Interstellar: Nolan, McConaughey

I'm talking about Best Picture winner LOTR: Return of the Bling, which had hobbits jumping on a bed as the faggiest of its baker's dozen endings, fools

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6yQ8BLSncc

but that was years before the BP extension and doesn't its winning imply that it wasn't a token populist gesture but the academy is actually the hilrod2016cademy? i'm working on it

also every BP winner of the past decade wld've benefited from hobbits jumping on a bed

imagine the Tower of Sauron roaring with dismay when Colin Firth learns to talk in The King's Speech.

I don’t agree with the idea that you can only achieve clarity through dialogue. Clarity of story, clarity of emotions—I try to achieve that in a very layered way using all the different things at my disposal—picture and sound.

whoa

Wasn't Dark Knight Rises known for those audio issues? Some people said Bane was difficult to hear and it got sorted out for later screenings and for DVD.

audio issues: everything i heard was crappy

I didn't have any problems with the audio.

resident pleb reporting in: i enjoyed the movie well enough. i thought the acting was pretty good (even in spite of poor dialogue in places) and i thought it handled the science pretty well up to the point where science fails to explain things, i.e. before any of the black hole ingress.

one thing i particularly liked was the idea of mcconaughey-as-bridge, between the higher dimensional beings and present day earth, to "translate" time. the canonical example used to broadly explain the simplification achieved with many modern unification theories (namely that if you keep adding dimensions into the mix the math collapses down into pretty closed forms) is of a 2D world in which any person who can perceive in 3 dimensions is effectively god, because he can immediately grasp the totality of the 2D reality and reconcile all of its physical phenomena. the spin the movie takes is that while, yes, the science may compactify to clarity for an nth dimensional perception, something is in fact lost in the generality. in this case that something is the way that a 3D being perceives time which seems irrelevant/trivial to the higher dimensional form, but is critical in this instance to the survival of humans on earth. the whole thing might fall apart under much further scrutiny, but it was an interesting concept that i hadn't seen employed in sci-fi previously.

a logical trajectory for Palmer Joss.. i found this well-watchable compared to Inception, which feels ultra-boggy/sloggy despite its interesting concept.

Nolan should just claim everything wrong or bad was on purpose, just to make you think.

Bane was Marxism.

Intersteller treats the planet as expendable, something to throw in the bin if we mess it up. Move onto the next one, without questioning our role in it. Great film, but his politics is not mine.

when a ticket is like a bottomless mimosa

http://www.cnet.com/news/amcs-unlimited-interstellar-ticket-lets-you-binge-on-black-holes/

Short video on the sound design. Worth a watch.
http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2014/11/18/the-sound-of-interstellar/

i really wanted to like this but was pretty :I by the end of it. i'm glad i watched it though, if nothing else for the image of TARS scooping up anne hathaway and galloping away from the giant wave.

michael caine's deathbed confession was the only time when i felt like i was supposed to be understanding the dialogue but couldn't because of the music. i also think david gyasi's performance as a guy who has been stuck on a spaceship for 20 years by himself with nothing to do but study gravity was funny and undermentioned.

oh and i really liked the pipe-organ driven part of the score that started kicking in around the 2 hour mark.

also when anne hathaway is watching a video from her dad and he goes "do not go gentle into-" and she gets this look on her face like "not this shit again..."- was that how other ppl interpreted that scene or was i just desperately injecting levity where it didn't exist?

The score is incredible and innovative all through. Absolutely captures the film and, well, space, perfectly. Much better than the Odyssey classicals, which to me never worked.

Especially liked "dust" but so many great songs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H08TFwDKILs

Would actually argue that Zimmer's the strongest player here aside from whoever designed those waves.

still think that having the music drown out the dying professor revealing a major plot point was probably a bad decision

Inception did this too: hand over most of the explication to the guy with the hardest accent to parse, and then drown him out anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtX4DnzAU8o
recommended for fans of john carpenter's halloween 3 OST

wait that was mislabeled, this is it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNW3LPKNFh8

it would have been cool if they just played the Silver Shamrock theme

I just watched this and it exceeded my expectations. From the trailers, I thought it was going to be some wishy-washy "we are all connected" bullshit -and it got close in some parts- but thankfully, it wasn't. Only the black hole scene was a little too far fetched for me -regardless of our ignorance of what the inside a black hole might look like, it's a pretty safe bet to say it is not a view of McConaughey's daughter bedroom. I did, however, appreciate the use of serious scientific and philosophical ideas. Sometimes I feel like Nolan's movies (this and Inception, in particular) would be much better if they focused more on ideas and less on action scenes. Their main problem is that they are conceived as blockbusters.

trailers before this movie were of upcoming movies featuring Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman. very time warp trippy.

