http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGdQURlmsjc

I guess it’s time for me to speak a bit more about Inception, since this is the week. There are some people even seeing advance screenings tonight. Perhaps surprisingly, I think my hype is at its low ebb right now. There are tons of gushing reviews and posts on Twitter and endless TV spots, but I’m just nonplussed. Perhaps that would be the wrong word — let’s just say they haven’t augmented my hype. I knew months ago that I would want to see the movie, and I knew that the movie would be awesome. Only a flood of scathing reviews could have affected my anticipation.

So right now I’m kinda exhausted from looking forward to this movie for half a year. There has been nothing else for me to latch on to for any excitement. I thought about checking out Predators, but it’s still hard for me to imagine ADRIEN BRODY filling Arnold’s shoes, no matter how good of an actor he might be (although, I guess that’s part of the problem). But he did get pretty ripped for it, and from all reports, they went in a different direction since they knew no one could fill in the shoes of guys like Arnold, Jesse Ventura, and Carl Weathers. Nonetheless, I can’t be bothered to gather any friends for a trip to the theater to see it.

Oh, I could have checked out Toy Story 3, but there was no way I was doing that without female company. That actually almost happened, but when it fell apart, I wasn’t about to push it. It’s not like I was anxiously anticipating it, anyhow. At nine years old, I already felt too old for the original Toy Story when it was released. I was all about Mortal Kombat. So I am left with Inception. Left to make a half-dozen posts about it. Left to post retarded shit on Twitter about it. Left to ask my friends if they want to go a midnight showing.

Somehow I feel like I’ll keep my record of ZERO midnight showings intact. I guess that’s why I’m only somewhat nerdy. Oh wait, no, I’m only somewhat manly. Full nerd. Damn it.

Earlier today, an embargo on Inception reviews was lifted. What followed was a flood of gushing praise that caused gushing of another kind. With 10 days to go until the first midnight showings, it’s time for hype to hit critical mass.

I’m just going to pull the review quotes from Rotten Tomatoes:

A wildly entertaining and dazzling mind-trip not to be missed. Kubrick would have been proud.

Inception is an exhilarating cinematic experience that suggests there is still room, even in the blockbuster world, for big ideas and dangerous emotions, and that may be the single most thrilling thing about it.

A devilishly complicated, fiendishly enjoyable sci-fi voyage across a dreamscape that is thoroughly compelling.

a stunning achievement and the most completely entertaining film I’ve seen in years.

Inception is a masterpiece. Making a huge film with big ambitions, Christopher Nolan never missteps and manages to create a movie that, at times, feels like a miracle.

I’m getting the sense that this movie is going to be pretty good. And thus concludes one of the least substantial blog posts I’ve ever made.

Edit: /Film made a similar post, only with longer excerpts instead of short quotes pulled from RT. And they used the same header. Weird.

I’m wondering when was the last time I was this excited this far in advance about an upcoming piece of entertainment. I’m sure a list would be a more effective and/or popular post (since everyone loves those), and maybe I’ll make one in the future, but right now I’m just going to ramble on about things that made me both hard in the pants and soft in the brain. With regards to soft in the brain, I present the example of how I wasn’t even hearing Joseph Gordon-Levitt correctly in the Inception trailer, despite watching it a half-dozen times.

Does something like Call of Duty 4 count? I don’t remember how much I was looking forward to that game before the beta hit and blew everything out of the fucking water. Yeah, after playing that beta, I was certainly looking forward to the full game, but I feel like the beta was equivalent to watching the first 30 minutes of Inception, or arguably even more. It was the FULL multiplayer experience, just limited to three maps — three maps which turned out to be some of the best in the final game. I played the beta for almost 50 hours; I think I got my money’s worth right there. I guess what I’m trying to say is that two months before that beta, I wasn’t watching clips of COD4 over and over again.

While attempting to think of other hyped-up things in the past couple of years, I can only think of The Dark Knight, which is probably indicative of my terrible memory or my incapability to think of anything not related to Christopher Nolan. But I don’t think I was ever as hyped up as I am right now, despite the amount of posts I made related to the film leading up to its release. There was no trailer that was as awesome as this Inception trailer — the latter of which I haven’t even seen in full 1080p glory on my HDTV yet. I will make another post just for that when it hits the internet. And really, the fact that The Dark Knight was so great despite being set in a comic-book world is only more reason to be flipping out at the prospect of an original Christopher Nolan film. It’s impossible for me NOT to be more excited about Inception than TDK.

