"Tenet" - 2020.. Nolan's new mindbender

First few seconds "A film we've made very much for the big screen"

It's easy to tell he would prefer this movie to be in theaters so you can experience properly

 

I mostly mean the drive in ban...

 

We don't know yet if he supported the drive in ban; we do know that he promoted this film for release in proper theatres.

 

We don't know yet if he supported the drive in ban; we do know that he promoted this film for release in proper theatres.

 

I find that more understandable, given that he took on the considerable hassle of filming with imax 70 mm cameras...

 

and yet when I saw it.. it a Cinemark XD screen with usually fantastic sound.. the mix he gave them was so terrible.. it felt like the film was a rough draft

 

actually seeing this at a drive in might be better. You can always adjust the bass levels in your car.. to make it sound good yourself

 

On the film itself -

I saw it at my local theater’s large Ultrascreen in the afternoon. Only 6 other people besides me. Nolan’s work has been frustrating to me since Batman. I liked his work before Batman and mostly like his trilogy. Since than not so much. Ironically I fell a sleep during Inception and never have revisited. Interstellar had some good ideas but did not make much sense to me but more important was not enjoyable to me. ( should mention that during that time period I was working 3rd shift and almost impossible for me to stay awake during any long movie. At home or at a theater.)

So I was hesitant to even see this. But as time travel junkie I was very curious of the little I knew. I am glad I did. I really enjoyed it. No doubt there are huge flaws in its time travel logic. But that was to be expected. It seemed to have a better pace than most of recent work, I might be curious enough to see it again. Anyone with safety concerns go in the afternoon and you might get a theater all to yourself.

 

I liked Inception reasonably well. I mostly enjoyed Interstellar for its strong science content, but the credibility suffered badly in the climax, and I'm disappointed at how bland and barren Nolan made the alien worlds compared to what was originally planned. It also troubled me that Interstellar had a nearly all-white cast, though fortunately Tenet doesn't have that problem.

 

the story should be a priority., In neither film did the races of the cast become an issue at all for me.. good or bad

 

That's getting it backward. Diversity is the natural state of humanity, so getting an almost entirely white cast requires filtering for that specifically, whether consciously or unconsciously. Which means that movies without ethnic diversity are the ones that do make race an issue. And it badly undermined Interstellar's credibility. This was a film that strove for scientific believability, but it was profoundly unbelievable in its portrayal of the population of the future United States, ignoring demographic trends showing that the US will become a minority-white nation by the time the film takes place. Not to mention that any credibly portrayed group of scientists, engineers, and experts would be far more international and multiethnic than what we were shown.

 

I disagree with your assessment. I mean The original SW film had all white people in it. But only in today's world would people call this a racist choice. He was just making a film with heroes inspired by pulp magazines, and wasn't thinking about how his film looked on the non-existent social media.. or whether it was "correct" or it lived to some "standard" by some kind of arbitrary measurement

Focus on the stories. I have no problem including races of all kinds.. but story first

 

Looking through a cast list to amke sure every bit of diversity is included before seeing a movie..that's asinine

 

That's the white perspective. I'm sure that nonwhite people always saw it as racist. It's white privilege to talk about this as something that "people" have only recently noticed. That only works if you assume "people" only includes white people, and that presumption in itself is the exact problem.

Again, you're getting it backwards. You're assuming that all-white is the automatic default and diversity is something you have to artificially create. It's the other way around. White people are less than 1/6 of the human species. You have to deliberately filter out the natural diversity of the population to get a uniform cast. The problem is that Hollywood (and Western society in general) has been doing that for so long that white audiences have been conditioned to mistake it for the default.

 

Or even when there is some diversity in the cast, the non-white characters are rarely the lead and often have some degree of ethnic stereotype in their characters. It was Simu Liu's stand against Southeast Asians being portrayed almost exclusively as nerdy scientist types that helped draw Marvel's attention to him. Although oddly enough, when I was growing up the ethnic type for Southeast Asians was that they were all martial artists.

 

I'm not saying a diverse cast is black.. I'm not arguing your stats. I'm arguing the approach to art. Diversity might be a-plenty in the world but it's not a responsibility. Cloud Atlas has a diverse group of races and genders in the film.. but it was an artistic choice.. not mockery, to have them played by people who were not those races for a reason consistent with the film. That is a once-in a blue moon example. A better example is that I don't buy frickin music if the people in the band are diverse.. I buy it because I like the music. Rush is all white guys?Metallica is all white guys? I don't care. I like the music. King's X has a black dude and two white guys? Love it. I don't care. Just like I don't care how many ballads they have per album Just do the art and I will judge AFTER if I like it. You are putting politics, agendas, twitter handles first. Where does it end. If a movie has a huge diverse cast but doesn't have a gender fluid character at all, are they suddenly NOT diverse anymore? What about a guy with freckles?

