Salon.com > Christopher Nolan http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 13:20:45 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 “The Dark Knight Rises” and the art of the teaser poster http://www.salon.com/2011/07/12/teaser_trailer_dark_knight_rises/ http://www.salon.com/2011/07/12/teaser_trailer_dark_knight_rises/#comments Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:05:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2011/07/12/teaser_trailer_dark_knight_rises Today the Web is buzzing about just one image. It's a pretty cool picture -- looking up at a crumbing city skyline that is falling away into the shape of a bat -- but without knowing the context of the photo, most people would be left wondering why the Internet is in an uproar over the pic.

Of course, the teaser poster for Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises" (the second of its kind, after the Bane photo) is obvious to anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last year. Teaser posters, which often come out way ahead of the film itself, can be self-explanatory, or totally baffling. They're like puzzle pieces leading up to the movie itself, and with the hyper-aware Web culture that grabs on to every leak and spoiler, they can be used to raise a film's buzz to a near-deafening screech.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/07/12/teaser_trailer_dark_knight_rises/feed/ 13 Pervs and thieves on the Internet: A Hollywood history http://www.salon.com/2011/03/29/trust_the_internet/ http://www.salon.com/2011/03/29/trust_the_internet/#comments Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/03/29/trust_the_internet Ever since Sandra Bullock's paranoid whine, circa 1995 -- "They're watching me on the Internet!" -- digital culture has served as an all-purpose boogeyman for filmmakers. Even beyond the fact that with a computer (according to Hollywood) you can find anyone or anything within seconds, download state secrets ("I'm in!"), and launch another country's nuclear weapons, the Internet in movies has become a lazy shorthand for describing everything that's dangerous about modern communication and Today's Young People. That was a whole lot more understandable 16 years ago, when the Web seemed to many ordinary citizens like a mysterious and powerful Terra Incognita, than it does in 2011, when most people use the Internet every day as a combination of newspaper, mailbox, Yellow Pages and Sears catalog.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/03/29/trust_the_internet/feed/ 16 The twisted, stupid brilliance of “Sucker Punch” http://www.salon.com/2011/03/25/sucker_punch/ http://www.salon.com/2011/03/25/sucker_punch/#comments Fri, 25 Mar 2011 01:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/03/24/sucker_punch Zack Snyder's "Sucker Punch" is like the Nietzschean Superman of CGI action movies. It's so far beyond good and evil as to make its morality irrelevant, and to undermine any verdicts you might render about its meaning or quality. A ridiculously ambitious and perhaps fatally flawed mashup of ideas, themes and influences, it's more like a Quentin Tarantino movie -- or more like the platonic ideal of a Tarantino movie -- than any movie Tarantino has ever personally made. I can't be sure whether it's brilliant or idiotic, although I'm pretty confident it's both, and not always in different places or at different moments.

This movie is going to be vehemently attacked as brain-damaged garbage that exemplifies everything that's wrong with today's filmmaking and today's audiences. It's also going to be vigorously defended as a subversive action-movie masterpiece that offers a big middle finger to Hollywood convention, audience expectations, and anybody and everybody who would rather watch "The King's Speech." People on both sides will be partly right and partly wrong. Here's where I come down: "Sucker Punch" doesn't all work by a long shot, but it confirms my sense that Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema at the most commercial, mass-market, attention-disordered end of the spectrum.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/03/25/sucker_punch/feed/ 1 10 year time capsule: The puzzle movie hits made possible by DVD http://www.salon.com/2011/03/22/10_year_time_capsule_memento_donnie_darko_muholland_drive/ http://www.salon.com/2011/03/22/10_year_time_capsule_memento_donnie_darko_muholland_drive/#comments Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:37:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2011/03/22/10_year_time_capsule_memento_donnie_darko_muholland_drive In 2001, DVD players outsold VCRs for the first time ever. I can't claim that this advent of home technology was the reason that "puzzle films" like Christopher Nolan's "Memento," David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" and Richard Kelly's "Donnie Darko" caught on, but it's a reasonably sound guess. With VCRs, you could watch a film at home, you could pause it, and you could rewind it. But DVDs were made to withstand intense scrutiny: high-res freeze-frames, replaying and jumping chapters, and of course those neat little bonus features that held the promise of providing supplemental material to the film.

