Blank Check with Griffin & David - teneT

Episode Date: January 10, 2021

!erom dna ,tsinogatorP eht sa notgnihsaW divaD nhoJ fo ecnamrofrep eht ,nosnittaP treboR fo reerac eht thgiltops ,DOV ot yenruoj lausunu "s'ameniC fo roivaS" eht ssucsid sdneirfowteht# rehtegoT .teneT ,mlif noitca sdrawkcab wen sih htiw naloN rehpotsirhC rotcerid stisiver kcehC knalB Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com

and as always i'm pretty sure i already did this bit on the memento episode uh tune in next week for wonder woman 1984 uh go to our shopify page for some real nerdy merch go to blankies.reddit.com for some real nerdy shit thanks to joe bowen and pat Browns for our artwork. Thanks to Lane Montgomery for our theme song. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. Yeah, great. I never say anything at the end. I was going to join in. Look, this episode's a little bit inverted.

It is. I just don't have an ending thing. You don't. You don't. You don't. I mean, you know, it's fine. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. It's fine. The thing that you do at the end is realize that we've been friends this entire time.

You know what I'm saying? You realize we've been biffles this whole time. For me, this is the end of a long and beautiful friendship. I can't remember the line exactly, but whatever that is. Yeah. He says, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And the rep ensign goes, no, no, bro. It's the ending.

I don't know. Right. Hello, everybody. We're talking Tenet. Ten tenet we're doing it it's it's it's a rare occurrence it's an odd occurrence to talk about a new release film this many months after its release uh there are a couple times where we've been a little out of sync with the director we're covering so dumbo was a little bit late in detroit was a little bit late but now we're doing this more than a little late and and the witch is more than a little late

it's like our podcast is on is untethered from the time stream i'm doing like a backwards. I'm walking backwards. David's doing a backwards man. He can go backwards fast as you can. Tenet, guys. Here, so yes. Blank check.

Come on, come on. Let's introduce this show, guys. This is very exciting. We're finally after. David, I can't introduce the show. I just ended it. Okay, fair enough. Okay, well, I'm still David Sims. And this is a podcast where we discuss directors' filmographies.

And we once discussed... I'm not getting everything out of the way. But we did once discuss the filmography of Christopher Nolan. We did. We have. Right. once discuss the filmography of christopher nolan we did we have and right you know and it was in 2017 before the release of his last movie and then in 2020 he released his new movie tenant and it saved movie theaters yeah right it totally saved movie theaters and went over normal um and so that was great and here we are to review it because, of course,

we wanted to wait until it was available on demand because, you know, things are normal, but maybe not everyone got to see it in Labor Day. We should say a couple of things. First of all, things are not normal. Second of all, we should say right up top, we went and saw this in a theater in new jersey we rented out a screen uh just a couple of days before it went on to vod we sort of the last window maybe of it playing in theaters i was overcome with the impulse to see it uh i have been uh barely doing anything

all pandemic i don't say this as justification as i've earned the right to go break some rules, but it was one of those things where I was like, fuck it, this is my thing. This is my one cheat this year. Is one cheat too many? Perhaps. I don't know, but I've also been doing less than almost anyone I know. I barely see anybody. So we rented out a movie theater in New Jersey for $150. It was astonishingly cheap. we were in the swamps

of sarcoccus we were in the swamps of sarcoccus uh it was a nice little theater i gotta say i was kind of into it little is maybe not the word but it was like a indie multiplex it was an indie multiplex i looked into it it was like a chain that got largely bought out by amc and most of their theaters were converted to amcs and this is one of the few that is still owned by the original family they didn't get this location carousotes the chain is called carousotes that's the name of the chain i was trying to figure that out so that's just a family name right that's the family name and there was a video before the movie from mr carasotes am i wrong also in thinking that mr carasotes is the name of the guy who eats too much and then explodes in vomit in monty python in the meaning of life does sound

right i don't think it's quite thatosote very very similar okay you know that uh scene really freaked me out when i was a kid is that normal uh i i don't know it's funny i mean i feel like i'm the one who usually talks about things having freaked me out when i was a kid i just thought that was one of the funniest scenes ever made. It is funny. Like, I think even as a kid, I mean, what's it? Way for thin, you know, like, you know, it is funny. I just remember it's so gross and insane.

I think when I was a kid, I was like overwhelmed by it. That scene always was hilarious to me. And I'm the guy who was uh terrified of austin powers the first time i saw it right because he was frozen too scary too scary uh this carousel chain yes they're they got bought out by amc they now have only a very small selection of they operate six theaters in all of the united states and one of them is in secaucus new jersey the point here is they played a video it's four of us in the theater okay griffin david ben ben significant other we're in the theater alone we pay 150 for the four of us to see it did not seem

like there was a single person seeing one other movie in the theater right no literally there was a person outside the theater like and ben enjoyed this person and she like basically like unlocked the door to the i mean to the to the front of the movie of the multiplex to let us in she's like wait what are you here for and we were like oh we booked a theater and she's like right okay okay you know come on in but like they were like they were almost hoping that no one would show up right yeah and there was like passive aggressive energy for sure which i sympathize it's a strange time to be operating a multiplex obviously but uh yes no griffin tenet the film by christopher nolan came out in labor day you didn't see it you you you you you know i think you flirted with it a couple times right well let me let me let me unpack this a little bit okay sure sure i was very staunchly against theaters reopening i've been very against uh most things

reopening even though i understand the necessity of people having to uh work for a living uh i do find uh this to be a this capitalist hellscape of uh how america has thrown people into the furnace in order to keep uh our big industries alive during a pandemic uh it just felt like a movie theater is a thing that's fundamentally going to be unsafe to do why reopen it and i also had the fear that reopening prematurely would doom the businesses low grosses would uh yeah speed up the death of it as a business which uh freaked me out because movie theaters are one of the only things that i like in the world um and so i was like very against it and very much like i'm not going to go to a movie theater until i'm vaccinated i cannot

see a thing changing my mind on that and then a couple of things happen one is uh the reopening of movie theaters was a disaster uh people have not been going right people just weren't going yeah which look on one hand i understand on the other hand that it's like a ding is that just me yeah no i hear that i kind of heard a buzzing yeah there's a weird buzz noise kind of inverted noise okay one of those classic inverted i know i don't i don't know what that is i don't know what that is i don't know what that is i'm marginally confused by how movie theaters are the thing that people are really reticent to do and so many other businesses seem to be uh immune in terms of uh idiots uh throwing willful abandon towards having fun in the short term right because in a movie theater you ostensibly sit silently which would seem to be

less but anyway whatever whatever which look i guess i guess i get the fear it was the fear that drove me at the beginning which was like i don't want to go see a fucking chris for nolan movie opening weekend with a packed crowd with a bunch of people jammed in like sardines in the middle of the movie the guy next to me takes off his fucking mask we've all experienced bad behavior from moviegoers but as the months wore on and it became clear that people were not going to movie theaters uh the idea of going to a movie theater to see tenant became more and more appealing to me because i was like i weirdly feel there's less risk than going to a restaurant like i absolutely i have i have really struggled to get my head

around even outdoor dining let alone indoor dining when I walk by bars and restaurants that are open, people are just there with their masks off. It fucking breaks my brain. And I'm not someone who's been like hanging out with people indoors with masks off or anything. I've been so overly cautious, but it was just sort of like something about the wild failure of movie theaters reopening makes it now feel like movie theaters are one of the safer places to be and we were also renting out a screen at a theater that's a little bit uh isolated off the beaten path so it just felt like oh there's probably not going to be anyone there my fear the entire time was some guy walks in after seeing a fucking 215 war with grandpa and sneaks into the second half of tenant and sits right down next to me because it was four of us sitting at different ends of the theater with our mask on right yeah but they're no but no there's no one around i mean it was the same thing uh that happened when i saw

it the last time there's just there's no one around no one's even thinking of going it's just nothing i thought about a number of times and one time i even booked you did it's screening and then i took a nap and then i woke up and i was like i'm not gonna take a path train to go see tenant new jersey by myself but i finally talked you guys into doing it uh and so we did it it's one of these weird things where it's like i feel somewhat hypocritical because i've been so anti-movie theater going uh and i've been such a fucking covid scold about everyone's behavior all the time uh and it's not like i endorse it but i also did walk away from it being like it feels more safe than most things right now uh i i try not to scold anything because for this exact reason because it's everyone's different no you know whatever whatever i can. I can't worry about it.

I go crazy. I go, well, that's my choice. My choice is that I go crazy. Your choice has been to go crazy, right? Yeah, correct. But I will say both times I did it, certainly, right. My anxiety was not particularly high. Ben, I don't know how you felt, but, you know, there's just no one around.

We were all safe. Like, I don't know. We just did all the things you're supposed to do. It was just an opportunity to do something that i hadn't done in so long and feel just a little bit normal i felt a little bit normal that's the thing you drove me ben and that's what we talked about in the car ride back uh is just like your your significant other was like i feel high right now and i was like i don't even feel high i feel even this is the first time i felt even i've been in withdrawal for the last nine months ten months whatever and now i just vaguely feel human for the next handful of hours yeah i got absorbed into a movie and forgot

about everything for however long this like two-hour movie it was great it was daylight and then it was night when we left i know and i was trying to figure out hour movie, it was great. It was daylight. And then it was night when we left. I know. And I was trying to figure out what the hell I was watching. Right. Like we went to a dark room. We were all in that room together, but we weren't talking to each other.

We were sitting in different parts of the theater. The lights went down. We turned our phones off. And for two and a half hours, we just thought about gobbledygook. We thought about Christopher Nolan and his pretentious goofiness and it was great and you you said it so well ben where you were like it was so nice to watch a movie about people trying to like stop an apocalypse like it felt like a relief to be focused on a fake phony baloney bullshit end of the world threat rather

than all of the real end of the world threats like to just have this complete escapist experience to just be engulfed by this screen and and his weird inaudible sound mix yes for two and a half hours plus some trailers i don't know i just felt so good that to some degree I throw this all as a preface. I don't even really know what I think of this movie. Like, I certainly enjoyed watching it. I think I understood 20 percent of it at most. because a it's the first hit i've gotten in almost a year of my main of my main fix right and b because it is such an elemental fucking nolan movie of just like sound and movement and imagery and shit and fucking suits and explosions and vehicles and whatever that i just had the distinct thought at several points like i would be very happy if this went on for 12 hours i barely know what's happening in this movie i would just be happy watching this as like a just a feed just as a raw feed for a day i wish this were andy warhol's empire i wish this was just endless uh but david you've seen the movie twice now. No, no, no.

No, no, no. Well, I watched it again before, you know, since we went to the theater. Oh, wow. So you've seen it twice in theaters and then you bought the steelbook and you've watched it once at home now? That's correct. And in between your first and second theater going experiences, you spent a lot of time on like uh reddit and uh i don't know about a lot you know a little time you dug into the rabbit holes of people trying to crack this movie right definitely definitely definitely like watching it for the third time at home how much do you feel like you get what's going on while you're watching the movie oh i've

yeah i totally get it i i love this movie this movie rules i yeah i accept the the final sequence is the one where that's gonna take me a while um i feel like there's there's just in terms of geography just in terms of what's supposed to what who's doing what, when, during the big final. But apart from that, oh yeah. I mean, like, look. I mean, Ben basically said this when we left. Forky said this after we watched it at home. She was like, he just made a movie for you.

It's for you. It's really for you. It is just a movie that christopher wanted to watch she was like you know pretty into this i would say for i don't know maybe an hour and then after that she was just like no i can't and i feel like that's been a lot of people's reaction to tenet right there's some point in which they're just kind of like no i i don't i don't care enough to do the really hard work of trying to keep up with everything here. So I'm going to kind of mentally tap out at this point.

Right? Like that's the negative hit on Tenet. It is absolutely a movie that makes you do the lion's share of the work in a way that is very unusual for a film of this size. Right. Although it also, it's trying to do the advice of so it's just like don't worry about just feel it it's gonna be you know like there's that early sequence where she's but yes yes you are correct uh but i also to me to some degree like a it feels like uh this movie's a present for david uh it's a movie all about rules and the movie's a puzzle. And to another degree, this movie feels like Nolan's response to everyone clowning on how much of Inception is spent explaining Inception.

Right. He's like, yeah, fuck you. It'll be the whole movie next time. But it's almost the opposite. Like Inception is just like you're very clear emotional stakes for each character, right? We understand who these people are. There's, like, a lot of sort of personality in the little scenes. There's a ton of setup before you actually get to the shit going crazy.

