Thoughts on a filmmaker who wants to be considered so deep, it must hurt to be him.
Has there been another director who has laboured as much as Christopher Nolan to make simple, generic stories look impressively complex? In Memento (Nolan’s first biggish movie; it still holds up very well), a routine revenge saga was tricked up with non-linear narration. The Batman movies attempted to transform your garden-variety superhero-saves-the-day stories into existential and political thesis papers. In Inception, a heist flick became a video game with multiple levels. And now we have Interstellar, which is, at heart, just an Armageddon-ish outer-space thriller about saving mankind, but how Nolan strives to make us think it’s so much more.
He throws science at us (gravitational anomalies! particle physics! quantum mechanics!). He throws Dylan Thomas at us. (“Do not go gentle into that good night” is recited about 4000 times.) And – in a touch that is sure to please the Nolan-is-God cult on the internet – he throws the Bible at us. The film is set in a future plagued by dust storms. (“The Lord will send dust storms and sandstorms on you from the sky until you’re destroyed…”) The space mission is named after Lazarus. In a key scene, the protagonists are threatened by waves as big as mountains. (Where’s Russell Crowe when you need an ark?) A long-suffering, Job-like character, who thought he had lost everything, says, “You were never tested like I was.” One man, a senior scientist, essentially plays God, while another (younger) man appears to be sacrificing himself to save mankind. And what do we hear on the soundtrack when Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) falls through a wormhole? Organ music, of course. Nothing else would signify the momentousness of it all.
Nothing in the Nolan universe is offhand – everything is invested with meaning (sorry, fans: Meaning), even the names. One character is named Murph (after Murphy’s Law). Another character, a space traveller, is called Amelia (after Earhart?). And the surprise guest star who drones on about mankind is literally named… Mann. Perhaps the name of the space station – Endurance – is a dry joke, a nod to the quality the audience needs most to withstand these three hours? But no, despite the occasional one-liners in his films, Nolan doesn’t do dry jokes. His speciality is transcending his material, the genre-based material, which, in other hands, might have resulted in a lot of fun. If he remade Jaws, there’d surely be a scene where Michael Caine, clutching a copy of Moby Dick, shows up in a subplot that references The Old Man and the Sea.
How else does Nolan try to convince us that he makes more than just popcorn movies? He gives us documentary-like talking heads, the way Warren Beatty did in the Oscar-baiting Reds. He gives us auteur-like casting, with actors appearing in multiple films. He gives us auteur-like tropes – for starters, the leading man with a dead wife. Then there’s all the Important Things he touches on, and all the time he devotes to explaining them. Then there’s the way he overstuffs (or needlessly complicates) the narrative so that we feel breathless trying to catch it all, when all we are, really, is restless, from being jostled from one unfinished scenario to another. People say you have to catch Nolan movies more than once to get it all. Of course you have to. His films are made that way – but is that a function of depth or half-baked writing? (Imagine the beginning of Inception had it not plunged us directly into a set of nested dreams, and had taken a bit of time to ease us into the conceit first – how much more thrilling this stretch would have been.) What I felt about Nolan’s filmmaking while watching The Dark Knight is what I felt about it while watching Interstellar : “[The film is] never content with doing one thing fully right when it can aim to dazzle you by attempting ten things with varying degrees of success.” Father-daughter bonding, meditations on Big Themes (love, aging, survival instincts), special-effects set pieces, disaster-movie drama, art-house aspirations… Interstellar has it all, the movie equivalent of a multi-cuisine restaurant that serves everything, but nothing really signature-special.
Inflating genre material, at least the way Nolan does it, is like building cathedrals in Disneyland. The films end up neither as entertaining as the plots suggest nor as profound as he wants. So much has been written about how accurate the science in Interstellar is – but does the average audience member really care? What we want is to be taken on a never-before ride, even if the equations on the board don’t really balance out. And that happens only fitfully. Save for a scene where Cooper receives some two decades’ worth of messages from his now-adult children (they’re aging faster than he is), the emotional moments don’t quite land – and even this scene feels rushed. Why not make us experience the passage of time that Cooper is experiencing? Even the big emotional scene towards the end feels rushed. The film has been working towards it for two hours and forty-five minutes, and we get a payoff that’s shockingly perfunctory.
There’s nothing special about the big action set pieces either (on water, ice, under a space station spinning out of control) – they have a been-there-done-that quality, which extends to parts of the script too. I was surprised to be reminded of Star Wars, from which we have the premise of a farmer who dreams of being a space cowboy. (Cooper sulks just like Luke Skywalker: “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”) A scene where Cooper is rescued on an icy planet is a direct homage to Skywalker’s rescue on the ice world of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. And the production design takes a cue from George Lucas’s vision of space. Everything looks worn out, used. The superbly designed robot-helper looks like a chrome-plated Kit Kat bar, and it speaks like a normal human (i.e. not in a monotone like HAL). Even the wormhole isn’t the dazzling light show from 2001 but something that resembles a river of oil slicking through a city street at night. Kubrick’s saga, meanwhile, is referenced in a WTF-y scene towards the end, where Cooper glimpses the past and plans the future. Even Robert Zemeckis’s Contact is visible, in the premise of father and daughter separated by time and space.
All of which leads people to think I hate Nolan’s films. But that’s not what this is about. The man’s no hack – it would so much easier to dismiss him completely if he were one. He’s the directing world’s answer to Leonardo DiCaprio, who, for the magnitude of his stardom, consistently challenges himself by seeking out risky mainstream movies. It would be easy for Nolan to cash in on his name and keep making sure-fire blockbusters. Instead, he’s made a three-hour film that looks like the love child of Michael Bay and Carl Sagan. And when he wants, he can be an amazing filmmaker. The most stunning stretch of Interstellar, for me, was when Cooper, having decided to go to space, drives away from his home and, as he is driving away, we hear the T-minus countdown, and we cut directly to the space shuttle blasting off. We’ve already spent a good amount of time knowing this man and his love for space travel, and we don’t need any more scenes in between. This is dramatic, economical storytelling.
But why is it absent elsewhere? Why is there so much flab? Why – when compared to, say, Gravity – are there so few visuals that are truly mind-bending, like the shot of a corpse floating in the sea, or the grave sight of the burnt-out parts of a space station? Looking at the zero-gravity sequences here, I was reminded of Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars – not a great movie, but it certainly had a great stretch where a character cut himself and the blood streaming out formed wondrous patterns, and later, the leads performed a playful waltz in these conditions. Maybe it’s time Nolan rediscovered some of the breathless playfulness he so wickedly unleashed in The Prestige. I don’t know if he’s reading all that’s being said about him on the internet bulletin boards (that is, when they’re not poring over the significance of the titles in Cooper’s bookshelf, which houses Stephen King as well as Arthur Conan Doyle) – but if he is, I hope he’s not taking it too seriously. I read a recent profile in The Guardian which opens with an anecdote about how Nolan, while location scouting for Interstellar, walked barefoot towards a glacier. This sort of thing smells suspiciously like mythmaking. We shouldn’t be making a god out of him… yet.
Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
Ashutosh
November 7, 2014
If he remade Jaws, there’d surely be a scene where Michael Caine, clutching a copy of Moby Dick, shows up in a subplot that references The Old Man and the Sea.
That was wicked clever 🙂
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Rajesh
November 7, 2014
For a director who made the brilliant cinema – Following – I consider Mr. Nolan’s films are regressing in cinematic quality. Its like jumping down from a tower of British cinema to Hollywood flicks.
Of course, now he must be more rich and have fame and that must be all what he care for.
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vaseey
November 7, 2014
I dunno. I think he is one director who takes movies that will lead yu to think a lot even.if yu see them like say In 5 years. any one can take memento in a straight forward way, but it was that screenplay that made it epic. To decide whether inception was a dream or a reality towards the end, thats the beauty of it. Any of the Nolan movies have a sincerity attached to them, be it tesla, be it a dream, be it short term memory loss or be it the worm hole. An immense effort is indeed being put. “does a common man really care about.all that” is a question that seems strangely on either side. It is the same common man who says, “Damn great concept, only if he had done more research” or if there was too much research “what the he’ll was that, is he teaching.us what that was” so criticism and opinions will be there even.for a mocie that has no.loop holes. If eye catching scenes are all it takes for such movies, then I have no say in it. Yes I’m a Nolan fan and yes I respect the guy, but this is beyond that imo. he has an art, a talent that not many film makers have, or the patience tat many lack. so my opinion here is tat he is on a different league altogether.. thanks 🙂
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KP
November 7, 2014
so basically you are saying Nolan is kamalgasan of hollywood nice.
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Avik
November 7, 2014
I like Nolan. And I loved Dark Knight (not Dark Knight Rises, which was utter crap).
But at the same time I agree with most of what you say about his work. The thing is it was able to entertain me in spite of all that.
And Prestige is his best work. Don’t know why it is so underrated.
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Bhargav Prasad
November 7, 2014
It just ends up trying to be too many things at once, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The Dark Knight was definitely not your garden variety superhero flick but it never jarred like how Interstellar did. The sociopolitical undertones in TDK was subtle. But with Interstellar, he was trying to say too much and the layering wasn’t perfect.
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Vara Ramakrishnan
November 7, 2014
It’s funny that you say “ease us into the conceit” when talking about Inception. I find Nolan’s movies tiresome, and have never managed to sit through an entire one. As for Dinesh, if he’s seen a movie once, he’s seen it at least four times. Your review sums it all up perfectly.
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Bala
November 7, 2014
Hehe. Just returned from Interstellar myself. While I thought it is brave of Nolan to attempt different genres and maybe emotions that he is not comfortable with, it does not quite come through does it ? And the dialogues here are probably the clunkiest they have been in a Nolan film. It makes the lines in Gravity seem like poetry. And it’s weird how what I tweeted about Bang bang (or one of those recent movies ) seems apt for this too. How the director takes us from A to C without even hinting at B. (in this case, the scenes at the end)
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Vishak Bharadwaj
November 7, 2014
The Dark knight was what first attracted me to Nolan. I really don’t care about his plots, which are complex so that people feel the need to watch em again and understand the characters better.
Inception had messy action sequences, but he’s trying for a sort of epic ness that he sometimes grasps, the rest of it I found very engrossing.
He’s trying to be the new DeMille. The problem is DeMille made 10 films in the time it takes Nolan to make two. He knows nothing of the economy and experience required to make a true megafilm.
I just hope he stops imitating ( the very overrated ) Kubrick and gets out on his own. He should make more. Making great “big” films isn’t as easy as Demille made it look.
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T_G
November 7, 2014
“This sort of thing smells suspiciously like mythmaking. We shouldn’t be making a god out of him… yet.”
Well said 🙂
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Suresh
November 7, 2014
Simply awesome. The way u weave words. Mmm. Bro. Kabhi Hamara phone bhi uthaAvo yaar.
Sent from my iPhone
>
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KayKay
November 7, 2014
Ok B, I’m gonna call you out here. I think you definitely DON’T fancy Christopher Nolan. And that’s cool with me as I enjoy reading WHY you don’t.
Me, I love him. Not because I’m blind to his weaknesses as a filmmaker (which you have elaborated on pretty accurately in the post above), but because he’s the only director today of Big Budget Spectacle who makes you work at understanding them, when he absolutely doesn’t need to.
Who else is there to dole out this type of Thinking Man’s Popcorn Blockbuster these days?
Michael Bay, whose offensive hatred for minorities and women get worse with each new film?
Ridley Scott, prolific but wildly uneven?
Tony Scott, lost to us forever?
James Cameron, whose Eco-Romanticism has dulled his hard-edged B-movie sensibilities?
Paul Verhoeven and John Woo, unceremoniously and unfairly banished back to their home country?
Steven Spielberg, who needs to be arm-twisted to make an Indiana Jones flick these days?
JJ Abrams, who alternates a fairly entertaining movie with a fairly dull one?
Michael Mann, who was never in the business of delivering Summer Spectacle fare?
The Wachowskis, who seem to have exhausted their creativity in the Matrix trilogy?
Kathryn Bigelow, who needs the trappings of War and Terror instead of Surf and Sand to deliver a kick ass action movie these days?
David Fincher & Quentin Tarantino, brilliant but far too nihilistic for the Summer Multiplex crowd?
Robert Rodriguez, wildly talented but too in love with resurrecting C-Grade Exploitation Fare?
Zack Snyder, whose Style sucker punches Substance into submission?
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Kartheek
November 7, 2014
Nice one – “breathless playfulness he wickedly unleashed in The prestige” it definitely is his best movie till now
But as long as he keeps trying and risking – he earns his audience
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brangan
November 7, 2014
vaseey: Oh, I don’t doubt his sincerity. Whatever his films are, they aren’t cynical.
