby was cruelest of all, presenting a triumphant conclusion mere frames out of reach only to wrench it away in horrific genuine Eastwood style. It’s been seven years since a film with a traditionally happy conclusion was tapped for Best Picture.

That’s not to say Ghost was entirely without the gloom that the Academy seems to favor lately; after all, the protagonist was dead for most of the movie, killed by the greed of his closest friend. The contemporary beef with Ghost most likely lies with the simplicity of its relationships. Swayze’s Sam and Demi Moore’s Molly have literally no conflict in their relationship apart from Sam’s inability to say “I love you” to Molly, which director Jerry Zucker goes out of his way to illustrate as cute and charming.

No, these days we have Revolutionary Road and Michael Clayton, and the relationships within our films have to be strained and loveless and irreconcilable. Ghost is an old-fashioned film about teamwork and the ultimate triumph of love and commitment over avarice. It’s fun to guess what the awards circuit might do with Ghost in today’s grim market, but I’d like to think that it might receive the same positive reception for the sheer novelty of its depiction of a loving couple and a petty criminal with a heart of gold.

So that’s what I’m wondering right now. Let’s say Ghost came out on Valentine’s Day 2010. Would you see it at the 2011 Oscars?

A new year has begun! We should be rejoicing at the opportunity for new beginnings.

Yet the winter and shortened days are still upon us. We are weary, our hearts are heavy and our fandom for our favorite teams is…well…kind of hard to take at times.

But still, we love our teams. We wear the jerseys of our favorite players, we carve out time to watch them play and yell maniacally at the television during games. It’s supposed to be fun to watch them play a game and exercise athletic feats that we can only dream of, right?

Well, yeah. To a point. We also like to see them win. Winning is fun. There’s no denying that. And when wins don’t happen for a while, minds start wandering. And when minds start wandering, they wander in different directions, and eventually those diverging directions come together again as bitter exchanges on the intrawebz. Then it strikes us that the source of all our fanatical woes lies not with our fellow fans, but with the players, the coaches, the managers, the athletic directors, the ex-players, the ex-coaches, the ex-…whatever. You get the idea. Our attention turns back to them once again, but this time with the stink eye.

So we watch and listen. We look at the apparel they wear (was that a Penn State shirt!?) and parse their words (did he say Lloyd Carr’s University of Michigan?!) looking for any clue that will expose the Great Divide – the smoking gun that will blow this whole thing wide fucking open so that we can cry out “YOU! YOU WERE THE ONE THAT CAUSED THIS TO HAPPEN TO MEEEEE!.”

Unfortunately, we’re not really smart enough to do that on our own. Luckily, in times like these heroes emerge that unmask the true culprits of our discontent, be it the Green Menace, the Ypsilanti Illuminati, the South Bend Opus Dei or the Maize and Blue Stonecutters lurking among us. It is then that our anger can be focused and appeased.

It’s sort of a natural progression, and it happens with most every fanbase. Winning keeps people happy, content and docile. Losing sets loose the angry tin-foil hat mob. And frankly, there’s been a lot of losing, along with some dandy tin-foil hats.

Let’s recap:

Mich? Let’s see. No bowling for a second straight year. A basketball team that needs to take on a strong Big Ten in order to even be considered for the Big Dance. A hockey team that will also be very lucky to make the tournament.

Enough of that. Good thing there’s pro sports. The LOLions? There’s a “LOL” in there for a reason, folks. Tigers? Not nearly as bad, but it’s also the off-season. Pistons? I don’t know much about basketball, but something tells me that 11-22 isn’t goodt. At least there’s the good ol’ dependable Wings that are once again taking their division by stor…oh. Nevermind.

Okay, it’s not great right now, and it would be remiss of us to believe that, as fans, it doesn’t feel like sometimes we’re the dumb schmuck that once lucked into a good thing, but is now taking it up the ass from Hunt Volk, while the popular girl from high school stands and laughs at us, only to walk off with the douche, leaving us doubled over after a public, embarrassing display. Well, fuck you, Hunt Volk.

That’s no reason for us to give up. Far from it. Hold your head high. It’s times like these that test our mettle as sports fans. The only advice we can offer you, our loyal reader, is this: Don’t panic. Remember some inspiring things that someone else may have told you over the course of your lives and go out as a winner!

If that doesn’t work, here’s a directional video that will guide you. Simply click the red button below any time you feel panicked as a fan. Note, this video may not be safe for work. It’s also probably not safe to view around children, the elderly, anyone that happens to hold you in high esteem, or toothless hillbillies. We warned you.

And once again – fuck you, Hunt Volk.