You Must Be THIS TALL (Mentally) to Go on This Ride

Rating: 10/10 (26 March 2011)

What is it with all the "over the heads of the average movie-goer" movies lately? "Inception," "There Will Be Blood" and "The Hurt Locker" all expanded the envelope of what could be expected from Hollywood. I have to wonder just what this all means. Can the end be near? Is the dream collapsing, leading to plenty of "edgy" entertainment that really requires the audience to be awake and paying attention? Far more "cerebral" than "300" or "Watchmen" this movie makes no effort to explain where it is coming from at all. You really are left on your own. You get it or you don't. What surprises me (a little) is that most of the critics (right now, March 26, 2011) are panning this movie even though it should be a monster hit and make a lot money, and so I expect that the critics will be changing their tune shortly. They tend to do that.
Here's a preview of what the critics will sound like in a few weeks. Here is film that is inspired by Simulationism and by Dada. It has a simple premise, hinted at only in the movie's previews, that "reality is a prison" and "your mind can set you free." No kidding. What's amazing is that this is coming at you with all the Hollywood bells-and-whistles. It's a mind-blowing fugue. An Aztec temple built to the Gods of Unreason. It's a riff on a sonnet by Nietzsche. No amount of explaining will explain it (but somebody has to be silly enough to try) and no amount of convincing will cause a hater to stop hating it.
I know, I know that there is all this "chop socky" stuff and lots of guns and chicks and stuff--and how can this anything "high brow" be buried under a dump-truck load of CGI and girls and stuff that 'splodes?? Well, that's the age we live in. Deal with it. Post a negative review on IMDb. Go on--you know you want to. And if you work up the courage to gather together your own set of weapons, and go on that quest to find the answer to your own mystery--then you will have arrived at home, where you have never been.
Hoo doggies--and thank God Almighty! It's glorious to be alive today and see a film like this!
It makes no attempt what-so-ever to be politically correct and that right there is enough to make it one of the highest-grossing "cult" films of all time. Nobody will want to admit that they like this movie (not at first, anyway) because nobody wants to be labeled a "weirdo." So what can we make of this? It's more "over the top" than Tarantino at his very smarmiest. It's beyond redemption. It's all that and a bottle of tequila. It's perfect.
I think I'll just end this review by providing some guidelines for parents and others. There are no "scantily clad" women in this film (not by the standards of the present day). There are women who are wearing clothing that is "suggestive" but that is hardly "misogyny." I think this movie does deserve an "R" rating but the PG-13 is just Hollywood politics as usual. Don't have a cow over it. The sex in this film is virtually non-existent. The violence is certainly served up by the barrel and it's messed up in a fakey-violent way. But it's violent. But that's all meaningless--this movie is not really for kids, even large ones who still live in Mom's basement. It's for...shoot, I don't know. It's for somebody. Me, I guess.
I loved it. Ten out of ten.