WHOA

(More thoughts later, but yeah, I kinda have to thank everyone who saw this and didn't like it because that helped me calibrate my expectations somewhat - enjoyed it a great deal, first Nolan film I watched in an actual theater)

trailers before this movie were of upcoming movies featuring Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman. very time warp trippy.

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, November 20, 2014 7:58 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I got neither of these, but something close (in a way) - a trailer for Fast Furious 7, with Paul Walker.

I almost saw this on Friday but decided to bank it for next week when I have to get out of the house.

(A much better BEE film adaptation, though problematic in its own ways: "The Rules of Attraction.")

oops, wrong thread

Bret Easton Ellis's Interstellar, that I would watch.

Meanwhile, this story about Kip Thorne is fun

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/great-reads/la-et-c1-kip-thorne-interstellar-20141122-story.html#page=1

Though a self-described introvert, Thorne is also a born teacher, and he clearly enjoys talking. One moment he's telling the story of how, in the mid-1970s, he won a scientific bet with his friend Stephen Hawking. The prize? A subscription to Penthouse magazine. ("You have to understand, I grew up in a Mormon culture — I thought that would be a fun thing to bet for.")

With all the loud organ music, they really should have had Tim Hecker collaborate on the soundtrack

ha, when we got home I played Ravedeath for my wife. I mostly like the score, but it did feel at times like Nolan mixed two different scores together, one by Hecker, one by a more trad hollywood composer, to make it as maximalist as possible.

"Sometimes I feel like Nolan's movies (this and Inception, in particular) would be much better if they focused more on ideas and less on action scenes. Their main problem is that they are conceived as blockbusters."

basically, he wants to be making films like shane carruth, but also wants to make them mega hits, which can be an awkward fit.

Primer had very strong internal consistency, which is one of Nolan's biggest problems -- Inception falls apart when you try to analyze it. So does Interstellar.

So does Upstream Color, but I mean that in a good way.

Interstellar really does seem like two movies smashed together

yeah the "biggest problems - falls apart when you try to analyze it" tonedeaf criticism of upstream color drove me batshit insane personally

but in saying that nor do you want to fully endorse dopey comfortable moodpiece wallowing either

imo Upstream Color has a purposefully loose narrative that encourages interpretation

Nolan films have narratives that aren't really open. You can talk about the ideas presented in the film, but there's not a lot of wiggle room on the actual narrative. I have overheard people talking about, say, Inception but it's usually due to one person not understanding the plot or puzzling over whether that stupid fucking top actually fell over at the end of the movie.

so this is the funniest thing nolan's ever done yeah?

another classic damon/affleck joint

https://youtu.be/VUhA8eSx6pQ?t=4m16s

Have to say I found this strangely affecting. I know it's corny as all get out, but as someone with a rather complicated relationship with my father, the absent dad stuff really hit home. Like shooting fish in a barrel with me on that score however.

finally got around to this, glad my expectations were tempered. I felt like this was too long, which undercut the actual tension you were supposed to feel; and the special effects, tesseract aside, weren't all that great. And ultimately, the denouement didn't have much emotional resonance for me. If in the end it was 'love conquers all', then there are about 30 Doctor Who episodes that do the same thing and are more satisfying.

It was ok. But only ok.

I was surprised by how much I liked this, and it reminded me why I like The Prestige and The Dark Knight and The Following so much. I really like Nolan, and I wish all mainstream directors were like him.

Didn't like this and all I could think about during parts of the movie is that his grandson's full name was Cooper Cooper.

You know, even though there were only a couple of things I loved - the score and the robots, the latter possibly the most originally designed and smart I've seen in a while - I pretty much liked this. It was like a '50s sci-fi film with a contemporary sensibility, so less outright dumb and more just painfully earnest/new agey. It reminded me of a lot of other near-misses, specifically "Sunshine," "Gravity," and "The Abyss," with a lil' dose of "Tree of Life." Nowhere near as dumb as "Prometheus," which squandered a solid foundation and excellent FX in the service of something totally silly, risible and not-even-trying nonsensical.

Of course, for all the shady science (which tbf at least tries to make accessible some really hard to understand mad genius science), its biggest fallacy may be the mundane time travel paradox. Like, in order to survive and evolve into a higher state of consciousness (?), all the events in the movie had to take place exactly as is, which sort of results in a closed loop. Were we not to evolve into beings capable of 5th dimension travel (?), then we would not be able to lure Coop into heading out on his mission, thus ensuring his daughter solves the riddle of gravity (?) and is able to save the human race by relocating it to ... Saturn? So that it can one day evolve and ...

Unless I'm totally getting it wrong. But I like how many ellipses or confusing questions/contradictions it left in. I would have liked to see it directed by Shane Carruth in "Upstream Color" mode.

Ha, funny to see others mention Upstream Color. I'd been avoiding a close read of the thread.