Relatedly: I'd been meaning to mention I finally saw Inception a few weeks ago, months after everyone else did, and I was entirely underwhelmed. The action scenes were dull and overlong (except the hallway one), DiCaprio's put his faith in his acting ability entirely into his frowny forehead and all the secrets he was trying desperately to convince us he was keeping were all obvious from the start.

And I thought the ending was much simpler than people seemed to try to convince themselves of. What's important about the top was not that it stopped spinning but that he stopped watching it --- the top is Mal's totem, not his, his totem has become something different: he know that in a dream he can't see his children's faces. He gives up Mal's idea of reality/unreality and decides, no, this is what reality is. Which is not to say that there is no possibility that he could dream up his children's faces, but that he has accepted the word "reality" to mean this: the world in which I can see my children's faces. He's decided reality means a sort of togetherness, a reconciliation, which is ultimately the same for cilian murphy or watanabe. There will always be the nagging question of whether any world is real (hence the camera cutting away before it could be proven one way or another), but he's decided to hold on to this reconciliation as truth. And as the credits roll we're supposed to take that with us as we wake up from the dream of the movie.

(of course there's no proof that dicaprio hasn't been sleeping for the whole movie. but as there's no proof for or against this, it's just not an interesting theory. Any movie could be a dream, what does that add to our understanding of it?)

(Just as we're supposed to believe in The Usual Suspects, Stephen, that Verbal isn't making up the entire narrative, but only changing names as he sees fit. What we see is an objective recounting of the narrative — If it had been a subjective account then we'd more easily believe what he was trying to get Palminteri to believe, that Gabriel Byrne is Kaiser Soze. No one believed that Gabriel Byrne was Kaiser Soze, it just didn't fit with the story as presented on-screen. Though it might fit with a verbal recounting of it (which was the point). So we see that Soze is just arrogant enough to give a 100% factual recounting of events, only changing small things like the name of his lawyer (just in case), secure in his knowledge that it will be misinterpreted.)