Wanted, Dead or Alive, We Think

The Plotniks only go to the movies -- the real ones, with popcorn -- when their children are in town or when they take Mummy Plotnik. Last night, on the Great PD's final night of his whirlwind trip to The Bay Area, he, Duck and Plottie went to West Portal to see 'Inception.'

Maybe the tip off was with the previews -- all of them for High School movies. It's not that the movie is immature -- or bad-- it's just preposterous. It's the kind of summer blockbuster movie where you are supposed to revel in your nice healthy jolt of fantasy, with endless car chases and gunfights where nobody can actually hit anybody with their blazing fusilades from pistols, rifles, automatic weapons, grenades and bazookas, and with a plot so convoluted that afterwards you don't even know if any of it happened or it all was a dream within a dream within a dream within a...oh pshaw, Hepzibah, are we too old for this?

The analogy is the other summer fantasy: Disneyland. Inception is Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. You have fun while the ride is going on and then when you come slamming through the wooden doors into the sunshine you realize you've been riding in little cars on little tracks built for little people and you feel a little foolish.

But then you talk about it., She wasn't actually dead, your son says and you say she wasn't? But then why this and why that? Well, he says, because this was a dream within a dream, and that was only a dream. Well, you continue, why didn't the son of the tycoon just throw Leonardo Di Caprio out of the hotel on his ass in the first place, and your son says, well, that's because the old tycoon had programmed his son to have guards in his dreams to protect his ideas and if you want to talk about the runaway train, well, that was his dead wife, but not really, because the dead wife wasn't dead. Was she?

Don't really know. Don't really care. It was fun. But not as much fun as playing a little basketball earlier in the day. Plottie didn't dream that one up.