Bala: That A to C thing you talk about is because he doesn’t finish what he starts. He cuts away and “lessens” that moment, and instead, we’re left staring at the next half-formed moment. And yes, he really needs a better dialogue writer.
Vishak Bharadwaj: I’m not sure he’s trying to be DeMille. DeMille was a ball-out mainstream filmmaker and he didn’t try to be subtle or anything. (I’m not saying this is a problem. That’s just what he wanted to do, and did.) And he did spectacle beautifully — as you say, the “megafilm.” Nolan is after something else IMO. He was to make very personal megafilms, and he’s — so far — not been able to do it, IMO. It’ll be interesting to see if he does.
KayKay: Okay, the fact that he’s the “best” among a not-so-great crop of filmmakers shouldn’t be a criterion for greatness.
I kept thinking of two films of Spielberg. One, “War of the Worlds” — look at how Spielberg magically choreographs the action, makes us feel the whole town/city/country is being affected. Here, it’s as if that one house (Cooper’s house) is being affected. We barely see beyond it.
Two, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” — a popcorn movie that’s also an epic, exactly what Nolan is aiming for. Look at how the Dreyfuss character’s obsession is detailed. Look at how his journey (both emotional and literal) is detailed. It’s an epic that doesn’t strain the least.
I don’t hate Nolan. I think he’s one of the most important filmmakers and I do revisit his films. It’s just that I don’t get the fuss around him.
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Devarsi Ghosh
November 7, 2014
The fuss around him exists is because he makes the audience feel more intelligent than they really are. So they can’t get enough of him, his movies and the standard Nolan-isms.
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Murali
November 8, 2014
No offence, but it’s a lot like how people always seem to read a lot more ‘into’ your reviews than just read them. Because you always offer that intense perspective.
That even if you reviewed a Transformers movie, people will seem to think you have discovered something in it nobody else has. When you were basically just bored and wanted to trash a useless movie.
It’s not like people see depth in Nolan’s movies where there really isn’t any. He does offer depth to a level where you think everything has depth. The same way Rajnikanth does things he never thought were mass but are being celebrated today. There is no fuss. Just fanfare. Lots of it. Mostly deserved, if you ask me.
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Prakash Ram
November 8, 2014
I think people make the mistake of seeing him as a wannabe Stanley Kubrick and they find his films superficial, I look at him as a smart Michael Bay, the kind of movies that you would love to watch on the big screen but still stands out from other generic popcorn fare.
For e.g: I liked Avengers but a year later I seriously cannot tell the difference between an Avengers, Iron Man or Thor, neither can I tell which part of Transformers I am watching and that essentially what sets Nolan apart from Michael Bay, Bryan Singer, Joss Whedon.
Although his movies do feel flabby, they still have enough tone and color to stand out from the overwhelming assembly line CG porn that we are served nowadays.
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oracle86
November 8, 2014
I wonder how is it that I seem to agree with all your reviews except those for Nolan’s films. Needless to say, I loved it. 😉
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venkatesh
November 8, 2014
BR : Spoilers tag saar !!!!
I read the word “Interstellar” and jumped straight out
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Maru
November 8, 2014
Tell us how you *really* feel about the film, Brangan! 😉 I don’t get all the fuss over Nolan either, so I was nodding along through much of your review. I will disagree with you hugely on one major point you make – ” So much has been written about how accurate the science in Interstellar is – but does the average audience member really care? What we want is to be taken on a never-before ride, even if the equations on the board don’t really balance out.”
I do like that there’s a genuine attempt to portray the science as accurately as possible. Not everyone will watch Neil deGrasse Tyson’s excellent Cosmos reboot, so if we’re getting a crash course in Cosmology from Hollywood then I’d rather Nolan use Kip Thorne’s expertise in bringing astrophysics to the screen. It all rather broke down for me when Coop pronounces that the *power of LURVE* trumps time and space and when Coop’s heroism upends the impossible (scientifically) for the (emotionally) necessary. What point then of the scientific accuracy if it’s all sacrificed at the altar of corny lines. *head desk*. I did think the black hole looked glorious and the ride through it had me gasping. It was worth the price of my IMAX ticket even if for the most part Hans Zimmer’s score beat my ear drums into submission and my seat pretty much shuddered right through the film. 😀
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KayKay
November 8, 2014
B, I definitely don’t consider Nolan a great film maker.Just one who expertly straddles the line between making a film that starts a conversation on the one hand while delivering the necessary pyrotechnics required of a big budget blockbuster on the other.
And I agree, the Nolan of today would be no match for the Spielberg of yesterday in balancing heart and brain. I just don’t quite like Spielberg’s current “I’m so above that popcorn stuff” attitude these days (his interviews post-Indy 4 reek of the sort of condecension I didn’t think Spielberg was capable of).
I loved War Of The Worlds, I just couldn’t help the nagging feeling that the Spielberg of yesteryears would have located a stronger heart at the centre of the narrative. Instead we’re left with a hero abandoned in the end, after safely handing his children over to a wife who’s moved on with another man. The Spielberg I love had a greater love for the nuclear family.
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Prasanna M R
November 8, 2014
@Rangan:
“..It’s just that I don’t get the fuss around him.”
Explains why you’re so utterly ridiculous when it comes to reviewing Nolan films. In the process of trying to paint Nolan as a wannabe, not-so-much-to-what-he-suggests director, you’ve become one yourself. You are not interested in what the movie itself was about, instead you have set your phony writing prowess in dissing the director you so evidently loathe for no valid reason at all (though you claim you dont). I dont think you’ll ever come out of this preconceived notion of yours, hence you cannot actually come up with an unbiased view on his movies.
Hardly surprises me. Cant expect a balanced view from the critic who *prefer* Man of Steel – the full blown debacle of that year – to the filmmaker who makes some sensible movies of our time.
Maybe if you stop thinking that you’re above Nolan, then we might have some quality writing from you.
What a pretentious piece, what a pretentious critic in our midst!
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oracle86
November 8, 2014
Hey BR, if you could summarise your review in 1 word, would it be ‘mixed’ or ‘negative’?
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KayKay
November 8, 2014
” The fuss around him exists is because he makes the audience feel more intelligent than they really are”
Devarshi Ghosh, you’re probably right. But I’ll take a filmmaker who makes me feel more intelligent than I am anyday over one who presumes I live just south of the Appalachian Mountains, in a trailer park, chewing tobacco as I clean my shotguns, while contemplating marriage with my sister 🙂
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simplyrdb
November 8, 2014
lol
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Ravi K
November 8, 2014
I don’t think his films are as smart or complex as they’re often made out to be. For me his films fall into no-man’s-land. Too self-serious to be fun, rollicking rides, but not deep enough to be taken particularly seriously.
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Madan
November 8, 2014
Maybe what you really have in mind is crystallised somewhere in the comments, where you refer to Spielberg? Maybe what you are referring to is a mainstream, proper pop corn film ought to induce emotions and thrill. I would not want to say that Nolan’s films do not have emotions, maybe they do for those viewers who are able to find those in them. But not for me, and probably not for you either, going by your views. Meanwhile, I don’t find the films I watched deep enough to be stimulating either. The reviews say Interstellar is different. I will have to check out for myself to judge. But while we’re on that, I think one could find the same ‘fault’ with Peter Jackson or James Cameron too. The box office loved Lord of the Rings, but for the most part I found those films overwrought. Maybe I am just a big Spielberg fanboy deep down, but I think he had a knack for creating some simple, even simplistic, themes and characters at the heart of the visually breathtaking special effects. ET was particularly great in this regard. Avatar by contrast was mindblowing visually but failed to make any dent at all emotionally. There’s nothing wrong, by the by, with either making big, pretentious films or enjoying them. Variety is the spice of life.
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gautham raam
November 8, 2014
@rangan,
your critic is absurd. i don’t know what makes u feel in that way.. you are showing off.. nolan’s unique signature is leaving the judgement to viewers and the depth in his movies portrays him.. you don’t deserve to give critic about his movie.. me neither
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Sri
November 8, 2014
I believe why Nolan’s Dark Knight or Zack’s Man of Steel appeals to us because they create the back stories depicting the humane nature of these characters. From Nolan’s Dark Knight’s parents to him conquering his childhood fears, finding his identity or Zack’s Man of Steel’s relationship with his father, wanting a normal life of a teenager, identity crisis or being a nomad all his life, finding stability and comfort in Lois lane. I believe it’s the same thing that Stan lee (Marvel comics) did a couple of decades ago when he said “When I came into comics, all the superheros were like gods, they could do no wrong or that they had superhuman strengths”. That is what led him to create characters like spiderman or the others with very humane issues like a teenager trying to impress his girlfriend or issues with his uncle.
Whether it’s Momento (a man avenging his wife’s murder, Inception (a father finding a way to get to his children) I believe the very humane flaws in these “let’s save the world” characters is what really appeals to us all.
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Sachin Dev
November 8, 2014
May be it is the intention of the critic to be consciously negative about this film so that he might stand out in the crowd that praises Christopher Nolan. People have already pointed out how pretentious a piece is this review, but strangest thing is that Mr. Rangan has an alternate version for the beginning of ‘Inception’ and he shares it with his readers. What does that tell about the maturity of a film critic? What does that tell about the seriousness with which he sees his own writing and how serious is he about his readers?
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Raj Balakrishnan
November 8, 2014
I am a big fan of Nolan, having seen all his films multiple times. The most incredible thing is the speed with which he makes his films. It is only 2 years since the dark knight rises which was again 2 years from inception. Writing something as complicated as Inception would take years. It is amazing that he released that within2 years of dark knight. He is a genius.
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Vivek Gupta
November 9, 2014
Great article! I agree with most of what you wrote here, lucidly laying out what I think were my sub-conscious feelings too because I did not enjoy the movie quite as much as I thought I would before venturing into the theater. Even so it seems I enjoyed most of it more than you did till the last half an hour or so where the movie stumbled rather unforgivably tossing out tired platitudes on love transcending space & time turning this movie from a solid sci-fi meditative film to a moapy melodrama. Still I have a feeling that Interstellar needs at least one more viewing (preferably with sub-titles) before a solid judgment on its merits can be formed.
I strongly disagree with one statement that you made about whether average viewer caring about scientific inaccuracies is important or not. I think a filmmaker should make those creative choices which he thinks are important to the integrity of his vision regardless of what an average viewer may or may not want. If a filmmaker concerns himself with average viewer only then we are all destined to sit through Transformers and Happy New Years of this world! Now that itself would be a reason I would be willing to pass through a worm hole to find another world to inhabit.
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Rahul
November 9, 2014
If you like someone, that person could empty the sambar bowl over your head and you will laugh it off. If you don’t like someone, you will hate the person for the way that person holds his spoon.
Not a huge Nolan fan here, but I find his movies at least trying to be more intelligent than the usual fare out there. I don’t even want to compare him to Kubrik or Speilberg or anyone else, cause ultimately he will be judged by what he makes. I agree with you, when you say his movies have excess flab, but I have never had struggle to sit thru his movie. I just don’t get why there is this emphasis on missing ‘fun’ when it comes to Nolan movies. Also, now you are criticizing Nolan for involving or asking a scientist, when all he maybe was trying to do was get it as correct as possible. I am sure movie directors/screen writers have consulted psychologists, mathematicians, and other people of sciences or trades to bring as much authenticity as possible to what they are doing. Nolan has established a connect with his audience, so however much you say the audience doesn’t get it…it doesn’t hold true, I guess. Of course, like fan boys everywhere, you would expect them to get defensive whenever something negative is written about their object of adulation, so beware the back lash 🙂
But, like some of us were discussing, it came as no surprise that you would diss the movie. That way you were predictable 🙂
In a case of reading too much into what is shown on the screen, I remember you asking Maniratnam the significance of some character doing something in one movie and how it related to some other character in one of his earlier movies doing something similar (I don’t remember exactly what it was…something to do with a pen). But Maniratnam said that there was no connection and it was a case of you interpreting it that way. This is an example of ascribing something more to the creator than the creator intended.
Your justifications on Maniratnam’s Raavanan and Kadal, in which you strove so hard to read meanings into what was a cliché ridden exercise in self-importance, is your fanboy writing. Gorgeous visuals do not make a good movie.This will always be held against your ability to be objective. You had so much love for those movies and then you go and dismiss Nolan movies off-hand. Nice move.
But then again, those are your views and you write bloody articulately…however much, there are times when I don’t agree with you.
Keep writing.
