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TGTPTU Book Club returns this week with Sir Christopher Nolan’s first and only adaption, i.e., THE PRESTIGE (2006), with bookworm and repeat guest Shannon joining from The Bunker.

Post-Batman Begins, Sir Nolan returned to his love of puzzle-box stories to bring to life the work of another Chris (Christopher Priest) while casting a third Chris (Christian Bale) as a rival magician to a non-Chris (Hugh Jackman) to make one of top three magician rivalry movies wide-released in 2006.

Sir Nolan omits the present-day framing story around Priest’s novel to focus on the period and the rivalry between magicians Angier (Jackman) and Borden (Bale) as the former seeks revenge on the latter for his wife’s death (yes, it’s another rare Nolan movie with a dead wife but you actually get two dead ladies—BOGO (Bury One, Get One)—for your money ). Keeping with the novel, each magician has a secret that allows him to perform a teleported man trick, with Borden’s secret seeming to be the anticipated, singular trick of the movie until the rug-pull at the end when the Great Sir C. Nolan the Magnificent abracadabras Angier’s clone-killing conclusion for a prestige of his own .

Uncontroversially, Scarlett Johansson is poorly used as the rivalling magicians’ assistants while David Bowie gets one of the best entrances in cinema history portraying Nicholas Tesla, a man with his own bitter professional rivalry and a last name that is impossible to say 18 years after this movie premiered without thinking of the car, much like what once beset my great-grandmother Edsel and our uncle PT “Cruiser” Koral.

Listen along as Jason Statham pops in, award-winning thespian Michael Caine is put on blast by our special guest, and the hosts break down why this might be the most “Nolan-y” Nolan film Sir Chris has made.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

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Ken: Ken Koral
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INTERSTELLAR

In this week’s episode of TGTPTU, director-writer-producer Sir Christopher Nolan adds space to his repertoire of time-bending narratives as we venture deeper into The Nolan Void with INTERSTELLAR (2014).

The Nolan brothers return with cowriting credits, Nathan Crowley on production design, and Lee Smith as editor on this tale of global dust bowl devastation and human hope through American derring-do as the U.S.’s secret space program saves the planet (or at least itself, or perhaps only some of its elite, it’s not clearly defined) by reaching again for the stars (celestial bodies, not celebrities). But new this time to the Nolan crew (at least in this entropy-forward timeline of your hosts’ dimension, that being the same in which these notes are composed), the making of Interstellar brings on a new cinematographer, replacing pod fav Wally Pfister who’d been part of the creative team since Memento with the bear of a man and no slouch himself: Double Hoyte (aka Hoyte van Hoytema). Hoyte will stick with Nolan from this film on through the remainder of the later films already covered this season (again, frame of reference being an entropy-forward continuum) and who’ll provide this week’s Nolan innovation to shooting on IMAX when he lifts the somewhere just short of 100 lb (45 kilo) camera to film handheld.

With Interstellar, Sir Nolan becomes the marketing of the flick and a multidimensional threat as he joins hard-ish science fiction with his timey-wimey narratives. His rewrite of Jonah’s script, which was owned by Paramount and originally set to be directed by Steven Spielberg (a notable, still-living, Boomer American director; see our Season Six for further info on this influential movie brat), introduced into the story sacrifices of duty and fatherhood, the vagaries of time, and Matt Damon and omitted the original version’s People’s Republic of China robots and the discovery of fractal alien creatures who absorb sunlight to instead have its protagonist Cooper return to his daughter (and their farmhouse rebuilt as a museum on a spaceship playing unused Ken Burn’s documentary footage, it’s a whole thing) as a man-out-of-time with his robot (actually, Sir Nolan prefers the term “machine”) ex-soldier buddy TARS. Oh, and possible predestination with interdimensional book-nudging and coded dust.

Special for this week’s ep, listen to hear first-time pod guest Champlain Amy’s hot takes before they’re censored by the alphabet soup of the deep state; host Ken’s longest Tarantino rant to date; other host Ryan fake it ‘til he makes it; and third host Thomas stump hard for CASE in that ongoing, friendship-ending, family-shattering, international debate between Team CASE or Team TARS.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

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BATMAN BEGINS

Cast aside your Batnipples! As a certain Patrick Bateman lookalike once said, “Well, a guy who dresses up like a bat clearly has issues,” and this week, TGTPTU tackles these issues in Sir Christopher Nolan’s entry into the franchise that would define his middle career with BATMAN BEGINS (2005). Former cohost Jack returns from France to talk Bat and comics with a Gen Z take. Meanwhile, Ken, Thomas, and Ryan grapple and claw and melee in difficult to parse action sequences to control the mic and effuse about this first of the three Batman films covered this season of NOLAN VOID.

After Insomnia, Sir Nolan’s efforts to get his and Jim Carrey’s project (a Howard Hughes’ late-in-life insanity film) off the ground (or out the hotel penthouse) were stymied by Michael Mann developing The Aviator, a film that would take off with Scorsese as captain. Without a script of his own or film in development, Nolan would meet with the Warner Bros (and maybe their sister Dot) to launch a “reboot” of the Batman franchise with Hollywood’s resident comic book aficionado David S. Goyer.

Together with production designer Nathan Crowley who’d worked with him on Insomnia for Warner Brothers, Sir Nolan worked to create a realism beyond what had come before in comic book films. In fact, per Nolan, “Everything we did was about being in massive denial that there was such a thing as [a comic book movie].”

Casting Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne (Batman takes nearly an hour to appear onscreen) and making use of his split persona from American Psycho, Bale is joined by a series of heavy hitters, including Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Rutger Hauer, pod-fav Ken Watanabe, the estimable Mark Boone Jr (back from Memento), and, perhaps oddly cast and not-to-return to the franchise, Katie Holmes.

Exclusive this week! Hear the Batman Baggins summary delivered by Ken but written by our guest director, someone really famous and from New Zealand and whose name rhymes with Jeter Packson, who may have confused Nolan’s film with his own take on rebooting the Dark Knight as so many directors took a stab at the reboot post-Schumacher Schumacher Schumacher (hopefully you weren’t reading this aloud before a mirror). Also, enjoy this week an experimental sound mix to cover for Thomas’s brief absence from the mike as he deals with a dog releasing mind-altering gas.

So listen and continue to download and listen through the remainder of Nolan Void, for there will be a Batman in the pairing for all remaining episodes. What, you ask? Will the hosts this season get caught by their very own temporal pincer movement by reviewing The Dark Knight Rises before The Dark Knight? Stay tuned to upcoming and exciting (perhaps, anything’s possible, but most at least one of the following four episodes will be moderately amusing) episodes to find out.

Now please forgive us. We have to return some videotapes. D-FENS.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
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Letterboxd (follow us!):
Ken: Ken Koral
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