And there's so many scenes where people, like, take the time to stop and with a chart explain everything that you're going to see before you see it. And everyone made fun of how much of that movie is like seminars oh so right so you're saying this time he was just like fine whatever i'll just yell at you a little bit and then throw you into the next set piece right he's like oh you're you're telling me you don't like how much instruction manuals right right fine absolutely i'll just throw you into the deep end. I'll have people yell shit mid-action, you know? Which I do think, we have to talk about all the different elements to this movie and its already weird legacy, but that Nolan very much positioned this movie as like, I think this can be the movie that saves cinemas right and aside from the fact that he made his move very prematurely uh it also is not the kind of movie that was ever going to function that way i think this movie was always going to turn people off a little bit especially in relation to his other movies yeah this was always right if they said just if 2020 had been

regular old movie season i don't know the movie would have made money people would have seen it warner brothers gave it the you know appropriate tentpole you know push but yeah i think it would have been a more minor people would have been i think somewhat disappointed by it and now it is saddled with just like unrealistic expectations right uh circumstances that were designed to make it look like a failure no matter what and i've even just seen in the last whatever it's been four days since it came out on home video i think it's been four days from the time we're recording to when it came out on home video um that and vod and what have you

that there's already been the sort of like people being like that's it and the backlash to the backlash and all that shit there was a tiny backlash on its theater release but obviously most people but there was a little bit of that in september and now there's more right and i think that would have been the reaction it would have been like it's like black hat it's like you know hardcore fans would have been are going fucking wild and hooting and hollering but a lot of people would have been like no he's up his own ass i don't i what like that's the other thing right that's the other thing is this movie is fuels the most michael mannish to me of all of christopher nolan movies. And people talk about how inspired he is by Michael Mann. We certainly have talked about it. But I feel like Nolan does have that kind of populist

streak in him where he wants to make movies that are accessible and enjoyable to the masses, right? And like, whereas Michael Mann has that, like, I don't give a fuck if you don't understand what these people are saying kind of thing to him. And this feels like him applying that sensibility to the Nolan thing where it's just like, I'm dropping you in. I'm not slowing down. I'm not holding your hand. I'm fucking going for it. I also think those types of movies are particularly best seen in theaters with total immersion and right i just like the entire time i was watching

this i went like i'm so uh thankful that i pulled the trigger on uh going to the fucking carousels theater with you guys and it's last week of release because i would not want to have to watch this movie at home for the first time if there's anything distracting you away from the screen it is so easy to just feel completely lost with this movie as opposed to just sitting there in a theater and going like i get that i'm not gonna get all of it whatever i'm just i'm i'm handing myself over to this thing um yes i want to say several things. Okay, one, because I've seen a lot of this on the internet. Christopher Nolan definitely is a hubristic creature who thought that he could save cinema. I don't think that's untrue or whatever, who wanted the movie in theaters, thought maybe things could rebound in the summer. That is definitely a part of it.

Sure. It's released. could rebound in the summer like that that is definitely a part of it sure uh it's released but i do feel like people have forgotten that theaters were begging begging studios to release big movies throughout you know and and really wanted to reopen in my opinion possibly foolishly like right right you know like they were like it's fine we'll do a video of us spraying down the seats like right which is what we saw we saw mr caris so it's fine, we'll do a video of us spraying down the seats. Right, which is what we saw. We saw Mr. Karasov, the world's least charismatic man, sitting dead-eyed in a theater saying, it's safe, it's safe. Looking to the cue cards in the corner of the screen, yes.

Right, right. While people in hazmat suits spray around him. Right. Right. And of course, also, this movie did far better in Europe and extremely well in China, in countries where, especially during the summer, COVID was really subsiding. And of course, America. Fucked it up? I don't think we did a very good job. I'm just going to say it. I think we did a kind of a shitty job. No good, very very bad doomed us Yeah so There was that issue as well

Just cause I feel like I've just seen a lot of like Well fuck that movie I mean Christopher Nolan single handedly killed the theater business I'm like no The pandemic is issue A Obviously Killing the theater business And some fucking studio was gonna try this shit

Like Someone was gonna try this shit like yes someone was gonna throw a movie out there most likely a movie like tenant that was planned for early you know like for a summer release yeah and they didn't want to delay it for a year you know like and some and of course nolan was like yes of course theaters i i am the the saint of theaters like this is my clarion cause we will i right we gotta do it yes i think you're right it could have been mulan just as easily it could have been one of many other films there's something about the fact that he is such a as you said like the patron saint of the theater and and sort of the old-fashioned big screen experience and all of that uh but also it

was like you know reported that he internally was like i think this is the movie that can save theaters that he did by all accounts have a little bit of that tom cruise like you don't understand everyone's looking for me at looking to me to save this you know who saw this movie tom cruise big movie big screen yeah i can't remember what he said he said i love the movie it's blanket thank you no it's true look it could have been another it could have been another movie but the difference is if it had been mulan or it had been anything of that sort if it had been crude's a new beginning or whatever they would have just been like oh this studio fucked it up with nolan it was so clear even just to like the

day after the hbo max announcement uh i posted on twitter this video that he made the india video right because it's finally opening in theaters in india being like it's ready it's safe you can all go this is how movies meant to be seen on the big screen like he was really trying to be like the ambassador of it's safe again we can't let this thing die and i think a it was not the right movie to pin those sort of hopes on and b it was way too early way way way too early and the reality is i think the only way that movie going feels safe is doing exactly what we did i say feel safe because everything is only safe on a relative scale when there's a fucking invisible virus in the air that could kill us all.

But ultimately, that's not a sustainable model for these theaters to just be renting out screens to for dipshits. It's just the best they can do now because, like, it's either that or no tickets sold. I think it was one of those things where they were like more right like you know we will find a balance there's levels of survival we're prepared to accept to quote agent smith and then they couldn't even pull that off right because people didn't want to go because it is a virus and because america fucked it up and it was just still there

and obviously the best way to deal with any of these things is to pay businesses to stay closed and pay people to stay in their homes and of course uh we didn't do that and i don't know if you know this but the president was was and still is donald trump um who i you know i just think has had a really mixed record as the leader of the country. The release of Tenet in and of itself, an absolutely insane thing that will be discussed and puzzled over for the rest of Nolan's life, right?

Yes, absolutely. And also, I mean, you know, with the full ripple effects of like him calling HBO Max the worst streaming service on the planet it's like i had no problem with that but it's like there's a really good chance this is the end of his relationship with warner brothers as well and that warner brothers was one of the more traditional movie studios still in existence that seems to have gone by the wayside and you have to wonder what the rest of his career is going to look like. Like to some degree, it is perhaps not fair, like it is not an accurate sample size. But I do think

that executives are going to look at Tenet and go like, maybe that type of movie is over. Maybe the Nolan thing doesn't really make sense in a current business model. And I did watch this movie and I am so grateful that it is a movie, but I could see people like now being counters looking at this and being like, why would we spend over $200 million for one two and a half hour thing that isn't going to become a franchise when we could give him like $200 million to make 10 episodes of a TV show or whatever the fuck? And the answer is not going to do that. No, no.

But I'm just saying for them, they'd be like, why would we greenlight this? For that amount of money, it should be a season. It should be a miniseries. No, no, no. Nolan is on the Tarantino level where he- David, I am not saying that Nolan is ever going to take that offer. I'm saying, I think to a certain degree, executives are going to go, why would we ever make that? I think, no, I disagree with you. Like he is on the Tarantino level.

Were he released from his Warner Brothers deal, which I don't know if he can be, and he was like open season, who wants me? They would fall over themselves to get him. Like it doesn't matter. Because this movie still made almost 400 million dollars during a pandemic sure like let's let's call out during a pandemic and it wasn't even that like well liked and like no people i mean tarantino made the hateful eight had worked with harvey weinstein for his entire career yes and after that falls apart he was like who wants me here's how it's gonna work i get the rights i

get final cut i get so much of the money and my movie costs so much money and like every studio bid on him every studio was like yes please very aware and they are in many ways sort of like the last two yeah excuse me hold on to an old model oh well camera yeah but i mean right but um everything you just said in terms of like tarantino's deals that he set up nolan is like that times two i mean his budgets are just so big you know this one was big this was a really expensive movie but dunkirk was not that expensive like you know he can make a movie for 100 million dollars you know what i mean like you know whatever he'll do it the three batman i don't know i don't know i mean all this is uh uh curious and hard to predict but

i wonder if they're gonna ask him to tighten the belt next time that's my real question i mean i also don't know what does he want to do next time. Like, it feels like, and we should talk about the Ark of Nolan, because, of course, this is Blank Check, and we've spent a whole miniseries doing that. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. If, like, you know,

Inception had elements of this, but, like, this is the Bond movie that he's always dreamed of, and as he said, he's, like, worked on this movie said, he's like worked on this movie. He's had the idea for this movie since he was like a kid, which, you know,

is sort of the vibe of the original Nolan projects often. Like the 12 year olds to, you know, mental toy box, like in the hands of a visual master. Well, also this thing I love about Nolan of just like this very sort of sophisticated british man with the slicked back golden hair and the finely tailored suits saying something

as if it's really profound and if you read it on paper you're like this could be a five-year-old saying like i think it'd be cool if cars went backwards exactly well this is the thing about tenant it really felt like, because even Dunkirk was a huge hit, right? Right. So it's like they're just going to keep giving him the money. And so Tenet, even after the Dark Knight, if he had walked into a studio,

and he sold them at Onception, which was, but if he had walked into the studio and he was like, all right, listen, guys, okay? So like, you can go backwards if you go through this machine and the guy's gonna go for he's not gonna have a name you know like if he tried to pitch them on this thing i think they just would have been like oh i don't know and so inception he's like well what about the dream thieves movie and they're like yeah i guess that one's easier to handle let's do the Dream Thieves movie, right? Like, this feels like the apotheosis of wild Nolan pitches.

But also, it's like Inception has the basic pitch you can give, which is like, it's a man who, like, operates in this weird sci-fi concept. He lost his wife to it. He's been locked out of the country where his kids are. He's desperately trying to get back to him. This mysterious businessman comes to him, offers him a deal that would allow him to clean the decks and get back to his family. Classic Hollywood formula there, embedded there, even without the time travel. There's a thing.

Right. The one last job, he's going to be able to be with his family. Right. The classic Hollywood story, Man Forever Haunted by his dead wife. And this one, Nolan's like first of all wife's alive the twist on this movie is the wife doesn't want to be killed in the future just on this movie is everyone's trying to kill the wife and i won't let it happen right and the wife is married to the bad guy right the good guy is trying to stop the wife from becoming dead but also he's

like you know like i just imagined him at the end and he's like and the ultimate ultimate thing that was going on is he's actually been friends with robert pattinson the whole time it's the doofiest twist and i'm such a sucker for it right you're like so here's here's the here's the idea okay these characters barely have names the the main guy is literally just called protagonist they seem to not care about each other at all and the twist at the end of the movie is oh actually they used to be pretty tight hey he knows he likes diet he knows he likes to diet coke yeah that's some personal shit right there that's some personal shit this is what i'm god i love this movie it's so good oh god when are people gonna figure it out i'm really i'm really into this movie too i saw someone on reddit predicting that i was

gonna hate it because it doesn't have like characters and emotional arcs i almost got in there and started yelling i was just like i think he likes it like but and emotional arcs i almost got in there and started yelling i was just like i think he likes it like but then i was like i guess i should wait for the episode maybe griffin does hate it even though you you had good vibes coming out of the theater yeah i really good vibes coming out of the theater i i ordered my uh steelbook it hasn't arrived yet i mean i'm like into this movie but to some degree i have a hard time like uh extricating uh my feelings from the larger feelings tied into the experience of being able to go to a movie theater for the first time whatever and what have you but also i just think like you know when i like voice my frustration

with something like rogue one it's because I feel like that is a fairly conventional movie that is lacking in character arcs and that sort of like intimate, emotional kind of stakes. Whereas this movie is mostly just a like, wouldn't this be a cool thing to see a movie do kind of movie, which is enough for me to get on board.

Like, guess what? Seeing shit go backwards is really fucking cool. It turns out it rules. And there's, there's something just about it being the most analog special effect in the world. Right. That's what I love about it.

One of the earliest things people realized is like, Oh, you could roll the thing backwards and then shit looks crazy. And he's like, here's the idea. It's just that. I mean, I have the stat here, but the number of special effects shots in this movie is 280. Which is just to be clear, very few for a movie that cost about $200 million and is enormously elaborate. Right.

It's less than most romantic comedies. Like, Dark Knight, you know, 12 years ago, 650 shots. Dark Knight Rises, 450. Inception, 500. Dunkirk, 429. So, like, Dunkirk was thought of as like a pretty scaled down movie for him. This is 280. That is actually incredibly impressive. I didn't realize it was, that is wild. Right. And, and even to the degree that I just noticed like several scenes, several shots,

several closeups in this movie where Elizabeth De becky is clearly having like a breakout on her face and there's like basic concealer done to try to like patch up her her zits uh which nowadays just is always cgi'd out it's always cgi just airbrush everyone's faces right and it's just like her complexion is different in a couple scenes there are a couple scenes where she has different bumps on her face like he's going out of his way to be like i'm doing as much of this in camera as possible even if it fucks up continuity um and again especially on the big screen it's really cool how uh everything feels very real i would say and i'm sure you would agree uh things like the crazy stunt of them climbing up a building or them driving a airplane into a warehouse um those

are just things they did like it's great dropping gold barspping bars. It's also just that thing that I hadn't forgotten about, but I've now gone so long without. I mean, for me, where I'm usually seeing several movies in theaters a week, you know? Sure. To go nine, ten months without any of this, to just be like... I sat up in the second or third row. I sat up really close, and you guys were like, you want to sit that close? And I was like, I just want to be completely overwhelmed by this thing. I want to be so fully immersed in it.

My neck was craned up. It was like, you know, extended beyond my immediate plane of vision. And just like any time there in any shot, just getting so caught up in the different textures of everything, you know? Just, like, every new environment and the way the light hit everything and the different materials of their suits. And as you said, like, the shininess of the gold or whatever. It's just, it's a very tactile movie. And it very much is an argument for that kind of like analog tactility. I fully agree.

