The best part of doing this podcast is the way the scrum of conversation keeps bringing up new ideas. Episode 5 gave us the General Theory of Creative Bloat (successful franchise = abandonment of editorial control), which gets mentioned again here. But this time we came up with what I call the Pie Theory of Popular Entertainment. It comes at the tail end of the episode, but it does kind of tie everything we jabber about together nicely.
These things keep getting longer, but we’ve sorted out all the audio issues, and are able to do this all from the comfort of our respective homes using CleanFeed.
Apparently Nolan has been utterly corrupted by his early Hollywood success and is now incapable of directing something better than mediocre (which is kind of the vibe I got from Dunkirk). Apparently Tenet is two hours of rampaging nonsense. I don’t know if that is true or not. But I’m even less inclined to see it now.
About 2/3 through the film I gave up trying to understand this mess and just started laughing at every nonsensical spectacle that continued to take place before me. It still didn’t help. This film is long and I still had another 50 minutes to sit through.
This is part of a longer Thread of Worse 5 Movies of All Time, which are also somewhat interesting, and relatively obscure, so it’s worth reading, if only to absorb another human’s thoughts about Art. 50 First Dates, is on there, and who can resist Adam Sandler films getting savaged as they deserve?
But why lament Bad Art, when we can discuss Good Art? In the next Shallow & Pedantic podcast, we’re going to be chatting about the nexus of Samurai films and Westerns, and part of that is going to be spent on Sturgill Simpson’s 2019 film Sound and Fury, which is not really a “film” so much as it is, well, honestly, this YouTube commenter summed it up best:
Have you ever wondered what would happen if a respected alt-country star went into surgery and, in its aftermath, refused pain killing narcotics and instead just took a bunch of weed?
Imagine then, in his fugue state, he decides to take a departure from country and produce a crazy good synth rock album. Now imagine he decides to have the entire album animated, writes a vague anime screenplay, goes to Japan, and has some of the top anime artists compete to see who could be the nuttiest in producing his vision. He then puts it all together in a 45 min montage that can only be described the three way love child of Heavy Metal the movie, Akira, and The Wall.
I actually thought this level of unrestrained creative expression from a popular artists had died sometime in the 1980s. Maybe it did but, if so, Sturgill Simpson resurrected it here.
