Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

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

i’m okay with ppl who are pompous, who are talentless and who are morons. all three yeah, it’s kinda hard to take! luckily i’m just out here enjoying his films not judging his persona

i haven't seen all of Nolan's films (missed Following, Interstellar, and Insomnia.) i don't think any of them are bad, really. well okay, The Dark Knight Rises is bad. Tenet is incomprehensible but maybe only due to the burying of the dialogue, and i've been meaning to rewatch it with subtitles. i like TLG's take: time travel is so realistic it doesn't register, it's not a big orb materializing to drop a terminator somewhere, it's just casually happening seamlessly within the world (i know it's not quite time travel but the point stands...)

i have always felt Nolan's coldness was probably overstated, when he does go for emotion he does okay, certainly no worse than many filmmakers, and in some cases better. for example inception gets dinged for being just a puzzle box but i think the marion cotillard storyline was moving, in the final act. cillian murphy's storyline too, though i guess in a way he's being conned and i'm not sure how much of a feel good emotional ending it really is for him!

Dunkirk was better than i suspected in that way, a relatively simple trick of messing w/time in the story, but vv cleverly integrated.

Memento is his best, it's simply astonishing that he was able to craft a narrative that made perfect sense in reverse in that way, and to fill it with such tension.

also if you don’t care abt what smart guys think why are four of your five of your seven adjectives personality traits (hack, pompous, talentless, moron). boring can be applied equally to film or ilx posters, monstrosity i suppose is an adjective about the film but just tells us you didn’t like the film, presumably to draw contrast between yourself and so called smart guys like nolan (who are actually pompous, talentless, boring, moron hacks!!)

man i can’t or edit

I don't even really know what his persona is apart from being a posh English prick. You sound like chatgpt you sad prick

the first one I outright hated was Interstellar. Tenet I didn't hate but there's only a certain amount of "Exposition: The Movie" i can take

but it is more interesting to see people defending Nolan itt for once so I support the late great

i liked interstellar for some reason despite it having all of the hoke im ripping him for above i found it light enough to really watch is as comic book fable

perhaps this would enrage him

It's funny, part of how I ended up seeing Tenet yesterday was because a few months back a friend who loves Miami Vice (2006) thought I would like it for reasons similar to that one. And after my first viewing, I get where he's coming from, in the sense of little exposition and everything being very present tense, and kinetic overshadowing comprehension (especially in Tenet toward the big set piece).

I also listened to part of last weekend's The Treatment interview between Elvis Mitchell and Nolan, where Nolan describes Dunkirk as being a challenge to write a story where character is action, without backstory. That definitely makes sense with our guy in Tenet. I didn't get quite why he needed to prioritize the Russian villain's wife over everything else. I did like Branagh as the Russian -- would like to see him and Malkovich face off in something.

i was going to save a huge post for later so as not to stifle fun conversation, but in order to give us something to talk about other than who is posh, english, and or a miserable prick … here you go!!

think the dark knight might be his worst, but it’s probably his most entertaining! the bank robbery scene and the joker killing a dude w a pencil are, frankly, the best gta cutscenes in modern history!!

i think i understand why nolan gets dinged for being pompous or a moron. he goes for emotions that you used to see in war movies, things like appeal to duty, or familial responsibility, etc. kinda dry civics lesson stuff you might remember from movies like “twelve angry men” or “forbidden planet”. the supposed big ideas and intellectual currents (in nolan and forbidden planet) are pretty straightforward and would have been totally to viewers of “outer limits” or readers of pulp sci fi (authors like blish, asimov, shakespeare)

forbidden planet is one of my all time favorites, i don’t watch it thinking that leslie nielsen or dr morbius are nailing relatable human emotions or experiences. they’re comic book characters, like perry mason or atticus finch.

i can connect emotionally to the story because i’ve fought with my parents, i’ve built things that have gotten out of control, i’ve used power incorrectly, etc but i have to pour my feelings about duty or ethics or whatever into these old movies, whether they’re corny movies about duty or ethics, formal puzzles like hitchcock, didactic sci fi films like thx-1138 or alphaville etc.

these films can’t do the emoting for me the way tony soprano etc does for ppl who watch prestige tv, and maybe it’s unforgivably glaringly obvious when modern stuff is that corny, but it’s all going to seem corny in retrospect. wasn’t there just a huge thread where ppl were talking about how (in the long run) prestige tv turned out in retrospect to be more emotionally manipulative than emotionally engaging?