It's got a vibe that I can't figure out. It's cool. Like for him, just like slick. I think it's also that he's playing it cool, Ben. Like I think it's that part of what we like about nolan is that he's a big old dork and he like cannot help but put these like very goofy broad emotions into it that his movies are always just about like man i really love my family right and that he's like so proud to show you all the work he did and this is one of the only times that he's sort of like held shit back

you know it feels like he's really yeah but it's a little a little more held back or a little less hard on sleeve or whatever yeah which to be fair like i like the the uh sentimentality of nolan but it is interesting to watch him like this movie just feels like a bunch of different exercises that he's doing like i want to see if it's possible to do a movie like this if it's possible to write a script like this if it's possible to tell a story this way also entertainment too of course it's entertaining that almost feels secondary like it almost feels like he's figured out how to make something that's entertaining to people right but then the eggheads come in and they note him to death so he's just like what if i put out of my mind that that basic people pleasing gene that i have

right what if i put that on the bench for a little bit and just try to like almost construct this like an intellectual exercise i think there's thematic stuff going on but we'll we'll talk about there is a lot of there's thematic stuff going on but but we'll talk about it. There is. I have a lot of feelings about this movie. There's thematic stuff going on, but that's the thing. It's more, very little of it is terrestrial. We're going to talk about Tenet. This villain is, he is, the idea of him is crazy. Yeah. I've really been, that's something i've been caught up

on where i'm like this guy is like i'm taking everything with me what a fucking nut yeah and i believe it man i believe that shit could happen if you gave the wrong evil motherfucker the power i also love the scene where he is like so how does he figure into this and it's like absolutely just right guy right place right time right like this guy has no importance in and of himself he just dug up a thing right that just popped up yeah a cruel society threw this guy into the gaping maw of like cleaning up the wreckage of uh you know nuclear destruction and he happened to be the guy who found the suitcase full of gold and unlocked all this shit hell yeah hell yeah he did so tenant griffin christopher nolan's tenant he said he

conceived of the ideas over the course of 20 years i genuinely think this is a thing he thought up of as a teenager yeah right he he was watching uh meatballs 2 on vhs and he rewound it the title of course is inspired by the satyr square as are all the things in the movie do you guys know about this um no have you where where's that uh it's a famous fuck i can't get it all in there but it's a famous roman here i'll put it in the chat um like word puzzle that pops up in a lot of christ early pre-christian art um that's just it's just words that go backwards and forwards it's really it's like here. How do I how do I do this? Stupid chat. There we go.

And so it's the word Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas it and like everything's forwards and backwards. If you look at it like it's it's a it's a I don't know. I don't know if it's it was for children. I don't know if it had I think there for children. I don't know if it had, I think there's weird sort of religious things going on with it, but do you guys see it? Yes. Yeah.

Right. So that's where he gets the name Sator. The company is called Rotas. There's an opera scene, right? Arepo is the, the, the guy who did the fake painting and then Tenet is running through the middle,

right? It's a palindromic title backwards and forwards tenet um this movie griffin well he makes dunkirk obviously it's a really big deal yeah uh gets i can't remember how long we had to wait but i don't know six months later or whatever right this gets announced like nola's next project john david washington elizabeth debicki pattinson right like that was right well because there was that same oscar season was black clansmen and dunkirk right i feel like before the ceremony the announcement came out like the rumor at least came out of like uh nolan wants john david washington as his new lead. He's going to be a new protagonist. And I really, apart from that, I feel like we knew nothing.

Like, it was just one of those things where even by Nolan standards, you know, you would, whatever, someone would interview Pattinson, he'd be like, oh, I really don't know what it's about. It's very confusing. was like there was no we kind of knew it was like a secret agent thing right you know and it would take place around the world and use imax cameras and all right i think they just kept on being like global massive scale and it was known that there was some backward shit going on i'm trying to remember what movie it was that ben and i saw together

where the trailer came up the teaser came up which was mostly just like shit going backwards and forwards it was right it was them in the um that you know in the hallway right the bullet bullet holes smoking yeah it was very brief right but there was right the proper trailer too right it was one of those things where they like put the teaser out, didn't put it online. You could only see if you went to theaters. But the marketing campaign felt somewhat similar to Inception. There was very little known about Inception before it came out, aside of just that the cast was so big. Right.

We just knew something about dreaming, something about your mind. Right. Yes. No, it's true. It's true. And just a blah. That's pretty much what we knew. lot of boys um right um so tenant yeah this is the other thing it's unlike some of these blockbusters they were they were in their marketing when everything got fucked

up yeah so they were they were every postponement apparently cost them like a million dollars just in marketing fees. Anyway. So the film comes out, I swear to God, I feel like people were like, is he actually James Bond? Is that what the movie is about? You know what I mean?

Like there was all that kind of wild rumor mongering of like, did he really secretly make a James Bond movie or something? I remember there being, and maybe I say remember, maybe I was just sort of like personally attached to this theory, but that it was in some way connected to Inception. That it was in the Inception universe. Right, it would be in, right, right. I remember that too. Right, because even the trailer had that weird thing where it said like it's time it's time for a new protagonist right and i was like are you is he saying a new

protagonist of the inception universe and it's like no he's saying that this guy's name is protagonist and the movie doesn't even give him a proper name no but i think that's the i think that's one of the many crude i mean like i like, I don't know if he wrote this character. I'm not saying that's a negative. No, no, I know. I mean, it's... Look, someone, I believe it was Jordan Ropp, I want to give him credit for the film stage.

You said that, like, this movie sometimes feels like a five-hour movie where Nolan cut all the fat out. Because it's not like this movie is short, but it does just kind of move and like go from scene to scene and go from location to like, right. Like it's, it is kind of breathless.

Yeah. And it does feel like so much of like the sort of detail has been stripped out. He's literally just called the protagonist, right? Like, you know, right.

Um, and you know, once again, feels like an exercise in testing the opposite of what he already did with Inception. Yes, right, exactly. Because we've talked about, like, Inception has to spend that much time talking about shit

in the first hour so that the last hour and a half can just be sort of, like, operatic. But they've loaded everything into your brain. And this movie is just asking you for, like, full submersion from the get-go without a lot of grounding. And it begins,

you know, with kind of like a big hammer blow action scene. Like everyone sits down at a fancy opera house in Talon or in the Ukraine or something like, I think it's in Talon. I think this very cool opera house. Oh no, it's the key.

No, they're right. They wanted to use the Kiev opera house, but they, they, they used the, the one in Talon because it's brutalist. Like it's got that crazy industrial look on the outside and it's so pretty on the inside.

It's such a cool location. Uh, yeah, it is now, unfortunately, a weird upsetting way for the movie to begin to see like a bunch of people sit down ready to watch a performance and then a bunch of masked guys come in and they all fall asleep and these guys coming with guns and like hijack the entire situation

there's something just eerie about it and i even like when the trailers were coming out over the summer when the movie kept on getting pushed back and it's like really that's a set piece in this movie is a bunch of people sitting in an audience wearing suits nodding off while people run around the theater and like swat gear and they're trying to convince us to go to theaters to see this yeah i went and i loved it i did it twice yeah but once again we did it uh away from strangers yeah um but uh i don't know you know whatever come on it's a it's a it's a it's just a very yeah i'm just saying it's arresting i i still found it unnerving i'm not saying this in a negative way, but I definitely like I,

at this point in the film, I'm still on edge enough about being out of my apartment, let alone in a public space like this. Um, and knowing that I'm going to be there for the next two and a half hours, the opening scene I found upsetting, but in an effective way. I mean,

the fucking train yard. Right. And then the train yard is great. That to me. He's getting tortured. Oh my God. That's the, maybe one of those scummier things I've seen in a long time.

Uh, that guy, what's his name? Andrew Howard. He has like a really boring name. Yeah. Andrew Howard, the guy who's like,

eh, maybe you, you do have can last another hour I don't know I'm gonna pull a tooth out he's just a guy Driver is his character's name so the protagonist is part of this big operation to try and avert

a terrorist attack it's really a cover for they're trying to steal something from somebody the protagonist gets it but then he's caught and he kills himself he takes his cyanide pill his metal cyanide pill and he thinks he dies but no he wakes up and who is there to say hey you passed the test you're a loyal guy hap hap himself martin donovan apparently his character's name is fay i guess uh guess we didn't hear that uh said out loud but i really like nice to see hap nice that he brought him back uh yeah i feel like there's

been a nice little uh martin donovan reclamation project going on like inherent vice and this vice ant-man remember he popped up in ant-man right right big little lies like he just is one of those guys we've kind of taken for granted he's always good he is always good he's a very solid creep or boss or you know whatever functionary older guy he's a guy

who knows how to use his innate squareness to great effect apparently he once played Jesus I can see that's sort of crazy in like a tv movie no in a hal hartley movie the book of life oh yeah well yeah hal hartley regular yes um yes so and he's basically like look okay so you pass the test everything's chill sorry about your teeth getting pulled out anyway your next mission there's a word there's a word ten it's gonna open some good doors maybe some bad ones too you just love that line you say it

all the time i like it whatever the line is yeah it's basically yeah you have to do this you have to put your hands together uh synergy style right and say tenant tenant and and it'll open some doors uh and that's it right that's all he tells him because the whole thing is like everyone has like one 115th of information for you and you got to talk to everybody and put it all together much like the doomsday device it's like you gotta just yeah i know nobody knows everything but if all together, it's crazy. But it feels, in so many ways, this movie feels similar to Inherent Vice for me. A film that I found endlessly frustrating the first time I saw it, and now I love. Yes.

But that movie similarly is sort of saying, like, just don't even get hung up on anything right right like just flow with this right at by the end of the movie you'll understand what you were supposed to understand but if you're getting too hung up on details in the moment you're you're absolutely gonna end up driving yourself mad um right that is the advice given by Clemence Posey. Mm-hmm. Uh, Fleur Delacour herself. Uh, let me, let me say, uh, Clemence Posey in, in the pasta dinner hall of fame. I just want to say.

Oh, you're a fan. I'm a fan. Um, I like her too. I, I, I would, I would, uh, gladly pick up the bill on a plate of rigatoni ben are you hearing a noise yeah it's super weird i don't know what i don't know what that is um another one where you're like oh like it's not like she's an actress i you know i know her but uh hadn't thought about her in a while i'm not sure no i think she's underused these guys cross right well you know and she's you know she's frosty exposition lady she's uh you know um this is a bullet it's inverted it goes backwards she's here to explain basic in backwards thing but see what

this is where i'll disagree with you a little bit i don't even think she's mostly frosty i think there's something very frosty delicate and quiet about clemence pussy that goes against the types of performances you usually have uh serving this function she seems yeah what's the word for it because right because she's like you know her job she's a scientist she's examining this stuff right like right now uh she she doesn't care about the larger implications she knows there are doomsday implications but yeah there is this sort of mournful moment where you know she's showing him how the bullets work and you're you know you're catching the bullet okay that's cool and then he's like but who cares like this doesn't seem

disastrous this just seems weird and she just leads him into this big room and she takes out uh this other equipment and she's like this is like the detritus of a war that's gonna happen like it's shit just sort of like washing up on shore but it's essentially just like evidence that something terrible will happen in the future right there's something very rueful about her here. Right. Yeah. Rueful. Rueful. Rueful. Rueful. Rueful.

Rueful. But yes, that's sort of the movie's big conceit is this sort of backwards, forwards, timey-wimey stuff is not sort of unmoored. It is very much a cause and effect thing where they can only do shit backwards if it's already been done forwards in the future. As I put it to Ben at the end of the movie, it's Christopher Nolan being obsessed with the moment in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure where they say, let's remember to give ourselves the keys in this bush later. And then suddenly the keys are there, right yes that's exactly it you said this and

i loved it that is his conception of time travel not back to the future not primer bill and ted right and there's the moment where he puts the glove on the bullet and you know she says the bullet's been imbued with this ability to move backwards in time we don't know exactly how it's probably the byproduct of some radiation thing but try you know picking up the bullet from the table and he does it doesn't work and then she goes like no it only works if you have already dropped it hell yeah it's a it's a frame of mind thing right we think about time so just a linear way, man. We're such squares. We only move forwards. But that's just one way to look at it. Yeah. I mean, Christopher Nolan at any given time is thinking about two, even three temporalities.

Oh, my God. There's so many temporalities that we have to think about. He's such a dork. I love what a fucking dork he is. is that he gets all this money to make these very you know uh crowd focused action movies but also he has to say like all right aaron taylor johnson uh temporal pincer movement like that's the line like let's say it back to me yeah um so yes but no i also just love and this is one of the things thematically that i love about the movie right is that the villains are us much like in interstellar where the aliens are just us right except in that they're they're good guys they're you know us in a better world but in tenet it's us and it's just hey all this is just gonna get worse and worse and worse and it's gonna get so bad even though we get more advanced and we fucking discover how to go backwards,

it's going to get so bad that at the end, as things are really getting bad, we're going to be like, well, what if we just blew up the past? Like, is that the only way out of this now? There's no way in the future. Yeah. Like, what if we just go backwards?

And I was just thinking about, the more I think about it, the more I watch this movie. I'm like, that is a very distressing and pessimistic, but also like kind of cold eyed and clever way of thinking about our place in the world. It's a very Griffin Newman worldview when you and I talk about things off microphone. It sure is. That's true. I'm not calling myself a Seder.

