Stellar Buzz for Christopher Nolan's Space Travel Blockbuster

For hype and anticipation, Christopher Nolan's sci-fi epic Interstellar is the one to beat right now. It's about two weeks away from release and early reactions are starting to surface online, all of them positive. What can I say, if the likes of Edgar Wright ("Emotional, visually stunning"), Rian Johnson ("some of the finest space travel spectacle this side of 2001") and Brad Bird ("WOW") are bowled over, I think we're going to be in for a dazzler. It's also worth noting Interstellar is the first Hollywood blockbuster we've had in what seems to be an alarmingly long time that isn't a sequel or based on some existing franchise/toy/book. Be sure to see at IMAX on November 6!

Sci-Fi Trailer Mania: Godzilla, Edge of Tomorrow, Jupiter Ascending, Interstellar

Last week saw the release of no less than FOUR trailers for upcoming sci-fi behemoths. Ok, Godzilla might not be technically what you'd consider "hard" sci-fi but anywho... There's Tom Cruise donning a mecha suit battling aliens while stuck in a time-loop (Edge of Tomorrow looks like a cooler Oblivion); there's Jupiter Ascending, the new space opera from the Wachowskis' featuring Channing Tatum with ridiculous pointy ears and a ginger goatee; and the highly anticipated Christopher Nolan Matthew McConaughey-starring joint, Interstellar, the teaser for which shows barely any footage from the movie itself but should make the hairs on the back of your neck stand...

Honest Trailer: The Dark Knight Rises

If you haven't seen The Dark Knight Rises (which came out on DVD and Blu-ray last week), don't watch this, but if you have, this clip might give you a few chuckles and maybe force you to rethink the movie you've just seen. For the record, I'm not a Nolan/Batman hater nor am I a fan, but it's quite clear there are many massive logical inconsistencies in Rises that can't be ignored.

Piecing Together the Action Sequence

Jim Emerson, who runs the excellent blog Scanners at Chicago Sun-Times, has put together a great video essay taking apart a key action sequence from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. It makes for a nice follow-up to Matthias Stork's Chaos Cinema essays, cogently scrutinising how certain editorial choices have affected the way this particular action sequence has turned out. It's not something that I noticed, nor probably most viewers out there; if you watch it uninterrupted without Emerson's commentary, it seems to hang together fairly well. And that's what's cool about this essay, is that it's examining the flaws of an action scene that isn't actually all that terrible or incoherent - Nolan's fight scenes are much worse - but the problems with "spatial integrity" are still there, as he persuasively points out:
In the Cut, Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight) from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

Emerson also looks at the the Angelina Jolie chase scene in Salt, which comparatively has a better sense of on-screen spatial relationships, even though it drops the ball where logic is concerned in one crucial bit:
In the Cut, Part II: A Dash of Salt from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

Notes:

• It's kinda interesting that he used Salt as an example. Noyce may have executed this sequence skillfully, but rest of the action in Salt is pretty forgettable and plagued with "Chaos Cinema"-style editing.
• Stork's essay made me re-watch Ronin - for the first time since its theatrical release - and it was simply a breath of fresh air and much better than I remembered. Frankenheimer really knew how to direct good, clear action.
• I'd like to see an essay from someone defending Paul Greengrass's Bourne films and how his use of shakey-cam can be argued as effective (or in the greater scheme of things, how this technique can be used well).
• Check out the comments under Emerson's essay. If you're really into this stuff, you'll lose yourself in it. Great stuff.

We Need To Go Deeper

It's the film that refuses to go away. Here's more food for thought, if you've just caught up with it on DVD... (SPOILERS EVERYWHERE)

Watch the film's dream levels unfold simultaneously:



A cool video essay looking at how Inception's parallel editing harks back to the pioneering work of D.W. Griffith:



Last but not least, Christopher Nolan's hand-drawn Inception map:

Trailer: Inception

First off apologies for the lack of posts recently. It's been a busy madhouse here in the past few weeks and workload has prevented me from posting as much as I'd like. But this stunning trailer for the new Christopher Nolan film Inception is worth taking the time out to blog about. I'm not completely sure of the plot - and I'm going to avoid details as much as I can from herein - but what we can glean from this trailer is that it looks like a rollercoaster sci-fi brain-melt that seems to take place a lot in people's minds and dreams. Maybe Paprika-style? And we can probably expect a DiCaprio performance dialed up to 10 a la Shutter Island. He plays an agent specialising in "subconscious security". Sounds ridiculous but I'm intrigued.



PS: Anyone feel like this movie looks a lot like Batman Begins? Something about the colour schemes - Nolan loves his browns, blacks, whites...