TENET does not work. I’m not here to make that claim. But it sporadically works, and my favorite moment of this is the dual Oslo airport fight scenes in which, famously, the Protagonist discovers the mysterious masked man he fought was himself, moving backwards through time. On a fundamental level, even before accounting for how difficult it would have been to write this, let alone stage it, it’s an exhilarating and original idea, like opening up a new wing in the universe. Frustratingly, the film overall does little to ground a viewer within this universe; the Bond spy elements simply serve to muddy the waters, given Nolan largely abandons the structural elements of those films outside the cold open and exposition sequence at the beginning.
One of the few things Nolan does to make the story work is film work is center us in the viewpoint of the Protagonist (John David Washington); his subjective experience of the film is entirely linear, with no flashbacks to earlier in the narrative – there’s nothing like what happens with Neil, who sees something we don’t during the first Oslo sequence that is only revealed on the second. Any information the Protagonist has, we share; his backstory, unimportant to the film, is kept a mystery, so that we identify entirely with his experience alongside him.
That identification with the Protagonist is what makes these two scenes work so beautifully. We see the bullet holes in the wall and, like our hero, realize immediately that they’re inverted bullets even before they start cracking mysteriously. Two men burst out of the mysterious object, colliding with the Protagonist on one side and Neil (Robert Pattinson) on the other; when he attacks the Protagonist, it turns into simple self-defence, and when he’s sucked out of the room, it’s uncanny and bizarre. Obviously, when we see things from tsinogatorP ehT perspective, it’s like things click into place; still uncanny at first (helped by that gorgeous music from Ludwig Göransson that makes the fight seem like it takes place underwater or in a dream), but delightful.
All Nolan films are, despite his reputation, driven by an emotion created by the cinematic tools chosen. Memento creates the experience of having no functional memory through its structural choices. Interstellar creates the effect of losing vast amounts of time. Oppenheimer is the most exciting, creating the sense of the title character’s consciousness – both memory and his vast imagination. Buried underneath the messy plotting and frequently incoherent exposition is this wonderful sense of learning; the repeated Oslo fight creates the effect of going over one’s notes and realizing one understands better than one realizes.
What makes the sequences invigorating both in an emotional, in-the-moment sense and when intellectualizing the experience later is that, technically, both the Protagonist and tsinagotorP ehT technically win their respective fights, and indeed work out how to win them about halfway through. The Protagonist is trying to get the upper hand, and at the end has managed to hold his enemy down with the gun, only losing because his opponent is mysteriously swept out of the room. tsinagotorP ehT is just trying to get to the turnstile. It’s actually really good action storytelling – not something one generally associates with Nolan – in the sense that they have goals outside simply defeating the opponent.
It’s unfortunate that the rest of the film doesn’t quite live up to this; the closest it comes is between these two sequences, when the villain Sator (Kenneth Brannagh) uses a turnstile and interrogates the Protagonist by shooting his own wife so he can pass that information onto his past self; Brannagh magnificently sells that Sator is working out what’s happening both very quickly and very slowly as he moves away from the turnstile. Early in the film, the Protagonist is advised to worry less about thinking through everything and focus more on feeling; cliche advice, but true nonetheless.
Aside from the fact that many of my personal problems have come from not trusting my instincts and feelings, much Nolan’s film career is trying to create cinematic myths to live by; again, starting from Memento, where Leonard has created a myth as a reason to get out of bed in the morning and live in the world, speeding through things like The Dark Knight and Inception where characters try putting myths into practice. Too bad TENET is more of an interesting failure than a real addition to that canon. Did you know there’s apparently four Neils running around in the climax?
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Year of the Month Spinning fictional plates, doing good, and the sainthood of an author.
The Man as caricature, straight presentation, and parody.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Happy Endings, Season Two, Episode Five, “Spooky Endings”
“Halloween is the Super Bowl of drinking.”
“Isn’t the Super Bowl the Super Bowl of drinking?”
“No, the Super Bowl is the Halloween of football.”
“What?”
“What?”
He’s right.
“You’ve read my blog.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll wear a diaper all night.”
“Not a selling point.”
“For me it is! Halloween is the Arbor Day of urinating!”
“Wait, so that makes Arbor Day the Wimbledon of having sex.”
“Yes! You get me, bro!”
“We’re not gonna pile on?”