I may be more of a Clemence Posey. But here's the things I've been thinking about with this. about things off microphone it sure is that's true i'm not calling myself a satyr i'm maybe more of a clemence posy okay but here's the things i've been thinking about with this yeah okay so do you eat backwards do you watch movies backwards do you know what i'm saying you have to go into your butt like these are the questions i have because i understand the advantage of like using the information you can get in the backwards world and then use that in the forwards world but there's stuff like that experiential stuff where i'm like well that's not enhanced or better this way it's worse i i can't believe i'm only now making this connection but there is of course the famous uh backwards episode of uh red dwarf

which david i don't know if you know this but red dwarf red dwarf is a comedy show from uh the united kingdom it's like a sci-fi comedy show that aired on tv uh in the uk i'm sure i've heard of it yeah what did you wait so you watched on like b America or like the BritBox streaming service or something? I have subscribed to BritBox in the past. I can't remember why. Oh, I remember why. I wanted to watch Our Friends in the North. Have you ever heard of Alan Griffin?

No. Oh, you might like it. Christopher Eccleston, Daniel Craig, Mark Strong, Gina McKee, 90s melodrama. I was going to say, the Red Dwarf episode, which maybe was a big influence on Nolan for this movie, they land on a planet where everything is backwards. And most of the episode happens backwards. And two of the characters start a comedy vaudeville routine as the Amazing Forwards Brothers. Right.

And their whole gimmick is that they just do stuff forwards uh but the the great final bit of the episode is that cat goes out to a field to go to the bathroom and then he makes this really shocked face and you realize it's because the poop went right back up his butt it's a perfect a perfect final joke and of course poop is a palindrome it goes backwards and forwards it went right up his butt he he went he dropped his pants he he crouched atop some grass and and poop went up his butt uh anyway i think that was uh christian olin's main uh influence on this movie was the poop going back up maybe if we pinned him down he'd be like look it was bill and ted in that one red dwarf episode you got me because christian put some james bond on top of it yeah he grew up in england um he did

but uh yes i i think that's one of the things i find very potent in this movie is the idea that this sort of like the the palindromic riddle of it of like we we're making it very clear it's not that certain people just have the magic ability to do things backwards it's that people have the ability to play and reverse things that have already happened right that are going to happen or that have happened in the future they've happened and they move can move backwards through the things that have happened right so they like right they grab this guy protagonist and they're like look it's really important you have to stop the end of the world and they're he's like cool what's the threat and they're like we don't know but we know it's severe because you

have to stop it and he's like what do you mean and they're like well it only the fact that we know something is going to happen means that something bad has happened because you now have to i'm already confusing myself trying to explain it but i just like this is the thing that it's such an abstract threat right that they're just like something is going to go wrong in the future and we know that the proof is the fact that we're telling you right now to stop it and yes and sator does eventually sort of talk about the villain of the movie played by kind of uh ham branna um and we'll talk about him plenty he's he's on a yacht in the middle of an ocean of ham he's sure yes he's on the uss ham that's right the ham cruiser um let them all talk but it's

just the queen mary going inside a pig oh what a good a good pitch. But he eventually says something along the lines of like, their oceans rose. You know, he alludes to like climate catastrophe and so on. But yes, we don't really know what it is, except the world has ended or is ending, is in some dire state. And Sator, the villain of this movie, is someone who is nihilistic about it.

Like Ben is saying, like it's over. And I'm dying as well he's dying of cancer because he fucking grew up inside a radiation and so he's like when i go down as you say ben i'm taking everything with me and then the protagonists and all these people who barely know what it is and barely know even like who they're fighting against and what time they're from but they are like well doing something is better than giving up so you know it is that very basic hero thing of like they won't be nihilistic about it like just because right it happened doesn't mean it has to happen well

and their question is like are we trying to stop something that's about to happen or is it something that has happened and we're fucked let's hope that it's something that's about to happen or is it something that has happened and we're fucked let's hope that it's something that hasn't quite happened yet on the time stream and we can stop it right before it's gonna happen and the hope is better than the giving up even whether whether or not the hope is well founded right like that's just the sims approach tomorrow yes sure The Sims approach. The moral. Yes. Sure. So he gets recruited to Tenet. He goes to, he sees these bullets from Clemence Posey. He goes to India and where he meets Neil, played by Robert Pattinson,

in just full, just dreamboat mode. I mean, come on just oh yeah outrageous charm he has just become such an incredibly compelling screen presence and i really don't think he always was it's not like he was a disaster like you know back in the day but i i really think he has grown like you know back in the day but i i really think he has grown just in terms of his natural on-screen talent yes i i have always been a big defender of his performance in the first twilight movie which i think is really good and then i think in the following twilight films he is completely uh overwhelmed by uh the weight of what the whole thing has come to represent and and the sort of fandom of his

character and i think a lot of the rough edges get sanded off the weird thing he was trying to do in the first movie which is really look at like on paper this guy is fucking bizarre right he's more right you're good it's a good point he's more into the creepiness in the first movie because it is weird he's like you smell so insane to me you know like it's such a weird fucking this guy's like 180 years old and he's still in high school like i think he's right i i think he's sort of doing like a peggy sue got married nick cage performance in the first one and then in the sequels they're like you have to be hot yes yes and also the sequels it's just they ladle in more and more stuff there's more and more characters there's all this you know vampire werewolf

but certainly that run of movies running kind of concurrent with twilight like water for elephants and remember me he is not that innately engaging i mean it's really like around the time of of like the rover and and you know what yeah let's talk patents i guess is this the first patinson we've discussed i think it has to be right right i can't yeah no it is and yes this this is the thing and i will say i also should shout out he is actually really really good in the harry potter movie in the goblet of fire even though that's not a movie i like at all but i do remember him you know just whatever it was like oh this is a charming guy but there's an argument you can make that he was like a good character actor right who then got saddled with this like you're a movie star you're a leading man you're

dream handsome right and then i think he got overwhelmed by all of that and then it's obviously like uh cronenberg starts to pull him that that this is that was what i was gonna say right that's the fulcrum for now and i will i will admit i'm gonna admit this i'm ashamed to admit it i've actually never seen water for elephants i'm sorry to say it so i can't actually say that he's bland in that movie i just feel like that was you's take. You never drank the water. It was for the elephants, Griffin. No, it's fair. It's fair.

It's fair. And in that case, you know, I guess I'm happy they were marked correctly. You know, but right. He's in that movie Little Ashes where he plays Dolly. He's in Remember Me, which I have seen. And I remember him being pretty kind of, you know, whatever. One note, grumpy kid and teen and but it just has that insane twist right so you're just like holy shit bellamy yeah i never saw bellamy i feel like bellamy was like a screenplay that had been you know on like on

the great unmade list for a really long time little ashes had been on a shelf for a little while uh right but then it's like cosmopolis the rover maps to the stars people are like huh he's like pretty engaging in these then there are a couple that don't connect in a row right there's like queen of the desert the weird he plays lawrence of arabia herzog movie that doesn't exist does not exist I've never seen it was expensive too and right scene right there's life the Anton Corbin movie right um Dane DeHaan is James Dean right yeah that and the thing right in in that whole period it was kind of like oh is you know Pattinson's trying but like this isn't gonna work he's just going for weird right right and he doesn't have it and then and the cronenberg stuff feels like outliers maybe

this is the one filmmaker who kind of knows how to work with him and then he just starts scoring right like lost city of z he right you're just like wait can this guy just do anything on screen now like here he's got the less showy part. He's sort of doing support. He's pretty silent. He doesn't have any tics. Right. He's not doing a beard. He has no beard. But but it's like the guy is just so innately watchable that my biggest complaint with that movie has always been I resent that movie not having Pattinson in the lead role. Weird to complain about that movie. I'm seeing here that's against bylaws. I just don't like Charlie Hunnam. I, you know, I had never liked him. And then I saw Lost in the Museum.

Now I love Charlie Hunnam forever. And he's my baby boy. I don't like Charlie Hunnam. And I think Pattinson just smokes him in that movie. But I mean, but Pattinson also has in that movie the advantage of being the second least so he gets to be quiet he gets to be I mean he is wonderful in that movie I had I had not seen Cosmopolis since it came out when I saw it I thought it was pretty good you know had stuff going on for it Cronenberg DeLillo you know I thought it was it was not my favorite cronenberg

at all but i remember thinking that he was like yeah he's i was like yeah he's fine he looks good in a suit i get it but i you know not innately like oh i'm turned around on this guy and i should re-watch it because i wonder i i should re-watch it too maps to the stars is the one i remember being very like kind of sold on i think he's very good then yeah i mean i love that he is good um but but then i mean like no when he popped up in z i was just like holy shit right and then right in the same year right then he does good time he is in good time my fucking movie like i i watched that shit all the fucking time which by all accounts he saw a still image right isn't this the story that he saw a still image from only god forgives and was like who

are these guys i'll do any movie they want to do and like reach out that was like heaven knows what but heaven knows what i'm sorry why did i say only god forgives but he reached out to them right and and was like uh uh i like the the look of your movie that i haven't watched yet write anything for me and i'll be the lead and that movie is just an experiment on like to some degree just twisting his screen persona as far as they can his innate watchability that's the thing i mean you know and like so i'd saw i'd seen him in lost city z that year and he has a big beard and glasses and i was like okay i get that he wants to you know he doesn't want to look like

a marquee idol he's you know that's that's classic i was once a marquee idol behavior he you know that i'm trying to hide yeah good time which is it had been a can and where i hadn't seen it but you know whatever i'm seeing it at a press screening I'm almost going in annoyed at the sort of like okay Robert you know you're making your grimy movie oh he's getting dirty yeah like you know yeah come on show me what you got and then I just walked out I was like oh that guy's incredible yeah and then you know after that like the year after you had Damsel which have you seen that movie yeah I like Damsel asel a lot. I'm a big Zellner fan. Damsel's not bad. I like their other movie better.

But the sort of joke of Damsel is kind of what he's doing. Yes. Which I love. Yeah. I don't want to give away the twist of Damsel. High Life, he's fantastic. And yeah, it just became this thing where suddenly he's working with proper a-list art art director already directors you know claire denis light house yeah yeah another one of my favorite movies which is the lighthouse i'm like

i'm a pattinson guy man he's so fucking funny in that movie that is such a weird ass comedy you guys were the ones who were like ben you need to see this and i was just like floored the whole time that's the other thing he's become so funny now and and even just like i feel like people started looking back at all the interviews he did from peak twilight and they're like oh he just like makes up shit in every interview yes he would genuinely would actually make up whole anecdotes right like it seemed like he was just like bored he was so uncomfortable being under the spotlight that he would just make up bizarre anecdotes and repeat them until people copied them as fact you know i interviewed him for high life uh you know this right and uh i interviewed him with claire denis who is uh a director filmmaker who matters to me a lot and i love but is also a terrifying,

intelligent French woman who I did not want to be in the same room with. Cause I just assumed she would look at me and I'd fucking turned to stone, which is pretty much what happened. Well, exactly. And like, literally I heard, I've heard like laundry.

She, she, look, she's like 80 pounds. She's 75 years old. And she like, yeah, she could just reduce me to rubble

but yeah so but but a24 was like well what if you talk to her and pattinson together like that'd be fun they were kind of like what if pattinson interviews her and i'm like okay and like we walk in there and pattinson's like so what's going on i very much you know whatever pattinson was but he was such because she was so scary he was such, cause she was so scary. He was such a dream because he's just pulling on his vape, Ben, which that's, you know, he's just pulling, you know, brushing the hair out of his head and he's just like a kind of like chiller, you know, he just has this vibe of like, Whoa, yeah, whatever.

And just wants to tell me about. Logging onto his old, his old bulbous or account and flipping off some hot film takes he just winks at me and says i'm bront um my favorite joke um yeah no exactly like and like telling me like about how weird the lighthouse is gonna be and have i said it on right claire denis i'm eating a sweet no yeah I was hoping you're gonna tell this story right it's a funny story right I don't think you've told this on mic maybe I'm wrong I don't think I've told it on mic I come into a24 she uh is sitting there and she's doing interviews all day obviously and they bring her a salad from sweet green the the chain salad restaurant

and you know they're like oh here you go you know and she's and she starts eating it and she's like i'm sorry i have to eat like you know i have to eat lunch and i go like oh no that's all right like i love sweet green i always get sweet green and she just looks at me like i'm a fucking slug like just like looks at me like why would i care that you like this boring ass salad chain that I am merely eating to sustain myself? I feel like the way you told to me the first time was that she looked at you with like resentment that she now had that information in her head. Like, why would I ever need to know what fucking salad you eat you piece of as i was saying i was just like why would she like why am i trying to form a personal connection with legendary french director claire denis over salad like this is not gonna work she's not gonna be like a leather jacket over striped

yeah don't you just love the harvest bowl like that's not gonna be the next thing out of her mouth the next line out of her mouth was aren't you supposed to ask me questions which is a great uh withering thing to say uh and i like you know fell over and farted or whatever i did but but it gets to the interesting patent thing of just like for a guy to become this much of sort of like uh an indie uh sort of dream boat right um i feel like he does not traffic in like pretension like he's got a little bit of that nick cage thing where it's like i'm working with auteurs but it all feels kind of like play you know like i'm just i'm trying to have fun i'm trying to see what i can do here but that's why it is interesting that this year he was in tenet or last year now right from when this and then of course he's got the batman it does feel like he's finally like all

right i'm now big enough that i can work you know in a blockbuster be weird if i want to be like you know do my thing and have some creative input probably i was gonna say i think it's that he just feels like he has the sea legs now he knows how to hold his own against the machinery of these things you know so it's a he's proven that that weirdo pattinson can hit he knows that if someone's hiring, they know what they're signing up for. And B, I think he knows how to like work within the larger system now, you know, which before maybe was threatening to swallow him alive. It also I mean, he said in interviews like Batman's the only one of these types of roles I've ever wanted to play. It makes sense, you know, sort of aligned with like Michael Keaton working well in batman that the psychology of him of that character is kind of uh interesting to him i think that movie looks cool i like that he's

batman i hope that it means that he will uh get to to do both you know it doesn't feel like it was just like well great i did my handful of 8 movies. Now I have my big franchise and I don't have to do that shit ever again. The hope is that he'll jump back and forth between the two and that, you know, he'll be able to help actually get things made, which he has for the last five years or so. really good challenging filmmakers get their movies made because twilight gave him so much box office juice over overseas. And now Batman's just going to re-up that shit. I mean, people talked about like for how much fucking twilight was clowned on, uh, Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson have kind of kept the art house cinema alive.