So what else has there been? I don’t get too excited about music albums until singles or live performances of the album start trickling out, and even then, I don’t obsess over them for hours. I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to a book; I think this is a result of never reading Harry Potter or A Song of Ice and Fire or any current fiction authors, period. And television? Yeah, I certainly get excited about the season premieres and season finales and everything in between for shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men, but they are such small doses at a time that it’s impossible to get into a frenzy. It’s only after an episode blows my mind that I go apeshit.

That brings it down to movies and games, basically. Advertising companies really do their job with regards to movies — maybe a little too well. I hope I’m not burnt out on Inception by the time the movie actually comes out. With games, it was always my constant checking of gaming websites and GAF that would fuel my anticipation. Nowadays, I barely read any gaming sites and I rarely venture over to the gaming side of GAF, and as a result, I haven’t been hyped up for a game in a few years. Starcraft II would be a very good candidate, but as I recently explained, that beta pisses me off so much sometimes that I rather imagine a world where it doesn’t exist.

So that narrows it down to movies then. That’s the only entertainment I’ll be going crazy about beforehand from now on. And possibly only Christopher Nolan movies.

Sony is still attempting to hype up their new machine, led by the insane statements of Ken Kutaragi, the chairman and mind behind the Playstation brand. A few choice statements from Kutaragi include:

“The PS3 will instill discipline in our children and adults alike. Everyone will know discipline.”

“If processors of high performance and wide bandwidth like the Cell were linked together without sufficient security, a worldwide system crash could occur with one attack.”

and possibly the best:

Bernie Stolar, a former Sony executive, remembers Kutaragi, CEO of SCEJ, asking him as early as 1994 where he thought the nascent PlayStation console’s main competition would come from. Nintendo, Stolar guessed. Maybe Intel. Kutaragi looked him squarely in the eyes. “No, Bernie, you are wrong,” he said. “It is Microsoft. And I will kill them.”

But this is not about Sony, it’s about Bungie. They’ve probably been helped and prodded by Microsoft to start the hype train so early, as with the PS3 out this holiday season, Microsoft wants people to hold off potential PS3 buyers by making sure they know of Halo 3 on the horizon. The commercial during Monday Night Football was seen by college kids and young adults across America. For months, you have not been able to walk into a Gamestop or Electronics Boutique without seeing at least 5 flyers telling you to pre-order Halo 3. The game is a year away. Is it really going to be that tough to find the game? Or maybe people just want the LEGENDARY EDITION that comes with a mini helmet for $99.99. I think this motivational poster sums up that situation pretty well:

It’s true and you know it. Even though Halo 2 was a pretty big disappointment to the people that bought into the hype, you know in your heart that Halo 3 will not do the same. Right? But remember that mindblowing city level shown in that first Halo 2 demo? It was nowhere to be found in the final, seemingly unfinished game. And Halo fans know this. I really don’t need to say this. I just don’t want people to buy into the hype again. I’ll admit that the commercial shown a handful of days ago during MNF was pretty damn awesome, but at least Bungie has made it known that it was CG. (Not like Sony and their bullshit of a Killzone trailer.)

I think Halo 3 has real potential with the shield grenades, the energy walls I’ve heard about, and just the massive power of the Xbox 360. The A.I. will hopefully blow away even the first two games. The environments will be more expansive and the vehicle physics more realistic. The game still has a year of tweaking and upgrading in front of it and I hope it is everything gamers across the world (except Japan) want it to be. I just have to keep telling myself not to get excited whenever I watch that amazing commercial. You should too.

P.S. I have one request to Bungie for Halo 3 online. If you want to keep the matchmaking service, fine – BUT I WANT A CHOICE FOR ALL ROCKETS. There’s snipers, SWAT, but no rockets. Maybe there was a choice during the months when I never played Halo 2 online (I don’t have an Xbox myself, just my friend does – it just so happens that at the present time it resides in my house), but why would it be taken off? Surely everyone across the world loves rockets. There’s not much in gaming that is more frantic than 16-player rockets in Prisoner in the original Halo. So awesome. You hear me Bungie? TEAM ROCKETS. ROCKET FREE FOR ALL. I want them. I really just want more choice, period. Ranked games you can keep the matchmaking system, but there should be much more freedom when it comes to non-ranked games.

Here’s a gif of that Halo 3 commercial to get you hyped again. I’m sorry.

Courtesy of Tieno over at NeoGAF.