Before "Memento" was released to the public on March 16, 2001, the most popular thriller mysteries of the past several years had been films like "The Sixth Sense" and "The Usual Suspects." Both great movies, sure, but both included clear expository endings to make sure the audiences understood what the hell they had just paid good money to see. But when Andy Klein wrote his definitive "Everything You Wanted to Know About 'Memento'" essay for Salon and created a numerical and alphabetical system to use to watch the scenes of the film in chronological order, it was only because DVDs had recently given us the ability to do so. As Andy says:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/03/22/10_year_time_capsule_memento_donnie_darko_muholland_drive/feed/ 20 “Unknown”: The thriller “Inception” wishes it could be http://www.salon.com/2011/02/18/unknown_2/ http://www.salon.com/2011/02/18/unknown_2/#comments Fri, 18 Feb 2011 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/02/17/unknown What do you get when you combine an A-minus cast that seems almost randomly assembled; an identity-loss plot that Mixmasters bits of "Inception," "Memento," "Salt" and perhaps a half-dozen other movies; wintry Berlin locations; and a little-known Spanish director who is arguably most famous for making a horror film with Paris Hilton? To my enormous surprise, what you get in "Unknown" is a stylish and muscular thriller with some nifty twists and turns, a wicked sense of humor, several terrific performances and not one or even two but three of the best car chases in recent action-flick history. All of which, I guess, illustrates William Goldman's famous maxim of the movie business, which can equally be applied to the world in general: Nobody knows anything.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/02/18/unknown_2/feed/ 35 Anne Hathaway cast as Catwoman in new “Batman” movie http://www.salon.com/2011/01/19/anne_hathaway_catwoman_batman/ http://www.salon.com/2011/01/19/anne_hathaway_catwoman_batman/#comments Wed, 19 Jan 2011 18:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/feature/2011/01/19/anne_hathaway_catwoman_batman Hold on to your capes: Anne Hathaway will be the new Catwoman in Christopher Nolan's "Batman" series. According to a press release from Warner Brothers, Hathaway will play Selina Kyle, the real life persona of the leather-clad minx loved by adolescent boys, middle-aged stock brokers, free-spirited housewives, and -- well -- pretty much everyone else. The official press release for the new film, "The Dark Knight Rises," falls short of mentioning the character name "Catwoman," so it's likely we'll be seeing Selina Kyle's backstory and sultry descent into her feline alter ego.

In related casting news, bi-curious icon Tom Hardy will play Bane, the chemically jacked up archrival of Batman. You might remember that awful moment when Bane who broke Batman over his knee like a dry twig. (Insert Major League Baseball joke here.) Christian Bale will return as Bruce Wayne slash Batman.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/01/19/anne_hathaway_catwoman_batman/feed/ 11 Early Oscar odds: “Inception” vs. “Social Network” http://www.salon.com/2010/10/21/oscar_preview/ http://www.salon.com/2010/10/21/oscar_preview/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/10/21/oscar_preview Question: Is it too unbearably early to begin thinking about the annual winter circus that is Oscar season? Answer: Never! Or at least not after the Gotham Independent Film Awards nominations, the unofficial starting gun of award-mania, have gotten us started.