This is, this is the thing. And we have to stand like it truly, like, I mean, and I, that's what I think he's doing. I agree with you. I think it's more that he's putting some money in the bank that he can then withdraw again

it's like right okay has twilight finally kind of run out like okay you're not gonna just give anyone any okay then yeah i'll go be batman and i'm sure he wants to do it and i'm sure it's interesting and exciting but like it's the one he can do well like it's like i you know i don't think he wouldn't have played hawk man you know but it's like well actually good hawk man have you seen the king no i haven't but i was gonna say that's the other category now where it's like if he does a performance in a movie that doesn't really hit his performance at least get some credit for being the interesting thing like the king and devil all the time where you're like he's doing shit he's doing an accent in both and the king especially comes in before with 20 minutes to go

and the movie is i think a bit of a snooze but yeah he's just having so much fun. I've only watched Pattinson clips. Yeah. They're good. Yeah. But anyway, in Tenet, he's really good. He's really charming. Right. Effortless.

Not doing too many bits. Like, not doing weird accents and shit, but, like, just effortlessly charming. But I think this is kind of the Nolan calculation, which is, like, we got this protagonist guy who's kind of unknowable and is a little bit of a cipher. Let's get a guy who's sort of more established at this point to be all the flavor, you know, to have the sort of swagger. Yeah, because John David Washington, we haven't talked about him yet. Let's talk about J.D. Dubs. Yeah, he's great. Yeah.

let's talk about jd dubs yeah he's great yeah um but he is you know he he's fascinatingly like closed off like yeah it's it's it's very interesting because you look you can't talk about him without talking about denzel and because you know denzel like his whole thing is like he'll be in any movie and it'll just be some basic ass dialogue scene where they're like, so here's where the, uh, you know, the, the body was. And he's like, what's that choice? It's the best. I love it. But like John David Washington, so buttoned down.

Yeah. Oh yeah. There's something very, uh, uh, sensitive about him. He's, he's sensi Denzel sensi boy denzel uh he's also there's something to like i mean just sitting there on a big screen watching this guy for two and a half hours i was really trying to crack into like what his innate movie star persona is he's such a good listener and he also has those like very kind of striking sleepy eyes right like his eyes always seem kind of half closed yes there's something about him that seems weirdly chill

with whatever's going on in the movie around him even if the circumstances are wild uh without him seeming blasé or above it all yes like there's something kind of vulnerable about him and kind of modern about him and he doesn't really have the sort of machismo that denzel is usually trafficking in in one way or another um i do think like i want to say i i want to be very careful with how i say this Like, I want to be very careful with how I say this. He gives a better performance in this than I will ever give in my entire life, right? I do not want to make it sound like I'm criticizing him.

You can criticize Jesus. You're allowed to criticize him. I think he rules in this movie. I think he's good in this movie. I do get the sense that he might just be, like, half a step too green to fully pull off what the movie is asking of him but i also think to some degree the movie is putting a lot of is distributing a lot of that weight to people like pattinson and bran on even to becky to a certain degree but i i do think like there are times where how i put this i had it this thought was sort of more cogent right out of the movie but especially like this kind of thing which i feel like is so much of what defines like

uh a movie star right it's like how convincingly can you sell bullshit and make it sound like it's not a big deal right is is like that's the kind of shit they pay you 20 million dollars for because it's just like how can anyone do that how can anyone make this dialogue sound like it's rolling off the tongue and there are moments in this where i feel like the dialogue a little bit has the better of him where he just like doesn't he he isn't totally in command of the star that he is clearly very inevitably and imminently going to be. There are moments where I feel him wrestling with it a little bit to try to make it seem natural. And there are moments where I think he makes it seem natural.

I've seen it three times. I mean, there's also the thing of just the dialogue is itself often quite ludicrous. So, yes, as you say, right, it's a difficult task i want to make it clear i think he's very very good in this movie but it is the reason why nolan goes to someone like mcconaughey doing the victory lap or dicaprio like undisputed for a decade to be like i know you're going to be able to make this shit work and this is him testing out a new leading man to some degree. Well, but this is also a question that I have that I don't know the answer to.

And, you know, maybe I'll ask Christopher Nolan when I interview him one day, but like, um, he's, you know, a black American actor.

Uh, Nolan's never had a black, uh, lead of a movie before. No, but beyond that, I don't know if the character was written to be black,

but he's presented and he's like, as this outsider, as this sort of like weird new, you know, thing in a tired formula. There's all this stuff. I mean, there's the line

where it's like, we need, you know, where, what's her, Priya, the armstander, is like, we need a new protagonist yeah yeah um but like and then he goes to uh see michael cain and michael cain is like you're gonna need new suit you're getting you know like he's kind of trying to give him the it's a great scene i really like that scene but he's he has that sort of like unusual swagger to him where he's like that's okay like you don't have a monopoly on snobbiness like i could figure this out as well where i feel like he wants the

guy to kind of stick out a little bit in in this james bondy universe of pattinson and his gorgeous scarves and elizabeth to becky so classy and branna the shakespearean legend you know like you know what i mean like he wants this guy who kind of vibes a little differently. I wonder if he really, that my only question would just be like, right, did he go into this being like, I'd really like this to be a black actor or maybe not. I have no idea, but it sticks out in a great way. I, it seems like the big thing was trying to find a new guy. And it's not like he was brand new. I mean, he had done Ballers. No, but he's pretty new.

I mean, certainly he was in cast. Black Klansman's just, you know, right. That's his first leading role. It was right after this, right. And he'd been in Ballers. I have not seen Ballers. Oh, I mean, Liz and I have been doing a lot of marathons together. Liz W.

Liz Dubs. That's, I guess, the point I was just making. And it's like a performance I do still think is very good. But like what we just talked about with Pattinson, how he got sort of chewed up and then he figured out how to really hold his own, be that engaging without feeling like he's overacting. This is a character where there's not really anything on paper, right? You have to fill in all the blanks. Right, on who this guy is.

And the movie's really asking you to just throw energy into it, to find what the interesting energy is on a scene-to-scene basis. It's a tall order. It's a big ask. And it's usually a movie of this size that ask is only extended to someone

who has carried a movie of this size five, six, seven, eight plus times already, you know? Yes. So I just felt like at certain points, like he's doing a very good job. It's a lot to put on him. He's by and large winning. And it kind of proves that he's going to be a real deal to stick around for a long time. I was talking with Olivia Craig, a friend past future guest.

And we were saying it's also to his benefit. Probably the only way he could be a superstar is that he doesn't look like Denzel Washington. Like, not, you know, obviously he looks like his dad a little bit. But like, I look, if you Google his mom, he really looks like his mom. Yes. And like, we were like, if he just looked looked like denzel it would probably be too weird it would just be like a like this new younger dude it would be like whoa yeah how is this pot you know like it's it's he's his own thing he sounds a lot like him though like especially this movie because black clansman he's doing the ron stalworth voice no but no he definitely sounds like him he sounds a lot like him he doesn't have

the same sort of uh denzel bravado um but he's got the same uh vocal quality um it it is interesting in that like michael douglas kirk douglas way though where it's just like rare that someone is the child of someone this iconic and is able to sort of hold their own and both remind you of their parent and also function in their own way it's also another thing about this movie and it gets into this area of i think like nolan trying to challenge himself in a bunch of ways you look at this film and realize that nolan has pretty much reset his base of regular collaborators right so it's like this is not the second brana and obviously you got kane in one scene and kane is like his standby but he's not using you know more much of his

like martin donovan or whatever but yes no everyone else is right but it's a guy he hasn't used since 2002 he's not throwing in killian murphy he's not throwing all those guys but also like this is now the the third hoidvan hoidama after uh it is after wally embarked on a huge career of directing the tick pilot uh you know just decided i i don't need these rinky dink nolan movies i i want to direct a half hour griffin newman uh episode right yes no but but uh the other crew members are new. Hans Zimmer, out the window. Well, Hans Zimmer, I believe, was busy on Dune. And so he brings in Ludwig Göransson.

The score fucking slaps and a half. Yeah. I mean, Ludwig is obviously a huge talent. But like, right? Don't you love this guy? I mean, I listen to the score all the time. And Jennifer Lame, who's the editor on this. Yeah. Yes. Well, I want to talk about all the time. And Jennifer Lame, who's the editor on this. Yes, well, I want to talk about this. Okay, so Jennifer Lame.

I just think it's interesting that he's shaken up most of the bag. Okay, yes, tell me. Okay, but Jennifer Lame has only, look at her credits. Her credits are, you know, Noah Baumbach movies, starting with Francis Ha, Manchester by the Sea, the two Ari Aster movies. Those are her credits

like as an editor. She worked on Before the Devil You Know You're Dead as like an apprentice but like her first big credit is Francis Ha. And Nolan approached her

and was like, I want you to edit this movie. And she was like, I don't know anything about editing a blockbuster. I've never edited an action movie. I like, you don't want to hire movie. And she was like, I don't know anything about editing a blockbuster. I've never edited an action movie. I like, you don't want to hire me.

And he's like, you are the person I want to hire. I, you Manchester by the sea is exactly what I'm going for. Emotionally. Like that, like sort of like recollection, the way you use recollection in the past and like the sort of bluntness of

like going back. Cause remember I'm at Manchester by the sea. This sort of goesness of like going back because remember i mentioned matches by the sea this sort of goes back to the the pre oh yeah yeah uh i just think that's fascinating it plays with time in interesting ways like i feel like a lot of that movie feels um you're you're not sure what timeline you're in it takes you a little while into each scene to right right i think that weird abruptness. Right. Isn't that interesting? I just love that.

Like, he's worked with the same editor for a year, Lee Smith, like, you know, who's like a robust action editor. Yeah, but I think to some degree that's like a strike against complacency. You know, it's like you need to get new eyes into the ecosystem. You need to mix it up. You know, you can very quickly fall into i think very repetitive patterns if you're working with the exact same collaborators every time and you're able to go like you know and then do the thing you know i like um i mean then even going back to like you know uh uh interstellar and stuff you see him trying to like challenge hans zimmer and go like okay only use

these types of instruments and avoid these sounds while together but the greatest way to do that is to just mix up collaborators yes totally um but it does have the white look that very clean like brutal visual i mean i love it to be clear. But just, you know. And obviously, I'd love to have seen this film in IMAX. That was not possible. But a lot of people shot with IMAX cameras, I'm sure. You know, when you watch the Blu-ray, you'll see, you know, from the aspect changes, like what's supposed to be in IMAX. And it's a lot of it. I'm hoping there's like some fucking one-week IMAX re-release three years from now or something.

I would imagine stuff like that will be happening. I'm hoping there's like some fucking one week IMAX re-release three years from now or something. I would imagine stuff like that will be happening. Are you seeing this? Part of the score features Christopher Nolan's own breathing, which was then manipulated into raspy sounds. Is that true? That's weird. I don't know. It sounds fucking cool. That's cool.

So, okay. The next act of the movie, he is him meeting Sator and Kat, his wife, and all this stuff. Well, because you have the early sort of heist stuff with patents and the plane thing happens pretty early on, right? No, we're not getting to the plane thing yet. Well, yeah, the plane thing is next, right?

The plane thing is because protagonist is like, let me help you, Kat. There's that great fight scene in the kitchen where he's sort of acting like they're the better of him and then he hits the guy with the cheese grater and shit you know oh that fight seems so good yeah that's a fight scene is great yeah and and you have de becky in the car outside like assuming the guy's being murdered well because also the jd dubs uh was a fucking football player like it's that interesting yeah it's an interesting thing where he does not move like an actor um and that that scene

especially just the way he you totally buy that this guy who's smaller than these people can just yeah like knock him against a wall um but right so he's like i'll get the painting this painting that you authenticated that's a forgery that he's holding over you i'll get it out of where where where is it she's like it's in a free port what's a free port a free port is a real thing ben was delighting in this that is like a you know extra legal international water style holding place for rich people. Shit in airports where they can't be like taxed because they don't like technically exist in a country. These are real world.

Yeah. Well, this is the thing that I think is because you've got the free ports, you've got the, the closed city, the Soviet closed city where, where the final action uh set piece takes like you've got these crazy yachts and these like futuristic fast boats that they're on

when they're uh just you know going out for a sale like nolan is like this is my bond movie this is like about like the weird world of the rich like that you don't even know exists like where where intelligence and all these deals are being done that's like so beyond anyone's like conception it's so crazy and and we think about like uh you know time travel as like oh someday they're gonna solve that then it'll just be a public utility but in reality it will remain something that only the the satin glove assholes have access to, to just fucking rig the game more for themselves. And that's right. That's what it's saying.

