A tenet-ative return to, and by, the multiplexes

I've talked a lot about theatrical droughts in 2020, but there's one more specific type of drought I haven't yet mentioned about -- frankly, because the distinction did not seem to be worth making.

You may know from recent posts that I've had droughts of 104 days and 122 days between seeing movies in the cinema this year. But those were arthouse cinemas (and a tiny local cinema in the coastal down of Lakes Entrance). They were not the big multiplexes, where movies that are intended to make hundreds of millions, even billions, get their three or four dedicated screens per location. These multiplexes did not even open during our brief window of COVID freedom back in late June and early July. 

So how long had it been since I'd been to one of those?

That would be The Invisible Man back on March 1st. That's 256 days ago. 

Hoyts has been closed that whole time. Until Thursday morning.

In fact, at first, my friend John and I thought they had forgotten to reopen.

I took the morning off from work and met him at the Hoyts at the Victoria Gardens in Hawthorn for a 10 a.m. showing of -- at long last -- Tenet. I knew this one would be long and hard to follow, so I figured, going to the 10 a.m. show gave me a better chance than going to the 9:30 p.m. show.

At first it looked like there would be no show. At 9:40, there was still a metal gate around the candy bar. There were still signs on the electronic ticket kiosks stating they were not in operation. The latest posted sign that they were closed for COVID was still propped up and greeting us.

Now, logic dictated that this was only going to be temporary, as I'd actually purchased our tickets online beforehand. There was no chance of a mistake. But the theater should be bustling with activity 20 minutes prior to the day's first showing. This one decidedly wasn't.

After a moment or two, though, I saw a figure moving in the darkened candy bar. And slowly, surely, the theater that had spent almost all of those 256 days shuttered, it started coming to life. 

The lights began coming on. A second employee appeared, and then a third. The third staked himself out in the spot to take our tickets as we passed through the entrance. The COVID signs were removed, the candy bar queue was cordoned off using the familiar posts and straps to guide the flow of traffic. 

Layers of dust, rust and cobwebs -- metaphorical if not actual -- were beginning to fall away. 

There were hiccups. John had to ask them to start making the popcorn to be sure they'd have the time to make it before the feature started. The soda machine was not working, which the guy explained was due to "the pandemic we've just experienced" -- as if we needed any explanation, or a reminder of the thing that has dominated our year. You'd think staff eager to start earning a paycheck again would have been here at the start of the week to check on things like that, but nope.

But the popcorn did get made in time, and this was, without a doubt, the hottest movie theater popcorn I'd ever eaten.

There was one other funny hiccup that needn't have necessarily followed from eight months of inactivity. From experience, I knew that a movie starting at 10 a.m. meant that we had until about 10:26 to meander over to our seats and get settled before the movie itself would begin. The pre-show wouldn't even be proper movie trailers until about 10:17. Yet somehow, when we passed through the theater doors at 10:04 a.m., the movie had already started. It appeared to be only a minute or two in to the opening set piece, but it shouldn't have been there until 22 minutes from now. 

John suggested going back out to tell them to restart it, because we were the only other ones in the theater. (So much for worrying about buying our tickets ahead of time.) I started out to do so, but was passed by another patron entering the theater, who might himself have some opinion on that particular idea. If I had to walk all the way back out to tell someone to start it again, and they had to figure out whether they could or not, I stood to miss the next ten minutes of the movie if it turned out they couldn't. Instead I just reversed course and sat back down with my extremely warm popcorn.

I don't think anything that happened in the first 60 seconds of Tenet would have helped me understand it any better. Oh, I mostly got it, eventually, but from moment-to-moment, it can be a very difficult film to follow. There's a good chance that its rules don't make any sense, and even if they do, that it doesn't adhere to them with any stringency. Sometimes, I just said "Okay, here is a big set piece -- why it's happening, or what the stakes are, will just have to be secondary to the spectacle."

In the end, I think I liked it more than I didn't like it, or so says my three-star rating on Letterboxd.

Now that I've finally caught this year's white whale that had eluded me to date, I have to see how many other multiplex-style movies Hollywood sees fit to release over the rest of this year. I'm hoping at least to have Wonder Woman 1984 at Christmas, if the current plan holds.

And in the short run, I will be sure to get to my seat plenty early. 

