Have now seen INCEPTION twice. Remaining questions:

- why does the "kick" work in both directions? this doesn't make sense to me

- why doesn't the gravity-less-ness in the hotel level, also affect the snow/hospital level??

- how did Cobb get from the "limbo" in which Fischer was on the balcony (and Ariadne had just shot Mal) to the scene immediately following, in which Cobb washes up on the "shore of [whose?] subconscious" and is taken in to Old Saito? I know Mal had stabbed him - presumably 'fatally' - but I thought Saito was on that *same* level and he was going to go look for him (physically, I thought)?

- what is the relationship between that latter scene, and the seemingly similar opening scene? At first it seems that we have come full circle - that the opening scene was the 'present' and all of the intervening action was a flashback - but the conversation is slightly different - Saito and Cobb take turns this time with the repeated speech about "leap of faith", "full of regret", "waiting to die alone" - and of course it ends differently. I haven't figured it out yet but I think we're being toyed with - we're having the paradoxical loop staircase thing being done to us: we expect the common "present, flashback, present, and then continue forward" structure, but it ends up dumping us out in a different way than we expect (a la the abrupt termination of the staircase that we saw a few times).
-- ETA Wait! I think I've got it. The opening scene is a dream, NOT a limbo, and it is one level down from the scene that immediately follows, when Saito is young - and he has not become young 'again'; rather we have been brought back up one level to the 'present' of the main storyline (if you can call it that). - Because it's one level down, time stretched out. -- Then, when the seemingly same scene occurs again, it's actually not the same and it's NOT 'again' - it's now 'later' (in the main 'storyline') - and this time it is limbo into which both Cobb (having been stabbed by Mal) and Saito (having EARLIER died in the snow/hospital level) have entered. Having had this conversation once before, Cobb remembers Saito's lines the from the 'first time' and so can 'share' those lines with him.

- Arthur said "limbo" was RAW, unconstructed dream space...but it looked pretty constructed to me in each iteration that I assumed (maybe incorrectly) to be a limbo (the level just below the snow/hospital, and the 'second' Old Saito scene)?? The "Old Saito" scenes' decor was quite like that of the early scene in which Saito is young, he's having a dinner party, and Arthur & Cobb are ostensibly selling him their security services - can't remember if it was identical- I think maybe the walls were less ornate? Mal indicated that that dream (with young Saito) looked like Arthur's style. So are both of the "Old Saito" scenes *somehow* taking place in Arthur dreams? I just 'feel' that the answer is no, but haven't thought through why... maybe they're just using his construction for convenience / since it already exists?

- I kept forgetting to watch for when Cobb is wearing his ring vs. not. What is its significance?

- What's with the shifting ages of the kids? - whether or not the final scene is 'reality', I can accept that the kids would be older than when Cobb last saw them. HOWEVER, in the early scene when he's on the phone with them, he repeatedly doesn't know which kid he's talking to, and their voices keep changing. Philippa in particular sounds noticeably older later in the conversation. What is going on with that? is Cobb *aware* of the difference?- he seems not to be, and yet is unperturbed by his own repeated confusion, which seems odd.

- I still don't quite get the Mr. Charles stuff at the hotel level... e.g., why and how the subconscious was made to stare angrily at Fischer / Cobb (Charles), and then mollified, then they'd be mad again... guess I should draw a diagram.

I'm also now pretty sure Cobb's totem is unreliable, because it was Mal's and he now could make it do whatever he wanted. (Does this suggest that the entire movie takes place in Mal's dream? Speaking of which:)

I'm now thoroughly convinced that NONE of the action of the movie takes place in reality (even within the context of the movie). Now that I was looking for them, there were a good dozen hints that what appeared to be the 'top', reality level, was in fact (at least) one level down:
-- e.g., in the chase through Mombasa, they make a point of using long-range overhead shots at least twice that I recall, indicating how mazelike the streets are; to say nothing of the NIGHTMARISH narrowing alley the mere thought of which makes me itchy with vicarious atavistic terror; and
-- when Cobb 'wakes up' on the plane just before they land at LAX, *HE DOES NOT UNHOOK FROM THE MACHINE!!* no machine in sight - Ariadne rightly appears to have woken up shortly before Cobb, but she too does not unhook - they make a big deal of hooking into and out of the machine in every other instance;
-- this is the only explanation I can think of, for Fischer's apparent non-recognition of Cobb or the others on the plane or at baggage claim... unlike everyone else who 'really' hooks into a dream - who always remembers the contents of the dream [and that they were dreaming] when they move up in levels. Perhaps he is a projection?)

...and that the entire movie constituted an inception on Cobb (just as a few examples: the intense closeup on Miles in the lecture hall, pleading with Dom, "Come back to reality"; I think the name Browning is a huge hint [one of the most famous poems of all time, by Eliz. Barrett Browning, ends with a line Mal may as well have said to Cobb in her desperate pleas to him, e.g., on the hotel ledge: "if God choose,/I shall but love thee better after death"), and even that this isn't the first try (e.g., on the balcony in Mombasa, Eames' seemingly throwaway comment about having tried inception once before but it didn't take), with Ariadne being the critical new team member who might finally be able to get him out (her name being an enormous honking hint).

Speaking of names: what are we to make of the presumably non-coincidental name of Fischer fils -- Bobby Fischer?

Now not having to pay as strict attention to the plot & levels, I really appreciated how Nolan makes at least 2 very Magritte-y comments that have occurred to me so far - no doubt he intended others:
-- our experience itself, of watching the movie - as we do so, we are already one level down, and it's kind of absurd of us to argue (as he must have known we would) about what is 'real' in the movie. It isn't, of course, at any level, and as we discuss it we are forced to resort to a lot of air-quoting. I also enjoyed how our entry into the movie demonstrates that repeatedly-noted feature of dreams, that at the beginning you don't know how you got there & you don't know wth is going on. We experience this again and again, for quite a few scenes in a row, before we get a grasp on what's happening. VERY true to 'real' dreaming, ha! Nice; and
-- we the viewer, in deciding whether the 'reality' of the movie was 'true' reality OR in fact one level down (and therefore nothing we saw was 'real'), are making a very similar choice to Cobb's shown at the end -- viz., whether Cobb 'really' got back to the US and his 'real' kids, OR has hopelessly confused dream and reality (the ironic opposite of what [he thought] happened with Mal ["You're in reality- stay here" vs "You're in a dream- come up"], and like the people in Yusuf's basement) and has chosen the dream (consciously or otherwise) in order to 'be' with his kids even if it isn't 'real'.