Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2020 12:20 am
by Monterey Jack
If WB wanted a broad, audience-friendly blockbuster to get audiences back into a theater-going mood (even with sanitary restrictions), they should have pushed for Wonder Woman 1984 to be their first big release out of the gate, not a typically glossy, obtuse puzzler from Nolan (especially one that will keep you trapped in the theater for close to THREE HOURS with trailers factored in ). I haven't been knocked out by one of his movies since the overstuffed yet underrated Dark Knight Rises, which actually DID have some humor.
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2020 12:25 am
by AndyDursin
Agree completely, RISES was overstuffed but it's one of my favorite films of his just the same.
I'm also a little surprised if TENET is not top-tier Nolan -- and obviously it's not, because you can't find one rave review anywhere -- that they didn't push WONDER WOMAN 1984 out the door first. Unless they want to see what TENET does, in an extremely uncertain marketplace, knowing possibly it's not an A-grade Nolan movie to begin with.
It's just never good when you cut at least 45 minutes out of a film from an "auteur" director with an "uncompromising" vision. He may well have realized the movie is flawed also, but on the surface, that's never a good sign.
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2020 8:25 am
by Monterey Jack
AndyDursin wrote: ↑Sat Aug 22, 2020 12:25 am
It's just never good when you cut at least 45 minutes out of a film from an "auteur" director with an "uncompromising" vision. He may well have realized the movie is flawed also, but on the surface, that's never a good sign.
One wonders, had Covid not brought the industry to its knees, if Nolan would have acquiesced to a full FOURTH of what sounded like a densely-plotted sci-fi puzzler getting the ax. I imagine a director's cut preserving his precious "vision" will be forthcoming on Blu.
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2020 12:30 pm
by AndyDursin
TENET tickets are on sale at Showcase, including "advanced" showings this weekend (which I guess you need the free Starpass or whatever card/app to buy) ahead of a normal "opening" Monday.
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2020 2:48 pm
by John Johnson
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2020 9:12 pm
by Monterey Jack
6.5/10
As stimulating as assembling a elaborate jigsaw puzzle, only to find out a fourth of the key pieces allowing you to fully understand what it's a picture of are missing, Tenet is an awesomely designed and realized film, full of the kind of full-scale mayhem only a filmmaker given a big, fat blank check like Christopher Nolan is given by WB every few years (although it just occurred to me the big "driving a jet into the side of a building" setpiece is cribbed from Airplane! ). It's also plodding, humorless, and never develops any of the characters to the point where the film becomes more than an intricate feat of temporal logistics. It really only earns the .5 due to how impressively Nolan stages certain sequences, and to be fair there are some authentically innovative visual effects, but overall the film left me cold. There's a moment early on where a scientists says to John David Washington's protagonist "Stop trying to understand it, just feel it" while exposting about the film's baffling science gobbledygook, and that's pretty much the only way to appreciate a dense, joyless film that's impossible to follow, and doesn't give the viewer much in terms of character development to make us care enough to suss out just what the fudge is going on. Lots of impressive pyrotechnics on display (all set to an Tinnitus-inducing score by Ludwig Goransson that's the equivalent of Quint dragging his fingers down a chalkboard in Jaws for 150 minutes), but, like most of Nolan's work, it's cold, austere, and vaguely autistic, the work of a man more interested in making college graduates with a degree in advanced mathematics pat each other on the back for "getting" it than providing any sort of, y'know, fun experience for general audiences. He may have done his "populist" Batman trilogy to earn the clout to make movies like this for the rest of his career, but those are by far amongst the most satisfying films he's made (even the overlong but underrated Dark Knight Rises). I'd say it's worth seeing just for it's impressive visual scale, but it's telling that Michael Caine delivers more dry martini wit in his 90-second cameo than anyone else does in the film's interminable 150-minute length.
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2020 10:03 pm
by AndyDursin
Sounds worse than your rating. Honestly Nolan really needs to start branching out. I feel like I've already seen this movie, and that's not good. The worst sin for a director is repetition and no matter the subject matter, there is a sameness to the storytelling, mood, and general tone of all of his movies.