Cheers,
Rahul
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Madan
November 9, 2014
I think his point might be that while the details are fine and dandy, a fictional film essentially has to tell a story and have a character development arc somewhere. I have not seen Interstellar and I cannot say if that is or isn’t the case. But there is a pattern here. The Nolan Batman films are loved most for the reason that they lay down the entire Batman backstory as per the original comics in great detail. I can relate to BRangan’s point here. At the same time, he probably has a tendency to, perhaps inadvertently, present his personal experience in a way that sounds prescriptive (which is what upsets the fans). There is ultimately no ought to or ought not to in art unless the work of art is just phenomenally bad and incompetently created. Once a reasonable amount of skill and craft is evident in its making, then anything goes, the artist may choose whatever technique appeals to him and it’s not, objectively, invalid as there’s no such thing as that in art.
It was recently pointed out in another thread to BRangan that “in my opinion” is more appropriate than “according to me”. So maybe this is an issue of semantics which does get pretty important if you do want to present your views to the readers in an agreeable way. Agreeable, as in not stating views that you know they will agree with but simply stating your own viewpoint in a way that doesn’t sound as if it’s being imposed on their own.
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brangan
November 9, 2014
Prakash Ram: I think people make the mistake of seeing him as a wannabe Stanley Kubrick and they find his films superficial, I look at him as a smart Michael Bay…
Oh, that’s an excellent way to look at him, and I completely agree — not as a dumber Kubrick but as a smarter Michael Bay.
But here’s the thing that bugs me most about his reputation — he isn’t quite the auteur he’s praised to be, at least the way I see it. His real strength (and he’s currently the best in the business at this) is in imagining up delicious plots — is films are always interesting at the plot level. What happens? Why? Who’s behind it all? What’s the real identity of this person? And then, all that rug pulling… He’s really, really good at this.
But an auteur (or even a good filmmaker), to me, is more than just about plot. Let’s consider David Fincher, whose work I love. (I’d also take Paul Thomas Anderson, but then he’s not really mainstream.) Every film of his — even the unsatisfying ones — give a strong sense of “being directed.” There’s a sense of how space is used on screen. There’s a sense of how mood is employed. There’s a sense of how people are made to speak dialogue. There’s a sense of choreography of movement, even if it’s just people sitting at a bar.
I see none of this with Nolan, whose films just give me the sense of “the plot being expanded/expounded.” Now, that’s still no mean thing. But it’s not the same as a film giving a sense of “being directed.” Fincher can make us marvel at even a nerd walking home with an idea — but Nolan can’t do that without dialogue, lots and lots of it. Has Nolan ever put up a set piece as thrilling as the oil wells burning in “There Will Be Blood”, with that scope, that immensity, that sense of movement and choreography and… vision?
So that’s why I consider him a better ideator than filmmaker. (His plots are visionary. His writing/filmmaking isn’t.) But yes, miles and miles above the Michael Bays. I mean, the extraordinary action scenes in “Inception” alone are enough to prove this claim.
But such is the hype around him that he gets celebrated for making a “brainy” movie like “Inception” a blockbuster (and he did, so there’s no doubting that) — but someone like Fincher isn’t half as lauded for making a huge worldwide hit out of “Social Network,” a movie that’s just about a man thinking. And it didn’t even have Leonardo DiCaprio 🙂
oracle86: I’m really glad you said that. It would be freakishly surreal if a reader agreed with everything a critic said. Then we’d have no arguments and all, and where’s the fun in that? 🙂
venkatesh: Oh come on. You of all people — considering how long you’ve been here — should know better than to read something of mine before watching the film 🙂
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brangan
November 9, 2014
Maru: Well, if I’d written a review (as opposed to this piece, which only talks about the aspects of Nolan I DON’T like), I’d have also alluded to the parts that worked for me. So if you put a gun to my head and asked how I really felt, I’d say it was pretty okay. I definitely didn’t mind watching it.
(In case you want to see a “review” of a Nolan film that I did, see here. It’s a very short review, but for what it’s worth…)
Oh, and about the “science” thing that you and Vivek Gupta bring up, I didn’t mean it the way you guys read it. To me, it’s great if your science is accurate and all, but the narrative/emotional arc of the film is more important in such a film. So if you’d given me a better narrative/emotional arc and if the science hadn’t been “accurate,” I’d choose that any day over a film whose science is accurate but whose narrative/emotional arc doesn’t grab me.
oracle86: But this isn’t a review…
Sachin Dev: strangest thing is that Mr. Rangan has an alternate version for the beginning of ‘Inception’…
This isn’t strange at all. Anyone who has problems with something in a film is essentially saying “… but I would have done it differently.” It’s just that I write about it…
Vivek Gupta: the last half an hour or so where the movie stumbled rather unforgivably tossing out tired platitudes on love transcending space & time turning this movie from a solid sci-fi meditative film to a moapy melodrama.
First of all, I don’t think it wants to be a “solid sci-fi meditative film.” The latter part just the icing, the tricked-up thing that Nolan does to make us think this is more than just a — as you put it — “mopey melodrama.” (And I love melodramas, so am not dissing the genre at all.)
But here’s the thing. Even within the mainstream space, look at how Spielberg handles the whole “man separated from wife and child and in some sort of limbo” arc in “Minority Report.” The “mopey melodrama” is so seamlessly folded into the larger sci-fi “meditation”. Only, Spielberg is too clever to feed us his thesis points through dialogue. They are there as subtext, for those who want to dig into it.
The main thing that was unforgivable for me in “Interstellar” was how Nolan completely tossed off the emotional arc he was building towards. The mid-movie scene with the videos and the final scene with the daughter should have been so much more. I mean, I don’t mind that you’re being sentimental — but at least go all the way. Instead, we have a filmmaker who has a sentimental plot but doesn’t want to be seen as sentimental. Pick a side. Stick to your guns, dammit 🙂
Rahul: This will always be held against your ability to be objective.
See, once again, I am being confused with some other critic who claims to be objective and who has never endlessly stressed his inherent subjectiveness… 🙂
In fact, even your opinions on those Mani Ratnam’s films are subjective. That’s where you (and others) fall when you consider these films — and I have to be okay with that. Because I cannot deny you your (subjective) opinion.
What really matters is how you back up these subjective opinions with evidence from the film. That’s the real (and IMO only) interesting thing about art appreciation, not whether someone liked or disliked a film.
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Rahul
November 9, 2014
Brangan, I can never be articulate as you, but yes, I agree that the impression a movie makes is very personal and I don’t grudge you that 🙂
…only thing is that I knew that you were not going to like the new Nolan. Give us credit for understanding you thru your review 🙂
Cheers,
Rahul
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oracle86
November 9, 2014
Okay, BR, granted this isn’t a review. But if you could summarise your musings into one word, would it be ‘mixed’ or ‘negative’?
A friend of mine said he found the ending (SPOILER ALERT! from the scene where Cooper wakes up in a hospital bed) a bit too contrived, and that he would have preferred an ending with Cooper drifting in space, recognising the space station by Saturn and realising that what he did actually worked – and leaving us to ponder about humanity’s future. I disagreed, saying that we needed to see the Cooper-Murph reunion played out and it gave us that glorious Star Wars-esque scene of Luke and R2D2 stealing a Ranger and heading out into the big unknown..
Would love to hear your thoughts about the ending.
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adroitami
November 9, 2014
Mr. Rangan – More than ‘being directed’, I always felt Fincher’s films have something to say about life. There is some insight into the nature of humans & society.
It’s interesting, you say PTA is not mainstream, never thought about him that way, expect for his last film ‘The Master’ and ‘Punch Drunk Love’.
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Madan
November 9, 2014
I thought Social Network was a great film. Maybe not the film that Le Zuck wanted made about himself but far more entertaining than one could expect what is essentially a corporate bio to be. But then, how often do you have a background score rendered by Nine Inch Nails?
Love Fight Club, needless to say.
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Ramakrishnan
November 9, 2014
Weren’t you gripped by the scenes in deep space that were spectacularly silent? That moment once they blast off, leave the stratosphere and into nothingness? Or the way the Endurance moves silently next to Jupiter as a bright dot? The way it goes out of control after an unfortunate accident and their space ranger tries to spin along like trying to set an out-of-sync waltz into rhythm again? Cooper’s sinking into a black hole and travel in time warp? His floating in the midst of space?
During the accident scene:
Cooper: “Sync with Endurance’s rotation”
TARS: “It is IMPOSSIBLE”
Cooper: “No.. it is NECESSARY”
This here is Nolan’s brilliance for me.
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Narender Singh Mehra
November 9, 2014
I was thinking about the subjective-objective thing you mentioned. People come to your blog because you are subjective. Come to think of it, a reviewer cannot be objective (though one can pretend to). A bias automatically sets in since we have emotions (negative or positive). The above piece is certainly not a review and you yourself admit that. There is a strong undercurrent of annoyance throughout this piece. And by your own admission, the reason is the god-like status accorded to Nolan. But may i point out this fact that with the increasing reach of social media (in multitude of platforms), people have become more vocal and every new GOD will be greater than the GODs of previous decades (irrespective of merit). 100 people liking someone elevates more than 10 people loving someone (and more so as 10 seconds of liking today is as vociferously projected as 10 days of loving in the previous generation). Negative side being that the same goes for hate.
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kshitiz saxena
November 9, 2014
Sorry Mr Rangan. You might wanna consider the possibility of having got greyed and decayed.
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Madan
November 9, 2014
@ Narendra Singh Mehra: I think letting fanboys influence one’s emotions is avoidable. Actually, fanboys of all kinds of artists, all kinds of filmmakers, actors etc can be pretty annoying. It’s just that we tend to be forgiving of those groups of fanboys who are fans of filmmakers we also like. Maybe in select cases like Justin Bieber or Atif Aslam, it gets really tough to shut out the fanboys from your mind (I know that I find it tough), but we can all agree Nolan is not that category of artist. He is certainly more than eminently respectable. Fanboys will do what fanboys do best. I mean, of course Sachin wasn’t THE greatest batsman of all time, he was just one of the greatest but just because the fanboys would like to shout out the first statement from the rooftops doesn’t mean we start saying he is overrated and get annoyed, right? Substitute Federer and the statement holds good again. If you actually like tennis a lot and either hate Federer or think he’s no great shakes, it’s sadly your loss at the end of the day.
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Utkal
November 9, 2014
Nolan is adored in Hollywood and given total control over what he creates to the extent matched only by Spielberg and Cameron. The reason is simple : he brings both money and prestige. Taking the comparison with Fincher , his Social Network grossed 225 million worldwide as against 825 million of Inception. Now these two numbers belong to two different planets. And Social Network was NOT about a man coding at his table. It was the story of how one of the biggest and best known brands of our times came into existence. Mulhollland Drive is a film ( by another David) that no one understands, and that earns 20 million worldwide. Inception is a film no one understands, and that earns upwards of 800 million! You see the difference! Nolan makes being intrigued a pleasure. Let us leave the ‘money’ aside for a while, an talk about the ‘ prestige.’ I am sure ‘ ‘The Prestige’, ‘ Menento’ ” The Dark Knight” and ‘ Inception’ are as much the films by an auteur as is any film by Fincher. Nolan does it with his plot and dialogues. So? So does woody Allen. So does Linklater. Take the dialogues out of their films and what remains? I don’t understand why camera angles make an auteur, but not plot and dialogues!
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Venkat
November 9, 2014
Has there been another critic who has laboured as much as Bardwaj Rangan to make simple, generic reviews on movies look impressively complex?
Mind /Ego cant live with the simple and it is attracted to the complex. That explains why lot of movie buff’s follow your blog despite there being a lot of reviews which are more simple to digest and understand.
Though it may sound cliché will explain two facets of what was explained in the story which we all know from our folk tales (if I may call so)
On the concept of love transcending time space, we have heard the story of Meera/Anadal who lived centuries after Krishna (a gap of 2k to 5k years apart) but merging and joining with Krishna owing to intensive love. Not many living today believe this and even people who believe this believe this have not tried if this is true. We need a scfi story for some of us to believe in this concept and even those who believe are not going try this out. ieTrying to test this with a loved one who is departed
The next one is on the time. We all perform some kind of remembrance to our departed ones and if you ask the pundit, he will say, one day in word of Pitrus is equal to one day in earth and higher ratios for other worlds. But have we ever seriously pondered on why this so? There are explanation of various types of universes and what they are made up of in the scriptures. But who reads them now? We need them to be told to us through a complex scientific explanation which no one understands. But its been tested in a lab..