Let me save your comment-typin' fingers a workout and stipulate the following: No, the Oscars are no indication of quality, historically speaking; yes, the best films of the year (whether by my standards or yours) are often overlooked; and yes, covering movies by focusing overmuch on the Oscar race resembles the horse-race coverage of American politics and signifies the downfall of journalism in particular and civilization in general. But you want to know about it anyway, so let's move on. (Check out my Movie List for an utterly subjective and totally non-market-driven ranking of the year's best and worst movies.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/10/21/oscar_preview/feed/ 15 “Valhalla Rising”: What to see instead of “Inception” http://www.salon.com/2010/07/16/valhalla_rising/ http://www.salon.com/2010/07/16/valhalla_rising/#comments Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/07/15/valhalla_rising One of the reasons I had this week marked with a gold star on my 2010 movie calendar was of course Christopher Nolan's "Inception," no doubt the most newsworthy event of the Hollywood summer. Even more intriguingly, that auteurist labor of love -- and whether you like it or not, "Inception" is clearly that -- is opening opposite another one, eccentric Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's hallucinatory Viking odyssey "Valhalla Rising."

This makes for an irresistible compare-and-contrast between two extraordinarily talented mid-career cinematic visionaries, starting of course with the fact that Nolan's movie will have 1,000 times the audience, at a very conservative estimate. (It could be 10,000 times, or 100,000.) "Inception" is largely set inside the world of dreams, which look like conventional Hollywood action movies. "Valhalla Rising" is set in the real world of medieval Britain and North America, at least nominally, but plays from beginning to end like a feverish nightmare.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/07/16/valhalla_rising/feed/ 13 “Inception”: A clunky, overblown disappointment http://www.salon.com/2010/07/15/inception/ http://www.salon.com/2010/07/15/inception/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/07/14/inception Director Christopher Nolan is such a master movie technician -- a combination of engineer, architect, game designer and God -- that it's startling to realize how constricted his vision is and how clumsily he tells stories. "Inception," Nolan's first film since his mega-googolplex hit with "The Dark Knight," and his first as a solo writer-director since the now-legendary puzzler "Memento" in 2000, is supposed to be a dreamscape movie. At one point, in fact, we travel with its central Scooby-gang of characters into a dream within a dream within a dream, and then into some deeper, still more unconscious, psychological limbo-state below that.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/07/15/inception/feed/ 148 Christopher Nolan says no Joker in Batman 3 http://www.salon.com/2010/07/12/nolan_no_joker_riddler/ http://www.salon.com/2010/07/12/nolan_no_joker_riddler/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:13:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/trending/2010/07/12/nolan_no_joker_riddler Even with director Christopher Nolan's wildly anticipated film, "Inception," hitting theaters this Friday, it's never too soon to discuss his forthcoming Batman movie.

Not much is known about the latest installment of the Caped Crusador, but one thing is for sure: the Joker will not be making an appearance.  "For me, Heath [Ledgar] was the definitive Joker," Nolan said. "It wouldn't feel appropriate to readdress that character."

Ledger, who won a posthumous Academy Award for his role as the demented Joker in "The Dark Knight," died of an accidental prescription overdose in 2008.

So, with the Joker crossed out, who will be the villain?  Bane?  The Penguin?  How about Catwoman?  A femme fatale would be an interesting change of pace.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/07/12/nolan_no_joker_riddler/feed/ 0 Films of the decade: “Memento” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/22/dangelo_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/22/dangelo_2/#comments Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/22/dangelo Reading the previous entries in this series has only reinforced my belief that naming your favorite film -- of the year, of the decade, of all freakin' recorded time -- is more of a personality test than an exercise in objective critical judgment. So rather than try to make a brief case for the unimpeachable awesomeness of "Memento," the movie that gave me more giddy pleasure than any other over the last 10 years, I think I'll just reveal the peculiar predilections and biases that made Christopher Nolan's stone-cold masterpiece (oops) custom-fitted for my particular sensibility.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/22/dangelo_2/feed/ 7 Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Caught between two worlds http://www.salon.com/2009/11/17/gordon_levitt/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/17/gordon_levitt/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:17:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/11/16/gordon_levitt At the ripe old age of 28, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is simultaneously a showbiz old pro and one of the hottest young acting talents to emerge in this decade. When Gordon-Levitt played his first high-impact dramatic roles in edgy, independent films like "Mysterious Skin" (2004) and "Brick" (2005), there were a handful of snickers at first: Wait, isn't that Tommy, the teenage kid from "3rd Rock From the Sun"? It was indeed, but Gordon-Levitt has been acting since early childhood. He had an extensive TV résumé long before the first of his 133 "3rd Rock" episodes -- with recurring roles on "Roseanne," "The Powers That Be" and the early-'90s "Dark Shadows" reboot -- and he damn sure hasn't let that role define his subsequent career.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/17/gordon_levitt/feed/ 6 The saga of George W. Batman http://www.salon.com/2008/07/23/transsiberian/ http://www.salon.com/2008/07/23/transsiberian/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:14:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2008/07/23/transsiberian

