Christopher Nolan’s dream-within-a-dream-within-a-whatever thriller Inception has been hurtling through U.S. moviegoers’ wallets for a couple of weeks now. The film stars an earnest and mournful Leonardo DiCaprio (handsome and a good actor–he’s a dreamboat-within-a-dreamboat!), and is perhaps one of the more poker-faced affairs I’ve seen in the theaters for a long while. But I think even its most hardcore fans can recognize that the film’s melancholic mood and dread-inducing soundtrack are ripe for spoofing, as demonstrated by the four recent parodies explained below.
Mashing up kid-favorite Dora the Explorer with Inception turned out to be a great idea–the movie is a high-flown action film about breaking into the sleeping minds of other people for the sake of corporate espionage, and Dora is a curious little girl who just wants things to make sense.
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Inception. The overdubbing here is a little suspect, but Bill and Ted’s stoner incomprehension dovetails nicely with the pay-attention-because-something-amazing-is-about-to-happen tone of Inception‘s soundtrack, dialogue, and hype. Actually, it’s virtually the same concept as the Dora the Explorer riff. Pretending you’re a bit dim and child-like is, I guess, inherently funny. Sidenote: when set to the Inception theme, Bill’s “Why would we lie to ourselves?” becomes almost touching. (Thanks, The Rumpus.)
I think this man-celebrates-dog joke misses the mark, except for the alteration of Inception‘s title at the end, and the concluding creepy-hilarious shot.
Toy Story 3 plus Inception. We should all be officially disgusted with this joke now. That was, after all, the point of this exercise. It’s worth noting, however, that Leonardo DiCaprio actually looks a little like Toy Story 3‘s Ken doll.