In India Shiva is referred to as Kaal Bhairav, which means one who has transcended time. Even when Jesus was asked what will the Kingdom of God look like, he gives a strange reply that there shall be no more time. There are techniques in yoga and tantra to surpass time, but then who is going to believe them today
But the irony is when higher concepts are explained in simple terms people don’t value the same. Mind always needs challenges and it is attracted to the complex. The BO collections of this movie will explain the rest
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Madan
November 9, 2014
Utkal: While Inception may have grossed way more than The Social Network, it was also made on a much bigger budget ($160 mn to TSN’s $40 mn). If you work out the BO gross upon budget ratio, it’s roughly the same for both films, maybe slightly higher for TSN. So both films were, really, equally successful, commercially speaking. But it’s very common since the days of John Maynard Keynes to look only at topline numbers and ignore the cost incurred in arriving at those numbers. I do not want to comment on who of the two – Fincher and Nolan – is an auteur or who is the better filmmaker because I don’t think there is a straight answer to such questions. But of the two, Fincher certainly seems to be the more subversive and that appeals more to my taste. Others may have a different view and I respect that. As a prog rock fan, I would say Fincher is King Crimson to Nolan’s Dream Theater. King Crimson fans, including this one, can be annoying in their own way but they usually tend to be more silent and understated than the often vociferous Nolan devotees.
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Ravi K
November 9, 2014
Madan, the big Hollywood studios would rather make an expensive movie with the potential to break records (but risking spectacular failure) than a smaller film that will likely make a modest profit without much risk. Hence the constant stream of expensive flops like Cowboys and Aliens, John Carter, Lone Ranger, etc. There’s little room for the $20 to $30 million dollar film.
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Madan
November 9, 2014
Ravi K: Yup. I am aware that this is the trend (and it’s a pretty strange and, dare I say it, wasteful one). If you can make a well crafted film on 1/4th of the budget and still get the same ROI, it would seem to be the more logical thing to do (so that you can take on more projects and spread your risk). That’s not the thinking that seems to apply any more and one day it might come to bite back Hollywood. Music industry’s already taken a beating, only a matter of time (as well as the attraction of the big screen experience) before it happens to movies.
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thekewldsm
November 9, 2014
The piece reads like a Nolanite bait, lol, and I’ll say at the very outset that I’m a die-hard Nolanite.
Well, I agree that there was a lot going on in Interstellar. But that’s what makes it interesting. I’m speaking for myself here. I’m sure there are other Nolanites who strongly disagree with what I am saying, so peace. But I feel (also as a budding film-maker) that as someone pointed out, he makes you think. That’s it. I love Fincher. His attention to detail is extraordinary. I love Soderberg too. But every director has his/her own flavor. I like chocolate. You may like vanilla. I would just like to say that by hating him or begrudging him his fan following, you are unnecessarily polarizing your audience (which is awesome if that’s what you intended).
It’s hard to compare him (or any director) with anyone else because we have our own disposition, our own experiences, our own priorities, etc. I will not quote box-office figures, I will not quote awards, I will not quote any social barometer.
There are fans (vocal, vehement) of Lars Von Triars. I hated Antichrist. I wasn’t too taken by Melancholia. I hated both Nymphomaniacs. Does that change anything? And yet, next time he brings something out, I’ll probably watch it, for the love of cinema if not for anything else. Whatever, just relax. Try and enjoy his films. If not, well and good. 🙂
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Rajesh
November 10, 2014
”The signal moment of cinematic disaster comes when Cooper, having accepted the mission, must leave his farm and head to the NASA compound. As he wrenchingly walks to his truck, gets in, and drives off—with the grieving, angry Murph unwilling to say goodbye—Hans Zimmer’s massively determined music hammers and wails on the soundtrack, and vanishes instantly as Nolan cuts to the spaceship’s liftoff.”
http://nyr.kr/1EpLPaQ
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Maru
November 10, 2014
Brangan, I was only teasing with the “what do really think comment”, but I don’t get why you need to reiterate that this isn’t a piece meant to have the balance of a review — or whatever (sometimes the pithy inarticulate comment is the most appropriate 😉 ) It is a perspective on Nolan and this film that you chose to write about. It’s articulate and well reasoned. People can disagree – vehemently- but with reasons and thoughts,not with name calling and insults and certainly not in your house.
But I digress, here’s the bit that we disagree about – perhaps vehemently and forever – it’s about the trade-off between emotional heft and factual accuracy. I did get what you meant, but my point was that I respect Nolan more and laud him for the effort to depict difficult scientific concepts simply and accurately thru his visuals and in the plot, irrespective of the schmaltzy story. If he’d got the science wrong but hit the right emotional notes, we’d have a more engaging Michael Bay and I certainly think he’s more than that and the film is better than that. In any case, that trade-off between accuracy and emotion is a terrible one, it’s hard for me to buy into one without the other.
The trade-off, or rather the primacy of the human drama over the context is a point you’ve made before and I’ve disagreed with it before. Recently, I liked the detail, the context, the tethering to the socio-political perspective in Haider even while I thought that the burden of Hamlet was too much for the film to bear. Ravanan lost me in large measure because of the lack of specificity; for me the human drama plays out in the richness of context and the lack of it makes me feel disconnected. Perhaps it’s a simply a matter of taste, in which case it’s bound to come up again. 😀
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Vivek
November 10, 2014
Funny, I described you as the Christopher Nolan of film criticism to someone not too long ago. Of course, my rationale was driven by the ‘contextual heaviness’ of your respective works in what is not necessarily high art (B movie making or Commercial film reviewing). I played back this entire post as a review of Baradwaj Rangan and it was pretty fascinating how at some level you transpose your inner angst on the compromises you make for a living to Nolan. Ever wonder why you have issues with Nolan but you don’t with Kamal Hassan (even a disease in his movie has to be Ebola)
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Gradwolf
November 10, 2014
LOL @ “Hardly surprises me. Cant expect a balanced view from the critic who *prefer* Man of Steel – the full blown debacle of that year – to the filmmaker who makes some sensible movies of our time.”
@ Prasanna: You must read the Guardian piece Rangan refers to in the last few lines of the article. It talks about how Snyder was inspired by TDK and sought Nolan’s inputs to make Man of Steel.
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brangan
November 10, 2014
Rahul: only thing is that I knew that you were not going to like the new Nolan…
But this isn’t really surprising, right? 🙂 If you’ve been reading me long enough, you know (more or less) what I will like, what I won’t… These aren’t just reviews but also inroads into the way I think.
oracle86: I think I said it above. I found it okay.
I didn’t have any special thoughts about the ending other than the fact that I felt cheated at that abbreviated emotional payoff and the random cut to the new planet…
adroitami: But PTA’s films don’t really spill over to a mass audience, do they? I was only talking financially… though even as a filmmaker, I find him less mainstream that Fincher. In the 1970s, PTA would have been completely mainstream, coexisting with the likes of Altman and Hal Ashby, but the audiences that made hits out of those films are gone now.
Utkal: I don’t think it’s that easy a comparison. One was marketed with a big global star, the other wasn’t. One was positioned as sci-fi-action, the other as moody drama. Just because “The Social Network” is about a “brand-name figure”doesn’t automatically make it a surefire hit. Consider the “Jobs” movie, for instance. To me, the fact that TSN made 225 mn worldwide is an AMAZING achievement, given how the audience for drama has shrunk — and this wasn’t even a feel-good drama like “The King’s Speech,” which had a sympathetic figure at the centre. This was about a prick.
Plus, there’s the budget/ROI factor Madan brings up.
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brangan
November 10, 2014
Maru: Okay, I guess we disagree there. I do appreciate a filmmaker who tries to get the science right. But to me, if someone comes up and says that the “science” in “Back to the Future” was all wrong, it won’t matter much because the narrative works for me.
But if I knew the science and then the film got it wrong, then maybe I’d have a problem. But if it’s science I don’t know, then that recedes and becomes an abstract background on which the narrative is mounted, and the latter matters more to me.
Coming to your second point, replace the science above with myth, and you’ll kinda-sorta see why I look at something “Raavan” too the same way. For me, it’s easier to buy into this “allegorical neverland”, and have the emotional narration (with songs etc.). I find it harder to buy it when the narrative gets grounded with reality — like in “Roja”or “Haider”or “Bombay” — and then you keep layering on the fantastical elements. It’s difficult for the two moods to coexist well, even though we may appreciate the detailing etc.
Vivek: Ever wonder why you have issues with Nolan but you don’t with Kamal Hassan…
Actually, I don’t wonder about this because I do have issues with Kamal too. You may want to read the following:
“And one of the reasons they stayed away from Kamal the Actor is surely Kamal the Writer, surely the excess that’s increasingly crept into his screenwriting… In Anbe Sivam, time just seems to stand still (especially with silence ruling the soundtrack) when trademark Kamal musings — about globalisation, MNCs, pharaohs, the nature of divinity, Adobe software — come to fore, because every single idea that crossed his head appears to have found its way into the writing, with sometimes scant regard for fitting in with the rest of the film. ”
“And instead, I’m suppressing a yawn as your film periodically sputters to a stop to launch into your by-now-patented excursions into theology and multiculturalism (you play a Dalit, a Sikh, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zen master from Japan… what, no Aborigine?) and the defining events at Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Do you expect us to be so dazzled by your dedication to your craft – for all those surely unending hours in the makeup room, we kneel before you, sire – that you think we’ll gladly gloss over what’s really important in a film, that it affects us, impacts us, and if we’re really lucky, moves us?”
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Uday
November 10, 2014
The T minus countdown bit struck me as a shorter version of a similar scene from Tarkovsky’s Solaris…
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Utkal
November 10, 2014
“One was marketed with a big global star, the other wasn’t. One was positioned as sci-fi-action, the other as moody drama. Just because “The Social Network” is about a “brand-name figure”doesn’t automatically make it a surefire hit.”
Well Shutter Island had the global star too, but it did only 294 million. So having Lenny is not a guarantee of a 1 billion USD hit. And talking of RoI, a Peepli (Live) made for 8 cr can do 32 cr and a 3 Idiots made for 50 cr can do 200 cr. But it’s not the same thing. And show me another film in the history of Hollywood that no one understood and yet made the equivalent of 800 million, and has a imdb rating of 8.8, ( rated by 1 million voters) and i will accept Nolan does not mean money + prestige, and that all the fuss over him is not worth it.
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brangan
November 10, 2014
Utkal: Well since you ask, if you look at the chart below, you will see that ” 2001″ made the equivalent of $350 mn (domestic) compared to “Inception’s” $300-odd figure (domestic).
http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm
I’m not sure what you mean by “no one understood” “Inception.” But if you think no one understood that film, then I don’t know what you’ll say about “2001.”
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Utkal
November 10, 2014
BR: Right you are. No one understood 2001 either. And yes, Kubrick did it in 2001, but not as consistently after that as Nolan has done so far.
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venkr
November 11, 2014
came across this….”The problems with ‘Interstellar’-Let’s talk about that ending”
http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/10/7185855/the-problems-with-interstellar
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Vivek Gupta
November 11, 2014
The third Pirates of the Caribbean ( or was it the second, they are all such a blur!) is another movie that “no one understood” but it made truckloads of money. I don’t think 2001 and Inception can be compared. Inception’s main draw was not the supposedly cerebral theme but the concept of dream navigation, rich with the possibility of kick-ass action sequences which drew the audience to the theater . If it allowed people to scratch their intellectual itch then that was just a bonus.
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Sam
November 11, 2014
I felt Nolan was refusing to accept what this movie needed to be: A Karan Johar film in space. If only somebody had shown him KKHH and K3G, then this would have made Avatar money. If only.
In any case, I hope YRF continues with its Nolan cribbing for Dhoom 4. That would be wild.
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Prakash Ram
November 11, 2014
I agree with Rangan on the point that he makes smarter popcorn fare but he is still not the auteur like a Kubrick or Paul Thomas Anderson. He is more like the director that engineers will feel proud of because of complicated plots and twists but does not offer more for the liberal arts guy in terms of mood, character depth etc. He would still occupy a very special place in annals of movie history not very different from a Spielberg or Lucas, who for all their deficiencies made extremely entertaining albeit overrated movies.
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KayKay
November 11, 2014
Just saw this yesterday. Well, tar me a Nolanite with a big, fat brush, but I loved it!
Like you B, I was uneasily aware of the Armageddon undertones (Average Joe is tapped to go into deep space to save humanity, an unhinged character stuck in space for too long, the constant setbacks and peril etc ) but thankfully there were enough of Nolan’s prints all over this to wipe out any comparisons to Michael Bay. For one, laidback Texan drawl aside, Cooper is no dirt farmer, but a qualified astronaut and Engineer. And the movie’s 2 female leads is possessed of the sort of quiet intelligence that would have them rejected at every audition for a (B)ay movie.
You mentioned that the appeal of Nolan’s movie is the plotting.Well, if I’m to be objective, then I’ve got to say that, be it in books or movies, for me, Plot Is God.Toss in a puzzle and you’ve reeled me in hook, line and sinker.
I love the sensation of watching a movie and yet puzzling out the plot’s numeous twists and turns at the same time. And with The Prestige, Inception and now Insterstellar, that’s the delicious experience I get watching them. That sensation of watching a stylishly filmed, expertly crafted entertainer while at the same time puzzling over it’s numerous twists and turns, not to mention the pleasure of later googling up all the nuggets of information that comes hurtling at you like a runaway asteroid. Looking up presdigitation, dream states and now wormholes,time dilation and Relativity after savoring a Nolan flick is the cherry on top.
(SPOILERS BELOW)
I had your review in mind watching the final reunion between Father and Daughter. I see your point that this scene didn’t quite have the emotional heft that the movie was supposedly priming you for.
But I look at it differently. At this point, Murph had made peace with the fact that her father DIDN’T abandon her and had moved on with life, starting and propagating the family line. The bitterness she carried into her adult life stemmed from the fact that her father DIDN’T return as promised, made worse by Professor Brand’s revelation that Plan A was a lie and her belief that her father left her and humanity to die. When she discovered that her father was the “ghost” , and that he was reaching across time to her, it erased her bitterness and resentment. She was ready and prepared to let him go. Seeing him on her deathbed was a bonus. Cooper could also let her go, content that she used his information to solve the equation, content that she didn’t feel abandoned, happy that she had moved on with her life. And she reminds him that his own life is in stasis, and that she should seek out Amelia, so she doesn’t die alone and abandoned.
Cooper’s anguish when he receives the first message from Murph in more than 20 years, when he realizes, in the Tesseract that he ws the one sending Murph those messages, the hokey premise right in the middle of all this science, that “love trancends space and time”, a father reaching out across decades to connect with a daughter and a climax that sees him steal a rocket to travel across galaxies to be with a woman he’s started developing feelings for: Come on, B! This is the most emotional and romantic I’ve ever seen Nolan being 🙂
Contrast this with the darkness and cynicism of The Prestige (which could have been directed by Fincher).
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brangan
November 11, 2014
Vivek Gupta: LOL at “Pirates of the Caribbean”.
KayKay: I don’t deny the emotional possibilities of the story. To me, they just weren’t consistently well developed.
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bart
November 11, 2014
Saw the movie in iMax and was dazed, glued & sucked into space. Music could’ve been better.
A lot of reading, pre and post-movie viewing of Nolan’s movies really gives you those small kicks when you’ve synced with the ideas and makes you feel wiser at the end of it (like someone pointed earlier). To me, he’s serving as a catalyst instigating you to stretch yourselves beyond just assimilating the movies during the watch. In the internet era, arguably, the matrix kick-started this style in a big way in late 90s. Internet era has made more people participate (through forums etc.) in discussions while also the ease of information access is adding to the movie watching experience. So he becomes important just by extending the movie watching experience beyond the theatres. Also, a Nolan movie watching experience is not dull and dry even if it doesn’t keep you spell bound always (compared to say, trying to achieve the same ends by making a documentary).
Agreed that Nolan has this clumsy way of story-telling (lacking big bang pay-offs) but he conveys very efficiently leaving to viewers imaginations. He is bold enough to take-on complex plot backgrounds or abtruse thoughts or twisted means of telling his stories and translate those into screen effectively. He is not off-the-mark by much. I admire what he is doing even if he doesn’t succeed to levels of his previous benchmarks always 🙂
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Prakash Ram
November 11, 2014
I just watched Interstellar and I should say it is one of the weakest films from Nolan, with plot holes the size of black holes and multiple story lines that don’t seem to blend organically, and it had too many A-list stars who don’t really seem to add much to the story line, felt like one of those crappy ensemble cast romantic movies that come out around Christmas or Valentine’s but now set in space ….
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Aditya
November 11, 2014
The revelation of this movie for me is that we shouldn’t be talking about Nolan; we ought to be talking about Hans Zimmer. He is to science fiction what Shore is to fantasy. And who knew one piece (is that the right word?) of organ music could be slowly escalated in frequency and volume until it peaked in a soaring, heart-pounding climax? Who knew the organ could cue us to bite our nails, absorb the wonder and enormity, and urgently root for the lead, in ways that the script couldn’t?
Weirdly, it was only once the organ started that the movie began to assume its taut structure, and once the organ stopped, the whole thing lost its way. It was almost as if that part of the score, while it ran, had them all mesmerized into scripting a tight movie. When it was done, they unwinded to a loose finish.
I have heard the music being criticized as monstrous and heavy-handed. So I suggest this is the critical debate 🙂
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Sid
November 11, 2014
@Aditya: The criticism of the music stems more from the sound mixing than the music itself, IMO. A lot of the music drowned out the dialogues in the film — I think that’s what people are arguing about, but incorrectly attributing it to Zimmer. Honestly, Nolan’s films have never had great sound mixing (again, IMO), and this one was no exception. I think Hans Zimmer’s work is quite stunning on its own, but a lot of it overpowers the film.
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Sid
November 11, 2014
@Utkal: Did you really compare Nolan’s DIALOGUE to Woody Allen and Linklater? Seriously?
With Allen and Linklater, they are not mere dialogues – they are ideas and themes and insights into character. With Nolan, they are merely expository and clunky. Honestly. it’s the worst aspect of his film-making IMO.
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Utkal
November 11, 2014
Sid: I am not saying Nolan’s dialogues are of the same level as Allen or Linklater. All I am saying is that plot and dialogues can be used to create an auteur’s signature as much as camera angles and creation of atmosphere .
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Raj Balakrishnan
November 11, 2014
Kay Kay, million recommends. Completely agree with your thoughts. Just back from my first viewing, completely blown and at the same time moved. The wormhole scene was jaw dropping awesome. And on the way back home googled to understand the ending. The movie also had its karan johar surprise star entry moment. Loved it.
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Reuben
November 11, 2014
Apart from the artistic liberty that Nolan has taken about the future humans as beings of 5 dimension capable of accessing and manipulating gravity and time, the science depicted in the movie is top notch and accurate. The marriage of the complicated science and the narrative style of Nolan can be a put off for many “average” movie goers but that in itself is not a bad thing.
What is killing me is the last 30 minutes of the film. Cooper in the future (from the tesseract) giving the coordinates of NASA to Cooper in the past (Murph’s room) so that he could travel through the wormhole and to the tesseract.
Is this an unresolvable plot hole or you have an opinion on this?
Probably you might not want to transform this thread into a full blown flame war on the different interpretations of this. But if you had given some time to think of this paradox would love to hear…
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Sid
November 12, 2014
@Reuben: This has been a part of sci-fi/fantasy stories since years (heck, even JK Rowling used it).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrap_paradox
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Reuben
November 12, 2014
@ Sid: Sigh, that just reduced Interstellar to Harry Potter…
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Sam
November 12, 2014
I agree with Utkal regarding Nolan’s auteurism. Nolan isn’t a great formal filmmaker, and you don’t get the sense that you are looking at the world through his lens with each shot, but he does have many elements that make him an auteur. Aside from elements of his writing (plots, themes, trailer lines (I’ve always felt he was bad at dialogue but great at one liners), his commitment to rules and grounding things in reality, etc), we also have his propulsive use of music, his editing patterns, his production design aesthetic choices, his favoring of practical effects and stunts, his restrained color palette. What goes on in the frame is certainly Nolan, even if his use of the frame isn’t. Couldn’t that be said of Cecile B. DeMille? He wasn’t exactly Orson Welles with his camerawork.
I guess my idea of an auteur doesn’t necessarily relate to quality. For example, there are enough consistent recurring elements in Paul W.S. Anderson’s films that he is as much of an auteur to me as PTA. Doesn’t mean he’s in the same league, just means but I grant him full auteur status regardless.
I’ve long thought that Nolan would benefit from pulling a George Lucas on Episode 5/6 and being a very hands on producer and co-writer rather than writing and directing. He’s the best idea-man in Hollywood but there are many better craftsmen, both in writing and directing. That said, aside from the Wachowskis there is nobody in Hollywood who consistently surprises and excites me with their films, and I really do love his films despite them being laughably flawed at times.
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oracle86
November 12, 2014
Here’s a very informative graphic that quite thoroughly depicts the timeline of the film – prepared by stoifics42 from REDDIT – i.imgur.com/hfoX7hf.jpg
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Utkal
November 12, 2014
“Space epics, the ones that have ambition beyond classic action (Star Wars) and adventure (Armageddon), concern themselves, almost by default, with metaphysics, questioning the how and the why and the what ifs of the world and the space beyond it. There’s Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its lauded ambiguities of spirituality and existentialism. There’s Zemeckis’ Contact, whose Palmer Joss (played by one Matthew McConaughey) is essentially an allegory of religious faith in the face of other approaches to the world. There’s Shyamalan’s Signs (with Mel Gibson in the role of the allegory). There’s Scott’s Prometheus. There’s the “metaphysical head trip” that is Cuarón’s Gravity. These films treat space not just as a spectacular setting for a story, but as a question to be answered. They deal with religion not just as a human institution, but also as something broader and more universal: a vehicle for human spirituality.
The latest to explore the spiritual implications of space is Hollywood’s reigning philosopher-poet, Christopher Nolan, and his reigning philosophy-film. While Interstellar, as one review put it, “never entirely commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world, it nevertheless has a mystical strain, one that’s unusually pronounced for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant.” Or, as Slate summed it up: “For the first time, Nolan’s universe has a God, or something like one.” ”
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/interstellar-isnt-about-religion-and-also-it-is-totally-about-religion/382636/
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Utkal
November 12, 2014
“It has been said,” Carl Sagan wrote in Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, “that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.” We are saturated, now, with images of space—not just from Hollywood, but from scientists. NASA offers an astronomy picture of the day. There are multiple websites dedicated to the sharing of “space porn.” The images appeal not just because they are pretty, but because they are, in the most literal sense, awesome. They encourage us to think beyond ourselves, to question, to wonder. Sagan wasn’t just an astronomer, but a philosopher-astronomer. Just as Christopher Nolan—and Stanley Kubrick, and Alfonso Cuarón—are philosopher-filmmakers. Space, speaking to us in its vast silence, brings out the philosopher in us all.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/interstellar-isnt-about-religion-and-also-it-is-totally-about-religion/382636/
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brangan
November 13, 2014
bart: So he becomes important just by extending the movie watching experience beyond the theatres.
That is a valid point. So you’re saying that maybe we need a new yardstick for measuring a filmmaker these days — where the film takes a life of its own on the internet. But I still see that as an adjunct of the movie-watching experience.
Sam: There have been some discussions in this space about who’s an auteur — and whether a not-so-great filmmaker can still be termed an auteur if he has a bunch of distinctive thematic conerns, stylistic tropes etc. I don’t think any consensus was reached 🙂
I’ve long thought that Nolan would benefit from pulling a George Lucas on Episode 5/6 and being a very hands on producer and co-writer rather than writing and directing. He’s the best idea-man in Hollywood but there are many better craftsmen, both in writing and directing.
This is an excellent point. Imagine what a Kershner-level director (and shaper of performances) could do with Nolan’s ideas.
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Cinemakkaran
November 13, 2014
http://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/in-the-cut-part-i-shots-in-the-dark-knight
Well lot of criticism of Nolan mostly about Shot editing, frame composition etc.
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vishak bharadwaj
November 13, 2014
Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” about astronauts traveling to the other end of the galaxy to find a new home to replace humanity’s despoiled home-world, is frantically busy and earsplittingly loud. It uses booming music to jack up the excitement level of scenes that might not otherwise excite. It features characters shoveling exposition at each other for almost three hours, and a few of those characters have no character to speak of: they’re mouthpieces for techno-babble and philosophical debate. And for all of the director’s activism on behalf of shooting on film, the tactile beauty of the movie’s 35mm and 65mm textures isn’t matched by a sense of composition. The camera rarely tells the story in Nolan’s movies. More often it illustrates the screenplay, and there are points in this one where I felt as if I was watching the most expensive NBC pilot ever made.
That’s Matt Zoller Seitz on Roger Ebert’s site. His full review is fabulous BR. I’m sure you’ll love it.
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KayKay
November 14, 2014
Raj Balakrishnan: My pleasure.
Ironically, the Nolan “twist” in this case was the weakest aspect of the film, being one that has been used quite a bit, from Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban right up to James Wan’s recent Insidious 2.
Everything else though, was aces!
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bart
November 14, 2014
Extended discussions (through web) just being an adjunct to the movie itself might be right. The question is how many makers are able to consistently to do it with a positive impact. Only when the viewers take the content and the maker seriously, you can see some real involved discussions and creativity based on the interpretations (e.g.: http://sploid.gizmodo.com/interstellar-explained-in-one-timeline-warning-spoile-1656588261). I feel Nolan has been very consistent. To quote a recent example from your site itself, the recent high-viewer-involved discussions were for “Jigarthanda”. It can happen even when the movie is not widely accepted while the maker is as well (e.g.: Kadal).
P.S.: Audience creativity can be triggered to the other extreme as well in smaller pockets (e.g.: #KathukitaMothaVithayayumEraku). To each his own joy 🙂
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Harish S Ram
November 15, 2014
I am surprised no one noticed the movie treading the path of Shyamalan’s Signs. A Farmer’s relationship with his children in the background of world’s extinction – all ending with a kickass payoff interpretation of the events that happen in the film.
Speaking about the film itself, BR, don’t you think the texture and tone he has given for the simple drama that unfolds in space is quite interesting? Take the giant wave scene – it could have been all out epic but he chooses to go a little subtle with the strangely effective organ theme and pulls it off quite convincingly. Also the final docking sequence. A part of me says that scene wasn’t epic yet it somehow gets processed as a great scene. I am unable to term what he just did. But it’s a new dimension for Nolan and is quite effective too.
Also unlike his other films, the title Interstellar seems bland/generic for the idea he presents here – change for the sake of change?
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Madan
November 15, 2014
Only when the viewers take the content and the maker seriously, you can see some real involved discussions and creativity based on the interpretations –
Sure. The question is whether this has necessarily to do with the depth of the work itself or the attachment of the viewers to the maker’s work. It is the latter but that’s not an answer that sits well among art lovers (be it of art itself or movies or music) because it is supposedly divided between the elites and the masses. I have long believed that this distinction is mostly superfluous but artists would themselves be reluctant to disturb this illusion because these divisions serve them well from the point of view of branding and differentiation. I am not saying, by the by, that Nolan’s films don’t have depth. I am just saying the question of what does and doesn’t have depth is in itself a slippery slope of subjectivity and depends a lot on our prism, our way of looking at a particular movie.
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Utkal
November 15, 2014
Another filmmaker whom BR may not consider a real filmmaker….but he makes classics, and is among the best filmmakers we ahve today.
“They may look easy but there’s a huge amount of work that’s gone on them, with he and his co-writers slogging on every scene, line and nuance. “The apparent simplicity is very difficult to achieve,” says Mishra. The ideas may look absurd on paper, seem impossible to pull off but his skill lies in audaciously managing to do just that. Muralidharan, who shoots happily for both the “simple” Hirani and the more “crafted, treatment-oriented” Sriram, explains the much-discussed “lack of cinema” in Hirani’s films. “The camera is ultimately a part of the creative functioning. Each film has a personality and the camera has to stay in tune with it. When I heard his story on Munnabhai, I realised there was no need for me to do any gymnastics with the camera. His is the classical technique, centred on story and dialogues. Any intervention would mean a change in pace and would affect the simplicity. It would become something else,” he says.”
http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Lage-Raho-Hero-Hirani/292580
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brangan
November 15, 2014
This is pretty awesome, I say 🙂
http://www.sify.com/movies/interstellar-creates-b-o-history-in-tn-news-hollywood-olpotjjbcebgf.html
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Madan
November 15, 2014
On Hirani, I felt Three Idiots lacked the simplicity that made the Munnabhai films, esp Lage Raho, endearing. Maybe Aamir ghost directed it to some extent but some of the over bearing seriousness of TZP seemed to have rub off on Three Idiots too. The audience loved it; I sort of liked it in spite of its flaws but not as much as MBBS or Lage Raho.
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Utkal
November 16, 2014
‘I go to movies to exercise my emotional muscles’, said Anthony Minghella. I do that too. But it’s nice, once in a while, to come across a film ( quoting Peter Travers of Rolling Stone) that the director wants you to think through rather than sit through. Nolan doesn’t leave your emotional muscles quite alone, at least not in this one, but he gives plenty to think about too, and that for me was the prime delight of ‘ Interstellar’.
The strongest theme that the film touches upon is parenthood. It is played out over two parallel strands – there is Dr Brand and her daughter Amelia; and there is Cooper and his daughter Murph and son Tom. Ideas on parenthood that one can chew on : ‘ The moment we become parents, we become the ghosts of our children’s future.’ Potent stuff there. ‘We are there to be memories of our children.’ “A parent‘s job is to make his children feel safe. A parent doesn’t tell his child that the earth is ending.’ All these are from Cooper’s perspective. Later there is Murph’s perspective too. ‘No parent should watch his children die. I have my children. Go,’ urges a dying Murph to her 124 year old father who is still young thanks to the time wrap he has passed through. Anyone who is a parent knows these insights to be quite real and not just pop psychology. Only here it is so poignantly brought out against a backdrop of death, abandonment and love.
The other major theme playing out all through the film is the issue of survival. Dr Mann voices this very convincingly, when he admits to have transmitted false data with the hope of being rescued. “ Don’t judge me. You have not been tested like I have been, ’ he says to Cooper. Dr Brand talks of transcending the thought of individual survival and think of the survival of the specie. That was the thought that led to his lying about the Plan A. There was no possibility of rescuing the people on earth, so at least a few could go out and set up a colony on some other star. It was easy for a child to abandon the parent, but is it the same when a parent has to abandon his children?
There are meditations on the nature of ‘ exploration’. How only the brave undertake it, because there was always the possibility of not finding what you were looking for, and not being able to return. Also as Cooper tells Amelia, “ To go out and reach somewhere, you have to leave something behind.’. Wasn’t that what Yudhisthir was told when he tried to enter heaven with his dog?
In fact the melding of well-known mythical concepts and modern science and weaving those threads seamlessly through the narrative is the other big achievement of the film. Take the concept of 1 year in the Brahmalok being an eon on earth, or the concept of beings living in 5 dimensions, quite explicitly mentioned in occult literatures. The film tries to make some of these concepts as real as possible. I loved the demonstration of the wormhole with a folded sheet of paper and the two holes coinciding, explain how one can eliminate distance by the folding of the space-time continuum. Of course, as is his norm, Nolan makes it beautifully complicated by making the holes three dimensional – a resplendent sphere.
The most criticised line in the film relates to the other big poster headline of the film – love transcends time and space. But then it is convincingly argued for by Amelia in the film. What utilitarian function does loving of dead person serve? And the assertion that Love will show the way may not be totally unscientific either – if one goes by the process of decision-making alluded to by Malcolm Gladwell in his ‘Blink’. When data is ambiguous, passion can help you make up your mind. Amelia was right about Edmund’s planet and Cooper wrong about Dr Mann’s.
To those who complain about the staged nature of the scenes and the dialogues, my answer would be : it is a concept film like, say, Ship of Theseus, so do not expect naturalistic staging or everyday speech.
And if you talk of lack of cinematic style, my answer would be – You do not read the Mahabharata for its linguistic flourish, you read it for its epic storytelling and philosophical quests. We don’t generally expect these from films, but that cannot be Nolan’s fault.
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Utkal
November 16, 2014
Visak Bharadwaj: I started reading other reviews after seeing the film tonight, including the one by you mentioned. I would like to quote the second and thord para from the review which si quite in line with what I felt about the film.
“ And yet “Interstellar” is still an impressive, at times astonishing movie that overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan’s work melted away. I’ve packed the first paragraph of this review with those objections (they could apply to any Nolan picture post “Batman Begins”; he is who he is) so that people know that he’s still doing the things that Nolan always does. Whether you find those things endearing or irritating will depend on your affinity for Nolan’s style.
In any case, there’s something pure and powerful about this movie. I can’t recall a science fiction film hard-sold to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome” in which so many major characters wept openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears streaming down their cheeks. Matthew McConaughey’s widowed astronaut Cooper and his colleague Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) pour on the waterworks in multiple scenes, with justification: like everyone on the crew of the Endurance, the starship sent to a black hole near Jupiter that will slingshot the heroes towards colonize-able worlds, they’re separated from everything that defines them: their loved ones, their personal histories, their culture, the planet itself. ..”
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/interstellar-2014
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PN
November 16, 2014
I thought you like me wanted emotions and drama and theatrics more than anything else.
Let me say at the outset that other than the Batman series (I am a comic book fan) I did not like any Nolan movie so far. In fact, I almost stormed out of Inception(angry at the unresolved ending), have never watched Memento and slept halfway through Prestige. So, thats where I am coming from. I watched this movie because as usual my Nolan fanboy brother wanted to watch it and forced me to go.
I love drama, I fall hook line and sinker for grand stories of great heroes.
As someone who feels viscerally about the father-daughter relationship, I am generally even touched by adverts that showcase this bond, so you can imagine my state when this relationship was emotionally and logically portrayed with such finesse and delicacy and respect and earnestness by the wonderful team of Interstellar.(FYI, I cried through the entire last hour of the movie)
I will be very honest and say I did not understand the science bits very much in Interstellar, I am not a science person(but I understood the internal logic of the film and don’t care to probe further). But I am a daughter, and my father was not a normal man, he was a hero a misunderstood hero who was an engineer forced to become a farmer back in socialist India of yore (See where I am going here?). Thats Hero with a capital H. And I can tell you this, that never before has the special relationship between *such* a parent, when he finally finds his calling and child been portrayed on screen in such a manner.
And for that I shall be forever grateful to Nolan.
Re: Your point about the “hurried” meeting b/w father and daughter in the end, like yes, the love was important, but the film ended with him exploring again in the true spirit of the explorer, but this time with his daughter *understanding* him.
Ultimately it is more than anything a dramatic story that touches upon the whole ouvre of human existence while keeping love at the core. What more could one ask for?
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PN
November 16, 2014
My favorite scene is when Cooper sees the videos sent by his kids.
“All the talk of black holes, wormholes and the space-time continuum take root in Coop when he realizes his two years in space have occupied 23 years on Earth. His children, the now-adult Tom (Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain), spill out decades of joys and resentments in video messages that Coop watches in stunned silence. McConaughey nails every nuance without underlining a single one of them. He’s a virtuoso, his face a road map to the life he’s missed as his children bombard him with a Rorschach test of emotions.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/interstellar-20141105#ixzz3JAUnURqE
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brangan
November 16, 2014
PN: Thank you for sharing that. We all make personal bonds with movies, and when a movie touches on an existing personal bond, it’s even more special.
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brangan
November 16, 2014
Utkal Another filmmaker whom BR may not consider a real filmmaker….
Not at all. I am not a big fan of “3 Idiots,” but when Hirani hits all the right marks, when he’s firing on all cylinders, his films can be magical — like “Lage Raho…”
You have misunderstood my point about craft. We don’t dismiss an Ozu because he never moved his camera. In that sense, we don’t compare Ozu to Welles. This isn’t about pyrotechnics. Fincher, of late, isn’t much of a pyrotechnics guy either. I am talking about using craft to conjure mood, atmosphere. I’m talking about using screenwriting to shape characters and emotions.
Take the scene in Murph’s bedroom, after Cooper decides to leave: (I am recalling from memory, so these may not be the exact lines):
Cooper: Your mother once told me that we are the ghosts of our children’s future… I can’t be your ghost, yet.
I mean, who talks to his daughter like this? Oh, but of course, this isn’t COOPER talking to Murph. This is NOLAN talking to his audience, laying in a CLUE that Cooper is going to be the ghost, so that people can catch this during their second or fifth viewing, and go, “Wow!”
This isn’t emotion. This is exposition.
Take this other scene where, after the Miller planet disaster and all the time has elapsed, Cooper and Amelia run into Romilly, who has aged 23 years, 8 months, 4 days. (Again, don’t recall the exact numbers.)
This is how the scene plays out. The connecting door opens. They see Romilly, bald and with a flecks-of-white beard. And almost immediately, he says he’s been waiting for… 23 years, 8 months, 4 days.
Again, this isn’t Romilly speaking to Cooper/Amelia. This is Nolan speaking to the audience, feeding us the information we need at that point in the most graceless manner possible. I mean, God (or Gargantua) forbid, we actually have a proper scene around the discovery of this aged Romilly.
And what about the scene where Mann is rescued:
Mann: You literally raised me from the dead.
Cooper: (gravely) Lazarus.
Again, Nolan reminding us of the name of the mission, and about the significance of that name.
Another scene. Tom’s kid coughs. Murph turns to him. Instantly, the kid clarifies, “It’s the dust.”
Point made. Information dispensed. The kid never coughs again. At least, not this portentously. (And why should he? The coughing has served its purpose. It’s told us what we need to know. Let’s move on.)
Another scene: Cooper senses that Amelia is hiding something about Edmunds. Then we get nothing about this… UNTIL the scene where Cooper tells Amelia that she owes Romilly this information… So we see that now Cooper knows. He’s found out.