First Look Studios

Emily Mortimer in "Transsiberian."

Now that "The Dark Knight" has led Hollywood to its biggest-money weekend since ... well, since the invention of the medium, not merely the backlash but the counterbacklash and I guess the counter-counterbacklash have begun. (For the record, I'm suspicious of all claims that some new blockbuster has set a box office record. "The Dark Knight," for instance, has been released on more screens in more places -- and has arguably been more massively hyped -- than any other movie in history. How does its per-screen average, adjusted for inflation, compare with "E.T." or "Gone With the Wind"?)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/07/23/transsiberian/feed/ 44 A thousand and one knights http://www.salon.com/2008/07/19/batman_comics/ http://www.salon.com/2008/07/19/batman_comics/#comments Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:38:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2008/07/19/batman_comics There's no such thing as a "definitive version" of Batman in comics, movies or anywhere else. He's a corporate property and a cash cow, so there are a few things that are set in stone about him: the cape, the urban setting, the millionaire-playboy alter ego. Beyond those premises, there are as many interpretations of Batman as there have been creators who've worked on his stories -- which makes the question of whether Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" is "faithful" to its source beside the point. Still, Nolan has dropped the ball on one of the most compelling ideas comic books have established about Gotham City's most famous resident: that his heroism doesn't come from his batarangs and right hook, but from his magnificent, brooding mind.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/07/19/batman_comics/feed/ 51 Batman vs. the lavender genius of crime! http://www.salon.com/2008/07/18/condition/ http://www.salon.com/2008/07/18/condition/#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:34:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2008/07/18/condition

Shochiku Co., Ltd.

Tatsuya Nakadai and Michiyo Aratama in Masaki Kobayashi's "The Human Condition"

I'm probably preaching to the born-again when addressing readers of this column, but I wanted to chime in briefly on the inevitable topic of the week, that being Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight." It's the most anticipated movie of the summer and all that, it cost a bajillion bucks to make and it plans to make 2 bajillion back. It's got some mighty impressive special effects and it's got an actor who's now dead, eating that fake-o, pixillated scenery for lunch. And no matter how many people proclaim its awesomeness, it's also an incoherent, bloated bore from a director capable of doing much more interesting work.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/07/18/condition/feed/ 29 “The Dark Knight” http://www.salon.com/2008/07/17/dark_knight_2/ http://www.salon.com/2008/07/17/dark_knight_2/#comments Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2008/07/17/dark_knight Somewhere between his first hit, the tricky backward teaser "Memento," and his most recent picture, the tricky dueling-magicians teaser "The Prestige," Christopher Nolan began gathering, like a lucky squirrel having stumbled upon a hoard of exquisite nuts, comparisons to Hitchcock. "The Dark Knight" makes me question whether he has actually seen any Hitchcock. It's true that Nolan, like the filmmaker he's so clearly trying to emulate, takes delight in teasing and tricking his audience. But Hitchcock was more than just a tease. He was a visual storyteller who knew how to build complex narratives frame by frame. He'd never use two shots if one would do. Although he used sound brilliantly, the dialogue in a Hitchcock film generally tells us very little; the visuals, and the implied but indelible connections between them, tell us everything. The trickery of Hitchcock is interactive, springing directly from the demands he makes on us: Even when we can't believe our eyes, we have to trust them, because they're all we've got.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/07/17/dark_knight_2/feed/ 131 He sings the cinema electric http://www.salon.com/2006/10/20/nolan_2/ http://www.salon.com/2006/10/20/nolan_2/#comments Fri, 20 Oct 2006 12:45:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2006/10/20/nolan My interview with Christopher Nolan goes like this: He is somewhere on his cellphone, patched through a switchboard in Los Angeles and another one in New York. Sometimes I can hear him and sometimes I can't. Sometimes I mishear him. His laugh, transmitted across all that fiber-optic cable and atmosphere when I ask him a question he doesn't want to answer, is scratchy and indistinct, more like static than the sound of human humor. A couple of times, we get cut off, and I ask a complicated question into the void and sit there, listening only to the feedback whine of all those Scotch-tape connections.