It's like what's happening is, yeah, they already know about time travel. They're using it. What? They have turnstiles all over the country. Shut up. You don't know what time travel is. They're using time travel right now because the them in the future already has access to time of travel and is setting them up for it now right and they know the world has ended by the way don't worry about it like this is i love this

the freeport scene is probably my favorite action scene uh which is the combo of the plane crashing in to the warehouse and pattinson and washington you know, fighting their way into the middle of this Pentagon Museum thing and then fighting a backwards person. But, you know, they're in these great suits. A backwards man. There's the weird, I love the weird clerk at the Freeport who's like, oh, well, of course, you know, you have nothing to worry about. Like, we value your bullshit over our lives, of course, you know you have nothing to worry about like yeah we value your bullshit over our lives of course you know all that but he plays it so well like you have to really trust in this super weird business like i don't know he's like a real estate person showing like

mansions or something you know like a hundred percent right that that's just right that that weird that weird vibe of like as we all know we live in an insane rich people universe where we just talk about these things like they're normal so don't even need to acknowledge that right yeah do you like this whole this whole set piece yeah i do look i mean you've seen it three times you're at a great... I'm at a disadvantage here. I still could... I could barely parse what was going on as I was watching it.

It will take me more viewings to figure it out. But I was vibing on every single thing that happened in this movie. Okay. So that's all cool. They fight a backwards person. Which is great. They ask if daddy would like some sausage yeah um and uh they uh meet him esh patel mr yesterday himself i want to talk about this guy for a little bit i think him esh patel rules i think he's great i think he's so good right i mean uh you know chris or nolan tried to save the movies

with tenant there's an argument that yesterday is the movie that killed movies that in fact movies died you're putting it you're putting it all on yesterday it died long before the pandemic yeah i know that was what did us in we let that thing become a hit um but but that movie he's very much playing your classic richard curtis like hugh grant floppy haired uh yes he has a little bit of beard but less so the in tenant he's got a big santa beard but i'll say this i liked him a lot in that movie especially because you know that character is such a fucking maniac and the script is such hot garbage i was like it's impressive that this guy's charming enough to overcome this script and actually make me almost like this guy but my takeaway from it was oh this is probably some

sketch comedy dude who's just innately kind of charming on screen and then he shows up in this movie and he's playing like fucking adam goldberg right he's like this gum chewing asshole over it fucking like american accent he's doing an american accent yeah he's so good in this he's so good american accent where is he from he's from he is from england he's from cambridge serious yeah uh yeah i believe he's of gujarati descent he's one of these he's one of these fancy brit boys ben and usually i can tell if someone grew up in england you can hear their voice you can hear in their voice so surprised yeah his parent his parents ran a news agent there he was in eastenders for nine years he years which is a famous British soap opera I don't know if you guys know about EastEnders

no how would we know that how would you know that no yeah that's not a thing I know about I grew up in Britain I thought you guys knew that what no you weren't aware of that

I had no idea to 2008 lived in britain i've seen a few episodes of eastenders let me tell you i just think i think kamesh patel 30 years old with this movie and the and the gulf between his performance in yesterday and this i'm just like oh this guy rules i'm gonna be watching him on screen for the rest of time uh i agree and now i'm thinking about him though i now like your argument he's been in three movies that arguably killed theaters all right one yesterday which you just seem to argue like that thing being a hit was just that that was just it threw off the balance that upset the algorithm

absolutely tenet obviously yeah has it we we much just we just discussed it the other thing the aeronauts which he's fun he's in that one he plays uh eddie red main's like goofy friend who's like helping him being an aeronaut perfect never watch that yeah right well here's the thing that the aeronauts was a movie that was made only to be seen in imax that thing is practically educational it's like when you went as a school group to see the IMAX movie about Everest. It's just this gorgeous, insane sky photography stuff. And then Amazon has it and they're like,

we have to release an IMAX? I guess we will, but just catch it on Amazon. So obviously nobody saw it. Well, David, I'm very confused. Are you saying that amazon did something wrong that jen salky head of amazon studios perhaps overpaid on a late night and britney runs a marathon without knowing how to market either one because she had no experience releasing a film in theaters and so when both of them over underperformed her takeaway was i guess movie theaters are dead

and so she took a movie that was designed exclusively for imax and put it on a streaming service because she refused to acknowledge that she was the one who fucked up the releases look griffin all i'm just you just you can't deny that britney ran that marathon she did she's sure and the night and the night was late and the night was late no you can deny everything about that one but britney did run that marathon the night was late just the thing at the end of britney runs which i saw at sundance which i believe won the audience award at sundance have you seen britney runs a marathon yes you know at the end where it's like and here's the real britney running the marathon and i'm like what do i fucking care she's just a person who ran a marathon like stronger i'm like okay the guy had no legs good job by him her it's just like she ran a

marathon i don't know i could you know whatever lots of people run marathons they all get movies it's weird how much they sort of centered the based on a true story in the marketing campaign of the movie where i'm like yeah i that was my guess was it was based on the director's friend it just has that vibe right it's not like he read in the newspaper like oh this is good material for a movie this absolutely reeks of huh i could make a movie about my friend because it's like oh oh she ran a method did what was she ill well no she's just kind of like a fuck-up oh yeah oh was everyone in her family dead no they no it's she just whatever she was just in her 20s and kind of annoying she's like a griffin in the

first act and by the third act she's a little more of a david oh god anyway uh so but good for we love him esh patel that's the we love him we enjoy him he's great um those are huge bars of gold yeah they're real big like here's the question what's up with that like what do you do with that gold well so okay here's the question okay and fork and i were discussing this say you're some airport worker you see a bunch of gold do you take one definitely but then what are you doing what are you gonna do then you gotta start asking around do you know do you have a gold guy you know can i melt this down like i mean that's what i would do yeah i see ben just like putting in a frying pan and being like will this work or like taking it in my backyard and hitting it with the hammer yeah it's also such a creepy

billionaire thing to be like oh money no no that stuff's bullshit that's what poor people use right i only use inverted gold bars right right because it's like future right he's sending gold back to his poor young self because it's like oh this currency is never gonna be out of style but also there is this sort of insider thing where it's like you gotta be rich to understand how to spend the gold right you can't you can't just bring a gold brick into a dwayne reed go to a bodega like can you break a bullion right and they're all those weird like you know like strip mall businesses of like gold for cash but they're they're waiting for you to bring in like a hammock a schlelemmer watch in exchange for like $40. If you brought in a gold brick,

they'd call the cops on you. So yes, they do. Right. The diversion for their airplane thing is they dump a bunch of gold on the tarmac. It rules. But Kenneth Branagh as Sator, Sator, whatever you want to call him. As we said, he was in Dunkirk.

Quite a lovely performance by him in dunkirk actually sentimental um branna in this it's like it's like nolan saw his performance and jack ryan shadow recruit was like a lot bigger please you're like Your favorite performance. Yes. And that performance is fucking so much ham. And this just makes it look like the most like nuanced, like fucking dogman 95 ass. It's a bit of realism. He's, I mean,

I really, I really enjoy him in this movie. I don't know what you guys thought of his whole vibe. No, I do too. I mean, this is fine, finely cut, finely aged ham. I mean, it is just, I think he understands exactly

what the movie is asking of him. I mean, his career has just become so weird now because of his resurgence as a director and the gulf between like like why why did you do artemis fowl like have you now become really into fabergé eggs or something but then that's the inexplicable one right right but then but but jack ryan too i mean the poro movies it's like he wants to direct those primarily so that he can be perot like it feels like he's far more engaged on the being perot side of things than the directing agatha

christie novel side of things uh and he keeps on talking about how his perot is like a younger more virile perot even though he's now the oldest guy to ever play perot that's the thing he and it was the same when he played Hamlet when he was like 44. Yeah. And you're like, isn't Hamlet supposed to be like 20?

And he's like, yeah, but my Hamlet fucks. Right. My Hamlet's gonna get all up in Kate Winslet's boobs. The guy has aged well, right? Like he's still extraordinarily handsome.

But every time he takes on a role, he's like, my take was to make him young and sexy. Like I want to be the sort of like, not your grandfather Seder, a kind of young,

more virile Seder. And you're like, motherfucker, you're the first guy to play Seder. You don't have to constantly make it seem like you're sexier than the guy who came before you. I will say that is kind of the vibe of this performance where he's, it's Nolan's kind of almost making fun of him

because he's like so anxious that like the first thing he says to john david washington is like are you fucking my wife like it's like they don't even say hello yes he's so afraid of getting cocked he's got that extended uh a dialogue stretch that is it's the thing never before in nolan's filmography have i had a harder time imagining nolan typing these words out himself right nolan probably working on your balls and i put them in your throat yeah right that and then you choke on your own balls i'm just like imagining christopher nolan by candlelight you know wearing like a long sleeping cap on some gas powered fucking typewriter typing in. Yes.

If I cut open your throat and put the balls in the throat and choked on your own balls. Yes. Yeah. Sator is for a billionaire who exudes class and sophistication. He's kind of a nasty little little asshole right yeah yeah that's that's how i describe him if satyr had his own character poster it would be kenneth brano the nasty little asshole well he's like new money but like future money yes he's new future poisoned radiation money his money is so new it hasn't even happened yet

oh my god uh because yes that is the thing he's just this russian kid who dug up a bunch of gold from the future and some instructions on how to make time travel technology but it's because he sent that to himself right i believe so but we don't know i mean there's a certain point at which we're like god knows who originally originally originally but yes yes it's it's as you say it's the it's the bill and ted right if as long as i remember to send myself gold bars then i'll have gold bars for the whole for my whole life right you know right like it's interesting there's stuff i know i didn't get in this movie but then there's stuff where i thought earlier i i i thought in an earlier point oh i guess we're supposed to know this as a given and then later it would be revealed

and i would be unclear as to whether I was ahead of or behind the eight ball. Like, very early on, I was like, oh, the implication, we're supposed to just ascertain that John David Washington is the one who hired Robert Pattinson, and then that's treated as something of a final reveal at the end of the movie. I mean, yes, it is a final reveal i i don't know if i think you're smarter or what not smarter but whatever you're you're maybe more keyed into this than some but yeah like but i want to make it clear i i was i also felt incredibly dumb watching this as a ton of shit i i absolutely did not get it there is right there's that sort of fun

puzzly idea of he's recruited into an organization, he found it. The movie starts with him being like, anyway, it's this thing called Tenet. And of course, right, the ultimate thing is he is Tenet. He created Tenet. Like, he is the protagonist, as he tells us. like just watching chris for nolan movie i'm like he's not gonna have any loose ends he's gonna tie everything in whether or not it makes logical sense he's gonna want this thing neatly arranged so just anytime there was any sort of lingering question i would just assume in my head that must loop back to the one thing that's already on screen you know yes so when there's a lot of business with Sator, Becky tries to push him off a boat and Washington saves him. And then he's like, she didn't do that.

I did that myself. Oops. Haha. Silly me. Like he won't even admit that his wife hates him. Yeah. Um, and eventually whatever is Sator is like,

go get me this fucking shit. I want, he claims it's plutonium. We know it's actually just part of this doomsday device. And there's this crazy truck heist where they sandwich a fire truck or whatever their sandwich is something. And, you know, and they,

they go in and get it right. Like there's a heist that happens. It's a heist set piece with cars. That's fine. But then at the same time, say tour is like in a dark place being like tell me everything that happens and there's backwards cars going through all of this yeah and then sator shows up at the end of this car chase wearing a mask and being backwards and you know

this is where the movie you know memento style and we should mention memento obviously one of nolan's first movies has kind of a forward backward structure and begins with a shot that is literally reversed and all that like he's literally using these tricks he did on the cheap you know 20 years ago um but this is where the movie meets itself and we have this crazy scene in the proving room in the, the red and blue crazy time tunnel place, this place where Cetra is talking backwards. And I think this is, this is where a lot of people truly are like, okay,

I don't even know what they're saying. Get the fuck out of here. And then of course, Aaron Taylor Johnson shows up right at the end of it. It's like temporal pincer movement, mate. and i think that some people understandably are like can the movie end now well now it's like he's got an elite squad here's this like they have this weird revolving door thing they start setting up which is how you can right move back and forth which to me just feels like do you remember the old like uh of course

this is the thing i'm gonna fucking invoke but like the old uh bat cave play sets where like you could transform bruce wayne into batman and it was like oh here's a little fucking roundabout and you put one figure on one side one on the other there there was something to that that i just found so endearingly goofy where it's just like this looks like a mechanism in like a star trek like a holodeck playset or some shit or the bat cave but it's done with like the utmost christopher nolan po-faced seriousness it is very po-faced i cannot deny it i mean there's nothing more po-faced that i think that sequence is kind of cool and nightmarish where he's like yelling at him backwards and he shoots his wife backwards

but then it ends and then aaron taylor johnson bursts it is like chill out mate chill out mate it was a temporal pincer movement you know and starts and you're like oh we're like oh right chris nolan is back like other chris nolan is back uh to talk us again. But now like my whole sense of time in this movie is disrupted. Not just I'm saying the sense of the timeline in the movie, but also just like how long has this movie been going? I don't know if we're at the end or we're towards the middle or whatever, but this is pretty much like the midpoint narratively where the rest of the movie becomes about doing the flip side of everything you've already seen.

