Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

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

christopher nolan direct a movie where a woman has an important part beyond being a plot device challenge

Interstellar almost worked but then you realize one character was there to give the protagonist an epiphany about being human and the other was there to decipher morse code

do u often handwave away strong female characters like that

it’s still monday morning here, dmac, let me complain a little without having to address my own systemic biases for a couple hours

i didn't love inception, but it had a much more interesting central conceit, more intriguing puzzle, and much clearer emotional stakes than this! why should i bother deciphering the puzzle if the action on screen is barely comprehensible and motivations obscure?

i thought tbh it had marginally less clear dialogue than incpetion but shared utterly the other flaws you set out there

they were mainly saying "woah" and "party on" iirc

I saw this tonight on a plane with subtitles and it was exactly what I expected it to be after reading the premise. It passed the time well.

but DID IT?

the time passed YOU

Yeah, originally I kept going back in time to watch it again but everything was inverted when I did that, so I cut that off and now I only watch it in the future.

And then your plane landed and you exited and walked backwards to the terminal gate of your departure...

I’m not walking backwards, I’m moonwalking forwards to the best sounding song in the inverted world: full fathom five by the stone roses

they've been showing it for 6 days in 70mm at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland... ends Wednesday

This last string of posts makes be wonder if the problem with this movie is that it needed to be far goofier

xp presumptuous tbh