• just got let in to Google App Inventor–allows Android app creation for non coders! http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/setup/index.html #

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Google App Inventor, a desktop application that allows non-coders to develop applications for the mobile Android platform, is starting to go live, with access being granted to folks who signed up on this page. I got my invite today–looks like a ton of fun, and I’m eager to see just how “easy” it is to make one’s own apps…

• @adampash So you've figured out that people go to Digg instead of you…congrats! in reply to adampash #
• People should get tattoos of the letters "DNR" on their chests for when they get older, just in case. #

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Like countless other poor souls, I sat through the nightmare that was Inception. My girlfriend and I left the theater laughing, wondering aloud to each other who on Earth could possibly have found the movie to be suspenseful or engaging. While I have a hard time justifying wasting more of my life on this film, a few of the Nolan-loyal have asked me just what my problem with the movie was. So here goes.

Before reading any further, please know:

• There are spoilers ahead, notably to the ending, although honestly, the biggest spoiler is this: this movie was terrible. I didn’t realize that Fecal Cinema was a genre, but apparently Nolan is a trailblazer in this department.
• I loved Memento.
• I enjoyed Ellen Page in Hard Candy.
• I was impressed with Leonard Dicaprio in Shutter Island.

So without further ado, five reasons why Inception is perhaps the worst example of movie-making in recent history, and why Nolan needs to be abandoned by moviegoers and studios. (As a side note: I now no longer have any interest in seeing the third Batman movie; I don’t trust Nolan to come up with anything resembling a well crafted movie, or anything worth $10—heck, I won’t even pirate any of his movies from here on out.)

1. Constant, poorly written foreshadowing. Perhaps the saddest part of Inception was that Nolan felt the need to add a character, Ariadne (Ellen Page), whose sole purpose it was to explain to the audience what was going to happen twenty minutes later. Within the first fifteen minutes of the movie, it was clear that Mol (a character Nolan straight-up plagiarized from Neuromancer) would be the villain that screwed up everything at the end. Nonetheless, every time Ariadne spoke up, it was to literally remind us: “She’s going to cause problems later! We should be worried about that!” Furthermore, every conflict or problem that any character ran into was explained as soon as it arose. For example, one character asks, “What will we do if we run out of time in the dream?”, and we are immediately supplied the response, “We’ll go into another dream within that dream, where time will pass more slowly.” Rather than allowing any element of suspense, we’re merely told what will happen, and then we watch as, surprise surprise, it does. Inception wastes opportunity after opportunity to make the audience guess about what’s going to happen next.

2. The lack of character development. Throughout Inception, we focus on the development of Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio), and the impact his subconscious has on dreams. Of course, he is the only character who’s subconscious affects dreams, leading the audience to believe that the other characters don’t have subconsciouses at all. Which is to say, all of the other characters are paper cut-outs simply there to move the plot along. At one point, Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character makes a romantic play for Ellen Page; why? No reason is given. Is the character lonely? Is he a player? Has he been harboring feelings? No background is supplied whatsoever—and this is sadly the case for all characters besides Dicaprio’s. I’ve heard the movie described as similar to Ocean’s 11, which is frankly insulting to that trilogy, which was built on the strength of the characters. Each character had a backstory, a personality, and not just a role to play. I believe Joseph Gordon Levitt can act; so why not give him, you know, a character to play?

3. The “action” scenes. This one was particularly surprising, given that Nolan’s treatment of the Batman franchise has provided such compelling action sequences. By contrast, in Inception, he chose the Michael Bay route: quick shots of movement so fast that it’s impossible to tell exactly what’s happening immediately followed by a cut to another set of characters to distract the audience from the lack of creativity. There’s a scene that is supposed to be a fight in zero gravity that could have been a beautiful fist-fight ballet; instead, we got a mess of pinstripes and hair grease, only shown in snippets that confirm “yes, there is a fight here,” and nothing more. (One would think they could have used wires, and one wonders why they didn’t.)

4. The constant exposition. Like Page’s constant reminders of “this is what’s coming next!” the script is riddled with paragraph after paragraph of explanations of the rules of the dream world, repeated ad nauseum. Instead of giving any character background whatsoever (like, say, why one character can shape-shift at will, and no one else can), instead we get beat over the head with the “rules of the dream world” time and time again. The ratio of “dream time” to “real time” is given at least a half dozen times; it’s reminiscent of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, but for a less intelligent audience. I found myself in the theater thinking about The Matrix, and how there were similar rules about the “not real world,” and the irony that a Keanu Reeves film was so much more subtle than a Dicaprio film. “Keanu Reeves” and “subtle” were not words I ever expected to put together.

5. The ending. OK, this one is the big one, and ultimately, the reason why this movie is not only unimaginative, but insulting to anyone who spent money or wasted two hours.

The movie is about dreams, and dreaming. Think about that for a moment: what would be the most cliched, most mundane possible ending for a movie about dreams? If you were reading a short story written by a 7th grader about dreams (and Nolan supposedly has had the script for a while before production, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this were the case), what would you expect the ending to be? THAT THE WHOLE THING WAS A DREAM. OOOOOOOOH.

So it is with Inception: they take the simplest, dumbest, most overused trick in the book for dream fiction, and tack it on to the end. Think about the company this movie now keeps: on the low end, season 8 of Dallas, and on the high end, The Wizard of Oz (which I don’t think anyone would count as an intellectual thriller). Yet, somehow, Inception is being considered enthralling, with a surprise ending. What part of the ending could not have been predicted from the trailers?

