Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

The Guardian gave it two stars and called it a dud. It wasn't Peter Bradshaw though, who has mostly good opinions imo, in spite of the fact that he tells the plot too much. I almost always agree with him. Catherine Shoard is good as well, so is Benjamin Lee. Obv it would be good to hear Gilbert Adair's take but he's deed. Thankfully we don't have to hear Phillip French telling us the plot in great detail since he is also deed.

I'm not glad that Phillip French is deed, obv, but I am glad to not hear any opinion of his.

Badshaw gave 5 stars to Dunkirk, need i say any more?

he has given 4/5 stars to so much garbage now his cred is shot. And he quoted his generosity to such "auteurs" as gaspar noo! and aranwrongsky as evidence of him supporting challenging avant-garde cinema, he's a clueless fucking charlie!

Dunkirk was the only Nolan movie I've kind of liked, but only after seeing it a second time and watching it with a friend who was really into it

it's the biggest load of brit propaganda bollox since the royal edition of it's a knockout!

or since the rona spreading street parties of middle-class suburbs of leafy ingerland

:)

and it fails on basic level of not representing the scale of what actually happened at Dunkirk, it's absolute cack on every level.

I liked Aronofsky's earliest films, Pi and Requiem for a Dream. I hated Black Swan but was fascinated by mother! and still not sure what to think about it

aronofsky is way more entertainingly neurotic than nolan

I loved Pi at the time as well, but probably needed my head looking at!

Dunkirk was definitely only 3.5/5 not 5/5.

not sure why but seeing mother! reminded me of the two Emir Kusturica films I watched a while ago

a surreal story as parable, told with an insouciance that was kind of captivating

at least aranofsky embraces his wrongness and goes with it I suppose, whatever you think about him, it isn't as stultifyingly tedious and sterile as everything with the nolan touch.

There are 5-6 minutes of Joe Wright's Atonement adaptation at Dunkirk that are better, cinematically, than Nolan's but I wonder if Nolan's is more true. Both films are pretty good as films.

I honestly don't give a shit about either film, so I don't know why I'm even talking about it. Rewind and forget.

yeah well that does capture the scale of the event and it utilises cgi to do it, but it still looks better than 200 ppl on a beach with Branagh and some cunt pissing about with a remote control spitfire.

it isn't much cop either tbf

but at least it has some heated saucy dialogue that you soon forget as the movie bores you death!

will watch Tenet at home when it's convenient

don't remember Atonement the movie although I loved the book.

Dunkirk had no interesting dialogue. I can’t defend it but at least it was more appealing than the The Dark Knight. I couldn't get through that film, I tried twice. The first time after an hour or so I left the theater and waited outside on the curb until the friends I was watching it with had finished it. I don't ever remember feeling that way about another film.

Inception was almost as bad, I watched it in a theater with a friend who I really like and respect. I didn't want to make a scene but had to grit my teeth through the whole thing until the end

that Rick and Morty ep that takes the piss is hilarious. Inception is probably the worst movie I have seen in my entire lifetime.

and I say this as someone who once took my kid to an autism friendly showing of John Carter at 10 am on some cursed Sunday

xpost lucky you!

3/5 for Dunkirk feels about right. The kid wandering round the beaches while ordered lines of tommies waited to get bombed to shit was pretty good in a cut-rate Come And See sort of way, tho the idea of war as purgatory was kinda undercut by the rest of the movie being about how heroism is possible in war. I instinctively reject that premise which is why the movie as whole didn't work on me, but even so its my 2nd favourite Nolan after Interstellar, which is a terrific dumb-2001 let down by a clunky deus ex machina of an ending.

The only kinds of heroism possible in war are the same kinds possible without a war. A war is just the irrelevant envelope in which the heroism is contained.

— Aimless Marley

Free yourself from Tenet slavery.

Christopher Nolan is that rare beast: an art house auteur making intellectually ambitious blockbuster movies that can leave your pulse racing and your head spinning.

translation: this turkey is like a $200m Shane Carruth movie with added car crashes and is boring as fuck but I'm contractually obliged not to say that.

Just realized this is his 11th feature, and I've seen all but the first 1 and last 1, and 1 1 is the first row of Pascal's triangle (after the 0th). Or, if you line up his movies along the 10th row, this is the only point in his career at which the Batman movies will be symmetrically distributed. And BATMAN backwards is TENET. Makes you think.

Batman Tenet
https://www.amazon.in/images/I/81v9zP%2Bj8tL.jpg

That kid will also one day play Batman.

Origin story right there. "Batman Emerges."

Overlong, noisy, full of poe-faced delivery of portentous dialogue, needlessly convoluted plot threads, unearned sense of gravitas that verges on the unintentionally hilarious and a script that isn't even vaguely as clever as it seems to think it is

this review quote sounds like a very generous summary of all his movies to me.

I liked Jessica Kiang's review in the NYT:

"But Nolan is, by several exploding football fields, the foremost auteur of the “intellectacle,” which combines popcorn-dropping visual ingenuity with all the sedate satisfactions of a medium-grade Sudoku. Within the context of this self-created brand of brainiac entertainment, “Tenet” meets all expectations, except the expectation that it will exceed them. Forgive the circularity of this argument: it’s a side effect of watching the defiantly circular “Tenet.”"

Meeting all expectations but not exceeding them is just a fancy way of saying ... fine.

just as nolan movies are fancy ways of saying jack shit, yes.

"medium-grade Sudoku" more like shoddy [sic] cackuro for beginners or pound shop word-search books with everything already filled in for you.

I remember Memento as being genuinely, darkly funny. Everything else he's done is dreary po-faced nonsense.

I remember Memento as being genuinely, darkly funny.

How old were you when you saw it?

Origin story right there. "Batman Emerges."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batkid_Begins

wikipedia has a page titled "Cinematic style of Christopher Nolan"

it should be blank imo

It feels as if people's capacity for enjoying what is essentially eye-rollingly silly bollocks has pretty much evaporated in the Covid era.

I think it was more Guy Pearce's performance than the script, tbf.

I rewatched Memento in lockdown and enjoyed it; haven't seen anything else of his bar two of the Batmen, which were terrible.

I liked The Prestige and would be willing to risk re-watching it. The Batman movies were shit because, well, they're Batman movies and I'm no longer 14.

you know what else I liked when I was 14? Stage magic

It feels as if people's capacity for enjoying what is essentially eye-rollingly silly bollocks has pretty much evaporated in the Covid era.

I think actually people probably want more eye-rollingly silly bollocks. What people don't want, speaking for people here, is stuff that is so po-faced and serious that the only reaction is to treat it as eye-rollingly silly bollocks. But yeah, in the best of times there are so, so few comedies worth a shit, let alone actually funny, and now more than ever ...