Right. This is where the movie becomes about doing the flip side of everything you've already seen right this is where the movie kind of folds i talked to alex ross perry's about this movie a lot and he was like humble that right uh yeah and he was like right this is the moment where he was and he likes the movie but he was like yeah this it is i can't he's gonna do it again nolan's gonna do the thing he did with inception and interstellar whatever where he has this sort of third act that falls into place right and it's like wow we're about to watch john david washington go backwards through a movie we just watched and it's gonna be so cool yeah and so he does that he

goes backwards he goes there's he's in the car chase again going backwards that's cool and then he gets on a shipping container and he goes to the uh airport and he's obviously it turns out to be the backwards man in that and that's cool too yeah it's a great idea and i'm sure that's the crux of the idea that nolan's always had right like what if you had a movie you played it forwards and then someone went through it the other way it does not feel it does not feel as ecstatically triumphant as it does an inception but i also think that gets to the idea of just like, this is, to a certain degree, this movie is him trying to be like, I can do Inception without all the emotions and the like overly dramatic character backstories. But also I'm going to prove to you why that is a value in something like Inception. Because this guy, the only thing that's driving him is that

martin donovan told him that he should do this shit right well and then you have the elizabeth de becky character right we should talk about the becky a little bit but like the becky feels like him also nolan doing this retort to oh i always it's always a dead wife the main female in every movie doesn't exist anymore right and is just existing as a driving force for the lead man who is haunted by her, whether it's Bruce Wayne's mother, you know, or like his wife,

you know, and obviously in the Marion Cotillard, right. In her, in her cellar, like, you know, has two female characters of note in the film,

but still is a guy haunted by a dead wife and how that fucks up his family dynamic and shit like that. And this, he's like, the wife's going to be alive. Trust me, guys, I got it. Note taken, note received. The wife is going to be alive. She is haunted by the fear that her son is going to die. Right. And then the son sort of becomes the wife in this. And the son is like supposed to be the emotional driving force for her. And by proxy, that's supposed to be the emotional driving force for protagonist who is trying to help her. But the son like doesn't even register. He's just some fucking kid.

He's just some fucking kid. But it also does. It once again keys into like a Nolan limitation where it's like he cannot think of a woman existing outside of a family structure absolutely and also i mean there's there's this bananas line that you know would get studio noted you know if you're a lesser director where they're like yeah you know if he activates this doomsday device it's the end of the world and she's like including my son and it's like yeah including your son the end of the world yeah your son's in the world you don't need to clarify that for the audience yeah we get that you don't want him to die also pot belly sandwich shop will go out of business like what do you what we could stay here

for eight hours extrapolating everything else it would be the end of and she do becky is an actress i love we both love her yeah i think she's good in this movie i think nolan has a lot of fun letting her be you know tower over uh the male actors in the movie right there's this incredible scene where during the action sequence where she can open the front door of a car from the back seat simply by stretching her legs yep um i think she's i think she's really good i think she's you know right rising to the challenge and all that but yes you know everything you're saying is accurate he he can't help but have kids and family and shit i mean it's the same right yeah he it's not even just that it's

the female it's just like he can't it's just he's such a he's so basic in a way that's yeah it's the same thing like we you and i've talked about this a lot that we find really fascinating about uh apatow where it's just like right these guys who just can't get over how much they love their wife and kids right yes absolutely and like all of their movies are them showing you family pictures and being like i would die for them and with nolan he's like i'm gonna make this movie and it's gonna be about heroes saving the world yeah it's going to be about heroes saving the world. Yeah. It's also going to be about them saving their families. Like every time he makes that for some version of that. But just like how Apatow is like, you know, there's this guy in here.

There's this person. They're so interesting and their life is so weird. And, you know, there's all kinds of crazy shit going on. And at the end of the day, what they need to do is just kind of settle down and grow up a little bit. You know, like it's just he can't help but tail off to that right and i also feel like people will will smack them with being like oh it's like heteronormative bullshit like they're so obsessed with like maintaining this conventional family unit it's like i don't think they're upholding anything i think it's just they they're both incredibly strange guys who cannot believe that their wives are still with them.

Like, I do think there's a degree of that, right? I mean, you hear all these stories about Nolan. It's like Nolan, his wife is his producing partner, right? Emma Thomas, yes. Like, they work together on everything. He doesn't have a cell phone, right? He doesn't have an email. He just lives in his little house.

He loves to not have a cell phone. I bet you at dinner parties everyone rolls their eyes they're all like when's he gonna say it it's like me saying i grew up in britain yeah wait what it's like everybody's just like when's chris gonna say he doesn't have a cell phone and chris is like oh i don't really know about that because I don't know. And they're like, oh, my God, we know. We know. Sorry. But it also feels like that's I mean, when when I've read when I've read interviews with him where he brings it up, it's very much about like maintaining, like preserving the sanctity of his time with his family. Absolutely.

I mean, I think, by the way, it's totally he doesn't need to have a fucking cell phone and it's great. And it seems like he really cares about his family. I don't mean to make fun of any of that. No, I'm just. It just feels like unfortunate that I think the genuine emotion he feels for his family always either gets pushed onto the female characters in his movies or the family is dead and the man is haunted by not having them anymore because that's the worst twilight zone scenario he can imagine um and and interstellar feels like a step forward honestly right because like his best hathaway and chastain have more agency it is kind of crazy how well uh interstellar has aged i don't know about you but i just feel like people were disappointed

when it came out and now i think it's commonly accepted as like, we were too hard on that movie at the time. Yeah. I think Interstellar and Prestige are the ones that like have, you know, grown the most, mostly just because those were the relative quote unquote disappointments compared to the insane success of the Batman movies and Inception.

Prestige is still my number one. You fully converted me on interstellar though and it might be my number two now um so fucking but yeah that was a step forward dunkirk has no women and then this movie it's like a real one step forward two steps back kind of thing for dunkirk is one of those things that that's what it's like no that's not his best movie i suppose but it's kind of the best movie. Like, that's a thing that's just unique in his filmography, I would say. And unique in recent movie making.

That thing is incredible. But then this feels very much like following those lines, right? Like, Dunkirk gets into that, like, I mean, the abstraction of, like, character and time and narrative. Yeah, no, you're right. It's true. of like character and time and narrative yeah no it's right it's true right and it gets away with that because you're like well it's like it's grounded in a very solemn real life event real tragedy real experiences so all the nolan timey-wimey bullshit doesn't feel like him just like getting off on his toys and then this is him trying to like apply the aesthetics and the sort of construction of Dunkirk onto something like Inception. I'm very curious to see what he does next after this, since this is obviously going to be such a big inflection point for him.

I think it will be. I assume so. I also genuinely imagine it would be hard for him to go bigger at a certain point. Like after Dunkirk, I wondered if he'd go smaller. And after this, I wonder, you know, right. Like, you know, does he? I don't know. I don't know.

I have no idea. What if he's like, oh, God, I'm doing World War Z, too. Yeah, right. It's the way it's the one. If you want to make a movie over 200 million dollars, you got to sign on to do that at some point. I really want to explore the Green Lantern course lantern course guys it's just this is the time i was looking at idb do you know this whole fucking fan thing where when the movie was announced that there were no further details people were like he's doing it nolan is doing green lantern john david washington is playing

john stewart what did they literally only think that because John David Washington is black? Was there any other reason to think that? Probably not. I guess it's Warner Brothers. Like that's about it. Robert Pattinson is Hal Jordan. Elizabeth DeBecke is Carol Ferris. People spread that rumor. That's very funny. You know what I rewatched recently? Green Lantern. That movie is so funny to rewatch because because it is the end the absolute end of non-connected superhero movies and it's not good but it's so hilariously quaint where it's just like there's no stakes and it's just like oh there's a guy and he's gonna get a thing and he's gonna learn some lessons then he'll be a hero like and like he's gonna defeat the villain the end like no stakes at all but david is that not

the most damning thing in the world that i'm not saying it's good it's bad no no i'm saying that that shit has gotten so out of control that now whatever it is eight years later green lantern looks quaint yeah that is everyone's criticism at the time was like this movie is so overblown these like fucking superhero franchises like they they why can't these movies be kind of focused and fleet-footed and now you look at it and you're like it's like this minimalist little object only because these things have gotten more and more overblown the end of tenant so okay all right so they they um satchel or yada yada okay whatever he runs through most of the movie backwards but it's a lot more haunted and it doesn't feel as

you know you don't have your fucking joseph gordon levitt the hallway fight you know pumping your fists like the score booming kind of moments everything feels uh uh less fun uh although i had a lot of fun watching the movie but it's like he's not looking for it's it's a cooler film like cool to the touch yeah no no it is it's cool it's a colder film fire in the backwards world is oh sure yes fire backwards is cold it's icy i don't know if you noticed, but there's this character called Wheeler, who is the lady who explains the rules of backwards to him when she's like... Fiona Dourif.

Right. It's Brad Dourif's daughter. Yeah. And a good actress that I enjoy. I'll say this. What? No, what were you going to say? Sorry. Wasn't she in the most recent Chucky or... she was in the last two chucky films and she was very good in both of them and i i will say this zero chill i matched

with her on raya fuck and i messaged her and i what i want to say this was a while ago i already fucked this up with the story i'm about to tell but i messaged her and i intended to say i thought your performances were really good in in the in the chucky movies and instead i wrote uh i thought your performances were really good in the cucky movies and i just i couldn't recover from that i i was so in my head i thought you were really good in those cucky movies she's like what you you're some cuck guy get the fuck jesus no i meant chucky okay all right and i already felt like does she want some guy telling her she was good in the chucky movies but then i made it so much worse by making it seem like it was some fucking porn thing yeah she doesn't want either so instead i made the the

slightly better thing seem worse by initially framing it as the worst thing hey i thought you were good in the kucky movies i mean chucky but now that i mentioned it like that's what she thinks you're about to do right oh uh accidental typo but uh have you ever considered uh anyway she's very good in this movie yeah but it's also one of these funny christopher nolan things where like i watch those movies i'm a fan of her work i watched this i did not realize it was her until the end credits because of the way this film is structured she's all you know in a right and everything's moving so fast yeah aaron taylor johnson who is uh traditionally one of my least favorite actors working today is just not my tempo but i've started to like him a little

more as i think he's leaned into his innate unlikability i want to say this yeah because i have been really rude about him uh maybe i can't remember if i've done it on the podcast but certainly i don't because i i go off. I am nothing but rude towards him. I've never really liked him. I've always found him kind of smarmy on screen. Like I kind of liked him in movies like Anna Karenina that used the smarminess, but still like, I just,

you know, you know, he was just never my favorite. I was sort of relieved when he died off in the Avengers movie. Cause I was like, great. he's not gonna stick around that's fine because i'll just say up until this point the things like albert knobs or anna karen or whatever where they try to use the smarmyness i'm still like too much

yeah right exactly much and uh you know i found him to be an active drag and shit like uh nocturnal animals which some people liked him in um but last a couple years ago he was in outlaw king and now in tenet where he's doing kind of the patents that he's bearded he's gruff he's not looking for star billing like he's kind of buried in the credits of both of those movies and i dig what he's doing and i don't know if he's just kind of like sanded some of this charm off or something. I don't know. It's good. Yeah, I don't know.

I just always found him very mannered and self-satisfied on screen. And this is one of the few times where I just felt like, oh, he's just serving the movie. Absolutely. He plays Ives, right? Who, you know, coins the term temporal pincer movement he says it really fun temporal pincer movement

and at the end of the movie they do a temporal pincer movement because they need to get the doomsday device they need to get it before Sator dies they're gonna go to this buried secret city and grab it and they're gonna go forwards and backwards

but unfortunately their enemy is also to go forwards and backwards but unfortunately their enemy is also going to go forwards and backwards so even though they can find out what happened their enemy is also going to find out what happened and this thing looks like this whole sequence looks incredible god knows where they shot it but it's some you know insane blasted landscape there's all kinds of wild shit going on where buildings like blow up and then reassemble and then blow up again you know like there's all this crazy stuff shit going on where buildings like blow up and then reassemble and then blow up again. You know, like there's all this crazy stuff happening. I've seen this movie three times. I don't really know what's happening.

Like, you know, I don't know if I'm supposed to, obviously it's like super chaotic. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. In the middle of all this, John David Washington,

like has a conversation with Kenneth Branagh on a walkie-talkie which is also just funny like in the middle of all this chaos he's like come on

it's better to try and save the world and Branagh's like no I hate no it's over it's all over we're all going to die ha ha ha

you know like that's just happening yeah Pattinson's character is at this point going backwards and forwards like multiple times through the whole action sequence he sacrifices himself to save the protagonist but also he's alive like there's all kinds you know and whatever i think that it's pretty valid to be like look for all the chaos you want to present i do i would like

to know what's going on and it's very hard to know what's going on but i don't know i'm cool with vibes like i forgive it and also like in comparison to a movie like inception which makes you do all the work in the beginning so that you're just floating through the last hour this is a movie that every five minutes is like okay now take out your pen and pencil again absolutely absolutely um but still you know whatever i love it and more importantly well there's two that one i love elizabeth zbicki shooting kenneth brown and then slip and sliding him out of the boat that's great that is great yeah um but two i just love the thing we already talked about the final conversation where they're like you know in the end of the day mate we're mates that's what's

going on that's really what this has all been about yeah the real tenet was love between men as friends but maybe more who knows we get into some stuff i have to say i'm a little worried because i know i tend to dive head first into this shit and you tend to avoid it but when you talk about like the cultural effect that movies can have right uh sure yeah right i mean the negative ways they can be interpreted you worry about this more than right yeah interpreted and then weaponized by a public once they're released from the hands of the filmmaker. Right. And the movie takes on a life of its own. I do.