And let’s go a step further, and talk about why the question of “Was it a dream or wasn’t it?” is completely asinine.

If the movie was a dream, defenders of the unimaginative argue, it’s possible that Mol was in fact alive, trying to rescue Dicaprio / Cobb from either Limbo or his own dream. Perhaps this would be interesting, if it weren’t for one fact: If the movie was all a dream, then the events of the previous two hours DIDN’T HAPPEN. The entire plot based on corporate espionage was all a part of Cobb’s dream, and the previous two hours were a waste. What is the point of a movie where the plot rests on speculation, and the events shown are all there to distract? Why did I bother paying any attention to the “mind heist” aspects at all? It wasn’t for the characters or the surprise, and it certainly wasn’t for the acting. (Dicaprio at times gets caught reciting lines, and not acting; not surprising, given the actor’s admission that “we didn’t know what was going on even during filming.”)

Fine, say the pundits, take the other route: it wasn’t a dream at all. If this were the case, Cobb/Dicaprio’s emotional journey was one of forgiving himself for “planting the idea that the dream world was real” in Mol’s mind.

Think about that last sentence for a moment. Cobb must forgive himself, supposedly, because he thinks he planted the idea in Mol’s head that the dream world may have been real. This is just plain ridiculous. Dreams, by their very nature, feel real, and when ANYONE wakes up from a dream, they have a moment of wondering which is real. The idea of “is this real?” is fundamental to the definition and concept of dreaming, and what separates a dream from a fantasy. So, in essence, we’re either to believe that (a) Mol was so dumb or uninteresting that she never came up with the question “Could my reality be a dream?” or (b) Cobb is so arrogant or stupid that he believes she couldn’t have come up with that notion on her own, and that he in effect poisoned her with it. In either case, the idea that he would be responsible for her coming to the single most basic question of dream-related endeavors is just silly, and negates his emotional journey.

An analogy: suppose that Cobb and Mol went on a roller coaster together. Further suppose that Cobb says to Mol, “roller coasters feel scary.” They ride the coaster, and during the ride, Mol dies of fright. In the world of Inception, Cobb would be traumatized by the guilt of the idea that he had planted the idea “roller coasters feel scary” in her head, and was therefore responsible for her death. And that’s where Inception falls apart: roller coasters ARE scary. Dreams FEEL real. Any adult would have asked the question, “How do I know which is real?”, and that would be normal. Why would he beat himself up for giving her an idea that only an idiot would not have come up with on their own?

In either case, the ending of Inception in no way encourages reinterpretation of the film; you either believe that nothing in the movie actually happened, or you believe that Cobb felt responsible for placing the most basic of ideas in Mol’s head. Both paths of thought lead nowhere, which is to say, leave any critical viewer wondering why they spent money and time on this poor attempt at intellectual cinema in the first place.

And, finally, a bonus reason why Nolan should be abandoned: he has yet to feature any black or hispanic actors. There is only one actor in Inception of color, an Indian gentleman, who not surprisingly speaks with a British accent. Maybe Nolan has a dream where the whole world is white (certainly the last half hour of the movie uses a whites-only color palette), but in this case, that only makes a movie about the simplest of ideas monochromatic.

Worst of all, Inception is a metaphor for itself: it has planted the idea in the American psyche, “This is what you should accept as clever film-making. This is what counts as an intellectual movie.” This idea-virus has clearly already started to spread. Here’s hoping you wake up from that nightmare.

• Exchanged my janky DroidX for a new one. Better, but Verizon ain't great in the hood. Can you hear me now? Nope, I can't. #
• Just woke up from the nightmare that was "inception". I've seen less predictable episodes of Scooby Doo. #

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• @VZWOffers – The system update made my Droid X camera go black. No photos, no video. Everything else works. What gives? Help!! #

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After a week with Android, I’ve found that version 2.1 of the software more than meets my mobile phone needs. Here’s a quick list of what I’ve found to be Android essentials:

Did I miss any essentials? Let me know in the comments.

• Consumer Reports "can't recommend iPhone 4" – http://tinyurl.com/3576et2 #
• Steve Jobs to Consumer Reports readers: "You're holding the magazine wrong." #
• If you have to lead with "Nobody's Perfect," you've already failed. #

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• True or False: iPhone OS 4 is to Android what Windows Media Center is to Sage TV. #

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There are two types of online music listeners: those who appreciate suggestion-based services, and those who want to pick what they listen to. For people in the former category, destinations like Last.FM and Pandora are great; they’ll introduce you to artists you enjoy but haven’t heard of before. For those of us in the latter category, there’s SubSonic and GrooveShark.

SubSonic is an app that runs on your home computer and provides web-based access to your music collection from any browser. I’m hoping to provide a more in-depth review later, but suffice it to say that SubSonic is the best at what it does: catalogs your home music and lets you stream it from any browser. SubSonic has mobile app versions available for the iPhone and Android platforms, so users are able to access their personal collections from wherever they are.

GrooveShark, on the other hand, is an on-demand music streamer that provides access to arguably one of the largest collections of music online available today. It is a music lover’s bliss: ask it for any song, any artist, it plays.

But here’s the rub: GrooveShark is supported on the Android platform, and not on the iPhone. Because of a perceived threat to the iTunes revenue stream, GrooveShark has not been approved for use on the iPhone (unless jailbroken).

While GrooveShark support may not be a make-or-break feature for a mobile OS, it is still remarkable that Apple has chosen to add this to the iPhone’s growing list of “can’ts”.

What other limitations are you running into on the iPhone? Share in the comments below.