Some Notes on Inception

• My overall reaction was slightly more positive than negative -- the movie is fairly entertaining as it goes by -- but I have major issues, too. What prevents Inception from being a classic pop thriller is overload. Going down three dream layers is probably too much, but going down four is ridiculous. From the moment the bus goes off the bridge in the first dream layer to the moment when it hits the water is an hour of screen time; that's simply too long, and certainly not justified by the material. Ultimately Inception is a rather wearying experience, and therefore not a film I'll be that likely to re-visit.
• The rules of the dream explorations are very confusing, and the dreamscapes themselves are often far too stable. I have to agree with a friend who said that he doesn't dream in action sequences.
• Dreams on film are really hard to do. Jan Svankmajer is possibly the best at this, and it is significant that most of his films are shorts.
• The cast of Inception is terrific top to bottom, without a single weak link; that alone makes the film enjoyable much of the way. I especially appreciated Joseph Gordon-Levitt's deadpan; if anyone wants to make a Buster Keaton biopic, here's your man.
• Marion Cotillard gives the single best performance; as David Denby points out in his New Yorker review, her scenes are the only ones with real emotional weight, and that comes out of her acting, not out of the humdrum lines Nolan wrote for her. Although I wasn't that crazy about La Vie en Rose as a whole (Nolan's use of Piaf in Inception is a witty touch), Cotillard completely deserves her international fame and awards. She's right up there with Kate Winslet and Cate Blanchett as one of our finest contemporary actresses. 
• I honestly am having a hard time thinking of any other film that is so thoroughly a tissue of influences. I felt the presence of The Shining (the hotel scenes), Michael Mann's The Keep (the histrionic use of music), On Her Majesty's Secret Service (the ski sequence), Blade Runner (the ambiguous open ending), John Sayles's Limbo (ditto), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (scrambled temporality and overall mood), Zabriskie Point (the exploding streets of France), Intolerance (cross-cutting between four different story-lines), etc., etc. Christopher Nolan is a director of the second rank because he is essentially a magpie; he steals bright shiny objects (and he does not then proceed, as Quentin Tarantino does, to make them his own).
• I would categorize surprise endings and open endings and any endings intended to send an electric current through your body as "frisson" endings. Inception has unquestionably got one, but it's a little too obvious to be truly magical; it's laboriously set up, and the crib from the Blade Runner director's cut is glaring. Two of the best frisson endings of all time are in the Tarkovsky science fiction films, Stalker and Solaris. The Coen Brothers' A Serious Man has a wonderful and truly unexpected frisson ending that achieves the level of mystery that Nolan reaches toward rather clumsily in Inception.  
• So: a decent summer blockbuster, far better than most of its kind. But I didn't find it special, and the closing sequence that some especially like is precisely where the film falls apart for me big-time. (When I first typed this, I wrote "clockbuster" rather than "blockbuster"; I think that was Freudian!)
• Denby's review is by far the best I've read, so here is the link: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/07/26/100726crci_cinema_denby