#so i need FODDER for when im in my PEN and can DRAW

[rosemarytrash]

if yall had to pick A song as a ROSEMARY song what would it be. i need suggestions :| posthaste !!!

[fipindustries]

TENET, i have *many* thoughts

ok, that was a mess.

so.

This movie is nolan at his most cocky and self indulgent. it is in many ways nolan at his worst. this is the quintessential example of what a bad christopher nolan movie looks like, this is the movie that every person that disliked nolan has been talking about all along. to quote the northern caves:

is undeniably imaginative; it probably has the most dizzyingly elaborate plot ever featured in a work of children's literature. Does that make it complex? No, it makes it complicated. And between those two little words is a world of difference.

Salby's plotting builds hierarchically, inexorably, unforgivingly. Every new development serves as scaffolding for the next, and any idea or event, however minor, however many pages or books ago it was introduced, can serve as fodder for new narrative contortions. The result is a reading experience that recreates with eerie accuracy the atmosphere of the schoolroom. Salby demands academic devotion; everything will be on the test

Sean Carruth’s masterpiece Primer has a lot of its hermetical power resting on the fact that it is presented in the most opaque and confusing way possible. Entire plot points are skipped or merely alluded to in throwaway lines, which make what would already be a really complicated plot much more impenetrable than it already is. But what primer does to compensate for this and what Tenet lacks, is time to breathe, presentation, atmosphere, mood, all the necessary components of movie making.

a lot of what happens in this movie occurs almost in a slapdash fashion, as if it had been pushed and churned out the editing room as fast as possible. this movie feels like a five episode long miniseries crammed as awkwardly as possible into two hours and a half. Not because it suggest to impenetrable depths or to a larger breathing world beyond the film but because it is missing entire sections that would have helped us get acclimated to the world, the settings, the events and most important of all, the characters.

the characters are all function over form, they are a collection of basic traits and lines, all whose main function is to exposit and make the plot move according to nolans convoluted design. i could probably have a lot more to say about this but sadly i couldnt pay any attention to what the emotional core in this movie was supposed to be, busy as i was trying to stop my eyes from glazing over the plot.

in some ways this feels like michael bay, there is a clear priority on looking cool, and sexy and glamorous which borderlines on fetishistic (nolan seems to be desperate to make a james bond film but since he cant he decides to make his own bond, with time travel and hookers) the only difference is that nolan has different ideas from Bay about what counst as “cool” or “glamorous” or “sexy”. instead of going for gaudy, over the top douchy excess, he prefers sleek, sophisticated, anodine elegance.

in fact i almost dare to be so bold as to say that the entire premise of this movie, for all its pretense of carefully calculated, metodic, intricate well thought out rules, it really seems to follow exclusively the rule of cool. the very first scenes where the conceit is introduced it already feels stupid. and then the rest of the movie builds on top of that shaky foundation and i was never able to get over that initial stumble. spoilers ahead.

the general conceit here is NOT that things are moving backwards through time, but that “their entropy is inverted”. so, for example, if a bullet flies backwards from a crater into the gun, it is not because the line of causality goes backwards and it was some how “postdetermined” to get reverse fired, it is because someone aimed a gun at that crater and in that moment the bullet decided that was the gun that shot it, it could have been any other empty gun, wielded by any gunman and it could have happened whenever the gunman decided it was time for it to happen. so it is still us going forwards in time what decide when things are falling up, or getting repaired from exploding, or being shot backwards, simply by waiving our hands on top of it. it is not time travel is just a fancy form of telekinesis. which is bullshit.

and it is this central bit of gobbledygook what explains all further convolutions that spiral outwards. add on top of this ever increasing forms of quintuple crossing, sextuple agents, shell companies within fake agencies, within false fronts from a mediocre spy novel on steroids and you get a recipie for the audience being unable to give a shit about what is even going on.

i need to stress at one point the movie explains the grandfather paradox, as if people didnt already know about it and as if it had anything to do with the actual plot.

so this is a bad movie, right? it sound pretty close and shut.

well

thing is, i am a huge fucking nerd, primer is one of my favourite movies of all time, the homestuck interlude at the end of act 3 is the greatest piece of media i have ever read, i have written pages upon page analyzing almost nowhere, i can keep throwing names around: fleek, fine structure, hpmor, im not telling you these titles to brag about how smart i am for liking big brain boy stories, im telling you this to emphasize that i love weird intricate messes to pick apart and unravel and boy tenet is a fine example of that.

i cant help but respect how unconcerned with being liked this movie is. nolan is doing whatever the fuck he wants according to his ridiculous designs and is paying no heed to people enjoying the show.

but on the other hand, every time i finished one of the stories i just mentioned my first reaction was that of a kid coming out of a disney ride, i wanted to go immediatly back, this time with pen and paper, ready to draw diagrams, to chart formulas, to parse through it all at 0.5x the speed to make sure i got everything.

i certainly would have to do that for this movie, the problem is that i dont particularly care to. it doesnt feel like a fun puzzle to solve, it feels like homework, homework to figure out a movie that im not even sure i liked all that much.

which is a pity, maybe some day ill go back, ready to understand it all, but that day is not soon. tenet, it could have been great.