This one was even sold early on like it was supposed to be "fun" or "different" like it was some kind of romantic Hitchcockian thing and clearly that was a ruse. But it's time to make a movie that's not just a "Christopher Nolan movie".
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2020 10:28 pm
by Monterey Jack
The last non-Batman Nolan movie that wasn't a "Christopher Nolan Movie" was Insomnia, which at least had an accessible genre framework, as well as some good, charismatic acting from Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank. He's a phenomenally smart and technically-assured filmmaker, but he's been allowed to disappear up his own ass for the last decade. I understand the auteurist urge to follow one's "muse", but someone like, say, Tarantino can indulge his and still make films that are fun and accessible to mainstream audiences. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was about ten minutes longer than Tenet, and mainly consisted of character talking and driving around, yet I saw that film three times in theaters just for the sheer joy of it. And it's not like Nolan's incapable of fusing the cerebral and the visceral and the emotional...he did that impressively with Inception, a film I was able to follow easily on the first viewing, actually had some humor, and a dramatic spine with Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cottilard that gave the film a satisfyingly emotive conclusion. Tenet is like someone with Asperger's trying to approximate the same feel, and only getting the "cerebral" part down.
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2020 12:08 am
by Monterey Jack
This was Goransson's score:
UNENDURABLE.
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2020 9:08 am
by Eric W.
Too bad we can't get any real music any more. I don't even know who that composer is.
I am not surprised by the feedback I'm gauging so far on this. Has Nolan has his focus or what at this point?
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2020 12:14 pm
by Paul MacLean
Eric W. wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 9:08 am
Too bad we can't get any real music any more. I don't even know who that composer is.
Sadly, many of the directors who championed "old school" film music -- DePalma, Meyer, Demme, McTiernan, Dante, Milius, Donner, even George Lucas -- aren't doing much these days.
Instead we have a lot of directors who are terrified a theme will somehow distract the audience and take them out of the film (which is ludicrous -- I've never seen anyone distracted by the music in a Bond movie, a Leone western, a Star Wars movie, etc.).
Other directors refuse to allow someone working for them to bring an original idea to the film -- like a theme -- which the director himself is incapable of doing (because it is "my picture").
Then there's Clint Eastwood, who is a phenomenal director -- and musician and composer himself -- yet for whatever reason doesn't want anything too thematic or assertive from the composer.
The "Zimmer sound" has become so ubiquitous that anything else "doesn't sound right". George Miller's movies contained some of the best scores of the 80s, but he's sold-out to the "Remote Control" sound.
Then there are composers who may have a talent for arranging, but little to no talent for creating a melody, so their scores are full of beautiful orchestrations (and even dramatic power and nuance) but devoid of themes (and they are hired by directors who can't tell the difference).
"Popcorn flicks" these days are edited with ADD teenagers in mind so even a talented composer doesn't have much room to write "broadly". Was there a single "reflective" or "scenic" moment in any of the recent Star Wars movies like the Binary Sunset scene, the Millennium Falcon's arrive at Bespin or Yoda's levitating the X-Wing fighter? And certainly there has been nothing like the "Flying Sequence" in Superman: The Movie, or "Enterprise" scene in Star Trek: The Motion Picture in decades.
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2020 9:00 pm
by Johnmgm
My daughter saw Tenet today. I dropped her off, I couldn't work up any enthusiasm to sit through it. She liked it, but said it was really loud and she couldn't make out much of the dialogue.
Re: TENET A "Humorless," "Palindromic Dud", Even After 45 Minutes are Cut
Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2020 1:19 pm
by AndyDursin
December 15th for 4K UHD and Blu-Ray --
ARRIVING ON 4K UHD BLU- RAY™ COMBO PACK, BLU-RAY™, DVD AND DIGITAL FROM
WARNER BROS. HOME ENTERTAINMENT
Burbank, CA, November 5 – “Tenet,” the must-see motion picture event, playing now on the big screen wherever theatres are open, will arrive on 4K, Blu Ray, DVD and Digital on December 15 in time for the holidays. Written, directed and produced by acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan (“Inception,” “Dunkirk”), “Tenet” opened globally beginning in August 2020 and has grossed $350 million to date, with the much-anticipated theatrical openings in the major markets of New York and Los Angeles still to come. “Tenet” will be available to preorder from digital and physical retailers beginning November 10.