Nolan is making concept movies. The fact that the main character is black is completely and in all way irrelevant that he is black. If he was white it would be the movie itself which I judge if it was good

If he was making a film about slavery or civil rights, that would be different... instead he chose palindromes.. fine.. nothing to do with racism


How can you POSSIBLE say that Tenet is more Diverse than Interstellar? Oh my gosh because there is a black lead? is that the REASON? What about the Amish? Are they represented. Or the indian Religion? Once you go through all the races not included in either movie you will be disappointed, but us here on a real world message board can still have a conversation about the movie itself, the narrative and the concept, and you are hung up on the most divisive aspects of the film.. you ARE the problem.. you are what is wrong with the world.. because you are actively looking for what is wrong in art, you are looking for political correctness or the lack thereof, you are looking to be offended, and then when it happens you start crying "oh my god they offended me.. they did not include someone" you are the reason that twitter has become a cesspool of over sensitive hypocrites who are just looking to to complain and be offended by everyone .

And if you are ready to type that I'm attacking you personally, than you can see that I've illustrated the problem that you are perpetuating my friend.. because I don't know you.. you are a probably a pretty cool guy to hang out with, and we can talk writing or whatever. But by me writing what I've written I've illustrated how easy it is for people to become divided for the wrong reasons.

TLR you're the first person I've ever heard bring up that interstellar did not have a diverse cast. Other conversations I've had were about the movie, and the emotions, or even the science. Just like for many many years it was never brought up that the original Star Trek series HAD a diverse cast.. as a kid and even a teenager, or guy in my 20s it was always "did you see the episode where they go to the Nazi planet, or the gangster planet, or the tribble space station" .. once diversity becomes the talking point than you have not achieved it

 

And that's the root of the problem -- that white American audiences take all-white casts so much for granted that they don't recognize how unnatural and unrealistic they are. "I didn't notice" is not a defense, it's a confession, because that failure to recognize the problem is an integral part of the problem. That presumption of white default is the very thing that perpetuates the unnatural bias.

It's hardly unique to Interstellar. I've seen plenty of movies with nearly all-white casts set in cities that have majority-nonwhite populations in real life -- Washington, DC in Minority Report, New York City in Limitless, San Francisco in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Clearly there is an active bias at work, since that would never happen so often by chance alone. Note, by the way, that the TV adaptations of those first two both did better at representation than the movies did (indeed, the only white regulars in the Minority Report series were the returning movie characters), since TV has done a much better job fixing the problem than the movie industry has.

 

Now you are living in a world where you are going to be constantly moving the goalposts to suit your own satisfaction, and then critisize otehrs when they don't score a goal. Tenet has a black lead. Oh that's suddenly diverse. Except what about all the races, and all the non binary genders and religions not represented? Ghostbusters had a black character.. but depending on how you view the film.. is he "the token black guy" or a character? I think, despite geting only like 6 minutes of screen time and maybe a page of dialogue. It was more than a cameo and more than a token because he brought a whole new sense of balance to the cast, including his own perspective. Yet the film has never been remarked as bad because it wasn't diverse enough, despite the fact that having one black dude appear for a small small role is hardly diverse. It's just that people actually care more about the STORY than the talking points. If you want to get on your twisted soapbox and start crying white privelage, then you would only like to look at the problems in this country even if that means only creating the problems. It would be like being dealt an Ace and a King and complaining that it wasn't two Aces and one of the Aces didn't have spades

 

You're inventing straw men. All I'm saying is that if a movie's casting is truly racially colorblind, it will automatically be diverse, because people are naturally diverse. A movie only gets an all-white cast if someone consciously or unconsciously makes that happen. The fact that most TV series these days are cast more diversely than movies is proof that it is possible. Indeed, it's pretty much the norm now -- it reflects the real demographics of the United States, which has grown far more diverse over the past few generations. TV has largely caught up with that reality, yet many feature films, for some reason, still lag well behind, in the same way they lag well behind on other facets of inclusion like LGBTQ representation.

No, it's just less of a disappointment in that regard than Interstellar was. (It also has a couple of major Indian characters, by the way. Nice when a movie doesn't mistake the US for the whole world.) This is not something to pick childish fights over. It's a complicated, nuanced issue that needs to be engaged with thoughtfully.