70mm at Austin’s lovely Paramount Theatre
Everything I’ve heard about this one for years is indeed true. A melding of past and future into a grimy retro fantasyland that dumps the tropes and textures of westerns, musicals, music videos, and noir all together and populates it with characters plucked from Ford and Hawks, all in a way that shouldn’t really make sense, and that probably sounds diabolically silly on paper, but that gels together into the goofiest face-melting rock ballad.…
I’ve always had more interest in this franchise existing as a barebones framework with which Miller and co. can repeatedly play around re-assembling the same tonal and visual building blocks of blood, guts, sweat, sand, chrome, oil, madness, and stoic loners won over by hope into ever more insane Looney Tunes-style chase sequences and action riffs rather than as some ongoing series of interconnected sequels. So, ittedly, the whole filling-in-the-gaps worldbuilding prequel aspect of this was the least interesting factor…
Wildly ambitious and irable but also frustrating and exhausting. This is very much Nolan doing his own version of PRIMER. Take that however you'd like.
Like INCEPTION, it's a film of mechanics and logistics, and like MEMENTO, there's a vague structural resemblance to an ouroboros, but it lacks the energy and mystery of either of them -- especially the way that INCEPTION piecemeals out the various machinations of dreamsharing without losing the forward momentum of the plot -- rendering the…