i think ppl want to think that modern cinema has some sort of different job, which is fine. that might be rooted into different ideas about ideas like duty (like can there be any correct relation to duty or power, or should cinema only be about how those relations are fraught). if that’s your take i suppose these movies would certainly look corny or worse

sometimes, I put on the sky movie channel for my son for some background noise. Every time I catch a few glimpses of a Nolan movie, it really triggers me. He's so bad at what he does. And the media coverage of him in the UK is so reverent, it makes me feel like I'm going insane.

wasn’t there just a huge thread where ppl were talking about how (in the long run) prestige tv turned out in retrospect to be more emotionally manipulative than emotionally engaging?

i missed this thread maybe, but i think the manner in which so many prestige tv shows went for the feel-bad, they were truly manipulative in that sense, and i always felt so many of those shows were ultimately not nearly as brilliant as they were made out to be when they were blinding you with their entertainment value. so many of them actually were great but for example for the above reason i think large aspects of the breaking bad extended universe are kind of manipulatively in the worse senses.

also with respect to the Miami Vice/Tenet comp, that does make sense in a lot of ways. also i felt like the debicki/washington/branagh triangle was reminiscent of the debicki/hiddleston/laurie triangle in The Night Manager, in some key ways (but other ways which were vv different.)

i think you can like or admire movies where everything is done well and as it ought be and all that but there might be an argument that in order to really love a certain type of big showy effort like nolan clearly is only interested in, you have to perhaps be able to see why people would hate it too

speaking of ways in which branagh echoes other movies in tenet he plays the same character in chris pyans jack ryan movie ie hes fuckin terrible in both and should have been laughed off the set and thats why malkovich comparison is a good one cf taht matt damon clip where he cant believe how bad of an actor malkovich is nor why people are praising what he jas just done

ben kinglsey? no shut up thats not the same thing shut up i said

every time i make an excellent post my keyboard gets smaller

well i certainly can’t argue with that. i’m always surprised make billion dollar multiplex bets on nolan. i’m not sitting around wondering why they’re not making nolan level event movies like phase iv or laloux’s fantastic planet.

even the idea that nolan is higher-profile than, say, aster or peele is nuts to me. i’m not really sure what makes him such a safer bet, or sell on a larger scale. is that just the commercial power of superhero movies?

ah i can answer that: connections

his uncle is shagging helga from allo allo

cant buy that level of pull m8

that post was all in xp response to calzino’s post abt feeling triggered. i don’t quite get nolan’s commercial “success” and i’m not sure my reasons for liking nolan match those of studios or his own goals

but yeah even as a fan i legitimately don’t understand his stature in the industry (compared to idk james cameron or michael bay, who i get). i was trying to go see asteroid city movie and was blown away at how many seats oppenheimer was taking up. barbie, sure, but oppenheimer? they were showing it on like six or eight screens in some theatres. are there smart people who just refuse to watch barbie?

branagh has been objectively terrible since the early 90s when my english teachers would make me go to arthouse theatres in fancy nbhds to get a few points of extra credit for watching merchant ivory adaptations of the bard

I thought The Dark Knight Rises and Inception were incredibly overwrought, with cartoonishly dark storylines that were just embarrassing and heavy-handed

...and with the worst kind of overbearing overloud music soundtrack that, just by itself, completely ruined the films for me.

Interstellar was ok. Dunkirk redeemed him a bit I thought

I didn't want to watch Tenet, maybe I will in the future. I'm hopeful about Oppenheimer

lost a post and fuckit

but i was comparing nolan to fincher in that each gets to wear a few hats lightly, can play as indie breakthrough or auteur or safe project guy or megahit talent helmsman while retaining critical and business kudos and all that, i think hes a director that producers feel good about backing essentially before they even start making money back

have you ever noticed the overlap between the elon musk fanbase and the hans zimmer fanbase

talk about overrated, holy fuck! but when he’s on … there were sequences (short ones) from that bad superman reboot (the one people compared to malick) that were redeemed solely by the zimmer score

there is some similar stylistic/pretentious prat comparisons to make between Nolan/Fincher. But imo Fincher wins because there is something so stillborn and dead about all Nolan movies and he seems to get nothing out of actors. I'm not really a Fincher fan either but liked his netflix work, Mindhunting and Mank. Probably his best work. And he's much better at atmosphere and mood, even if most of his movies aren't that good at least they aren't completely fucking unwatchable trash.