Since the movie is currently still fresh in mind, here are my stray thoughts about Inception:

I liked the movie while i was watching it, for sure. The more I thought about it after leaving the theatre - and I mean, immediately after leaving while walking to the car - it started to disintegrate. Which felt properly ironic, given that this is how remembering dreams after waking often feels to me as well - the logic and the intensity and the importance of the dream almost immediately seem to fade until all you're left with is a few stray images or trace emotions. I had a professor in college who had a quote on her door from a theatre artist who said, and I paraphrase severely here, theatre is an immensely ephemeral experience, and the best we can hope to remember about our favorite theatre experiences is the vivid flash that they create in our memories, a flash of emotion, maybe if we're lucky one or two crystal clear images that burn themselves in - we may not even remember the narrative circumstances that generated those emotions, but we'll see some image from the play in our mind's eye, if we're lucky, if the play was that good. And that's like dreams - I have dreams from childhood that I can remember in that fashion - and that's how I am already starting to think about Inception.

That said, I thought Inception was pretty stupid in a lot of ways. Morose pacing, inconsistent characterizations, laughable exposition, Leonardo DiCaprio is a golem made of expensive moldable clay not an actor, etc. But who cares about that. I continue to describe the movie as "very flawed but very enjoyable" and I think I'll stick with that.