Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

Saw this last Sunday. Best theater in Baltimore miraculously reopened despite the rest of the city remaining closed (they're right on the city/county line, with multiplexes opening up a mile away, so The Senator was allowed to open).

800 cap theater normally, now 25 max.

Felt totally safe and comfortable, wore mask whole time, main theater is gigantic

Movie was SOO fucking stupid but it was big and loud and that was enough for me rn. Felt great to be back in a theater

cf.

Sound mix is fine—it’s the movie that’s incoherent! hey now pic.twitter.com/a6scjx2ZAS

— Nicky Smith (@nickyotissmith) September 6, 2020

were concessions being sold flappy?

concessions

You mean besides paying money to see a dumb movie in the middle of a pandemic?

they were showing this in IMAX last night for $10 and i still couldn't get myself to go

did you think the last hour of Interstellar was on par with Citizen Kane? if so, this flick is for u

i was hoping for a cross between casino royale (2006) and matrix reloaded

is that too much to ask

both of those movies are impotent tbr

uh ... ok

joeks

phew!

that’s a good one for the post / username thread 8======D

Rip: They were, just popcorn and soda and candy. They had every other row blocked off and people separated themselves well. Masks required "unless eating in seat." Super ad-hoc. I went with my mom (she was really dying to go back to the movies, I could've waited but glad I didn't), and we told each other if the situation looked really dire--people misbehaving, coughing, huge crowds--we'd turn around. It was fine. Everyone was on their best behavior and again, this place seats 800 people normally.

Josh: I'm sure you've made equally "dangerous" concessions in the last 6 months. I love my mom.

and I would've gone to sit with her in the Senator if they played two hours of unexposed film

hey hey hey sit down and take yr COVID shaming like a man >:-(

I was just making a concession joke and making fun of the movie. No offense intended.

None taken 😘 Sorry for jumping to concessions [ ;) ]

https://deadline.com/2020/09/tenet-broken-hearts-gallery-warner-bros-sony-weekend-box-office-1234575805

In case the link doesn't work, suspicions are the movie only made 12 million last weekend.

lol hope he goes bust!

The article basically says, if not literally, chin up, Warner Brothers, you are going to lose money on this, but you will recoup on something else in the future. Also observes that by obscuring and misleading to make the box office look bigger, but still low, then the big drop from weekend one to weekend two will look even worse, rather than just holding steady at a low number.

What does the box office even mean during COVID?

I literally fell asleep in this movie, early in the third act.

But my review from what I did see is: He introduces a really intriguing idea concerning time travel, with an element, or twist, that you may have never considered, and you're thinking 'okay, this could be fun,' and then proceeds to make the worst and most boring movie possible around that idea.

DAMN

lol

that's the Nolan approach in a nutshell yeah

haha I was laughing at the $12mil box office, but believe me Rip is OTMFM.... movie starts out fairly strong--I like the symphony sequence a lot, and it's cool to be just plunged into the thing--but yeah, as Rip said, it just goes NOWHERE.

This won't hurt Nolan's career tho, in a way I think the pandemic saved him, the box office for this will always have an asterisk next to it. I think if this movie came out in 2019 for example, he would've been eaten alive. his New Jersey maybe? Who knows. it would've made a ton of money obviously but this thing is not fucking Inception, which was very good! or Interstellar, also very good! it's just fucking BORING LOOKING and GOES NOWHERE!!!

Saved by the virus the man is!!

"but this thing is not fucking Inception, which was very good! or Interstellar, also very good!"

it's worse than that he's dead jim!

My 2014 comment about Interstellar:

in the future, space travelers will put their kids into stasis and then revive them when they return, so they won't miss out on attending all their ball games. kids will put their pets into stasis and revive them months later, just as a joke to confuse them. housewives will put leftovers into stasis instead of a refrigerator. laid off workers will be put in stasis to save on unemployment benefits. the possibilities are endless!

rip van wanko otm

Interstellar may not have made sense, but I thought it looked AWESOME with many striking and memorable images (the fucking bookcase! the dust on the desks...), and I got swept up in it. and I watched it at home! Inception with a packed summertime crowd was so much fun. I haven't seen it since then but those were two really fun action movies. I don't care if he's a dilettante! Brits get SO worked up over Nolan.

I've got to admit, I do like the idea of event movies that aren't just piggybacking on existing properties. And honestly even when Nolan *did* do that with the Batman movies he did it in such a way that made just as much of a cultural impact as Tim Burton's did, if not bigger. So if I'm being honest, I'd rather have a bunch of pretentious shell game twaddle that aims big and falls short than not. I mean, yeah, I'd still rather have a *good* movie first and foremost, but Nolan's not the only dude letting anyone down on that front.

I'm sympathetic to the new editor of Sight and Sound trying to grow - or even retain - a readership, but this cover is the absolute pits. Saviour of cinema, even with a question mark, fuck off.

https://i1.wp.com/thumbs2.imgbox.com/64/89/Vj6T0KQv_t.jpg?ssl=1

I mean, only if he literally means keeper of 70 mm or whatever.

just a very serious artist in a suit. lol he looks like such a prick! And there was me thinking S&S had a rep to protect, desperate stuff.

you know, the first 45 minutes of this where we had fun buddy comedy with (FINALLY) a non-white charimastic Bond and R Patz doing his usual good job were quite good fun. then you add on 100 more minutes of a very very bad sci-fi film which basically does the same thing as Bill & Ted or Red Dwarfs' Backwards minus all the joy, comedy and interest that this concept should provoke, and i just wanted to die. At one point i did think "hmmm am i just not clever enough to keep working this out" - and then i decided that no, it just wasn't WORTH me giving a shit to try to decipher. Intersteller had it's problems but it at least had enough going on in various ways to make me keep wanting to watch. this is just a total artistic bomb and it doesn't deserve having a worldwide pandemic as an excuse for it's shitty box office. also, Kenny Branagh seems to take his bad guy inspiration and accent from classic 90s vhs board game Atmosfear's Gatekeeper:

https://youtu.be/2lJYFLvjkuo?t=25

feel bad for Chadwick and R Patz because no amount of their heavy lifting can make this dull weight of shite worth watching

John David Washington

I agree it starts out strong, I think it all goes downhill not after but during the plane crash. It's astonishing he could make something so inherently exciting so fucking boring looking.

just as much of a cultural impact as Tim Burton's did, if not bigger.

damning with faint praise

Much bigger

Saw a good comment:

And the hubris of their release. The local theater here before Tenet was playing older films for $5 in about 50% of it’s houses to fill the void of content. All but Black Panther are gone now. Replaced by 9 screens of Tenet. NINE. I saw it at an early access screening and there were less than 10 people. What in god’s name made them think that at ONE single theater over 1,000 people were going to simultaneously show up to watch Christopher Nolan for over a week three times a day.

Yeah it's nuts. Makes it even more incredible that the movie only made $12mil Labor Day weekend.

Luckily it only cost eight trillion dollars.

that did piss me off actually. cos i sure as hell ain't sitting through Tenet again, and now not much else playing.

btw basically 30 of the last 60 minutes basically is the same as the ending of Interstellar, where the unseen characters doing things on screen in the present are later revealed to be the main characters visiting from the future

Makes it even more incredible that the movie only made $12mil Labor Day weekend.

― flappy bird, Monday, September 14, 2020 12:27 PM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

How much of that was IMAX upcharges?

But yes, Tenet is in the vein of Interstellar and Memento--in retrospect you can fit the individual parts back into a linear narrative, but the whole doesn't live up to the effort. And if you subtract the "reverse entropy" element you're left with a so-so espionage film. The only element I enjoyed was the crashing of a cargo plane into the freeport as part of the raid. (What's Norwegian for "I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue"?)

i really liked this, but i like p much all nolan movies and don't relate to the comments on the ilx threads. the plot was a little too complicated, i wish he'd dumbed it down a bit more or had one more scene of exposition. the explanation for the turnstile machine is really quick for how important it is

john david washington is amazing

this movie was not good! twilight was kinda ok but branagh's evil russian was fucking horrible. also looked like they ran out of money by the big battle scene at the end, serious kirk vs the gorn desert landscape vibes

otm. never had any urge to check this out again.

lol, this was garbage! i just wanted a dumb enjoyable sci-fi movie and what i got was a bloviated, muddy and self-important time travel movie that's too cool to admit it's a time travel movie with a plot for that infinitesimal audience that finds bond films too pedestrian and direct. all the relationships are pointless, the sound design and mix is as terrible as you've heard it was (watching with subtitles made the story clear, but no less garbled and silly). the punchline is THE CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE and the moral is we should stop global warming or else the future will send gold to russian gangsters. the much ballyhooed visual fx are, by and large, pedestrian and - eventually - boring through repetition. complete waste of time, energy and resources. Recommended if you're the kind of person who likes to rewatch fight sequences that are reshot backwards to see how they mesh up with their prior iteration, otherwise skip this shit and wait for Synchronic which looks about twenty times better.

i am at a complete loss why i am supposed to care about the tall white lady or her kid; she's utterly horrible throughout and it's a safe bet the kid is gonna grow up to play polo with barron trump