It's a fitting encounter, I guess, with the guy who, even after just five feature films, looks like the premier cinematic sleight-of-hand artist of our time. Nolan may never quite outdo "Memento," his reverse-narrative, memory-loss murder mystery that will be blowing minds in basement rec rooms deep into this century, but he's certainly moved on. (Nolan tells me that he's only met one journalist who has grasped his precise intentions in "Memento," but adds that he now considers the film "open-ended," and believes that other people's interpretations are as valid as his own.) He reached the franchise-movie big leagues this year with "Batman Begins," one of the summer's biggest hits, and hard on its heels comes "The Prestige," a slippery, deceptive magic trick of a film that Nolan and his screenwriter brother, Jonathan, have been developing for five or six years.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/10/20/nolan_2/feed/ 12 “The Prestige” http://www.salon.com/2006/10/20/the_prestige/ http://www.salon.com/2006/10/20/the_prestige/#comments Fri, 20 Oct 2006 11:50:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2006/10/20/the_prestige For Christopher Nolan, darkness seems to equal depth -- when, really, sometimes darkness is just a big hole. "The Prestige" tells the story of two rival magicians in Victorian England, the elegant showman Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and the less polished but brainier Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). The two begin as peers and wind up bitter enemies: A trick that goes tragically awry sets off a game of one-upmanship that, as we're shown in one of the movie's early sequences, will end in one man's death.

Of course, we only think we know what we're seeing: That's what sleight of hand is all about. And for the first hour, at least, "The Prestige" -- which was adapted from the novel by Christopher Priest -- keeps you guessing where it's going to go next, wondering what it is you're not seeing that might be the key to the interlocking mysteries laid before us. The movie's first line -- we hear the words "Are you watching closely?" over a seemingly static shot of a bunch of gentleman's top hats in the forest -- is both a challenge and a taunt. What can those top hats possibly mean? Even as we scrutinize them, we know there's something crucial we're not seeing, and Nolan has given us our mandate to find out. At that point, the movie and the mysteries within it spread delectably before us.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/10/20/the_prestige/feed/ 12 “Batman Begins” http://www.salon.com/2005/06/15/batman_begins/ http://www.salon.com/2005/06/15/batman_begins/#comments Wed, 15 Jun 2005 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2005/06/15/batman_begins Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" fills in, with a series of murky pointillist dots, the back story of one of the most soulful and tortured superheroes of all. In "Batman Begins" -- which takes its cues from the original vision of Batman creator Bob Kane, embellishing it heavily -- young Bruce Wayne once fell into a well on his parents' estate and was set upon by a fluttering, flapping cloud of black bats. His dad rescued him, but predictably, batphobia set in. Worse yet, not long after the bat incident, young Master Wayne watched in horror as his parents were killed in a city alleyway. The grown-up Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has never come to terms with their death, and after a stint learning Ninja moves in remotest Tibet, he returns to his beloved Gotham City to help restore peace and order to its troubled streets, ostensibly so he can do the same with his mind.

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