Boy Movies #61

Boy Movies After Dark talks Tenet

You’re reading Boy Movies, a newsletter which is basically released weekly. There is much to cover in this rare late night issue (it’s a little after 11pm on the East Coast and I considered just releasing this tomorrow but I thought I’d experiment with something new… let’s call it Boy Movies After Dark…), so we’ll get right to the good stuff.

Merch alert

Your regular reminder that Boy Movies stickers are still available! I will keep doing this until we sell out completely, so if you’re tired of hearing about it, well, it sounds to me like you know what you have to do.

First, thank you to everyone who wrote in with suggestions for the newsletter last week! It is always so helpful to hear from the people who actually read the thing about what you actually, you know, want to read. If you missed my pathetic little plea for inspiration, the floor remains open for any thoughts.

Some thoughts on This Is Me…Now: A Love Story

I watched it between newsletters and was too sick last week to form even one single sentence about it, but TIM…N:ALS is Boy Movies canon so it would be wrong not to comment. I’ll keep it (relatively) brief:

• Well, first of all, it’s an hour long. All that for an hour!

• There’s an interesting push and pull about what JLo thinks of us and what we actually think of JLo. The whole conceit of this “movie” (it is so generous of me to call it a movie) is her responding to her haters, I guess? She seems to see it as a breathtakingly self-aware display of commentary, a response to the thing people are always making fun of her for, which is the fact that she’s been engaged/married so many times. As a lifelong JLover, I would say her perception of how we see her is, like, fascinatingly off-base. No one really cares that she’s had a bunch of husbands — girl, people make fun of you because you can’t speak Spanish! People make fun of you because you’re a pop star who can’t sing! (Allegedly… don’t sue me, mother… Waiting for Tonight is one of my favorite songs of all time…) It’s crazy that the extended edition of the Dunkin commercial (please), somehow makes a more nuanced comment on the way Ben views his own public persona. JLo clearly has a sense of humor about how people generally think of her, but she seems to have a twenty million dollar mental block up around this. We may never know whether it’s because she’s delusional, or because she’s too afraid to explore it in front of an audience, or an odd mix of both.

• Like, sorry, there is way weirder shit about her (complimentary) to fixate on. But JLo doesn’t know it’s weird that her character has frequent flashbacks to when she worked in a, uh, steampunk factory… where women pick rose petals to… power… a… heart…? JLo doesn’t know it’s weird to have a “zodiac council” made up of the likes of Jane Fonda, Kim Petras, and Post Malone, all of whom obviously filmed their scenes on different planets. JLo doesn’t know it’s weird to end on a recreation of Singin’ in the Rain. Sure, JLo knows that many will not “understand” TIM…N:ALS, but she also believes it is entirely on them for not getting the twisted machinations of her big beautiful brain. And, really, I have to love that.

• Ben plays a total of three (3) separate roles, one of which finds him in hideous Trump-like prosthetics.

• If you didn’t read Variety’s JLo profile, it is a delicious look at a sincerely bizarre person. I devoured every word!

Notable: The same day TIM…N:ALS was released, news broke that Jennifer Garner might just be starring alongside Matt in Ben’s next directorial venture. Which. Could. Mean. Nothing.

My weekend at the movies

When Tenet came out in 2020, I remember thinking, “Under no circumstances will I be seeing that movie.” We, the royal we, had a collective chuckle-sigh over the hubristic decision to release it in theaters at the height of the pandemic. We listened to the mighty few who, for some reason, risked getting Covid to see a Christopher Nolan movie, as they told us how cRaZy it was. To many, Tenet was a deliberately confusing mess; others (men) insisted the confused were simply not getting it. Once I tried reading the Wikipedia summary, just because I always like to know what the girls are talking about, and I got so bored I never made it to the end.

Christopher Nolan, respectfully, has made some of the dumbest movies in modern film history. I say this as someone who enjoyed Oppenheimer, who will drop everything at any moment to watch Inception, who still holds a sense of fondness for his Batman trilogy. I disagree with the accusation that he’s a cold filmmaker (the true mark of a Nolan lead is that he’s actually sooooo fucked up emotionally over some really specific event), but it’s fine to poke at how overwrought (and, in the case of Tenet, outright bad) his screenplays are, at how his films often seem to be saying, “Did I just blow your mind?” Like, no. After all, Nolan’s films are super popular, big budget spectacles. They are the closest thing we have left to film-based monoculture. Aside from Tenet, which feels deliberately muddled, they’re all pretty easy to understand.

A lot of the fatigue that surrounds him, however unfairly, has to do with his fan base. I don’t blame Nolan for them, because I rarely blame directors for their own rotten fans, but the Nolan bros are just not serious people. (“It’s like Fincher males with more testosterone and fewer bitches,” as my friend Alexis so astutely put it.) They, in my opinion, give the culture of boy movies a bad name, as they thrive on alienation, so convinced that existential thinking is something only men are capable of. These guys are ready to mobilize at the drop of a hat, and they certainly showed up in droves for the Tenet reissue’s 3pm showing at AMC Lincoln Square on Saturday, for which I was also in attendance, joined by

Akosua T. Adasi

. (Where two or three are gathered in his name, etc…) While we were chatting between trailers for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Furiosa, I asked her, “So you’ve already seen this? And you’re here again? By choice?” Yes, she confirmed, sounding trepidatious. Going in, the vibes were already hesitant. They did not get any better when I was held against my will and forced to watch an extended preview of Dune 2 before Tenet began. I hoped that would be the low point. Ultimately, I was wrong.

Of course I get why they put Tenet back in theaters right now. With Oppenheimer mere days away from winning Best Picture, there has never been a better moment to remind the general public that they love the films of Christopher Nolan, especially one that, according to some, didn’t get its due in 2020. (J. Robert Oppenheimer even gets name-dropped in Tenet, which made Akosua and I laugh a lot. The bros did not laugh with us.) But I probably would not have used one of my three weekly allotted AMC A-List reservations on the reissue if anyone other than Akosua had asked me; I famously wrote last year in this very newsletter that I “will literally never make time for Tenet.” Oops! Never take anything I say seriously.

Look, I cannot speak to the act of Rewatching Tenet In a Post-Oppenheimer World, because I never watched it in a pre-Oppenheimer world — though Robert Pattinson might say I’ve actually always watched it, and I in turn might tell him to shut the fuck up — but I see the parallels between Nolan’s fixation on the nature of humanity, his interest in the ways people destroy the world, and each other, and themselves. I went into Tenet pretty blind (I never did get around to finishing that Wikipedia summary…), with flashes of past criticisms I had absorbed like a clueless sponge in 2020 coming back to me in flashes the longer I sat in the theater: the baffling sound mixing, or lack thereof, that rendered the exposition-heavy dialogue incomprehensible; Elizabeth Debicki’s one-note Woman Character; John David Washington’s wooden, charisma-free performance. Even those maddening inverted set pieces felt like nothing compared to any of Inception’s goofily thrilling action sequences. Sure, Tenet is a film only Christopher Nolan could make, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

Tenet appeals to me more in theory than it does in practice. It is a film that is not remotely rewarding until one of its final scenes, when Robert Pattinson tells John David Washington that they have, in fact, always known each other and they will know each other again. Time is a flat circle and all that. I love stories about people who fuck around with time, with memory. I love when a story understands the importance of going back to the beginning to make sense of the end. I love the romance of people fated to end up together. That all does it for me, but Tenet takes so long to arrive there, and the package that precedes it is such clunky, self-serious nonsense, that it renders its potentially, dare I say, girl movie-esque finale meaningless. There’s just too much bullshit to wade through that by the end you’re just tired of trying to sort through it all. And I could maybe have even forgiven some of those grievances if Kenneth Branagh hadn’t been doing that stab-yourself-in-the-ears-just-to-escape-it Russian accent the whole time.

Then on Sunday I saw Pepsi Presents Madame Web and laughed so hard I started crying. I loved it. Nothing else to say. That’s the boy movie-girl movie dichotomy at work, baby.

• I reviewed the new HBO joint The Regime, which similarly appeals to me more in theory than it does in practice. It’s no Madame Web, I’ll tell you that!