Interstellar: Nolan, McConaughey

i'll happily take a comparison to robin ince! xp

sunshine will forever live in my memory as a cinema experience for creating a super-cool persistence-of-vision trick where a the image of a sudden blast of white light with a silhouette in the centre of the frame lingered on my retinas into the next shot

Is there not a Sunshine thread? no search on Zing

with typical ilx flair, we have What's the best way to discourage people from going to see Danny Boyle's Sunshine?

this came up at drinks tonight and i realized i am still pissed off about that stupid gravity planet

it sucked you in

and brought you down

it felt like it went on forever

this was nice

makes u think

well, we're plowing through movies during the pandemic, so....

maybe the best example of the nolan thing where if you tell me the macro executive summary idea of the movie i'd say yeah, sure, i'm all in. but then i hate almost every individual choice he makes along the way. this movie takes place in 2060something but everyone is driving well-maintained c. 2004 dodge trucks? the only crop is corn but someone is served a regular-ass sandwich at one point?

nolan's arrogance is basically that he thinks he knows how to make some things important while minimizing other things in a way that he thinks the audience will never notice. that's how you make a move that makes it seem like the dylan thomas poem is some sort of undiscovered masterpiece while presenting a future earth that doesn't make any sense at all if you think about it for 30 seconds.

the slab robots were cool. there were some good exterior space shots. the rest of it was nonsense.

My wife calls this film Matthew McConaughey in the Closet.

Nolan definitely coasts a lot on elliptical but not quite fully explored Big Ideas disguised by high concepts or time jumps or that sort of thing at the expense of coherence. At the time I did like this movie, but I haven't seen it since opening weekend. I did (completely coincidentally) watch the first 10 or so minutes of Inception with my daughter last night (it was a punchline in an episode of Community we'd just watched, and she said it was a punchline in The Office, too) and I can tell the po-faced hand waving (and furrowed-brow DiCaprio thinking so hard) is going to be a problem when I try to explain what's going on.

Murph!!!!!

I thought the overbearing music was used to give the dialogue an unearned emotional depth. I think if there was a cut of this movie with no music it would be even clearer how comically bad much of the dialogue really is.

McConaughey is more orange than Trump

orange man sad

okay now this is driving me nuts, there is some big obvious precedent for the 'oh god i am the ghost!' twist and i cannot place it. in the one i'm thinking of it's more of a horror moment, guy realizes he was in all these other scenes and he's shouting and no one can hear him, no no no, don't do it... fuck what is this i'm thinking of? i guess it could just be a twilight zone episode or something but i feel like there's a VERY big movie that has this exact same bit and now i just feel like an idiot for not being able to name it.

I watched Interstellar last night and had the exact same reaction!
I also came up with Cypher but that's not quite the same. Maybe Timecrimes

Anyway I actually enjoyed this loads, despite the frustrating bits and dumb things. I think mainly because of the robots.
Is there any Nolan film that doesn't basically have the theme "Ahh, but you did it to yourself"?

"Ahh, but you did it to yourself"? is how you feel if you pay for a ticket to one of his movies

I watched this on a plane recently and honestly, what a weird mishmash of a film? I stg I groaned audibly at the ending where it turns out the secret of gravity is love (or some shit). Enjoyed Matt Damon being obviously evil, the whole thing is an occasionally interesting mess and visually stunning ofc but it did kill three hours

And yes. Everyone living on the upside down planet at the end is a load of shit

okay now this is driving me nuts, there is some big obvious precedent for the 'oh god i am the ghost!' twist and i cannot place it. in the one i'm thinking of it's more of a horror moment, guy realizes he was in all these other scenes and he's shouting and no one can hear him, no no no, don't do it... fuck what is this i'm thinking of? i guess it could just be a twilight zone episode or something but i feel like there's a VERY big movie that has this exact same bit and now i just feel like an idiot for not being able to name it.

I watched Interstellar last night and had the exact same reaction!
I also came up with Cypher but that's not quite the same. Maybe Timecrimes

Triangle

This is exactly the plot of The Others tbh

Although why I'm putting spoiler tags in for a 20 year old film I don't know.

I watched Voices today and it has this as the plot twist at the end too except it's the wife who has been seeing the ghosts all the way through, and David Hemmings is adamant it's her mental state (having had EST and attempting suicide after the death of their son). Although it's him that realises they're dead first.

Very much a TV vibe in the way it's shot too.

plus, if it really was 7 years for every hour, the data would effectively only be a couple hours old at that point. you'd think they would know that and maybe not risk everything to save it

classic Fred B post:

Frederik B
Posted: 2 December 2014 at 22:32:16

I was surprised by how much I liked this, and it reminded me why I like The Prestige and The Dark Knight and The Following so much. I really like Nolan, and I wish all mainstream directors were like him.

lol wins

scientist: now think. what's a circle in three dimensions?
engineer: (thinks for a few seconds) ...a sphere!

i had to reread the plot on Wikipedia to sort this out, but: Hathaway and McConaughey suffered all the same time dilations. the first big one is when they both go to the stupid water planet, after which the daughter is adult Jessica Chastain. the second one happens I THINK because they slingshot around the black hole, which brings daughter up to death's door.

at this point McC heads into the black hole and Hathaway heads for her old flame's planet. he spends a while transmitting messages back in time to Chastain-Daughter, enabling her to start shipping humanity off Earth en masse. they spend decades building space stations before reaching the point in time where McC and Hathaway are. McC then teleports himself in space (not time) to be picked up by the space station folks, have an underwhelming chitchat with dying daughter, and then head out to meet Hathaway, who has just been setting up shop. i'm not sure why the space station people haven't sent any other missions through the wormhole and beaten her there, but that's the gist of it, I THINK.

I'm out of touch. Is Christopher Nolan "Nolan" or "Christopher Nolan" nowadays? During his heyday I lost touch with pop culture so I've always thought of him as Christopher Nolan, director of Memento and The Prestige. But then he was Nolan, genius director of The Dark Knight and Interstellar. And then he did Dunkirk and we weren't supposed to like him any more.

Looking back at his filmography I have the impression that he was Nolan from 2008-2015 or so, but Christopher Nolan outside that period. He wasn't dominant enough beforehand to be Nolan and now he's something of a fallen star. Like Peter Bogdanovich but with a shallower drop-off.

Is Nolan Nolan or not Nolan? Is there a consensus?

okay, yeah. i thought that the big time zoom between chastain-murph and deathbed-murph was because of big mac going through the black hole but you must be right.

dr c i loved reading your thoughts on the deranged, rushed logic of which planets they looked at first, the lack of any preparation or even curiosity about them before just careening recklessly into their surfaces. weird behaviour from people trained to save the human race.

xpost: idk

This film lost me at solar powered jet drones flying for decades or whatever it was.

there were so many lines like this:

GETTY
They just pack up and leave. What are they hoping to find?

MURPH
Survival.

I just had to google what topher grace’s name was in this, obviously I had no idea.

aww glad to have spread some joy through my annoyance. in hindsight the visuals of this movie really were something, but all the plot developments were like the traps in Home Alone, with Nolan as the kid: he's set them up so those burglars are just gonna have to be stupid enough to walk into all of them.

Only saw this movie once, in the theater. It was gorgeous but kinda ridiculous in a way that Nolan movies typically aren’t quite. Heck, I’ve seen Tenet more than this - somehow I have more fun with that movie.