“Tenet” features an international ensemble cast led by John David Washington (“BlacKkKlansman,” TV’s “Ballers”) as the Protagonist. The film also stars Robert Pattinson (the “Twilight” films, “The Lighthouse,” upcoming “The Batman”), Elizabeth Debicki (“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” “The Great Gatsby”), Dimple Kapadia (“Angrezi Medium”), Martin Donovan (“Ant-Man,” “Fahrenheit 451”), Fiona Dourif (“Cult of Chucky”), Yuri Kolokolnikov (“The Hitman’s Bodyguard”), Himesh Patel (“Yesterday”), Clémence Poésy (“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (“The Avengers: Age of Ultron”), with Michael Caine (“Inception,” “The Cider House Rules,” “The Dark Knight”) and Kenneth Branagh (“Dunkirk,” “Murder on the Orient Express”).
The film was produced by Emma Thomas and Nolan. Thomas Hayslip served as executive producer.
Nolan’s behind-the-scenes creative team included director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema, production designer Nathan Crowley, editor Jennifer Lame, costume designer Jeffrey Kurland, visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson and special effects supervisor Scott Fisher. The score is composed by Ludwig Göransson.
SYNOPSIS
Armed with only one word—Tenet—and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist (John David Washington) journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. Not time travel. Inversion.
4K AND BLU-RAY AND DVD ELEMENTS
“Tenet” 4K UHD Combo Pack and Blu-ray contain the following special features:
Looking at the World in a New Way: The Making of “Tenet” - An hour-long exploration of the development and production of the film as told by the cast and crew.
BASICS
PRODUCT SRP
4K UHD Combo Pack $44.95
Blu-ray $35.99
DVD $28.98
4K, Blu-ray, DVD and EST Street Date: December 15, 2020
Preorder date: November 10
DVD Languages: English, Latin Spanish, English-ADS, Canadian French
BD Languages: English, Latin Spanish, Canadian French, English-ADS, Brazilian Portuguese
DVD Subtitles: English SDH, Latin Spanish, Parisian French
BD Subtitles: English, Latin Spanish, Parisian French, Brazilian Portuguese
Running Time: 151 minutes
Rating: Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some suggestive references and brief strong language.
). I haven't been knocked out by one of his movies since the overstuffed yet underrated Dark Knight Rises, which actually DID have some humor.
). It's also plodding, humorless, and never develops any of the characters to the point where the film becomes more than an intricate feat of temporal logistics. It really only earns the .5 due to how impressively Nolan stages certain sequences, and to be fair there are some authentically innovative visual effects, but overall the film left me cold. There's a moment early on where a scientists says to John David Washington's protagonist "Stop trying to understand it, just feel it" while exposting about the film's baffling science gobbledygook, and that's pretty much the only way to appreciate a dense, joyless film that's impossible to follow, and doesn't give the viewer much in terms of character development to make us care enough to suss out just what the fudge is going on. Lots of impressive pyrotechnics on display (all set to an Tinnitus-inducing score by Ludwig Goransson that's the equivalent of Quint dragging his fingers down a chalkboard in Jaws for 150 minutes), but, like most of Nolan's work, it's cold, austere, and vaguely autistic, the work of a man more interested in making college graduates with a degree in advanced mathematics pat each other on the back for "getting" it than providing any sort of, y'know, fun experience for general audiences. He may have done his "populist" Batman trilogy to earn the clout to make movies like this for the rest of his career, but those are by far amongst the most satisfying films he's made (even the overlong but underrated Dark Knight Rises). I'd say it's worth seeing just for it's impressive visual scale, but it's telling that Michael Caine delivers more dry martini wit in his 90-second cameo than anyone else does in the film's interminable 150-minute length.