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This week, the TGTPTU’s untrademarked “temporal pincer movement” catches up with the boys as THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012), Sir Christopher Nolan’s conclusion to his Batman trilogy, gets covered before his penultimate The Dark Knight. Sir Chris has been quoted as saying, “There are no good third sequels, basically—Rocky III maybe,” and this week Ken, Ryan, and returning former host and editor Jack gang up to defend the film against Thomas’s lackluster appreciation for the film that ends the Nolan franchise.

Additional to Sir Nolan and Dame Emma Thomas expressing feelings that they were content with where and how The Dark Knight ended, production of a sequel was complicated by the death of Heath Ledger as Joker, a major draw of the preceding film and the basis for a rough idea Sir Nolan had if he decided to make a third film. Instead of whatever might have been, the Brothers Nolan wrote a movie about Batman’s retirement inspired by the French Revolution as told by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities that brought us Nolan-versions of Catwoman (Anne Hathaway who will star in Interstellar, Nolan’s next film and part of TGTPTU’s previously pairing) and Robin (Joseph Gordon-Levitt who had starred in Inception, Nolan’s previous film covered in TGTPTU’s next and final pairing).

It’s a race against the calendar clock as Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has to heal himself from a back broken by big baddy Bane (Tom Hardy) in order to escape an underground prison-hole in the desert by making a leap of faith and back to Gotham before an atomic bomb set to explode in a mere five months can go off and destroy the city he’s sworn to protect, a city with the majority of its police squad trapped underground, a city judicially administered by a kangaroo court presided over by Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) while Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is laid up in a hospital bed working with the Boy Wonder who consults the Gotham permitting office and discovers Bane’s nefarious plan. Or, as Jack suggests, the plot is simply a proper British gentleman with stiff upper lip seated cross-legged on the plush carpet of his country manor smashing action figures together.

Listen for technical difficulties band-aided on mic by the show’s former editor Jack; to Ken lose his cohosts with American football jokes; and bat scrotum. Also for your ears’ pleasure, each host cycles through their impersonation, allowing the listener to judge who does the best Bane impression… for you.

See you next week for the exciting concluding pincered pair of Dark Knight and Inception. Same Bat time, same Bat channel.


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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.

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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.

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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.

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NOLAN VOID 3.5: WET 'N WILD WWII

Join TGTPTU for an hour, a day, a week—the approximate runtime of, how long it feels listening to us talk for, and the delay in releasing the episode due to internet issues, respectively—as we respectfully cover Sir Christopher Nolan’s DUNKIRK (2017) as part two of our third pairing in our NOLAN VOID season.

Surprisingly his shortest major release film, Sir Chris employs his time bending chops to retell the heroic(question mark) story of England’s bravely running away, away, bravely turning their tails and fleeing from the Nazis and the French through three intercut and overlapping tales with a cast strictly from the British Isles: young WWII soldiers played by mostly unknowns (with one notable Millennial icon exception) over a presumable span of a week try evacuating the French beach; cutie Barry Keoghan on a civilian boat sent to help evacuate Dunkirk over a day tries surviving a head wound caused by shell-shocked Cillian Murphy while Mark Rylance keeps a stiff upper lip and carries on; and, finally, over an hour of flight due to leaking fuel, Tom Hardy (Bane on a plane) provides air support shooting his machine gun from his Spitfire: pew-pew-pew (and if the movie feels like a run-on sentence, then perhaps this verbose paragraph is justified).

At approximately half the cost of INTERSTELLAR (preceding film yet to be discussed this season), Dame Thomas considers this a low-budget production of only $100M that used real equipment from the era for an air of verisimilitude. As mentioned last episode, experiences gained shooting on water will prepare the Nolan team for the wet work in TENET (subsequent film already discussed). Despite or because of this historical piece’s bending the war genre with little dialogue and absence of enemy combatants (Germans) portrayed, Dunkirk earned Sir Big Daddy Time his first Oscar nom for director but (spoiler for our second episode) not his last.

TGTPTU recommendation: Dunkirk is best watched in IMAX if you’re gonna.

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NOLANVOID FIVE!

For the first in our third set of NOLAN VOID pairings this week, TGTPTU hosts Ken and Thomas take on the surprisingly linear INSOMNIA (2002) with newly appointed co-host Ryan to introduce a new drinking game guaranteed to kill any participant: take a dose of an alcohol every time Kenneth says something about not wanting to compare Nolan’s adaption to the 1997 Stellan Skarsgård-starring Norwegian original… and then does exactly that.

Perhaps one reason for the linearity of Nolan film starring three previous Oscar-award winners (Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hilary Swank) was it has the unique distinction of being his only film without a screenplay credit by. Rather, scripting the adapted Insomnia was the work of Hillary Seitz who is also credited with writing a grand total of three movies: a never-released dark comedy Early Bird Special (small role with Jon Hamm), Eagle Eye (starring Indiana Jones’ son later of Transformers fame), and, in 2021, The Unforgivable (starring Sandra Bullock, Viola Davis, Vincent D’onfrio who we all know as Thor in Adventures in Babysitting), which received limited release and was Netflix top film for two weeks before being bumped by a film starring Mother!, Margaret Thatcher, Madea, Willy Wonka, Howard Hughes, and Hellboy (yes, of course, we’re mentioning the unmentionable Don’t Look Up).

