THE PRESTIGE (2006)

sus

sus

Moderator
Corpsey said:
What I felt watching that film and thinking about it afterwards was confusion. It was so loud, you couldn't hear the dialogue a lot of the time, he'd jammed it full of lofty themes without any conclusion being drawn from it all, the two face story felt like an extra storyline, one too many, the action was chaotically directed and you couldn't even see what was going on sometimes...

I guess all that confusion actually contributed to that film's power and success because it was perfectly in synch with Ledger/the Joker, the one truly remarkable element of the whole movie. His nihilism, which I think people actually embraced.

It's also his bombastic skill as a director. He's mr bombastic. The soundtrack is so overwhelming, the 'dark' tone of it all, it's hugely emotionally manipulative despite not really making that much sense...
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There's a Janus coin in the Prestige, too! Jekyll & Hyde's a touchstone in his works, for sure

I do think in general "pretense" is Nolan's Achilles. He puts it all up out there, wants it to be everything, the biggest film with the biggest ideas—much like Angiers, come to think of it.
 
V

version

Well-known member
Going through his films on IMDB atm. Apparently this is genuine dialogue from Tenet...

The Protagonist: There's a cold war.
Neil: Nuclear?
The Protagonist: Temporal.
Neil: Time travel?
The Protagonist: No. Technology that can invert an object's entropy.
Neil: You mean reverse chronology, like Feynman and Wheeler's notion that a positron is an electron moving backwards in time.
The Protagonist: Sure, that's exactly what I meant.
Neil: I have a master's in physics.
The Protagonist: Well, try and keep up.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
QFP(osterity)

luka said:

All Go Into The Dark​


Alan Green's "Suicide Kings" was, on this occasion, the augur leading back into the desert. After reading Weston's From Ritual to Romance, I decided to reread Conrad's Heart of Darkness and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Living in Japan, I do a lot of my reading on the train. One day, just as I was about to finish Heart of Darkness and begin reading Eliot, I decided on a whim, as I had the afternoon off, to watch Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. I got through the Conrad on the train and was just wrapping up The Waste Land in the theatre as the movie started.

I was truly not expecting much from this film at all, and I was actually only there because I wanted to see Interstellar before listening to the (very sadly defunct) Moon Room Cinema podcast on it by Mark LeClair and Alex Fulton. Not long into it, though, I realized that Nolan's largely mediocre film was exploring precisely the same themes as were haunting myself.

The central "character" of this film is a black hole. At one point it is described as "the literal heart of darkness." This got me sitting straight up in my seat. Even more cortex-crackling was the fact that, in a key scene, a "ghost" knocks a book by T.S. Eliot among others off a bookshelf. In my slobbering astonishment came the instant recollection that I had just finished reading Eliot's poetry.




Later, not believing my senses, I checked online to see if this actually occurred in the movie. A review from the Telegraph informed me that it was even more uncanny, more improbable, than I had imagined:



I had literally, without previously knowing anything about Interstellar, just completed reading works by both Conrad and Eliot immediately before watching the flicking film! How is this possible? What dream realm had I entered into? Had the "ghost" also decided to contact me?

Further digging on the web confirmed that Nolan was very consciously playing with these themes. In an interview he stated:



Dr. Mann, a brilliant yet twisted scientist/explorer stationed on an uninhabited planet orbiting the black hole, was also Kurtz. All of the pieces snapped into place.

I in no way want to defend Interstellar as a great work of art, or even less so to affirm its very questionable message. The conclusions of this film, when its surface is scratched, are quite disturbing. That it actively promotes a transhumanist agenda seems obvious, and there is no better exploration of this angle than in the LeClair and Fulton podcast I mentioned above. But, given the deep weirdness I was awashed in, this is by no means the entire story.

Nolan knows. It's hard to avoid this conclusion. The "ghost" of the bookshelf turns out to be Murph's father attempting to communicate to her via gravity waves from the heart of the black hole in a Borgesian labyrinth of the imagination apparently constructed by humanity's four-dimensional descendents. A few startling claims are implied here about the nature of the "conspiracy" which rules our present world

Groupname for Grapejuice

groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com
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V

version

Well-known member
I did actually watch it last night. It was decent, but it's all story. There's no flair whatsoever to Nolan's direction. It's so lifeless and grey. The soundtrack's the same.
 
V

version

Well-known member
It's worth a watch, imo, but he has no eye for imagery. There's that one bit Gus posted the pic of in his first post that almost looks good, but that's about it. The rest looks like this,

the-prestige-christian-bale-hugh-jackman.jpg
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
Version not content with destroying new lad faucet needs more blood and goes on to destroy spens. Walking it back now but the damage is done.
 
V

version

Well-known member
You shouldn't read this thread if you ever plan to watch it as it'll be ruined if you know the twist.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
Cheers, I won't read anymore. This is the crucial issue with Nolan isn't it? It's all in that one moment. He's like m night shamalayan. There's no second run on the films, cos thd central conceit requires a blindside, so the next time, the impact is lessened.

Both of them, to a certain extent, can be seen as hitchcock imitators, although a few hitch films do stand up to repeated viewings.

Whereas to compare back to M&C, that is proper drama, it doesn't matter if you know the ending, cos the playing out is what's interesting.
 
V

version

Well-known member
I think this one would benefit from a second viewing actually, but you definitely want to go into the first without knowing what's going to happen.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Yes what Version says re: thread is true, I would've put spoilers but I was confident no one was going to read any of the posts.

I think you're right that the cinematography is shit, altho I think in part that's about capturing the squalor of 1899 London, and making all the drama "stagey" (sets like the one V posted above for an e.g.). This movie is all about acting ("life's a stage") and transcendence, so it thematically fits: Burden literally knocks on a stone wall and says, that's what magic's about, rising above all (gestures) this.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Like V says, the second viewing, once you know how it fits together, is probably about as gratifying as the first.

Thanks for re-watching, V! Sorry you didn't like it more!
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Acting is a terrible thing. It's not as bad outside of Hollywood. But in Hollywood acting is a real problem.
 
V

version

Well-known member
I think it might be the only thing of Nolan's based on something that wasn't written by him or his brother. That might be why it's better than the others.
 
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