I'm a little worried about kids, you know, seeing this movie and trying to execute their own temporal pincer movements. I do. I do think that that could be potentially a problematic trend what could be a problematic trend now i gotta repeat the joke that didn't land just say it backwards and it'll be better this time it's just teenagers doing temporal pincer movements on TikTok. Insane person. It was just one of those Griffin jokes where I'm like,

he's now just enjoying how long it's taking to get to it. Like now that he's just in that. This is the problem. I've been doing that bit where I make the wind up for the joke longer and longer. And so I started doing the wind up for this one and five seconds in you were like cool i'm gonna catch up on emails and then i i made this wind up shorter to try to combat that but you were gone you were already checked out you had given yourself five minutes assuming it would take me that long to get to my punch line i i was i was assuming look i not going to say what I was assuming, but what's important is we should do a temporal pincer movement on this podcast.

I'm going to go backwards through it and tell myself everything about it, just so I know in the beginning what to expect. I think that's how we should do podcasts from now on. I have a turnstile in my house, of course, for this very purpose. I hope people weren't looking to this episode to to have the movie explained can it explain look if you want to go on reddit there's all these fucking subway maps people have drawn where it's like here's you know what sator does and here's you know here's where they go backwards and here's where they go forwards again like you

can see all that it's like primer or whatever like i don't know you'll watch it again but i'll say like primer is a movie i mean granted i saw when i was fucking 15 or whatever but that was a movie where i just threw my hands up and was like i i can't i cannot that was absolutely my reaction to it but isn't it one of those movies that people like to try and solve like there is yeah there's like there is a way to figure out what's going on in terms of all the timelines of primer but this is a movie that makes me want to solve it like there's enough on a surface level that i'm vibing on that i want to do the work as opposed to primer which just feels like a spiteful challenge by a spiteful man uh david is holding up his tenant steelbook it looks great it's shining

in the light i can't wait to get it i i put in my order today uh it is interesting that the whole like second half of this movie is action sequences of people wearing masks uh which is supposed to be the big visual signifier that like oh they're from the other the other time stream they're backwards people but now it just feels like well yes they're wearing masks like all responsible citizens do that's how we know the good guys are isn't it weird that we wear masks it's so weird it's it's so weird this is all they're so weird let's play the box office game unless there's anything else you want to say about tenet uh the suits look really good. The suits look incredible.

I love Dimple Kapadia. I think she's really fun. She's got good energy. Yeah. Yeah, so that's cool. I think all the reverse fighting is fucking awesome. You just like a backwards fight. It looks so weird.

And I don't know how he choreographed it all uh i i i don't know i don't know how they did most of this movie and i don't know what most of this movie they filmed stuff forwards and backwards at the same time they did shit like that i don't really i need to watch like the special features on this thing i feel like they'll probably get into all that right david chen was i think i saw on twitter yesterday like trying to cut the movie together every time they do you see a scene from a different way to sync up the two versions with each other uh so maybe by the time we've uh uh released this episode he's posted that online i'd be interested to watch like fan cuts like that this is the thing right the the the surface has only been scratched in terms of like the nerdy

fans who are gonna get all over this thing because it just came out on fucking dvd and all that so right like yeah it's just also so weird to have a movie of this size that people want to like crack into that just sort of like kind of came out four months ago you know weird it's very weird it's crazy to me too that christopher nolan has made a career on being part of the conversation for college kids and stoners do you know what i mean yeah where it's just like he's he just he has this whole filmography where it's basically people are just like man you gotta fucking like you gotta read into this fucking thing man it fucks with your head and he himself seems like the least trippy guy in the world uh yeah for sure it's true that's the that's the funniest

thing about it all he is this fucking british garden gnome i mean he's a you know good looking guy who wears a nice jacket but like it's like it's so crazy to think about him thinking about fucking turnstiles that make you backwards balls in your throat balls yeah the balls that's that's the one i can't get over okay let's play the box office game uh it's just weird to think about like i i just remember reading box office projections uh the weekend before the week before this movie came out and people were like estimate i don't know 10 to 50 million dollars final total 60 to 300 like people just had no sense yeah absolutely i

mean this thing ended up making about 60 domestic 360 worldwide it did very well in China it cost 205 it's I think expensive the most expensive original film of all time hell yeah fuck yeah um and it opened you know on Labor Day weekend to 20 million dollars but that was actually like a week's worth of preview screenings getting folded into it. Right. It wasn't just a four day weekend. They kind of resisted revealing the number, which is when you realize like, oh, they're clearly underwhelmed because they had put it in Canada a week earlier. And then they sort of soft released it on Monday.

And their plan was to roll all of that together and and present that as the opening weekend and the hope was that it would be something well over 30 and then it kind of just came in right under 20 right and then it was number one for five weeks in a row i mean you know again in a world where the fucking pandemic did not surge again which is not the world we live in yeah maybe you know there was all this notion that from the analyst oh yeah it'll be like a road show like people see it in different places at different times as things get better and it'll just play in theaters for months like this is the plan right that was the question was like can it make 10 million dollars a week for three months

right and then people would have been happy but nolan also had all these weird rules where he like didn't want it playing at drive-in theaters and shit he he didn't let it play at drive-ins where there weren't theaters so like it didn't play at new york area drive-ins it's so you take new york and la out of the equation which are traditionally the two biggest movie going cities in america i mean obviously you're not gonna make much money on a drive-in i mean the other thing is that I can't imagine seeing this movie in a drive-in. It would be incomprehensible.

But who cares? There was a weird touchiness about the release of this movie that was a bad idea considering that you're trying something here. Like, the worst thing to be if you're fucking trying something is to have all these rules but

chris loves rules i think people were really caught up on this idea that like there's gonna be some weekend where it's safe to go to the movies again and there's gonna be so much pent up demand and everyone's gonna go to the theater with bells on and they tried they they said like maybe that weekend will be here by like september and then when it was clear that it wasn't they were like what if we can just make it happen right well the other thing that happened um and again this is sort of hard to remember it would hurt crazy to think about is that international theaters were screaming more than even more than american theaters for releases because they were like and we are open like we need to show movies our cases are down right that was the big thing was like could we

have a major blockbuster come out in europe and just be undated in america right and so there and then there's all this worry about piracy or whatever but like you know but yeah no that's the whole thing and so they were like okay they announced it they were like we're gonna release tenant in mid-august around the world. We're going to release it in America on Labor Day. So the theaters have time to get ready. And it'll open wherever it can in America. And America, because it was mostly states run by maniacs who wanted to please Donald Trump, were like, everything's open.

Everyone can do whatever they want. American theaters were like like two extra weeks yeah yeah no they'll give us enough time two extra weeks i think everything will be good by then cool cool cool let's talk in two weeks yeah so anyway it opened to 20 million dollars but griffin what was number two at the box office number two at the box office now this is a little trickier because all the other clear blockbusters of the pandemic come out after this. Is Unhinged number two? That is number three.

Unhinged, which was the sole hit of pandemic season in a weird way, is number three. Because that came out late August, I guess, or early August. I can't remember. It was the first new movie in theaters, right? And Solstice Studios, its distributor, has now already started collapsing in real time. That's funny. I did not know that. I mean, that's not funny.

There were like three different stories today on Deadline, yeah. Oh, boy. Well, you haven't seen it yet, I'm assuming, Griffin. I have not yet gotten unhinged, no. I'm fully hinged at this point. I think it's a somewhat deplorable movie, but Crow just as a big man that you're afraid of is pretty compelling.

It's got stuff, sort of. It's like a really shitty slashery movie, but I don't know. It's just that he's an a-list talent i guess uh yeah yeah and look it's it's all a dry run for uh kong right for donkey kong of course that's he really he is close to kong physicality in that one he's you know anyway no number two griffin is another blockbuster that was released a week before Tenet. More of the classic COVID movie thing where it was released almost so the studio was like, yeah, people won't see it.

Good. Oh, oh, it's the New Mutants. Right. We can finally release this to nobody. No one can ever know it exists it is so funny that that movie just uh came out in the middle of a pandemic and did pretty well all considering like that's the other wild thing is that you're like the new mutants did one third as well as tenant which would never happen in any other timeline yes it did not do as well

in other places where i guess there were other movies to see but people look at tenant and they're like million dollars right tenant they're like 60 million domestic oh boy not in the middle of pandemic that movie would have soared past 200 and new means people are like 23 domestic they came out pretty well that's probably the exact amount they would have made not during a pandemic right i genuinely wonder what it would have made that's yeah there's a chance it made less there's a chance it made the exact same amount and if it made more wouldn't have been by much i need to see that movie yeah i assume it'll be on disney plus or something at some point number four at the box office griffin is uh the third film in a series that we talked about on this episode

uh is it a new movie or is it a re-release it's a new movie but it's it we talked about this series we talked about this series in this episode. It's a new movie. Fuck. Fuck. Is it a horror franchise? No, it's a sci-fi comedy. I think this is a really nice movie. Yes, I agree with that. It's Bill and Ted Save the World.

Face the Music is the title. Face the Music. I can't fucking remember the title. Yes. Do you agree? I feel like we've actually never talked about it, but I thought this was a really sweet and nicely done movie. And Keanu and Alex Winter are very, like, dialed in.

Yeah, I really like it. I still feel like I've just barely processed it in my soup brain. But I watched it the day it came out and i enjoyed it uh thoroughly i like this franchise a lot i think it's a good ending it's a good movie uh i just kind of already forgot that it existed um but i don't think that's a strike against the movie i think that's a strike against uh this bad year of being a person um number five is a movie that i forgot came out but another blockbuster i think really only played in canada save the world why did i call it bill and ted save the world okay well they do save the world i mean i know but still uh it's a children's film an animated film it's an animated children's

film that mostly just came out in canada yeah i mean it was i assume supposedly it was supposed to have a big come you know release but uh yeah is it spongebob yes spongebob yeah sponge on the run right spongebob only came out only went to theaters in canada is going to netflix everywhere else in the world and paramount plus next year canada is the one country where it was released in theaters i think and it's canadian gross alone put it at number five in the box office what a weird fucking time pretty weird yeah um yeah those are the five yeah because this is before the really in you know lots of re-releases yeah so it's like personal history of david copperfield another charming movie that you know just didn't get to be released

uh words on bathroom walls uh train to busan peninsula the sequel like it's odd that this 10 is like all new movies because after this point the theaters are open and the studios are scared and then it starts being like uh number eight at the box office is girls trip right exactly yes hocus pocus obviously i mean right there's yeah no it's weird there's uh that weird number two is ice age four there was that weird chunk before then when like relic was the number one movie for like a month. Right. Mostly just playing in drive-ins. Or like the Jesse Eisenberg Marcel Marceau movie.

Yes. Like they was just like, well, we got to show something. Have you seen Relic? You'd like Relic. I haven't seen Relic. IFC had like 10 consecutive weeks at number one at the box office. IFC. It was The Wretched was the other one, which I watched.

It's not good. relic is good is relic the the um uh no okay didn't romola garai do one of those movies that was number one it's called amulet it absolutely fucks so hard really and you would love it amulet rules i mean it's like it's got its problems whatever like it's not a perfect movie that was a movie i saw at sundance because i had a gap and i was like didn't rom like gary make a horror movie i'll check that out and like yeah the opening seconds are just this like heavy metal font it's like amulet and i'm like all right cool whatever this is great and it's just ben you would love it you would love it i don't want to spoil anything carla jury and melda staunton i need to see this shit it's good melda staunton is a scary nun rules just watch nothing like the first three months

of 2021 are gonna be just cramming non-stop for the blankie awards because all i've done this last year is watch sitcoms and cry watch the fucking simpsons you maniac i've been watching mary tyler moore now too oh that's a good show yeah show rules luke vance my fucking man oh god yeah luke grant rules i love mary tyler moore god I have such a crush on her in that show. It's wild. I mean, come on. I'm a Rhoda guy. Well, Rhoda rules. Rhoda Morgenstern.

I just watched... There's a big anti-Semitism episode in season three that's really good. Okay. Yeah. I think I remember that. Yeah, it's good. It's called Some of My Best Friends Are Rhodas. There you go. Some of my best friends are rotas there you go some of my best friends are rotas uh tenet that's our episode on tenet and uh uh we've we've done it uh i hope you uh enjoyed a

little break away from zemeckis um i mean obviously this and wonder woman 2 and then we we go back into the zemeckis stream and finish out that miniseries. Yeah, baby. But it felt like these two big Warner Brothers blockbusters finally coming out for home viewing at the end of 2020. It felt like we should start off 2021 talking about them. I'm seeing Wonder Woman tomorrow. I'll see.

I hope it's good. Are you seeing it seeing in a theater are you getting sent to link i'm no i'm seeing on my television no no theaters i never did a press screening there were a couple times people were offering and i was like no i don't want to because i just don't know who's going to be in there with me you know that's my whole thing it's just like i I don't trust anybody. Like the only times I've ever even considered like eating outdoors at a restaurant in my neighborhood is when no one else is there. Like it just, even neighboring tables freaks me out.

Neighboring tables. Anyway, I'm just realizing we should do an episode on monster at some point too. Cause then we can just be all in on Patty Jenkins. I like that movie. I think it's a good movie. I haven't seen it since it came out. It'd be good to watch it. I haven't seen it in years either. Well, folks, this of course is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin.

I'm David. And it's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their career and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion products they want. And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they invert baby uh this is a one-off episode following up on christopher nolan our mini series on uh christopher nolan the pod night cast from several years uh back and uh all i have to say here is I'll see you in the beginning, podcast. Good job. Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok