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With this opening in IMAX, this is surely not the rumored porn star biopic he was linked to

Those quotation marks were screwing with the CF.org front page something fierce

domino harvey wrote: Fri Jan 25, 2019 11:54 pm With this opening in IMAX, this is surely not the rumored porn star biopic he was linked to

But oh what an IMAX experience that would be...

Maybe it will be Nolan's answer to Panorama Blue (NSFW)?

I don't understand, how could CDAN have gotten this wrong?

As this begins shooting it is being described as a "romantic thriller" that's like North by Northwest meets Inception.

I'm a bit of a Nolan fan but I didn't get farther in that description than the word "romantic" before my heart sank.

If it's in the vein of North by Northwest I don't think it'll be too much of a problem for me. It will at least, I expect be well above technically competent. Whether or not it's composed like Dunkirk, with a lot of the fat trimmed out remains to be seen though.

Wait, if it’s shooting, do we still not even know who is in it?

The only problem with it being in the vein of NORTH BY NORTHWEST is that Nolan has, of course, no sense of humor.

The film is very much not shooting - it starts filming in June. I'm assuming we'll get something about it before then.

Yeah, sorry, some of the articles today were like "as it starts shooting" and I guess that was an exaggeration.

Glad that Hoytema is back as DP. And, yes, if the "romance" is a North by Northwest-ish component, that could work fine for Nolan.

Maybe he’s bringing Hitchcock back to life. That would be an event.

Roscoe wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2019 8:13 pm The only problem with it being in the vein of NORTH BY NORTHWEST is that Nolan has, of course, no sense of humor.

And isn't very good with female characters either.

That's blatantly false. Just look at Interstellar which lives by its female characters.

The only Nolan I haven't seen, my bad, but with Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, it's hard for me not to have this impression. I felt as if Nolan is our Jean-Pierre Melville regarding this.
But true, I haven't seen Interstellar which seems to be a strong counter-argument to this, though one could argue that within Nolan's filmography, it looks like an exception rather than a rule (not unlike some female characters in Melville's oeuvre).

I'd say he has other well written female characters in films like Memento and, yes, The Dark Knight Rises. Those are well written, within the frame of genre, characters. They're just not gender written characters which is something he seems to have no interest in.

My issue is that in many of these movies, even if they're not "gender written characters", they often play some romance with them and some of the male characters, but it often feels, I don't know, strange. When looking at the 2 Marion Cotillard characters (Inception and TDKR) for instance, they seem written by somebody who just doesn't understand love and romance. The relationships felt robotic to me, which no display at all of emotion, even implicit or introvert.
Anne Hathaway's Catwoman fares just a bit better but still feel shoehorned in the way she sometimes interact with Wayne. I understand the point about it being written in a non-gender way, and my memory of it recall it as very true, but still.


Maybe I poorly phrased it though, since looking back at it, it's not so much the female characters writing than the romances they sometimes are given and that feel as if it's totally alien to Nolan.
We often joke about how his movies seem to show he has no sense of humor, but in all the movies I've seen from him (ie all except Interstellar), I'm also quite curious about this other subject.

Anycase, just my 2 cents.

How do you read Ellen Page’s character in Inception, tenia?

tenia wrote: Wed Mar 06, 2019 1:59 pm My issue is that in many of these movies, even if they're not "gender written characters", they often play some romance with them and some of the male characters, but it often feels, I don't know, strange. When looking at the 2 Marion Cotillard characters (Inception and TDKR) for instance, they seem written by somebody who just doesn't understand love and romance. The relationships felt robotic to me, which no display at all of emotion, even implicit or introvert.
Anne Hathaway's Catwoman fares just a bit better but still feel shoehorned in the way she sometimes interact with Wayne. I understand the point about it being written in a non-gender way, and my memory of it recall it as very true, but still.


Maybe I poorly phrased it though, since looking back at it, it's not so much the female characters writing than the romances they sometimes are given and that feel as if it's totally alien to Nolan.
We often joke about how his movies seem to show he has no sense of humor, but in all the movies I've seen from him (ie all except Interstellar), I'm also quite curious about this other subject.

Anycase, just my 2 cents.

Citing the Marion Cotillard characters in that regard seems questionable to me in that you're completely ignoring the actual plots of the films.

In Inception we explicitly only see her character filtered through the male protagonist's subconscious. This may present some gender issues, of course, but I'm not particularly interested in starting a debate along those lines. But I think it's worth pointing out that, of course the romantic dimensions are going to feel odd. How wouldn't they? The entire plot revolves around the notion that the protagonist's feelings towards her are poisonous and something he needs to overcome.

And in The Dark Knight Rises, her romantic feelings towards Bruce Wayne are of course a ruse. Again, I'll acknowledge that writing the female character as a villainess seductress might stir some PC issues, but again that's neither here nor there in terms of the complaint you're making. Her romantic feelings towards him were not real. She was pretending. This is presented within the film as something he should have caught on to.

I think if you want to criticize the romantic relationships in Nolan's films, it would be better to point to actual romantic relationships. But that's not something that Nolan has done a whole lot of ... even the relationships in The Prestige and the Bruce/Rachel relationship in the Batman films have their undoings baked into their respective plots. Still, they're more fertile ground if you're curious about the subject.

Thanks for your interesting additions, Brian. I'll try to summarize my issues with Inception : DiCaprio is supposed to have had a soul-crushingly passionated love story with Cotillard, and his feelings now are (negatively) intense because of how intense their love was, but the movie never do anything to show us whatever intensity there was during this relationship that makes this so difficult to overcome. I'm not sure if it's how it's acted, but at times, I wondered if it was because DiCaprio and Cotillard had 0 chemistry together, even when they were supposed to for the audience to feel this past intensity.

However, I never thought this might be done on purpose, and that's it something that I indeed either missed or that didn't work well for me.


For TDKR and Cotillard, I was rather thinking about her and Bane, not Wayne. They're also supposed to have some kind of a long-term quite deep love (IIRC, they're even married), but it also felt superficially treated in the movie. It's there, but it might have been eluded totally and yet yielded the same relation between her and Bane. Either too much or not enough is shown, I don't know which.


Mr Sausage, it's been some time since I haven't seen Inception and have pretty much no memory of her character except how she seemed mostly there to over-explicit the movie's plot and twists, which is fitting for a character (almost) named Ariane.


And yes, I do realise that I might need to revise these movies.

Bane is more of a father figure for her in the film. They met when she was a small child.

Turns out all this back and forth is for nothing, as the alleged comments on the film weren’t true

So now all we know about this film is that it is about an event? That's not one of Nolan's strengths

The sources on this one were pretty reliable, typically. Honestly, I'd probably be more inclined to trust them than the studio trying to smoke-screen. But who knows. The description in and of itself is sort of subjective. WB could be like "it's more Spellbound meets Memento!"