Maybe you guys can straighten me out on some of this.

1) Why do totems continue to spin when you're in a dream world? The point of a totem was to have a guaranteed inconsistency so that you could tell if you were in a dream of someone else's making. They know you carry a little totem, but if the one they re-create in your dream is heavier/lighter than what you know it should be, you'll recognize that you're in a dream. Where does the spinning come in? I don't remember that being explained.

2) I don't understand how the "kicks" work. I mean, I thought I did. The brain wakes you up when it realizes that you're "falling." However, there were some obvious falls that never woke them up. The van they were all in rolled over twice and slammed to a halt against a barrier, yet they never budged. Then it just skidded into a barrier while remaining upright, and that's a kick? Furthermore, how did they "miss" the first kick? And how did Ariadne at the end choose to be "kicked" by dropping off the ledge? I thought the whole point was that they couldn't wake themselves up, and had to rely on the kick to do it automatically. Were they able to force themselves to continue sleeping despite the kick if they wanted to?

3) Was it just me, or were the time scales very messed up? There were a lot of examples, but I'll try to explain with just one. Before the job, they discussed how time is (essentially) slower in the dream than in reality, because of the mind moving faster. This time slowing effect was supposed to compound itself with each new level of the dream. They discussed how long the flight would give them in the dream, and they said that the new chemical compound made the mind move twenty times faster, so they'd have a week at the first level, months at the second level, and ten years or so at the third level. Yet the events that happened while they were "under" clearly didn't take years, months, or even a week to happen, at any level. Maybe that means they just weren't under for long? No that's not right, because when they wake up and are on the plane, the stewardess says they're coming in for a landing, or something like that.

Furthermore (ok, one more quick example) they all go down to limbo at roughly the same time, yet when Cobb finds Sato, Sato is ancient, and Cobb is more or less the same. Cobb went down to limbo before Sato. How did Sato get so old?

Anyway. Those were the three things that bothered me most, I think.