Returning from Memento are both Wally Pfister as cinematographer (and will stay with Sir Chris until DK Rises) and Dody Dorn as editor (who leaves for Ridley Scott flicks after this) while old-timer David Julyan scores again (having done so previously for both Following and Memento).

This week, along with Ken gripes regularly comparing Nolan’s to the original, in a surprising twist Ryan and Thomas find themselves aligned in enjoying this Americanized thriller.

That Chris Nolan, don’t sleep on him.

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This week TGTPTU goes deeper into Season 12’s NOLAN VOID with TENET (2020), a title spelled the same forward and backward, and the progenitor of TGTPTU’s “temporal pincer movement” description of our podcast’s episode pairing methodology.

Instead of spoiling the episode with notes, here’s a transcript spoiling cohost Thomas’ plot summary:

We’re following one main person, played by John David Washington, who gets his guy but when he returns to get rid of bombs, he himself is saved by someone who is not from his crew nor the police nor of the terrorists but has a noticeable red charm like for identifying airport luggage on his pack.

Unfortunately when he gets back to the van, Washington’s undercover character appears to have been made, and so he’s getting his teeth pulled out at a train depot and is unable to take his cyanide pill but his buddy is able to slip him his and our protagonist is not dead but awakens with new teeth and has passed his test as the suicide pill was not real. Instead, it was all test; he’s now considered dead and can pursue a deeper danger that is only known as “Tenet” (and interlocking fingers).

Because of arms dealing or something, Protagonist meets his handler Neil (Robert Pattinson) who knows all about Protagonist, including that he prefers cola to soda water. They slingshot themselves onto an impenetrable building to meet an arms dealer who informs Protagonist the real baddie is a Russian oligarch who’s getting info from the future.

Protagonist travels to brunch with Michael Caine who plays Michael Caine to inform Protagonist that his entry point to the oligarch is his wife Katherine “Kat” Barton (Elizabeth Debicki) who had an art scam she’s being blackmailed for by her husband, so she meets Protagonist for dinner and husband oligarch (still unseen) isn’t happy and his goons arrive to take Protagonist into the kitchen to rough him up but instead get the business end of a cheese grater from Protagonist.

So now we’re at like Minute 40 and it’s a two-and-half-hour movie.

Oh, Branaugh’s got a fitness tracker, the radioactive material from heist is really the final piece from the future’s doomsday device that might not be set off in the future as Branaugh now has all the pieces and that fitness tracker is a deadman’s switch so Washington’s Protagonist and an army with turnstyle technology on a boat and Pattinson’s Neil get divided into two teams (one going forward, one backward) to raid the facility with the device while Debicki’s Kat is on a yacht with Branaugh to keep him from suiciding, although she wants to kill him.

Neil swaps sides between forward and backwards during the attack to save the day and, after saving the day because it hasn’t happened yet from one timeline maybe, needs to go back to the past—and his likely death (although Protagonist keeps this information compartmentalized).

Neil lets Protagonist know they will be friends in the future because that’s where he’s from and Protagonist notices a red doohickey we saw from the Opera scene. Movie continues because there was a cell phone and we find out that Protagonist appears to have mastered timey-wimey things because he saves Kat from being killed by the arms dealer from earlier to protect the Tenet secret by killing the arms dealer first, and everything’s fine and there are no repercussions. Yay!

Oh, spoilers. But you already knew that. Or you will.

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MEMENTO

Our Nolan Void Season continues with the first of our second pairing MEMENTO (2000). Many of you might suspect we would try writing these show notes in reverse, but, as that’d be too meta for us, we’ll leave that to some other aspiring writer with memory problems we know.

Speaking of self-referential memory problems, Memento was actually the film that couldn’t find distribution that Steven Soderberg claimed could be the bellwether of the death of the 90’s indie cinema wave (see our erroneous show notes for FOLLOWING, Season 12, Episode 1).

Listen past the awesome intro song for a surprise guest giving the plot synopsis this week, dogs barking not on command, and, to the eagle-eared listener, the return of the squeaky chair.

Sir Nolan upon reflection stated there was a greater leap between his first feature Following and Memento than any between project. He had to trust another behind the camera (Wally Pfister, who’d shoot this and the next six Nolan films and win an Academy Award for INCEPTION) and had union rules and budgeted shooting schedules (losing some days when relocated from Canada to the States). Eventual Dame Emma Thomas would not be the executive producer as she was working at a different company. Memento also would star professional actors, a stellar lineup perhaps thanks to the early interest of Brad Pitt in the role of the Leonard instead played by the amazing Guy Pearce and costarring two actors hot off the success of the MATRIX: Carrie-Anne Moss and Joey Pants.

Written concurrently with his younger brother (no “Sir”) Jonathan Nolan who’d develop his premise into a short story “Memento Mori” published in Esquire, the movie Memento follows an amnesiac and heavily tattooed protagonist Leonard (the former attribute part of but latter absent from the short story) as he pursues seeking revenge on his wife’s mysterious killer, having himself somehow contracted a condition similar to Sammy Jenkins, a man who allegedly retain all of his memories up to a specific moment of trauma but afterwards could form no new memories. But is there more similarities between Jenkins and Leonard than his memory triggered by the tattoo “Remember Sammy Jenkins” allows?

To unravel this story told backwards and to find a deeper understanding as its paired with next week’s TENET, cohosts Ken and Thomas are again joined by the provisional host Ryan, who also recorded the intro/outro music.

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