I'm not preserving Tenet anymore

Tenet has been, in many ways, the film of 2020. 

At the start of the year, it was one of the most, if not the most, anticipated movie(s) of the year. That's a likely outcome for any new Christopher Nolan release.

Then it was our greatest gauge of how coronavirus was affecting the movie business, as its ever-changing release was a moving goalpost for when things might be getting "back to normal," which would in turn signal to other movies it was safe to debut. When it became clear things weren't getting "back to normal," eventually they just had to release the thing. 

Then it became a further cautionary tale to movies considering releasing by taking in a paltry box office compared to what it could have made under normal circumstances. Quite unjustly, I imagine, it will go down as a historic flop.

I still haven't seen the thing. Movie theaters have not been open in the state of Victoria, the hardest hit by COVID in Australia, since early July. Having learned our lesson by a spike in cases, now the government is delaying the potential re-opening of cinemas as one of the last benchmarks in our return to some semblance of normalcy. 

But yesterday, I stopped preserving it as a gift waiting to be opened at some point in my future, because I have no idea when that time is ever going to come.

I had been holding back one of my Filmspotting podcasts that's more than a month old now, because I didn't want to hear spoiler talk about Tenet. Now, the Filmspotting guys are good about avoiding actual spoilers, but I think you would agree that a Christopher Nolan film can be best when you know nothing about it. Even the premise of some Nolan films is something that's only revealed once you start watching, and Tenet seemed like a prime example of that.

What ultimately caused me to cave is that their review of I'm Thinking of Ending Things was nestled into the second half of the podcast. I wanted to access that review, and forwarding through content I don't want to hear is just not how I roll. (Especially when I'm out for a six-and-a-half-mile run, and I need most of the podcast's 93 minutes to get through it.) 

So yeah, yesterday I "gave up" on Tenet.

Which was a sad but very 2020 thing to do.

The good news is, they didn't do a special spoiler section on the movie (sometimes they warn us to press stop if we haven't seen it, then proceed to spoil it), and that they were both flummoxed enough by the movie that they mightn't have been able to spoil what happened even if they wanted to. So Tenet has not been totally despoiled for me.

The bad news is, they did describe certain shots, certain techniques, that I would have been thrilled to come across organically while watching the movie. And that's the kind of thing they definitely do have to talk about if they want to talk about anything at all.

The "I'm not sure how I feel about it" news is that both podcasters considered it the worst Nolan film they've seen. Not by leaps and bounds, but by enough of a margin that they didn't really doubt that conclusion. 

So maybe that's another way Tenet is like 2020. In the end it is a disappointment, and we just don't understand what to make of it. 

Ranking Christopher Nolan

Tenet is open in parts of my country right now. Not parts anywhere near me, as the state of Victoria is still under Stage 4 lockdown, and will be for another 12 days. After that, who knows really.

But some people in the world, even elsewhere in Australia, have seen this movie. It even has scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. I really never thought the day would come.

In the past, the relase of a new movie from a major director like Christopher Nolan would have been the occasion for me to consider the director's whole career. The distant past, increasingly. According to my records, the last time I ranked a director's whole filmography on this blog was in October of 2014, when I put the films of David Fincher under the lens, tied to the release of Gone Girl. (Which remains Fincher's last feature to date, though Mank will finally end that drought later this year.)

I could have waited until I saw Tenet -- it will happen, eventually -- before writing the post you are currently reading. But there's a couple reasons I didn't do that, as follows:

1) Before Tenet, Nolan directed exactly ten feature films. I love round numbers, something I suspect I have in common with most listmakers. Really, I should have done this when Dunkirk came out in 2017.

2) The Filmspotting podcast has just recently finished their so-called "ouvre-view" of Nolan's films, the end of which was supposed to coincide with the release of Tenet. It did not, but they still continued on as planned, and recently revealed their own rankings of Nolan's ten films to date, having watched them all again. (It was a month ago, but I'm a bit behind.)

So I thought this made a good opportunity for me to do the same.

However, I will take a little bit of a different approach than on my previous times doing this exercise, as when I ranked all the extant films of Pixar, Wes Anderson, Joel and Ethan Coen, Danny Boyle, Star Trek, and the aforementioned Mr. Fincher. (I'm asking myself now how Tarantino has escaped me so far.)

In those instances, I organically chose which movies should occupy which spots on the list, without any input from outside sources. This time, it will be all outside sources.

See, I can tell, at any given time, exactly how I rank the films of any director I choose, simply by doing a filtered search on my Flickchart. But I find that takes all the fun out of it. What fun is making a list if someone else makes it for you?

This time, though, I thought I would consider a different goal. I thought it was time to figure out if I am more of an Adam or more of a Josh.

If you don't know, Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen are the hosts of Filmspotting. Adam has been the host since the begining in 2005, and Josh is his third co-host, having started his own tenure at the beginning of 2012. While previous co-hosts couldn't hang on for more than three years, Josh ain't giving up this gig any time soon.

I've had my suspicions over the years which host was more aligned with my personal tastes, based on individual opinions I wholeheartedly agreed or disagreed with. But there are just so many movies out there that all three of us have seen, and so many exceptions to so many rules, that it's hard to say for certain whether I've more regularly agreed with one than the other. There really has been no perfect litmus test to figure this out.

Until now.

Christopher Nolan has made enough of a variety of different films, in enough genres and tackling enough varieties of the human experience, that he certainly seems to function in the way we want him to for the current experiment. Given how he's risen to be among the most successful working directors today, someone embraced by Hollywood but with a consummately iconoclastic approach to making movies, he's also the greatest common ground for the modern cinephile. In short, he's probably the director whose films you can be most certain the people you discuss movies with will also see. Some people don't like Tarantino's violence, or Apatow's juvenile humor, or Anderson's arthouse pretensions -- either Anderson, really. But most everyone is okay with seeing the new Christopher Nolan movie.

But the key is, if I'm going to find out whether I'm really an Adam or really a Josh, I can't let my own unconscious biases enter into it. After all, I've listened to that episode of Filmspotting and I know what they've picked. Armed with this knowledge, I could skew my own list one way or another if I picked it organically.

Enter Flickchart.

Using the aformentioned Flickchart filter, I can immediately see how I have judged Nolan's ten films relative to each other -- which best, which worst, and everywhere in between. And while a person's Flickchart may not feel 100% accurate at any given time -- changing its course can feel like turning the Titanic -- it's going to be pretty close when you're considering only the relative positions of ten films out of the 5,000+ on my chart. And because Nolan hasn't made a film since Dunkirk in 2017 -- not one that I can currently see, anyway -- I don't have to worry about the fact that I'm way behind in adding the movies I've seen to my Flickchart. (I'm still stuck somewhere in early 2019.)

So ... before I lose you on endless preamble, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I will reveal my Nolan rankings according to Flickchart, and then I will figure out whether I have a greater absolute difference in my rankings from Adam's chart or from Josh's chart. So that means if, say, I rank Dunkirk #6 and Josh ranks it #3, that's an absolute difference of three. Of course, if he ranks it #9 that's also an absolute difference of three. The least absolute difference is the one who has more similar tastes to mine ... at least, using only this flawed Nolan litmus test.

Shall we begin?

Here's how Josh ranks the films:

10. The Dark Knight Rises
9. Insomnia
8. Following
7. Interstellar
6. Batman Begins
5. The Prestige
4. The Dark Knight
3. Memento
2. Inception
1. Dunkirk

And here are Adam's rankings:

10. Following
9. Batman Begins
8. Insomnia
7. Inception
6. The Dark Knight
5. The Dark Knight Rises
4. Dunkirk
3. The Prestige
2. Memento
1. Interstellar

And here's a bit more, but not too much, on my rankings and their order.

I should say, before I start, that even though I have not very recently rewatched any of these movies -- I saw Memento back when they started the ouvre-review in April, for probably the fourth time -- I've seen six of these movies more than once. That means that percentage-wise, I might have a greater familiarity with this filmography than with any of the others I've considered in this forum previously. Which just means this post has been longer overdue, and my thoughts are, for the most part, still fresh.

According to my Flickchart:

10. Dunkirk (2017). 3613/5249 (31%). Adam #4, Josh #1. The harshness of my response to Dunkirk is a residual of that first viewing, when my former editor said I was crazy to see it after a couple glasses of wine. I talked about that here. But my second viewing last year or the year before did not significantly improve my impression of this movie. It still feels like a frequently confusing experiment with a bombastic score and too little payoff, plus too little character development. The latter was the point, I guess, but not everyone wants the same from Nolan as I do.

