A Critic's Meta-Review: 4/5
Who needs Leonardo DiCaprio, man? I mean seriously, I would like you to actually try and convince me that Inception was a good movie. Try - come on, try! Give it your best shot. I’m all ears. Okay, maybe not all ears. I do have some other body parts, too. I should be shot for these jokes. Seriously. Please shoot me.
In all fairness, I have been told that I do have a particularly oversized set of ears. In this respect, I am somewhat redolent of a former U.S. president by the name of Barack Hussein Obama. Some other things we share in common are a mother from the great state of Kansas (as opposed to Oklahoma, which is just OK [and also where my dad is from, but that story is bound to take up far too much time to tell - after all, I have a cat to feed]) and a love for the game of basketball - a game which was, interestingly, invented by a Canadian. Pretty cool, eh?
Anyhoo, I personally think Inception is vastly overrated; as a matter of fact, I shall emphatically aver that anyone who ever tells you that they enjoyed that movie and totally understood it is just putting you on so you might glean the impression that they are in possession of a level of intelligence which you are unable to obtain, you simpleton, you daft duck. And no, that was not a Looney Tunes reference; but, alas, how would you know? You are not a man of culture, as I am.
That’s what people who really dig that movie sound like to me. Anyway, enough ragging on the flick - let’s get to this here poem. I think that if more people read this poem, and less people watched that god-awful movie, we would all collectively be able to have much more interesting conversations about the concept of a dream within a dream. Then, perhaps, people would stop throwing “-ception” behind every example of a “something within a something” and we could talk like civilized adults. Learned folk.
Having said all of that, I think this poem might even be too overly ambitious for the message it is trying to get across. Maybe I’m just a sucker for some simplicity - I don’t know - but I much prefer this concise version, which gets the gist across just as well (if not more effectively):
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream
