Interstellar: Nolan, McConaughey

lol wins

scientist: now think. what's a circle in three dimensions?
engineer: (thinks for a few seconds) ...a sphere!

i had to reread the plot on Wikipedia to sort this out, but: Hathaway and McConaughey suffered all the same time dilations. the first big one is when they both go to the stupid water planet, after which the daughter is adult Jessica Chastain. the second one happens I THINK because they slingshot around the black hole, which brings daughter up to death's door.

at this point McC heads into the black hole and Hathaway heads for her old flame's planet. he spends a while transmitting messages back in time to Chastain-Daughter, enabling her to start shipping humanity off Earth en masse. they spend decades building space stations before reaching the point in time where McC and Hathaway are. McC then teleports himself in space (not time) to be picked up by the space station folks, have an underwhelming chitchat with dying daughter, and then head out to meet Hathaway, who has just been setting up shop. i'm not sure why the space station people haven't sent any other missions through the wormhole and beaten her there, but that's the gist of it, I THINK.

I'm out of touch. Is Christopher Nolan "Nolan" or "Christopher Nolan" nowadays? During his heyday I lost touch with pop culture so I've always thought of him as Christopher Nolan, director of Memento and The Prestige. But then he was Nolan, genius director of The Dark Knight and Interstellar. And then he did Dunkirk and we weren't supposed to like him any more.

Looking back at his filmography I have the impression that he was Nolan from 2008-2015 or so, but Christopher Nolan outside that period. He wasn't dominant enough beforehand to be Nolan and now he's something of a fallen star. Like Peter Bogdanovich but with a shallower drop-off.

Is Nolan Nolan or not Nolan? Is there a consensus?

okay, yeah. i thought that the big time zoom between chastain-murph and deathbed-murph was because of big mac going through the black hole but you must be right.

dr c i loved reading your thoughts on the deranged, rushed logic of which planets they looked at first, the lack of any preparation or even curiosity about them before just careening recklessly into their surfaces. weird behaviour from people trained to save the human race.

xpost: idk

This film lost me at solar powered jet drones flying for decades or whatever it was.

there were so many lines like this:

GETTY
They just pack up and leave. What are they hoping to find?

MURPH
Survival.

I just had to google what topher grace’s name was in this, obviously I had no idea.

aww glad to have spread some joy through my annoyance. in hindsight the visuals of this movie really were something, but all the plot developments were like the traps in Home Alone, with Nolan as the kid: he's set them up so those burglars are just gonna have to be stupid enough to walk into all of them.

Only saw this movie once, in the theater. It was gorgeous but kinda ridiculous in a way that Nolan movies typically aren’t quite. Heck, I’ve seen Tenet more than this - somehow I have more fun with that movie.