Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

So I haven’t watched much tv, let alone movies, in the last 3 yrs - just haven’t had the attention span - but I watched this on a plane last week and it was really good and even fun?! It’s pretty dry but I didn’t mind that. It was just nice to watch a movie that gives you an idea to think about afterwards. The whole inverse entropy thing was a pretty original take on time travel, regardless of how factual it was.

I watched The Northman right after this, and it was so fucking bad all round. I looked up reviews and couldn’t believe how high people were rating it. So corny.

I watched this recently and enjoyed the angle...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OoLokmqo0A

hmm! i do appreciate the idea that basically the equivalent of a GAMES Magazine elite-level brain-teaser, delivered as an action blockbuster, rather than an action blockbuster that founders on all its brain-teasing attempts.

did disagree with the idea of JDW as a blank slate. i thought he was great, but i definitely felt like this was his *next* huge star turn after BlackKklansman.

Xp that was a good analysis and summed up why I enjoyed the movie so much

Watching that also made me realize I’m a dumb fuck bc until he mentioned it, I didn’t realize JDW was Denzel’s son - the stupidest part is that while I was watching tenet I kept thinking how much he sounded just like Denzel but I never made the connection

This movie’s good as heck and that’s my most horrible opinion from the last couple years

In the last couple of months I've heard a couple of people say this is actually Nolan's best movie. It's making me want to revisit it even though I didn't really care for it too much the one time I saw it. Maybe this is the one movie in his filmography which actually gets better on repeat viewings? (probably not)

It's going to take me about a week to watch it but so far I'm enjoying more than the first time. Subtitles definitely helping.

silby is right, tenet is good now - in the sphere of timey-wimey films that need to be watched at least twice, anyway.

https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/eagle-mountain-california-ghost-town-18096768.php

Finally saw this today at an arthouse theater (had tried to watch it only a plane once and only got a few minutes in). Definitely want to re-watch with subtitles sometime, but enjoyed it a lot -- imagining Nolan pitching this as a James Bond movie.

Spoiler for the first two minutes of the movie: can't believe Nolan had the audacity to open this with a mass shooting at a theater with stadium seating.

*on a plane once

alternatively could be formulated as a clunky joke: can’t believe nolan had the honesty / prophetic power / foreshadowing skill to open this movie with a theater full of sleeping people

i like nolan and this movie tho

I'm gonna watch it tonight for the first time....after the Barbie screening lol

I feel like I might have liked this better if the theatre had closed captioning when I saw it

like what were the backwards people experiencing? what were they trying to do? i don't understand

this is a hilarious and perfect level of not getting it, since the backwards and forwards ppl are the same ppl, and the backward ppl in the second third are mostly just ppl you’ve already seen moving forward. so this implies you don’t understand what forward ppl are doing either!

tbf not understanding what the forward ppl are doing or saying is like 90% of the complaints about this movie

you have to remember it’s a nolan movie tho, so when you remember that the backward ppl in the second half are the forward ppl from first half, you think about what the second third forward ppl are trying to do, and then remember back that the first third forward ppl are reacting to the second third forward people going backward in the first third, and that’s why the backward ppl in the second third are doing what they’re doing, which is important, because then when you see the final third all those ppl going forward are now reacting to the backward ppl in the first half while the backward ppl in that part are doing incomprehensible shit because they’re mostly from the in world future and have foreknowledge of stuff that hasn’t happened yet to anyone, so basically you’re doing inception on your own big brain as an advanced viewer of big brain cinema

there’s LEVELS to nolan do u see which is why just like cremaster movies they’re always in weird big buildings with spiral staircases and odd hallways with weird forms of ingress and egress

xpost
as someone who hasn't seen the movie your last paragraph is the funniest thing I've read all day

what’s funny about restraint, masturbation, big spectacles, masturbation while restrained and a ten hour film cycle about your own testes?

also, i know this is the nolan thread but what’s so funny about mathew barney?

wokka wokka i know but honest to god i assume someone has already done this? the tweets write themselves (gif of the demolition derby in the guggenheim juxtaposed with dark knight returns batman making the joker’s long truck stand weirdly erect like a skyscraper)

Barney IS Nolan but moving backward

(I meant the paragraph that explains the story btw)

haha epic take

the dinosaur?

xpost yes i caught the xpost

xp yes, bjork married barney, who is a dinosaur. pvmic by neanderthal

specifically the reverse momentum was cool but simply incomprehensible to watch

specifically any time nolan hits u with the "but what really matters is _feelings and ppl_ do u see" despite having deployed more excellent casts as walking overplot explainers for a higher proportion of his movies than any director i could name

nb i like nolan movies as things to watch and feel smugly about appreciating the technical efforts and style and cool stuff while criticising the lack of heart and this is an important niche tbf

nolan as darraghfirmation

i probably would rep for memento as a work of actual genius also, i mean im going to go see oppenheimer in 35mm and all that

its vey frustrating that a billion dollar machine cannot see how much better i could make his movies, chris baby if ur reading this call me baby

actually this is bringing in more unrelated BS but there’s a very similar gimmick in gene wolfe’s new sun and subsequent series, a set of characters moving in reverse continuity (vs the narrator / reader). then when the reader starts moving in time the actions of this set of characters take on a different light. this is a really dense set of books though, and it’s pretty confusing!

so maybe: 1) nolan really did want to make a puzzle box, and that’s okay (as opposed to being a titanic masturbator like mathew barney) and 2) nolan would be the only person who could direct a gene wolfe botns movie

i was so so so psyched to read newsun because of the ilx thread on it and i put it down one night and i went to read it the next day and not only could i not findy way back to wherever i left it but not a word of a lie now i couldn't even find out what fucking *book* id been reading

it is confusing and subtle. a lot of the practical effects are really weird. like the shootout in the road when the cars are stopped, there’s windshields shattering in forward and reverse, and in theory you could mentally follow backward to see who’s shooting in what direction, so you can pick apart who’s on what side and who’s going in which direction

but when you watch it in real time it’s very subtle, and you mostly get this sense of unreal weirdness because windows are shattering but everything looks subtly wrong, sort of like an uncanny valley i guess?

time travel so realistic it doesn’t signpost what’s going on (like the way back to the future or marvel might with time travel) so you just end up feeling dislocated and confused.

and then on top of that it just makes the mundane plot (about trying to grab the macguffin from the other guys) harder to follow

the “feelings and ppl” criticism also makes sense to me! although i don’t find feelings and ppl important in movies. i mean, feelings and ppl are important but that’s not really what i watch sci fi films for

so maybe: 1) nolan really did want to make a puzzle box, and that’s okay (as opposed to being a titanic masturbator like mathew barney)

im all for feelings and ppl in any genre i think nolan has rarely demonstrated the actual knack for it tbh, he wants to always blow you away with the moment in a tour de force of shock and awe which i think rarely doesnthe performances of his actors justice (pattinson i think actually takes his quiet moment beautifully in tenet tho)

i think the first comparison id go to to demonstrate what good looks like is probably arrival, if i had to shorthand where i think nolans stitching doesnt quite hold up?

the technical stuff, entropy and momentum as reversing forces or what have you, i trust him to be getting right and to have deployed perfectly as gar as justifying each separate effect.

i just think he doesn't always deploy the undoubtedly correct phenomena/concepts at play very well as story device i guess

arrival is good! but how about dune? annihilation? i’d suggest it’s a better comparison than you might realize. they have a similar technique (or at least similar rigid adherence to a maybe less similar set of principles) and a similar hit rate!

i think arrival is disappointing to me in that the parts a lot of people like are the parts that make a lot of tv / cinema (and even more so, literary fiction) hard for me to swallow. see also ilx favorite children of men, which takes bleak sci fi and adds in that golden globe bs plus the urban combat misery porn you usually just get from the intl news

i loved both dune and annihilation but they are either flank of arrival on the "hard scifi the only emotions are devastation, lust or glory" or "all sci fi is actually a dream of the central character" axis which is totally a real axis

children of men had charlie hunnam in seven league boots chase a car for an hour in what one can only assume was a t-1000 reference we wont hear criticism

feel like the tide is turning and more and more smart guys are admitting that they like nolan movies

versus the previous equilibrium where smart guy consensus was that nolan makes "a dumb guy's idea of a smart movie" so if u admit u like the movies you're admitting that you're dumb

As part of my media cleanse/donation I gave away my Children Of Men DVD, because there’s probably no time I’ll need to be horrified like that again - real life is already to close to it

speaking of the tide turning his next movie is a family drama set during a supertsunami caused by a tilt of one half a degree in the earths axis caused by the main characters grandfather standing on a butterfly fifty years before we're only waiting on a title and mcconaghey to be old enough to play the grandfather also the grandfather surfs do u see

Every screening for Oppenheimer starting Thursday is sold out at the AMC theater where I'm screening Barbie tonight.

I hate DeSantis.

sounds p good xp

so a cloud atlas remake?

or was that the tree of life

yeah its gonna be good michael caine plays the butterfly

it’s intellectual, philosophical, psychedelic sci fi cinema, like a reboot of point break done in the style of kubrick’s 2001. the first is told from the point of view of a shark hunting prehistoric samoans

first hour*

I don't care about so called smart guy consensus, if they think these boring hack Nolan monstrosities are good then I'm glad to be thick. He's a pompous talentless moron.

calz its about a shark chasing prehistoric Samoans but its also a metaphor cmon this is good stuff anyone can enjoy