Showing posts with label Christopher Nolan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christopher Nolan. Show all posts

Tuesday 19 September 2023

Inception, dreaming and is Cobb 'awake' [whatever that is] when the film ends ? (work in progress)

Inception, dreaming and is Cobb 'awake' [whatever that is] when the film ends ? (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 July

Inception, dreaming and is Cobb 'awake' [whatever that is] when the film ends ? (work in progress)




Michael Caine, as a lecturer in an unspecified discipline at a French academy (which, however, we may rightly assume to be La Sorbonne), graces a scene close to the start of Inception [which, thanks to this word from the world of insurance, necessarily sounds like the start of the start], and then does not reappear until the closing ones.

From their conversation, we learn that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), whom he addresses as 'Dom', is his son-in-law and that he had once been one of his brighter students. (The credits tell us that Caine's character is called Miles, but we do not hear that name used.) Despite Cobb's seeming implication in the death of his daughter (Mal**, played by Marion Cotillard), Miles appears to have relatively few reservations about introducing Cobb to one of his current students, once he has first urged Cobb 'to come back to reality', and Cobb has argued both that, after what happened, he has to use what he was taught to do as he does (but cannot now be the architect of his own dream-deceptions), and, moreover, that the job that he is undertaking represents his only chance to be what Miles and Cobb want him to be able to be, a father to his children.

When Cobb asks for someone 'at least as good as' he was, Miles claims that Ariadne (Elliot Page) is 'better than' Cobb. (Apart from at the end of the film, where Miles meets Cobb at the airport, we see Caine do no more than effect an introduction to Ariadne. (If, that is, Cobb and co. have actually reached Arrivals...))


More to come...


























Appendix :





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Friday 30 June 2023

Conflagration, Catastrophe and Christopher Nolan (work in progress)

Conflagration, Catastrophe and Christopher Nolan

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 June

Conflagration, Catastrophe and Christopher Nolan (work in progress)









More to come...






















Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 2 November 2021

TENET (2020) Reloaded : Is Nolan's film a full-on Blakeian prophecy - so impenetrable that we miss the light between the trees ?

TENET (2020) Reloaded : Is Nolan's film a full-on, so impenetrable, Blakeian prophecy... ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 November

TENET (2020) Reloaded : Is Nolan's film a full-on Blakeian prophecy - so impenetrable that we miss the light between the trees ?


















































Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 22 September 2020

I'd give them all to you : #UCFF on Christopher Nolan in TENET (2020) (work in progress)

I'd give them all to you : #UCFF on Christopher Nolan in TENET (2020) (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October) (Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 September

I'd give them all to you : #UCFF on Christopher Nolan in TENET (2020) (work in progress)


Tenet. n. A belief by which one lives, or which guides one's thinking



Prelude :

If I can't have x, no one else will

Whether expressed in the proverbial form of Dog in the manger, or, from military tactics, Burning one's bridges [behind one], or even - back to proverbial language, if more colourfully - Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, none of it is far removed from the stuff of legend, literature, or works for the opera-house or cinema, because it is, or can be, a human impulse.

Darren Aronofsky might thinly disguise rooting a film in such soil, whereas Christopher Nolan constructs yet another maze around it, so that we do not immediately perceive what is at its centre, and does so with enough brash stage-business of spectacle built around it (detonation, collision or combustion) that he broadly keeps our attention from wandering back to it.



The main event :

Christopher Nolan's Tenet could be seen as a mass of red herrings - or, if one prefers, a couple of diamonds (maybe more ?) in the dust :

What we least need to know, or to follow the ins and outs of it (as the general direction suffices), he gives us by darting around, from country to country, in the style of (early) Bond films (except that there is no (rigged) game of Vingt-et-un, poker or Baccarat in sight).