“She obviously doesn’t feel well.”
“She is your sister!”
“No one is close enough to high-five you.”
“Who is Brett Butler?”
“Grace Under Fire.”
“Yeah, I didn’t see that.
“Being straight sounds like so much work.”
I have an intense phobia of the common cold (exacerbated right now by the fact that I’m actually sick) so you can imagine how uncomfortable I was through Alex’s plot.
“Good news guys. Whatever I have is not caused by the bird I kissed.”
“When I wanna watch kids, I’ll buy a playground.”
“What?”
“Who names their house?”
“You named your favourite pair of sweatpants.”
“Hey, you leave Garret out of this.”
“Sorry, Doc. Guess you’re gonna have to go to St Elsewhere.”
“Love being back in the game. Hate myself for calling it the game. But what can you do? It’s the game.”
“We’re gonna turn off the lights, pretend that we’re not home, and hide. In the hot tub.”
“Is that ZZ Top Gun? That’s the first thing I’ve liked since Barbara Walter died.”
“Barbara Walter is still alive but that’s very kind of you.”
“Sorry, I don’t actually work here. This is just a costume.”
“Max! That’s kind of harsh!”
“Yeah, I regretted it right away.”
“They look so real! When did you get ‘em?”
“Eight grade.”
“”Piano Man” is Billy Joel, not Elton John, and I’m not Elton John!”
“I can’t wait to see your penis!”
“We have your door. Over. This isn’t over.”
“This is the property of Breezy Acres, and I’m taking back the night! And the door!”
“Proud of you, man.”
“Thanks.”
“Psyche!”
“Looks like bacon finally got its eggs, huh? … Oh come on, who bacons somebody?!”
“On the bright side, the hottest guy here thinks you’re the hottest guy here.”
Chapaev
Watched this so I have the bare minimum in understanding socialist realism, so I could make an observation about it in my essay next week. It feels tempting to dismiss this as propaganda, given this was Stalin’s favourite Soviet film, but I can’t quite do that, but also I can’t quite not do that. I was essentially lumping it in with lowbrow cop shows and Ayn Rand in that it presents a heroic narrative with a focus on procedure and low interpretive space. Which is what it is – even the filmmaking is pretty rote, being largely what Hitchcock called ‘photographs of people talking’ – but it’s a pretty good example of the form.
It’s very strange watching a fairly modern-feeling storytelling approach with references to the Communists, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks; there’s one scene where Chapaev is asked if he’s a Communist or a Bolshevik, which he mostly dodges. Socialist realism – or romantic realism, if you’re like me and enjoy being snide – is really one more aspect of the human condition here. There’s always going to be people that like that best. What I was surprised by was the range of acting here; Chapaev himself is a larger-than-life figure, but the movie has the sense to make the people around him more normal and down-to-earth, to make him look more extraordinary.
The sweatpants are called Karen.
“Oh, so it was my idea to go as Carlito’s Way Sean Penn and I Am Sam Sean Penn?”
“I thought you loved double Penn!”
“But Penny, I wanna go to my weird gay turkey party!”
“I think Ray Manzarek’s a real guy.”
“Whatever. You sound like Brett Butler.”
“Jane already said that.”
“No, she said you look like Brett Butler.”
Ray Manzarek did have a name that sounded made up.
The Apartment – Still a classic, and dammit, I was tearing up at that ending, as much as Wilder did not make movies meant to bring us to tears. Still so frustrating that Shirley McLaine did not win the Oscar for what is the greatest performance in one of the great movies ever. But that’s how things crumble, cookie-wise.
Spider-Noir, “Betrayal” – It’s noir, of course there’s betrayal. Even as Silvermane puts together his gang of supervillains, even as we learn the origin of the Spider and his connection to the other “freaks.” It’s not nearly as simple as being bitten by a radioactive spider. If you can look the other way on the notion that WWI scientists knew enough about genetics to cause mutations, you can continue to enjoy this banger of a show. The great Andrew Robinson joins the cast as the assistant to a doctor studying the mutations.
