As salt sets its seal on your silky skin

[sovay]

I have just been informed that Christopher Nolan, not content to have performed the same indispensable service for the concept of nuclear physics, is now generating discourse about the Odyssey, which I am sure will go over in a respectful and informed fashion on our current internet where every other bright spark has some expert opinion unsullied by such petty considerations as reasonably accurate data that wasn't sicked back up to them by unexamined reception or extractive AI. My contribution to this charybditic scrum is that the Odyssey has too many female characters for me to trust him with it, even before we get to more general reservations about the alienness of the ancient world and its gods who are not reducible to one-stop abstractions or human psychologies writ sky-size. I return to lying on a couch, this time with strange tales of the sea.

Comments

[sovay]

Following (1998): Didn't see.

Ditto. I didn't even learn of its existence until decades after the fact. It is apparently a no-budget, minimalist neo-noir which I might want to check out if it were not by Christopher Nolan.

Memento (2000): Really liked! Carrie-Ann Moss! But that was also before I knew the dead wives were going to be a through-line. And it was 2000. Cute when I didn't know you?

Carrie-Anne Moss! Actually I remember her more vividly than any other character in the film. It was my introduction to Nolan as a filmmaker and I remember both enjoying it and being way less mindblown by its structure than I felt I was supposed to be, which seems also to have become a theme.

Insomnia (2002): I'm going to be a hipster and say the Scandinavian original was better, but it was filmed locally, which was pretty funny. I always forget this is his. Also, that it exists.

I have acres of feelings about the differences between the two Insomnias. Had no idea the American one was filmed near you. That is neat.

Batman Begins (2005): It was fine? Peak Christian Bale being the hot thing, I guess. Not much to say about Batman origin stories, and the plot was hilariously clunky.

I have not seen more than the occasional TV glimmer of this one. My mother liked it at the time.

The Prestige (2006): Never did see. I hear there were dead wives, but people seemed to like it?

I saw it three times in theaters and still love it despite it being one of the key reasons I do not trust Nolan with the female characters of the Odyssey. David Bowie made a wonderful Nikola Tesla.

The Dark Knight (2008): FUCKING LOATHED!

Have not seen, although I had a secondhand, irrationally negative reaction to a friend telling me I should on the grounds that Heath Ledger's Joker was a perfect archetype of the Trickster, which, look, no.

Inception (2010): Wanted to set on fire!

I saw this movie under physically awful conditions which in hindsight pointed to something incredibly wrong with my relationship with the person with whom I saw it and therefore while I remember enjoying the story on a level of puzzle-box inventiveness, I have never felt like rewatching it and did not agree even at the time that it was trepanningly profound.

Everything Else (2012-2023): Did not see, do not care to see.

Skipped The Dark Knight Rises (2012), partly because I had not seen the preceding installments, partly because spatch came straight home from the theater and described it as a movie that no amount of weed could save. Can still recite reasons I hated Interstellar (2014) and am confident that I have forgotten even more. Saw Dunkirk (2017) twice in theaters and a third time on DVD and while it lost a little of its revisionism in hindsight of the 1958 version, still consider it to be the one Nolan film I have seen where the elaborate structure is emotionally justified and effective, partly because it is not set as an exercise for the viewer. Did not see Tenet (2020), did not see Oppenheimer (2023), after Oppenheimer am kind of taking it personally that he's doing an Odyssey. I like that he is the kind of filmmaker who loves film stock and practical effects and complex narrative structures and I wish he made more films with them that I actually want to watch.

Every time I go back to the classics, I get so many more references. It's a very deep rabbit hole.

And it gets deeper every time someone gets the words out of a new papyrus, which makes me very happy.

[muccamukk]

Insomnia (2002) was not only filmed locally (which meant the light was wrong, and would always be wrong), but half of it was filmed in northern BC, so you'd be walking down a street, and then the shot would change, and suddenly they're in a different town entirely (but the light was still wrong).

[sovay]

Insomnia (2002) was not only filmed locally (which meant the light was wrong, and would always be wrong), but half of it was filmed in northern BC, so you'd be walking down a street, and then the shot would change, and suddenly they're in a different town entirely (but the light was still wrong).

I see why you keep forgetting it's Nolan's, then, since he didn't make a press release about the whole shoot staying sleepless above the Arctic Circle.

(I recognize at this point I am just replicating the discourse.)

[selkie]

I think Memento had a significant impact on my graduate studies which is really off the beam when you consider it was not a film MFA. And the impact was AT LEAST I'M NOT PAYING FOR THIS.

*shudders in Graduate School, bitter as arsenic and slow-acting as lead*

[sovay]

I think Memento had a significant impact on my graduate studies which is really off the beam when you consider it was not a film MFA. And the impact was AT LEAST I'M NOT PAYING FOR THIS.

You also neither compose nor process narrative in a linear fashion, so there has to be some other emotional or intellectual element in the story to engage you, or, anyone who has ever been exposed to Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along has already been punched in the heart by time.

[selkie]

*looks at shirt, winter shoes, self*
At least, my dear friend, no one can say we chased the money at the expense of our fondest interpersonal and creative ties.
(If anyone would like to save me chasing it now I've got the game leg, they are welcome to apply.)