Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

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.

so it’s not complicated, just trot out the hoary old chestnut whenever a white elephant needs deflating

methinks you're greatly overthinking it

too many underrate the impact of campus utility data when evaluating a director’s work

“We live in a twilight world.”

pattinsons jerry maguire

starting to watch this now, assuming this still applies

Is there any Nolan film that doesn't basically have the theme "Ahh, but you did it to yourself"?

― kinder, Sunday, 27 June 2021 09:06 (two years ago)

Kenneth Brannagh really didn't need to be a grumpy Russian in this, seriously was no-one else available?

I like how the woman's character is "her son", it's good they remind you she has a son every 5 minutes in case you forget she's a mother and start to think she might have any other facets to her whatsoever

I see the young son hangs back out of the foreground for a lot of this movie about what is going to happen in the future

Her son, though

On a tangential John David Washington note, _The Creator_ confirms he has a knack for sf films with big sets and design. (Was very entertained by said new film, I'll add.)

I'm now watching Bill and Ted Face the Music and there are genuinely some of the exact same themes

ive watched kenneth branagh in his last five roles and im not sure he fucking changed expression or accent across the gamut