Elementary, “Alma Matters” – The owner of a for profit college (Tate Donovan) has two people who know too much about his predatory schemes killed. As much as I suppose bringing the practices of for profit colleges to light, this one isn’t very interesting. Somewhat more interesting is the discovery that whoever tried to assassinate Morland tried to frame Sherlock. And even though Sherlock has once again washed his hands of his father, he’s now determined to find the culprits because of how offended he is someone would besmirch his name. We also learn, BTW, that for all of Holmes’s progressive views about the mega-rich and sexual activity, he hates plea bargaining.
“I’d spell it out for you, only I can’t spell.” The scene that got me last time (and made me wanna kill Sheldrake) is Baxter begging Sheldrake to come by and see Kubelik, just to cheer her up, and he refuses.
Finally saw this for the first time about six weeks ago, and yes, I was shocked to learn MacLaine did not win the Oscar. She’s incredible in this.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
1956 version. I thought I’d appreciate this more the second time around, but I still find it a bit sleepy. Stewart grates on me a little here too, but he comes fascinatingly close to almost being a rare male example of Tasha Robinson’s Sexy Lamp. Doris Day’s character is sharper: she realizes Bernard pumps them for information without answering direct questions, for example, she figures out the “Ambrose Chapel” clue, and she sets up the climax. It sometimes feels like Stewart is there just because she can’t be everywhere at once, which adds a touch more bitterness to the bus scene where it becomes clear she would like to still have a stage career and doesn’t see why he can’t move from Indianapolis to New York for her. So there’s an interesting feminist reading here, but there are few points good enough to make me feel like they’re worth having a major character bore and annoy me and feel kind of useless.
That said, there are some stellar Hitchcockian scenes here, from the attempted assassination at Royal Albert Hall (so good the Mission: Impossible franchise cheerfully ripped it off, and I can’t blame it) to the superbly weird taxidermist encounter (Stewart’s best scene) where would-be drama turns to comedy turns to the bizarre. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this movie overall, it’s that you should have your sets be as specific as possible, because that makes everything better.
This is my dad’s favorite Hitchcock movie thanks to his longstanding crush on Doris Day.
Stoker
Exactly My Shit. More on Wednesday.
In the Mood for Love
One of the most gorgeous films ever made. It’s fascinating to me to watch how Wong Kar-wai visually emphasizes the unconsummated longing between his characters here, from blocking that unobtrusively puts other shapes between them to the costuming (all those high collars, all those ties) to filming certain conversations in tight back-and-forth without a unifying shot: as physically close as they often are, there’s always a sense of the apartness that’s so crucial for preserving this kind of yearning. It only feels like it erodes all the way when they’re pretending to be their spouses, and then the roleplay provides its own distance even as it also gives an excuse for more intimacy. Really hilarious to revisit this while the Sex Purge movie is still in theaters. Oh, you had such a hard time coming up with obstacles for your two attractive straight people that you had to glorify fascism? Get fucked. Set it in the ’60s, throw in a marriage or two, and learn how to work a camera, you coward.
Does you day play the same Doris Day record over and over till it drives all the doctors nuts…no, wait, that’s Sherman Potter. I don’t love either Man Who Know Too Much but I think I like the former a bit more.
The former has Peter Lorre getting a 10/10 villain entrance.
“Really hilarious to revisit this while the Sex Purge movie is still in theaters. Oh, you had such a hard time coming up with obstacles for your two attractive straight people that you had to glorify fascism? Get fucked. Set it in the ’60s, throw in a marriage or two, and learn how to work a camera, you coward.”
I have not seen Sex Purge, nor do I plan to, but I wholeheartedly endorse this level of vitriol and contempt. FATALITY
The Lightyear of 2026 in that it is bad, gets more confusing the more anyone tries to explain it, and no one wanted to see it.
Buzz Lightyear can only have sex once a year?! I guess that’s what drove Woody to Jessie.
It’s Bo Peep! BO PEEP! I’ll kill you, I’ll kill all of you! Especially those of you in the commentariat!
Ahahahahahaha, forgot about her. As I believe the writers of Toy Story 2 through 4 did as well.
I mean, the Sex Purge director said he cut a bunch of the sex! What the hell is even the point of making that movie then?
Now it’s just Purge, and we already got a bunch of those.
24 Hour Party People — forgot to mention last week! This rules, an actual good music biopic because it embraces the style and wildness of its subject, instead of po-faced seriousness it tells lies with panache. And it’s all held together by Coogan, who is clearly presenting a softened version of Tony Wilson but who is always willing to take it on the chin for a gag and is clear and true about loving this music, the final scene at the club invents LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” (for reals maybe, James Murphy already jacked a Joy Division riff for the song) and the comedy — like constantly crapping on poor A Certain Ratio — just makes that love more sincere.