Lacking any other name than in the credits, The Protagonist (John David Washington) is principled, but he is not answerable to an M, or armed by a Q, etc., etc., and so has only the crudest notion overall what he is trying to do - such that he makes errors. [In this, he resembles a less humorous take on Frank Capra's earnest Clarence (Henry Travers)]. However, whether it be a Connery or a Moore, Washington has and employs the charm and bluff of a Bond, and also has the resourceful Neil (Robert Pattinson) as his running-mate* (as well as a few other assistants).




Even if Tenet were to feel as if it needs to re-watched for something that one missed, one is as likely to gain very little new (and only benefit the film's box-office figures) - or not to be able to concentrate sufficiently to glean whatever was thought important. Whether it is what happens here, or Cobb (Leonardo Di Caprio), trying to change Fischer's (Cillian Murphy's) mind undetected in Inception (2010), the basic thrust can be easily enough perceived, although doing so is despite all the elements of distraction.

For example, neither Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), nor Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), narrates an incident in their past without our being fed visual snippets, which, by being intermittent**, only serve to stop us weighing the truth of what they say. (Except that, although it is not obviously going to be so, we prove to have no reason to doubt what is said, and it seems that Nolan just wanted to embed the images ?)












[...]


By the end of the film proper [not the coda that deals with a couple of loose ends], we will have no more idea why (if we were to stop to think and ask) :

* Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), any more than any mother would (Aronofsky's entrée), obsesses about her son to the extent of enquiring, somewhat idiotically in context, Not even my son ?

* The Protagonist (John David Washington) cares about her and her son's freedom and survival, to an extent that is, very often, beyond the point of what we can judge reason dictates

* He is, for so long, so much on his own, and, with only some information, skills in bluffing and fight, he is out on a limb, albeit with trusted personnel, given what he is trying to do


Only on the level of the similar anonymity and agency of a Pertwee, where a Nicholas Courtney (Lethbridge-Stewart) provides the (usually meagre, but sufficient) fire-power towards the end, or of Baker, realizing, with clues from conveniently available allies, what is at stake, and, with their assistance, defeating The Master (or some other nemesis), does Tenet pretend to cohere : the answers to what, as set out, we do not know, and will only know extrinsically, may and should matter, but they have been subjugated to the overall arc, whose matters of import (hidden in all the pseudo-technical 'huff and puff') are themselves a tiny fraction of what we see in 150 minutes.

For a headlong dash into the stuff of an unseen world, the comparison of G. K. Chesterton's 'Nightmare' The Man who was Thursday (1908) is worth making.






Postlude (NB Spoiler alert) :





End-notes :

* Much as Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur) is to Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb) in Inception (2010).

** Versus pure narration, or PoV that takes us through the whole of what is told.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 26 August 2020

Plotting to have Christopher Nolan make a rom-com next...

Plotting to have Christopher Nolan make a rom-com next... But who plants the seed ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


26 August

Plotting to have Christopher Nolan make a rom-com next... But who plants the seed ?



Nolan heard it from Lilly first* : Chris, are you really writing a rom-com ?




Cypher : It means fasten your seat-belt, Dorothy, cos Kansas is going bye-bye !



End-notes :

* Or was it Lana... ?




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)

My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


26 August

My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)













Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Thursday 13 August 2020

Christopher Nolan and the non-poetics of Inception (2010)

Christopher Nolan and the non-poetics of Inception (2010)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


12 August

Christopher Nolan and the non-poetics of Inception (2010)

We need look no farther than Andrei Tarkovsky - in Solaris (1972), Mirror (Зеркало [Zerkalo]) (1975), Stalker (1979) - to be shown dazzling profundity in simplicity.


NB Spoilers in the Tweets immediately below !




Dædalus proper :



By contrast with Tarkovsky (whose films are alluded to under the title), one of the premises of Inception (2010) - stated when Cobb is telling Ariadne* why he needs her to design a certain type of maze (and, rather obviously, Cobb / Nolan is all along really referring as much to cinema) - is that its complexity serves to conceal the fact that a dream-world has been fabricated, not dreamt per se.





[...]




End-notes :

* Of all people, given the signification of her name !



Nota bene - Level -8
Appendix of spoilery stuff ! :






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)