The digital deal of the day is over at Amazon today is Inception, which is available for rental for only $.99.

This deal is valid only for today, Saturday, January 1, 2011, until midnight PST. Once you activate the rental through Amazon’s Video On Demand service, you’ll have access to the movie for 48 hours. If you’re interested in purchasing the digital version, the cost is $9.99.

Also, if you’d like to own a physical copy of the movie, the Blu-ray Combo Pack is on sale for $18.99 while the DVD price has been dropped to $9.99.

Both the DVD and Blu-ray editions of Inception are part of Amazon’s “Buy This DVD and Watch it Instantly” program. That means with the purchase of either version, you will be able to watch the movie instantly through Amazon’s Video On Demand (see more details about this below). Basically, it’s like getting a free digital rental while you wait for your physical copy to arrive.

Inception
Blu-ray Combo Pack | DVD
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Paige, Marion Cotillard, Michael Cain, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe
Warner Bros Home Entertainment
Release date: December 7, 2010

American Beauty had a tagline that instructed us to “look closer.” Apply this instruction to Inception and see what lurks underneath the myriad of descriptions explaining what inception and extraction actually are. Adhering to a more surgical approach to Christopher Nolan‘s film we will be granted what truly drives the movie. Looking closer we are no longer misconstrued by the esoteric explanations of dreams, but are firmly grooved along a rail that is undeviating in its approach of getting to the heart of the film: which is the wounded souls of two men who inhabit an unrelenting atmosphere of ceaseless action.

The true meaning of this film isn’t about penetrating through multiple layers of dreams, nor is it about an espionage heist. Inception, as psychologically brilliant as it is, is even more potent when it reveals that it has a heart; a heart so beaten down to a wounded mass that it is thriving to be resuscitated. It is this kind of heart that takes the film past the esoteric and psychological realms of excessive commotion and into the heights of the masses who can empathize with what it is like to have a heart that feels it cannot be mended. Here is Nolan channeling a universal theme of extreme grief. We are swimming in a pool of grief the entire span of the film (the brooding soundtrack is evidence). Hearts want to mend the past, dissipate the regret pervading its existence and get revenge on things eating away at it. Nolan created a character that had intact these same motivations in his hallmark film Memento. That film and Inception reveal men disconcerted with their current way of living, motivated by past events and regrets that have the potential to drive them mad.

Inception, this summer’s “mind-blowing” blockbuster film, will be released on Blu-ray, DVD, and On Demand through Warner Home Video on December 7, 2010.

The Blu-ray Combo Pack (Blu-ray disc, DVD, and Digital Copy) will contain will over 90 minutes of bonus material featuring writer/director Christopher Nolan and star Leonardo DiCaprio, and have a suggested retail price of $35.99. The widescreen DVD will apparently has “mind-bending featurettes” and has a suggested retail price of $29.99.

You can pre-order both formats right now at Amazon and lock in their discounted price: Blu-ray Combo Pack ($24.99) or DVD ($20.49).

Warner Bros hasn’t released the full list of bonus content at this time, but their solicitation beckons, “Go inside the dream with extraction mode,” which I’m guessing is some sort of Blu-ray-only feature that allows you to press a button during playback that will give you facts and other details, perhaps in a picture-in-picture format. Maybe, just maybe, some of our unanswered questions regarding the film will be answered with this feature!

The trades are reporting that Inception and Batman Begins star Cillian Murphy is in the final stages of negotiation to take on a role in New Regency and 20th Century Fox’s new science fiction drama, I’m.mortal.

Murphy will be joining Alpha Dog co-stars Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake (also working out an agreement) on the title. The movie is set in a future where we’ve figured out how to combat aging and live forever, but to control the world from a suffocating over-population crisis, time has been turned into currency. This allows the rich to live as long as they want to, and the poor to figure out a way to keep living or die off trying.

Inception – **1/2
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine
Release date: July 16, 2010

A thief of dreams is one who drowns out the purities of cinema, cashing in on the big budget extravaganzas and deterring from the simplicity of storytelling in favor of an extremely intellectual web of narrative that proves to be in the long run too tedious, too sophisticated, and too savvy for its own good. Ideas are extrapolated from the likes of Freud and Jung, then are mixed with cinematic concepts spanning from 2001: A Space Odyssey, to BladeRunner and to The Matrix. All of this and more occurs in Inception, a refreshing film that seems to have forgotten how a great cinematic tale can be told with such simplicity.

What is meant to confound the mind in a stimulating and energetic manner turns into a rather laborious process that gives us a contemptuous attitude towards a film that dares the impossible: it perceives colossal dreams and attempts to make them possible (key word there being “˜attempt’). An exuberant imagination, even an overwhelming fury of inventive images, is displayed before us with hopes of redefining not only the sci-fi genre, but the entire panorama of cinema. The elaborate logistical demands of director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan‘s film is a cause for celebration only because he is audacious enough to go dream them up and apply them to his film. He conjures up an inconceivable idea that obliterates the familiar landmarks of cinema and troubles the mind profoundly, but in a way that is detrimental to his film.