9. Interstellar (2014). 2335/5249 (56%). Adam #1, Josh #7. Every time I tell myself I should like Interstellar a little more than I actually do, I remind myself that Matthew McConaughey spends the last 25 minutes of this movie yelling "Murph!! MURPH!!" Or at least it feels that way. However, there are also some totally blow-your-mind moments in this film, like when they lose all that time down on the wave planet. Damn, space-time can be a bitch.

8. The Dark Knight Rises (2012). 2251/5249 (57%). Adam #5, Josh #10. I like The Dark Knight Rises pretty well, but I don't take it very seriously -- certainly not as seriously as Nolan wants me to take it. The thing I like best about it, for example, is how fun it is to do an impersonation of Tom Hardy's ridiculous Grandfather Bane voice with its absurdly comical high pitch combined with muffled incoherence. But it's a decent conclusion to the trilogy. Anne Hathaway is the best part about it.

7. Insomnia (2002). 2209/5249 (58%). Adam #8, Josh #9. The first time the Flickchart rankings are letting me down a little bit. If I were making this list organically, I probably would have put Insomnia at #9, but what are you going to do -- these three movies are all within two percentage points of each other on the chart, so it's not that far off. Yeah nobody really loves Insomnia but it has its moments. I prefer villain Robin Williams in One Hour Photo from the same year.

6. Following (1998). 1582/5249 (70%). Adam #10, Josh #8. That this is this high up on my Flickchart tells me two things: 1) I've been pretty generous in this movie's duels over the years, and 2) I am by no means a diehard Nolan fan. This basically means that a full half of Nolan's films are a bit shrug-worthy to me. I do like Following and I remember thinking it demonstrated some real cleverness on Nolan's part, cleverness that would fully bloom over his coming films, but I have little interest in seeing it again.

5. Inception (2010). 1001/5249 (81%). Adam #7, Josh #2. And here's where we start getting to films I really like. I actually didn't love Inception on the first viewing, but the second and third have increased my appreciation significantly. I always thought it was a narrative mistake to have the movie introduce us to the world on an atypical and ultimately botched version of the core premise -- don't you know you have to demonstrate a successful incarnation before starting to throw curveballs? Of course, this complaint ultimately pales in comparison to Nolan's many ambitious concepts and their execution. It's really good.

4. The Dark Knight (2008). 725/5249 (86%). Adam #6, Josh #4. Taken in comparison to Batman Begins -- which you'll note you haven't yet seen on this list -- I found The Dark Knight to be a mild disappointment. By any other standards, it's a remarkable accomplishment with a truly frightening villain performance at its center and a genuinely dangerous tone of anarchy for such a mainstream film. It's probably telling that this is the only of the three Batman movies I've seen more than once. It gets under your skin.

3. The Prestige (2006). 530/5249 (90%). Adam #3, Josh #5. I've been on the Prestige train since the beginning, as each of the remaining films on this list cracked my top ten of the year they were released. I might even like it better than my #2, but more on that in a moment. This is the most pleasurable type of puzzle box, the one that rewards repeat viewings and isn't afraid to go off the rails a bit in terms of your expectations. Adam and Josh described it in a way as the ultimate Nolan film, and that may still be true nearly 15 years later.

2. Batman Begins (2005). 288/5249 (95%). Adam #9, Josh #6. This ranking may be very problematic as for some reason, I have only seen this film once, the only one in my top five of which this can be said. I guess that first viewing really made an impression on me -- and I don't think it was just the circumstances, seeing it in Paris on a day of rest after a lot of walking. I got on board with Nolan's Batman right from the start and found the ensuing films to be a case of diminishing returns, though not significantly. I'll watch it again sometime to see if it truly deserves to be ahead of The Prestige.

1. Memento (2000). 119/5249 (98%). Adam #2, Josh #3. Nolan has never been better for me than when he first came out of the chute -- and though he actually came out of the chute with Following, I hadn't seen that so it was coming out of the chute for me. Even if Nolan makes another ten films I doubt he will have a chance of eclipsing one of the most ambitiously structured, faithfully adhered to, and philosophically rich narratives I have ever seen. (Just don't ask the premise to stand up to much nitpicking.) This is also the Nolan film I've seen the most, probably four times all the way through.

