Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

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.

i thought the joker *mostly* managed the very edge of the balance between light and dark (will be familiar to readers of late 80s comics) … those goofy gags that i referred to as video game cutscenes helped. completely agree about dark knight rises, which lost those iirc

inception got worse and worse as it went on. beginning was ok, bit like existenz or something. then toward the very end it got to be like a tool or dream theatre video. not hard to imagine the guy from soundgarden or stone temple pilots screaming into the vortex while the band shreds at all angles behind him in a crumbling escher cityscape

like inception, i think their songs were also about their distant parents not loving them enough

Even though I'm fairly pro inception, I have to say the whole backstory involving DiCaprio and cotillard might have made for a more interesting romantic tragedy film minus all the dream thief hijinks, which I mostly probably enjoy for the visuals, when the story gets its most matrixy.

I didn't get quite why he needed to prioritize the Russian villain's wife over everything else

i think it’s because, unlike the lady in india, the washington character (the “protagonist” lmao) isn’t willing to make compromises about harming innocents.

the problem is that the the lady in india and the russians’ wife are soooo murky (in terms of whether they’re good guys and whether they’re being honest or not) that it doesn’t really qualify or land as an example of “action as character”, it just seems like nolan is making washington make white knight choices because its a james bond movie and he’s the james bond character.

i think it relates to some kind of bigger conversation about blame and innocence that ALSO sort of relates to a point about climate crisis and action (which in real life tends to get locked up in conversation about responsibility) but all the moral relations are so murky and realistic and understated all this stuff never congeals either

007 movies would make easy work of that stuff by just w the wife lady a cute dog (instead of an absent son) who saves the protagonist in slow motion, also the indian lady would have a snake around her neck and bionic eye

"bit like existenz or something"

Cronenburg was slightly ahead of the curve with that gem

all posts since otm bar the word unwatchable which ofc is personal

agree about mindhunter for sure i think zodiac and that will stand test of time v well

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.

men in fancy suits working through plots with lots of moving pieces being threatened with violence/destruction is Nolan's wheelhouse for sure

it actually works really well as relaxing background sunday afternoon viewing

My not-really-a-joke about Miami Vice (one of my faves) is that you have to watch it four or five times before it starts getting really good. Before that, there's a lot of muffled jargon that also happens to be essential to making sense of the plot, rather than just experiencing it as one of the world's best coffee-table books. I was showing it to someone recently who asked for the subtitles, and it made a huge difference (even to me, on my 30th or so viewing).

And funny seeing Tenet in a theater (and I don't see a ton in theaters) and feeling like I wanted to have subtitles and/or rewind to make sense of moments. But then I wouldn't have had the experience, especially with that hostage scene, of trying to figure out why the dialogue was processed into gobbledygook, that I wasn't missing anything yet that I was supposed to understand. And in this way, both Tenet and Vice have an audacious ton of incomprehensibility for a $150 million-plus popcorn movie.

holy shit is Branagh not scary at all after the first three minutes

i rewound tenet in a few bits but all that happened was different people were moving backwards and talking nonsense

I definitely took three watches of Miami Vice just to figure out exactly what was happening, and the third watch was where I went from guarded like to love. so Eazy otm

i rewound tenet in a few bits but all that happened was different people were moving backwards and talking nonsense

― Ár an broc a mhic (darraghmac), Tuesday, July 18, 2023 3:35 PM bookmarkflaglink

and sadly the mileage still wasn't reversing on Cameron's dad's car

and Cameron's dad was Kenneth Branagh

poe cameron

My not-really-a-joke about Miami Vice (one of my faves) is that you have to watch it four or five times before it starts getting really good

this is my usual line about à la recherche du temps perdu (“yeah i can’t say i really appreciated it until the fourth reading, maybe halfway through albertine disparu)l when it clicked for me”)

holy shit is Branagh not scary at all after the first three minutes

I just finished watching myself and...yeah. (Man, that sound mix too! I flicked on subtitles about four minutes in.)

Please note that utility data for the entire campus is also included. This was the only data made available with the application, and in order to accurately estimate and verify savings, individual building meter data will need to be obtained from the campus.

See, I would accept this.

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how to get a standard ilx post a four star empire review

Sold.

I have to admit one thing that bemused me was one of the characters started talking about Oppenheimer and his fears about blowing up the world and I'm all "Okay, wait, was this a conscious plant or"

yes, he must have known that Oppenheimer was his next project when making Tenet right?

I like the idea of Oppenheimer being a stealth Tenet prequel (or sequel? I guess it could go either way)

the crimes of george lucas ('90s on)

can someone from the ilx film clown car explain

Explain the greatest bit of film criticism ever?

I was lurking on that thread in real time as it was happening and I still laugh at that Utility Data bit every time I think about it.