The Odyssey — something about po-faced seriousness vs. panache. This is essentially Batman Begins (As A Literary Construct), Damon’s Odysseus is a noble ass-kicking genius who does bad things in the name of good and fucks off at the end with Anne Hathaway, there is a moment of laugh-out-loud comedy when he reprises one of the funnier lines in The Dark Knight Returns at least. But this also requires Odysseus to Feel Bad and more importantly feel traumatized, among his many innoventions is PTSD apparently, something only he feels. There is an interesting counterpoint here of Agamemnon, another king who violates pretty basic laws and pays the price, to me this puts the lie to Odysseus’ moaning that his big horse has ended civilization. Civilization was already doing pretty bad! Or was just “civilization.” In any case, there are good parts but I’ve been more skeptical chewing it over. One thing that was clear from the start, though, is that while Nolan can film action spectacle he still sucks ass at fighting, the final throwdown is very Batman-y in scope, structure and incomprehensibility. I saw some interesting speculation that IMAX cameras and their inflexibility contributed to this but even so, come on man.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die — was surprised to see Gore Verbinski’s name pop up at the end of this as director, I largely associate him with complex action setpieces that Nolan only dreams of and here the complexity is turned toward the structure of the movie. Sam Rockwell does a 12 Monkeys bit, coming from the future to get a motley crew of LA residents to stop an evil AI from gaining power and taking over the world, the movie alternates between this ongoing business and flashbacks to how the crew got to the point of joining up with Rockwell. (Well, some of them — it’s a bit obvious and slightly insidious who won’t get backstory.) These parts are pretty good — they’re all anti-tech in some ways, the basic read was they’re mini Black Mirror episodes — and one, involving Juno Temple as a mother finding out about a way to restore her son killed in a school shooting, is superb dark sci-fi in its blandness and undertones of rage. The school shooting stuff points to a meaner direction the film doesn’t go in, instead it has more of an Everything Everywhere All At Once — On COCAINE! vibe that gets tiring. But it’s something that feels like it could’ve been a TV show and was instead made into a movie, which is laudable, and Haley Lu Richardson does great work throughout and there is a detail of a giant cat scrotum that I noticed earlier that came back in a big way later on, so points for thoroughness. This is a mess and I wouldn’t recommend it, it’s also something that swings for a lot and could very well be someone’s favorite movie. Cheers to that.
Escape From Alcatraz — Eastwood, Siegel, prison, roadmap. Funny to see how much Shawshank Redemption ganked from this (and there is a prison mouse too! The Green Mile GUILTY of theft!) but mostly just a pleasure to watch pros at work, there is no larger story other than “guys want to get out of prison” and that’s all this needs. Well, maybe one thing — Patrick MacGoohan’s evil warden confiscates the art and supplies of an old prisoner who then goes insane, this is because the prisoner painted an unflattering portrait of the warden. The warden gloats about this to Eastwood, “Someone should have warned Doc to be careful about what he painted.” “You’re right,” Eastwood sneers. “There’s always a possibility that some asshole will be offended.” A mission statement.
Interesting watching the second wave of Odyssey reviews/reaction, which is not nearly as enthusiastic. (My wife’s Tumblr feed has been particularly unimpressed, and also buoyed by translator Emily Wilson’s takedown of a movie she helped inspire.)
Those confiscated art supplies in Escape from Alcatraz haunt me: absolutely ruthless, top-tier cinematic cruelty.
It’s obviously coming but it doesn’t hurt any less. And it’s a great move to have the portrait be subtly mocking as opposed to a caricature, and to have McGoohan not be fooled by this at all — he’s an evil prick but not a dumb one.
I think the punkier the music biopic subjects, the better, they inherently lend themselves to more cinematic style and fun even if the scripts can still be cookie-cutter.