Why not give us the scene where he finds out? (There’s a brief moment where he quizzes TARS.)
I mean, it’s not as if Nolan is making this stark art movie where all emotion (in the case of the characters) or emotional manipulation (in the case of the audience) is forbidden. So why skimp on making the people people, instead of making them information dispensers?
I could go on.
So it’s not about dazzling craft. It’s about doing *properly* what you are setting out to do. This sort of thing would get an F in a screenwriting class.
And when you are making these “visionary” films, you do expect a certain level of signature craft, which you don’t in the case of a Hirani.
Like I said, I didn’t hate the film. I thought it was pretty okay, and once the last section gets going, it’s pretty good — even if scenes like the one where Cooper docks with the spinning Endurance aren’t exactly nail-bitingly done. This last section works probably because the scope for talk/exposition is diminished. I found the same thing with “Inception.” Once they began to shut up about the concepts and it became pure action, it was riveting.
“And once we get past the gassy setup – a truly testing tract of tedium – we get the thrilling payoff, the real reason for the film’s being, a mind-bending third-act stretch that instantly slots itself among the great action-adventure sequences of all time.”
And yes, I’ve made my peace with the abbreivated father-daughter scene at the end. It bugged me when I watched the film, but now I’m more inclined to see it as a result of all this time that has passed, and the fact that they have already “said” what they needed to say to each other through time and space.
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brangan
November 16, 2014
A really interesting take on the film (literal-minded people who ask “but did the director really intend that?” stay far, far away 🙂 )
http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/interstellar-is-about-the-death-of-film.html
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Utkal
November 16, 2014
“Cooper: Your mother once told me that we are the ghosts of our children’s future… I can’t be your ghost, yet.”
Frankly I prefer this infinitely to some inane, cool-sounding, naturalistic line like , “ Honey, would you like to make you a sandwich. With real butter.”
I mean it is not supposed to be a line that a father is likely to speak to a daughter. I cannot imagine one viewer to him it is not clear. The fact that this pattern is repeated throughout is what establishes this as a style. This IS Nolan’s auteur signature. Because it is done consciously, with an artistic purpose.
I am reminded of someone looking at a Van Gogh painting and saying my son can paint a tree that looks more like a tree. Or another saying my daughter paints like this. Both of them are missing the point. Van Gogh is NOT trying to paint a tree that looks like a tree – he is trying to paint a tree as HE SEES IT. And in the second case, the daughter might have managed to doodle a few swirling strokes in a painting, but it won’t have been consistently there. Modigliani’s elongated faces, Picasso’s faces with both profiles visible at the same time…these are deliberate departures from reality, consistently and consciously done to establish a signature. ‘ Mere pass maa hai ‘ or ‘ Tumne toh mere maathe pe likh diya hai ki Mera Beta Chor Hai’ is not how brother would speak to another, or how a mother would speak to a son – these are Salim-Javed lines – does not mean these are not great lines. And just because it is Hollywood does not mean that Nolan has to stay within the boundaries of naturalistic dialogue.
The great thing is that just because the lines are expository does not mean that the scenes do not have emotions. Deewar is emotionally moving , and so is Interstellar, as the experience of someone like PN proves.
That is why Matt Zoller Seitz, who says ‘It uses booming music to jack up the excitement level of scenes that might not otherwise excite. It features characters shoveling exposition at each other for almost three hours, and a few of those characters have no character to speak of: they’re mouthpieces for techno-babble and philosophical debate. And for all of the director’s activism on behalf of shooting on film, the tactile beauty of the movie’s 35mm and 65mm textures isn’t matched by a sense of composition’, also says, “And yet “Interstellar” is still an impressive, at times astonishing movie that overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan’s work melted away.” He goes on to elaborate, “With the possible exception of the last act of “Memento” and the pit sequence in “The Dark Knight Rises”—a knife-twisting hour that was all about suffering and transcendence—I can’t think of a Nolan film that ladles on misery and valorizes gut feeling (faith) the way this one does; not from start to finish, anyway. The most stirring sequences are less about driving the plot forward than contemplating what the characters’ actions mean to them, and to us.” And : “McConaughey, a super-intense actor who wholeheartedly commits to every line and moment he’s given, is the right leading man for this kind of film. Cooper proudly identifies himself as an engineer as well as an astronaut and farmer, but he has the soul of a goofball poet; when he stares at intergalactic vistas, he grins like a kid at an amusement park waiting to ride a new roller coaster. Cooper’s farewell to his daughter Murph—who’s played by McKenzie Foy as a young girl—is shot very close-in, and lit in warm, cradling tones; it has some of the tenderness of the porch swing scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” When Murph grows up into Jessica Chastain—a key member of Caine’s NASA crew, and a surrogate for the daughter that the elder Brand “lost’ to the Endurance’s mission—we keep thinking about that goodbye scene, and how its anguish drives everything that Murph and Cooper are trying to do, while also realizing that similar feelings drive the other characters—indeed, the rest of the species. (One suspects this is a deeply personal film for Nolan: it’s about a man who feels he has been “called” to a particular job, and whose work requires him to spend long periods away from his family.)”
I have no doubt in my mind that this is no ordinary film, and Nolan is no ordinary filmmaker.
And I feel the same way about Hirani. And I think he is at the peak of his game in ‘ 3 Idiots’. Compared to Lage Raho Munnabhai – it has more energy, more interestingly picturized and better songs, it makes you laugh more, it makes you feel more. I think the only thing one can hold against it is that it was hugely successful, enjoyed by a huge number of people.
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brangan
November 16, 2014
Utkal: So the only alternative to that Cooper line is a “banal” (your word) and “naturalistic” one? Interesting… 🙂
Of course, this is a style. This exposition dispensation *is *Nolan’s style, and no one is denying that. It’s just that some of us find it an ugly style, whereas others don’t.
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Utkal
November 16, 2014
BR: ‘So the only alternative to that Cooper line is a “banal” (your word) and “naturalistic” one? “
Actually I quite like the sandwich – with real butter line, even though I wrote it. And if used well , can work nicely enough. And there many other possibilities as well, including no words spoken. But Nolan likes to do it his way.
“This exposition dispensation *is *Nolan’s style, and no one is denying that. It’s just that some of us find it an ugly style, whereas others don’t.. “
Fair enough. Can’t really argue with that.
And the ‘Death of Film’ write up is VERY interesting. the ‘ Don’t go gently into the night’ invocation makes much more sense with this fanciful but fitting interpretation.
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Utkal
November 16, 2014
“Movies, of course, have always been a form of time travel: We age, but screen characters do not. Interstellar even takes us on a sort of tour of the medium’s post-silent-era history, showcasing the way we’ve filmed the past (in its Dorothea Lange Depression sequences) and the future (in its numerous allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey). In one sequence, Cooper even turns into a filmgoer of sorts: He cries, with light flickering on his face, watching transmissions that have accrued over the previous 23 years. Fortunately, the clips are well preserved. “
This is wonderful!
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Madan
November 16, 2014
I think the only thing one can hold against it is that it was hugely successful, enjoyed by a huge number of people.
– If that was the case, surely the people who have a problem with that would also have a problem with Lage Raho and MBBS, which were also successful films?
The problem with 3 Idiots was it got convoluted – convoluted in the way masala Hindi films, especially the ones with identity mistakes, judwa bhais or double actions, can be. The angle of Javed Jaffrey being the real Rancho and stealing a degree just dragged the film adrift. MBBS and Lage Raho were much more focused and linear films which honed in early on on a point to be made and proceeded to do so quite nicely. They also had scenes that were absurd or implausible but, and I agree with BR here, Hirani appeared to be using such absurdity to instill humour in the proceedings. In 3 Idiots, the absurdity became more central to the film.
Also (perhaps because it was initially based on a Chetan Bhagat book and, imo, a terrible one?) it oversimplified and sugarcoated the message far too much. I have a friend who is a musician and who after struggling to keep a band together for the last few years has finally released an EP and he has shared his travails often times with me. Sorry, but treading the road less travelled because that is your calling is not a bed of roses and it takes a lot of mental strength to stay the course. None of which is brought out in 3 Idiots; I had lots of colleagues tell me the film inspired them to think about what they really ought to do and to follow their dreams. Well, they stayed right where they were in their cushy corporate jobs (not judging them, I have a job that pays well too and am grateful for it). In MBBS or Lage Raho, Sanjay Dutt remained a gangster, albeit one who was good at heart. The basic message was more that even a gangster may be useful to society which is a morally ambivalent position. 3 Idiots was pretty black and white in its criticism of the education system and made the alternative look far easier than it often is.
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Utkal
November 17, 2014
Madan: I have no bones to pick with you if you prefer Lage raho Munnabhai over 3 Idiots. As for me, I like the 3 Hirani films almost equally which represent a cinematic journey. Munnabhai MBBS is the most inncent and pure. Lag Raho depends on a certain degree of contrivance, and while being very clever, does not have the same raw emotional appeal of the first Munnabhai. 3 Idiots has a bit of both and is the work of a more assured and accomplished director.
Yes, the whole Javed jaffrey track is a contrivance that takes the film away from its realistic footing. But that precisely was the purpose. It was not meant to be a realistic slice-of-life film like Kai Po Che, or a multiplex chic affair like 2 States. This was constructed to be a film with an universal appeal. You know Beckett is more pure than Shakespeare. But a bit of masala and impurity makes the material more rugged and universally appealing. The task of course is to do it without losing the soul of your material. And Hirani aided by his writer Abhijat Joshi, does it quite creditably.
And I will givea lot of credit to Chetan Bhagat for the film’s appeal. No, Five Point Someone is not a terrible book. In fact it is his best, in fact the only one that came totally from the heart with many truthful insights into male bonding, and adolescent rebellion, as it came before he became a successful writer. The social milieu, equation between the characters,and the tone and the voice established by the book keeps the film grounded and helps the audience identify and connect with the film to a degree that as not possible with the Munnabhai films.
But if you are expecting the film to tell you how tough it is to follow your passion, you are barking up the wrong tree. Ina country where parents start dreaming of their sons joining an IIT literally at birth, the first thing was to get them to think differently. That the film manages to do with unquestionable success. And there is nothing unrealistic or dishonest in suggesting that you will do better in life if you study for the love of a subject than for the sake of marks.
The sheer number of IItians and IIMians who have started writing books after the book/film bears testimony to how the message has hit home.
But forget the message. What charmed me off my pants is the sheer comic invention the level of which is maintained constant through the film, and the high energy manifest in these scenes as well as songs like All Izz Well or Zoobi Doobie. And as I mentioned befotre , like in the best of Chaplin, the comic scenes play so well as they are staged against a solid backdrop of poignant social reality , constructed with bits like the student who commits suicide ( Give me some sunshine..what a song!), the parents of Shraman and Madhavan, and the wonderful chemistry between the three friends, not to forget the cute love story as well. I thought this was a virtuoso performance from Hirani that may not be matched again by him. No wonder the film has aged so well, and I can watch it from any point even today when it shows up on TV.
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Madan
November 17, 2014
Utkal: Fair enough. I guess the movie struck a chord with you and when that happens, a lot of things that may appear contrived can fall in place. I wouldn’t say the basic issues didn’t resonate with me but not to the extent that I would overlook some aspects. With that, I want to talk about things in your response that relate to larger issues.
But if you are expecting the film to tell you how tough it is to follow your passion, you are barking up the wrong tree.
I would go along with this if the movie restricted itself to showing the students finally breaking free and following their dreams. But the movie concludes with Wangdu finishing higher in the conventional power hierarchy than Chatur and the latter thus feeling embarrassed. This is measurement of success by conventional benchmarks and is misleading. To bring back my aforesaid friend here, he did major in electronics and held a job with a top consulting org. He earned himself a parachute for his future endeavours and quit. Does he make as much now as a musician as he would if he had stayed on in corporate? Not even close. What he searched for was satisfaction and fulfillment. But it IS a trade off and that is why it is a difficult decision. One may, if one strikes gold, get rich doing what one is passionate about as well but it’s a course fraught with uncertainty. There was fertile potential here for drama and emotion that Hirani passed over and ended up with a conclusion that is misleading as it is to believe that IIT-IIM is the only route to success in life. Without also proffering the view that there can be multiple definitions of success depending on one’s perspective, a film urging people to look at education and career from a different perspective is incomplete imo. I have had this problem with the conclusion of two other films too – Black and TZP…where having spent 99% of the film’s length urging people to look at the ‘victim’ differently, the director proceeds to show the victim achieving success by a different benchmark. But why should a dyslexic beget love and affection only for succeeding academically? Shouldn’t the fact that the kid is nice at heart suffice? Would we have had to restart from square one if the kid had still failed his exams in spite of receiving special attention?