So I mentioned diminishing returns in terms of the Batman movies. It seems I also have diminishing returns in terms of Nolan on the whole. My top seven films are the first seven films he made, with the last three, chronologically, occupying the eighth, ninth and tenth spots on this list, in that order. I'd blame a reverse recency bias, but I've seen both my #9 and my #10 twice, to give them a chance to move up. They didn't.

Still, I wouldn't say this means I'm down on Nolan. I'm just as eager to see any new movie he makes as when I saw Insomnia after Memento. I know there's the opportunity for my mind to be blown any time out.

Now, the important question -- how do I compare to Adam and Josh?

I won't bore you with a film breakdown, but here were the absolute differences:

Adam = 6 + 8 + 3 + 1 + 4 + 2 + 2 + 0 + 7 + 1 = 34

Josh = 9 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 0 + 2 + 4 + 2 = 28

So I am more of a Josh, I guess!

How do I feel about this?

Well, a friend of mine, the friend who introduced me to the podcast, doesn't like Josh very much as a Filmspotting host, in part because he's never really forgiven him for replacing the host he liked best, Matty Ballgame. Plus, Josh is capable of some very eccentric preferences, the kind that sometimes go so far as to undermine his credibility. Adam, on the other hand, tends to hew slightly more to the critical mainstream in his views on films, though his tastes skew a little more independent as well.

Because of my friend, I've thought I'm not supposed to want to be a Josh, but I don't mind it. I have always liked a critic who will go out on a limb and champion something he loves that others don't, and Josh does that. So I'm okay with it.

Interestingly, though, I did have my biggest difference on any Nolan film with Josh. He worships Dunkirk, having it as his #1, while I've got it entirely on the other end of the spectrum. Outside of that, though, we are very much in sync, having no greater than a four-ranking difference on any film. Whereas with Adam, we've got three different films with a ranking difference of six places or more.

If you'd care to do your own Nolan rankings, I'd love to hear them in the comments. Whether they make you an Adam or a Josh is optional.

Tenet-pole

As goes Tenet, so goes the entire film industry.

Christopher Nolan's latest has been pushed back a second time. Whereas once it was set to debut on July 17th, then that dropped two weeks later to July 31st. Now it is has fallen again, another 12 days, to August 12th.

This matters not because I am dying to see Tenet, though I guess I am -- really, I'm just dying to see anything that does not look like it was made for Netflix, or seemed like a perfectly logical candidate to end up there.

No, it's because no one else seems ready to do a damn thing until Tenet figures out what it's doing.

This is not entirely true -- the most recent plan was to have Disney bring out Mulan a week earlier than that, on July 24th. I have not heard that this has been postponed yet, but in the wake of Tenet's decision, it may now be.

The theory for some time now is that Tenet, with its massive girth, length and Christopher Nolan-ness, would point the way for every other movie with aspirations to open while it's still summer in the U.S. It was fashioned -- if not by official assignation, then by group consensus -- as a kind of tentpole for the whole summer movie season. A Tenet-pole, if you will.

But as the film continues to recede toward autumn, I'm wondering if movie theaters can take it.

We've got some open here. And even though they are not the ones with the biggest screens -- those seem to be waiting for a steady flow of Hollywood releases -- you get the sense that they, too, are hanging on in anticipation; waiting, if not for Tenet itself, then at least for Tenet's run-off.

But instead of providing run-off, Tenet has just run off.

I'm not saying it's the wrong decision. We're second-waving it even here in Australia. In fact, whereas things looked pretty optimistic a couple weeks ago, now I'm actually hearing that there are runs on the grocery stores again. Seriously? That's so fucking March, people.

But I feel like, in a very real sense, whole giant swaths of the economy are wrapped up in Tenet's giant, gangly legs, and as it trips, so does everything else. I feel like there are theaters that may have targeted Tenet's opening weekend as a time to finally throw open their doors, to put Tenet on all ten damn screens in the place at once, so they can reduce available capacity in each screening space by two-thirds.

If that was their plan, now they will have to wait 12 days longer, and that's 12 further days that hungry theater staff won't be working, and that their employers will not be making any revenue in order to pay them. How long can it continue?

You know what, I'm pretty much jack of all this COVID-19 shit.