Oliver! – Carol Reed was apparently considered an odd choice for this musical but it tracks given his experience filming movies about crooks (the climax isn’t quite The Third Man level but it’s terrific) and his sheer expertise. Every choice he makes with the dancing and shot sequences is correct even if tonally Oliver! was always going to be weird. The very good (if annoyingly old fashioned for me, the dancing goes on and on and on) crowd-pleasing musical clashes with the darker, rougher drama (nephew of Carol) Oliver Reed and Shani Wallis are in.* This was a childhood favorite and while I always liked the songs, Bill Sykes always stuck with me more, Reed’s blue, cold eyes wordlessly indicating an environment of poverty, desperation, and violence, the one Dickens did try to convey and to reform. The old world of Lionel Bart and kiddie musicals was dying, the new one of Sondheim and confrontation with reality in the book musical was struggling to be born.
*That and the inherent Oliver Twist problem of a ludicrously passive protagonist, Miller must surely hate this kid.
Lol, I have never read Oliver Twist or seen this movie, but I really hated the kid in Reed’s The Fallen Idol, who everyone else apparently loves? So yeah, this sounds terrible. I prefer Reed when he is killing children with phony penicillin.
I would never say it’s a bad movie! But it’s totally not for you, you’d be rooting for Sykes to kill the twerp. (Well you should YouTube “Reviewing The Situation”, its a fine song.)
Oh yeah, I mean terrible for me.
“Reviewing The Situation” sounds like a circa-2008 AV Club article about The Jersey Shore.
What did we play?
Played a “Pub Trivia” game with my cousins though a lot of the questions seemed embarrassingly easy, do better game-makers! My cousin’s new fiance impressed with his sheer history knowledge, getting a World War I question that stumped me.
Super Mario Bros. 2 – NES Virtual Console on New Nintendo 3DS
Planned to do a full playthrough, but got a game over at the first world boss, and only then remembered this game has limited continues. Oddly, it’s the only NES Mario that does this, and I guess it’s related to why it’s the one I’ve finished the fewer amount of times. I decided to start over (since using a continue in the first world is basically the same as wasting it) but I haven’t picked it up yet. Anyway, it was a good reminder of how good the design is here. There’s a lot to do in just the first world, and many different ways of doing it.
“Early in the film, the Protagonist is advised to worry less about thinking through everything and focus more on feeling; cliche advice, but true nonetheless.”
This is where the film runs aground for me — it’s good advice that Nolan can’t follow. See your note about four Neils — the big final setpiece is a triumph of logistics and mostly lifeless. The FAR last week had an article on Nolan that briefly compared him to Michael Mann, and that unlocked something for me. Mann can make a movie like Miami Vice that rides vibes, he is a romantic; Nolan tries but can’t do vibes.
On a basic level, Mann’s characters know that there is little likelihood that, given their roles in the world, that they will receive the grace of permanent sentimental domesticity. That sense of romantic fatalism combines with his various visual and musical tropes to give off that melancholic yet cool vibe. With Nolan that possibility, at least in his blockbuster era, exists, albeit in a state that requires some form of transformation over space, time, and memory. TENET’s insistence in telling the story through the viewpoint of a Bondian protagonist, one whose job subsumes any other wants or commitments, is one of the reason’s the film remains frustratingly abstract in its gamesmanship with the audience.
Would argue Nolan can be romantic but in a more nostalgic/neurotic key – the Dead Wives and Girlfriends seem more about his worry that his professional fixations will destroy his loved ones.
“the grace of permanent sentimental domesticity” is a great phrase. And the person who it immediately makes me think of is Frank in Thief — other Mann progatonists want this but as you note know they can’t have it, Frank’s tragedy is both not understanding he can’t have it, but also wanting something so simple in the first place. He’s just a guy who wants to work and have a family, he is really not ambitious. Whereas Nolan’s guys increasingly want family but know their Work means they must reject that domesticity, it is noble yet suspect in a way Mann is not.
As Nolan moved away from noir into blockbuster spectacle, his films take on a more Spielbergian take on homecomings or loss of the emotional stability that domesticity represents. I agree with the article cited in FAR that his tone is too hard edged to lend emotional leverage to this longing. Rather than blaming that on spectacle, I think it lies in the architectural bedazzlement of his storytelling structure, which is more about lending life to abstract struggles to the character’s struggle against the strictures of of time than in pathos of loss and separation.
My dream Nolan project would be an adaptation of Cornell Woorich’s THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES, in which a phony psychic suddenly is gifted with the ability to really tell the future, and realizes the near impossibility to use it to effect the tragedies of those he cares about.