And there is nothing unrealistic or dishonest in suggesting that you will do better in life if you study for the love of a subject than for the sake of marks.
– Sure. But does the onus necessarily rest with only the parents? My father wanted me to study engineering too and I put my foot down and stoutly refused. I took up commerce initially as a compromise (was more interested in Eng Lit.) but eventually it became a calling. I think kids can be plenty assertive when they want parents to get them toys or computer games or what not of their choice. What exactly makes them weak kneed in judging what they should study further and sticking by their choice…especially since they are at then an age when most of them have found their voice? Some parents may perhaps be draconian in asserting THEIR views of what the kids should study but a lot of it also has to do with the difficulty we have, as a people, in saying no. Also, as Mark Twain said, never let education get in the way of learning. So there’s nothing stopping students from taking interest in their chosen subjects, not even the education system. For a middle class kid from a reasonably comfortable background, there are plenty of options to expand one’s learning. But hey, learning by rote gets the job done so why strive for more, right. Maybe the parents or the teachers have something to do with it but ultimately no force on Earth can stop one from utilising the stuff between their ears….if one so desires.
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Utkal Mohanty
November 17, 2014
The right way to watch Interstellar is to watch it like a Bollywod film…with one’s heart.
“On the paper was a short story, no more than a precis, about a father who leaves his child to do an important job. It contained two lines of dialogue – “I’ll come back” “When?” – and quoted something Zimmer had said a year before, during a long conversation with Nolan and his wife at the Wolseley restaurant in London. It was snowing, central London had ground to a halt, and the three of them were more or less stranded. “There was no movie to be made, there was no movie to discuss, we were talking about our children,” said Zimmer, who has a 15-year-old son. “I said, ‘once your children are born, you can never look at yourself through your eyes any more, you always look at yourself through their eyes.”
He worked on the score for a day and then let Emma Thomas know he was done.
“I said, ‘Do you want me to send it over?’ She goes, ‘Oh, he’s curiously antsy, do you mind if he comes down?’ He got into the car and drove to my studio in Santa Monica and sat down on my couch. I made the usual excuses a composer makes when they play something to somebody for the first time. I played to him, not looking at him, I just stared straight ahead at my copy of the screen and then I turned around and he’s sitting there. I can tell he was moved by it. He said, ‘I suppose I’d better make the movie, now.’ I asked him, ‘Well, yes, but what is the movie?’ And he started describing this huge, epic tale of space and science and humanity, on this epic scale. I’m going, ‘Chris, hang on, I’ve just written this highly personal thing, you know?’ He goes, ‘Yes, but I now know where the heart of the movie is’. Everything about this movie was personal. That’s the other thing, the trick he pulled on me, when I see the movie, it’s a girl. But he wrote about a boy.”
You know, being parent, that’s the part that got me. And like PN .I too was moist in the eyes for the last hour of the film.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/04/-sp-christopher-nolan-interstellar-rebooted-blockbuster?CMP=fb_gu
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abvblogger
November 18, 2014
Ha! I *knew* the movie’s heart was in its music. And not just in the same generic way you can say that for any score.
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Utkal
November 18, 2014
Madan: The message of 3 Idiots
“We’ve tried very hard to be very clear, and this is absolutely sincere, that our goal at Apple isn’t to make money,” he said.
“We’re not naive. We trust that if we’re successful and we make good products, that people will like them. And we trust that if people like them, they’ll buy them. Operationally we are effective and we know what we’re doing and so we will make money. It’s a consequence.”
And nowhere does Hirani say that it was easy for Wangdoo. It is just that he didn’t show the struggles and dark moments, because that is NOT the movie. Or that Wangdoo couldn’t have failed. But the story in which Wangdoo failed is NOT the movie. The story in which Bhuvan’s team lost the match is NOT Lagaan, the movie. THi is something we have to understand when we try to take home a message forma film.
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Madan
November 19, 2014
Utkal: I get that the film is not about the story of the struggles involved in the road less travelled. What I don’t agree with is the supposition that I have to accept this just because that is how the director wanted to make the film. No, the choice is mine as the viewer. I can, as I have, question why an angle that is very much related to the subject was left out to conjure up a fairy tale ending. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Wangdu as a scientist shames Chatur, Bhuvan wins, Ishaan does very well academically and Michelle graduates after several attempts. It points to the escapism that even our relatively well acclaimed mainstream films struggle to break out of. And unrealistic escapism in a message movie dampens the fun a bit….for me.
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Utkal
November 19, 2014
One thing that bothers Gilliam about Hollywood is the pressure it exerts on filmmakers to resolve their stories into happy endings. In this interesting clip from an interview he did a few years ago with Turner Classic Movies, Gilliam makes his point by comparing the work of Steven Spielberg–perhaps the quintessential Hollywood director–with that of Stanley Kubrick, who, like Gilliam, steered clear of Hollywood and lived a life of exile in England. Kubrick refused to pander to our desire for emotional reassurance. “The great filmmakers,” says Gilliam, “make you go home and think about it.”
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/terry_gilliam_on_filmmakers.html
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Sharath Bhat
November 26, 2014
I think that we love movies at a gut level. We experience it viscerally. A review is just an attempt to rationalise how you felt at the gut level. It is like saying that I like Mango juice because it is yellow, it is pulpy and it is smooth. We don’t really experience things that way. Some critics don’t just like Nolan films at a gut level. Fanboys like me get really excited at a gut level watching a Nolan film. Those who do not like try to rationalise it. One guy told that Nolan is cold and cynical, others repeated it. One guy told that his dialogues are clunky and all critics started repeating that. Another guy complained that there is lot of exposition and all critics started suddenly got a rational reason to complain. Suddenly, every single critic started complaining about exposition. They do not even seem to be having any idea about when or when not to use exposition. I am glad that you did not resort to some of these critical cliches!!
But you also are trying to find rational reasons to discredit Nolan. This is where your “Nolan is not an auteur” thingy is coming from.
Actually Nolan is an auteur in the sense that he has his signature in technical things. Firstly, lighting. Nolan prefers noirish low key lighting and natural lighting. He is influenced by the paintings of Francis Bacon and MC Escher. He prefers Real effects over Special effects and film over digital. He has his theories about everything from camera angles to how colour correction should be done. You just did not notice them probably. A case in point is Memento. It has many themes, one theme is Subjectivity Vs Objectivity. Black and white scenes are objective and COlour is subjective. Camera work reflects the same. Watch the film again with this in mind. Camera moves, angles, lighting everything is Objective for B&W and everything is subjective in colour scenes. How many critics have noticed this ??
And one last thing to clarify why there is such a fuss about him. Why do we watch movies? Most people watch movies for the story/concept/idea and plot. Nobody gives a damn about whether you used a jump cut or you shot a canted angle shoot on a zoom lens. What people want to see is an idea/story/concept. This is why a 70s Kannada film with worst technical aspects and terrible camera work is loved much more than a film shot today with hi fi cameras and a big budget. Hollywood knows this. There is a technical word called “High Concept” in Hollywood. A high concept is a unique and interesting idea that can be summarised in 1-2 sentences. Ideas like Speed, Phone booth, Liar liar, Memento, Inception, Munna Bhai films etc etc. Most get excited with just one high concept. Nolan fills his films with endless high concept and thematic ideas. This makes people go, “Wow!! What an idea sir jee” many times in his films. 90% people watch films to be surprised with a good idea and plot. This is where Nolan wins. He is never running out of unique ideas and premises. And he explores the ideas with precision and ingenuity. He also plays with structure and editing.
One more thing is that he has bridged the gap between the commercial and ART. I find the mainstream Hollywood to be formula driven,cliched and predictable. I find the Bergmans and Antonionis way too pretentious, intellectual, abstract and boring. My solution? Nolan!! He is a poor man’s version of Tarkovskys, Bergmans and Fellinis. He pursues arty themes and concepts like them. But he dresses them up like mainstream commercial stuff. Lots and lots of people crave for such a middle ground. ART films are abstract and boring for us, commercial films are cliched and dumb. Nolan gives us what we need – Commercial films that borrow good things from art films.
Another thing is Nolan makes his audience feel intelligent. We like solving puzzles. That is why we love detective fiction and mysteries. Nolan takes this to heights by designing movies as puzzles to be solved. And there is nothing like a reward that is earned. Let us say I decide to give 1 crore Rs to you. I have 2 options: a. I can give it as charity b. I can give it as an award for being the best critic. Which option will you prefer? You will prefer b. You will feel that you have earned it. This psychological factor works. COnsider the screenwriting tips given by Billy Wilder:
1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then—that’s it. Don’t hang around.
I am talking about the 7th tip. This is exactly what Nolan does. He gives 2+2 and lets the audience figure out that it is 4. Audience feels like they have earned it. It makes them feel intelligent.
There is one last reason for the fuss. He’s always original, always daring, and always interesting. His success means a lot to movie buffs because such successes will encourage more and more original ideas. Hollywood keeps churning sequels, reboots, remakes, super hero films and stuff like Transformers part 20 So, if one daringly original idea wins studios will sponsor more and more original ideas.That is why there is lot of interest about Nolan. If films like this fail then studios will keep making Spider man part 6 and Transformers part 21, Harry potter part 23 and so on.
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Utkal Mohanty
December 26, 2014
Interstellar’s box office total is $622,932,412 and counting. It is the eighth-highest-grossing film of the year and spawned an endless raft of think pieces testing the validity of its science and applauding the innovation of its philosophy. But it is not so new. The idea which propels the plot – there is a universal super-consciousness that transcends time and space in which all human life is connected – has been around for about 3,000 years. It is Vedic.
When the film’s astronaut hero (Matthew McConaughey), declares that the mysterious and all-knowing “they” who created a wormhole near Saturn through which he travels to save mankind – dissolving his sense of material reality in the process – are in fact “us” he is simply repeating the central notion of the Upanishads, India’s oldest philosophical texts. These hold that individual human minds are merely brief reflections within a cosmic one.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/25/movies-embraced-hinduism
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marees
January 17, 2015
There are 2 separate things about Nolan movies. One is as you say he just created the idea but didn’t develop the plot properly as a movie.
Other side is that he creates the spectacle
my first ORIGINAL DVD was Batman Begins (really enjoyed this reboot of batman)
first blu-ray was Dark Night (why so serious, Nolan?)
the first movie I was desperate to see in iMax was Interstellar
ended up seeing in Vetri theatre tho because no iMax in Chennai. and dragged my family along for 1st Eng movie in 14 yes of marriage.
I think the movie deserved to be seen at least once for Nolan’s vision. but his approach seems to work better with cartoon superhero themes rather than real flesh and blood characters.
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Mukesh Kumar
April 4, 2015
I think one would appreciate Interstellar infinitely more, if one tries to understand the science behind it, which is thoroughly grounded in relativity and quantum mechanics. The blackhole you saw, was how a real one would look. The time-dilations, bulk, tesseract, all were rooted in hard science.
In fact I hated ‘Gravity’ for precisely the same reason of it being way too fantastical and not having enough ‘real’ science. While I agree, different people look for different things in a film for fulfillment, I am a little hurt by such statements as “audience doesnot need exact science in the movie”. Anyway,I treated it as a hard boiled sci-fi, of the like Isaac Asimov, used to write. That might have helped.
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udhaysankar
June 17, 2015
I have always had an fascination for spielberg. In all his sci-fi, adventure movies, he never tries to transcend his material. He keeps things simple. Yet, at the end of every one of his pop-corn blockbusters, I would feel the movie was much more than a generically constrained feature.
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niranjanmb
November 17, 2015
I saw Interstellar finally, and on TV (of all things!) when it premiered on television sometime last week. I am just putting down a couple of thoughts that struck me. Frankly, I thought the movie was great.
One thing that is very much part of the Nolan construct, is his fascination with the idea that Time is a non-replenishable resource, and what makes it even more interesting is the fact that you never know how rich you are in that resource till you actually run out of it. While he has been toying with the structure of time in ‘Memento’ and even the yo-yo nature of the narrative in The Prestige, it is with ‘Inception’ and now ‘Interstellar’, that the denomination of time as a form of currency takes a very definite form, and what (in my book) makes ‘Interstellar’ more interesting is the fact that here, the fiddling with time is based (at least moderately well) in solid scientific ideas.
Only time will tell where Nolan goes next…
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Sangeeth
July 20, 2017
Wow! Didn’t catch it first time it was shared. Just what I thought about “Interstellar”.. amazed now that after “Dunkirk”, he is being again compared to Kubrick. That’s maybe leagues away from happening.. Kubrick was and will always be a teacher who can’t be surpassed..
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