Reading · Tim Goodman / Bastard Machine

Last Thursday night it was hard to not be excited — standing in front of the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, a local treasure that has the only 70mm screen in Oregon, about to join hundreds of others at a 10:15 p.m opening night screening of Christopher Nolan’s three-hour “The Odyssey.”

It was going to be epic, because epic is what Nolan is known for and best at.

Even though I’m on vacation, I had thoughts of racing home and putting up a review for Friday morning. And then I realized something I had already known but conveniently buried in the excitement of watching a blockbuster in a format that’s hard to find:

I love the technical audacity and directorial skills of Nolan’s films, but they rarely move me.

I like to process most films I watch for a couple of days anyway, so that was my reasonable out for writing anything quickly — and there’s much IMAX and technical craft to process, surely, in “The Odyssey” — but driving home I was reminded of a very similar experience in that same theatre, with a Nolan epic:

I had left there after watching “Oppenheimer” and thinking, “Well, I wish there was more to move me. It was…fine.”

“The Odyssey” is a much different (and arguably better) film in many ways than “Oppenheimer,” but that’s two films in succession where the audience already knew the story. Granted, not everyone is up to date on the source material in Nolan’s latest — I read both “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” in college and my remembrances are likely as vague as yours, if you did the same. The larger issue is that knowing a story from start to finish can diminish the joy, unless there’s something else entirely at play.

With Nolan, that something else is always and forever a kind of magisterial artfulness of blockbuster filmmaking — just look at how 90 percent of the interviews he’s given for “The Odyssey” focus on the technical work of shooting entirely in IMAX and the innovations he’s employed in the process (the other 10 percent seem to mostly focus on how he pared down “The Odyssey” as a long and difficult book that became a mainstream movie; it’s a fine feat, but few people are raving about the writing).

In the New York Times, critic Manohla Dargis wrote: “Few directors close the divide between the art film and the blockbuster like Nolan does,” and I wouldn’t argue with that spot-on summation. However you digest “The Odyssey” when you’ve finally seen it will relate in some way to your expectations of a Hollywood blockbuster. I have almost no expectations other than to be entertained or in some way impressed, by blockbusters. I’m not the kind who loves a blockbuster. But the vast output from Nolan has almost always been both entertaining and impressive.

And so I watch. Yet his films just don’t transport me in the way that I desire cinema to thrill me. I’m always feeling the blockbuster in the experience and only getting periodic moments of the art film, if I’m looking at his work through the description that Dargis used.

As context: I absolutely loved “One Battle After Another,” (also seen at The Hollywood Theatre), a film that felt like a blockbuster but was firmly rooted in the arthouse. There are more examples, but that’s the best recent one.

I think part of that comes down to the fact that Nolan is a much better director than he is a writer, which is not breaking news, and in all of his feature films — I’ve seen every one except for “Insomnia” and “The Prestige” — the appeal for me has always been his directorial flourishes, his visual ambition. The stories, outside of “Memento” and “Dunkirk” haven’t been able to compete with what he does visually (again, taking into consideration the two I haven’t seen, which are perhaps more story-forward).

So, yes, I quite enjoyed the spectacle of “The Odyssey” and would like to see it again after the lines die down, on the biggest screen possible. I love to read about the craft of what Nolan does and I’m excited to return to see it a second time with more of that information in my head.

But the reason I took five days to write about “The Odyssey” speaks to how there are, for me, different ways to be “blown away” by a film, and Nolan’s work always seems to land in that less emotionally relevant area, more craft than art, where I’m in no real rush to shout about it.

In the best possible way, “The Bureau” has taken over my life. In the process, it has made evaluating other current series something where I have to keep the asterisk of this great series in mind when judging them. It’s not fair to compare anything on TV right now to what the “The Bureau” is delivering. Watching with Viewing Wife KB, our lives have been wonderfully hijacked, and we are now in the middle of the fourth season (and “co-watching” that from different locations, as she’s back in the Bay Area for work). If you missed this piece, check it out:

“The Bureau” is yet another excellent proof of concept example of why it doesn’t matter when a television series aired for it to be essential (just like films).
On Monday night, four days after it dropped, which is telling, I watched the third episode of “Silo” on Apple TV — a series I’ve loved for the past two seasons. That’s the series where I had to admit that “The Bureau” is making watching most anything else unfair. While I’m not sure I love the direction this season of “Silo” is going (or more accurately, has started), watching an episode right after an episode of “The Bureau” was, to keep things timely, like reading The Odyssey and then reading the Cliff Notes version of it, an analogy that probably only makes sense in my head, but I’m sure you get the gist, with no offense to “Silo” or any other series I’m currently watching.
The World Cup has ended, and for a lot of newbies to soccer it was quite the revelation. Even people who don’t normally watch seemed to find at least some instances, when they did, to catch some of its fever — usually in a pub or a place with lots of other people, which is the ideal way to watch. Beyond that, though, many of the matches were thrilling and the spectacle and controversies and side stories were all worth absorbing, even if the toll (for me) was less time for other things. But let’s not kid ourselves — I spent that time basking in one of the greatest espionage stories ever, television or film. And I’m not yet done. The forgotten French gem is more responsible than the world’s “beautiful game” for stealing my time.
I believe that since the beginning of July, at least, we’ve entered that Summer Season where more time is spent outside or on vacations than rooted in front of a television or seeking escape in a movie theater. Things generally pick up at the end of August, I know. (Though there will be plenty to see before then.) So perhaps this a good time to remind people that my first subscription sale in four years will be over by the end of August, so if you’re interested in locking in at a great rate, now’s the time:

Get 30% off forever

One of the elements I always tout about being a paid subscriber is that you have access to the Archive, which has everything I’ve written about and, as “The Bureau” proves, much of the criticism and discovery is timeless. I’m proud of the depth in there and the deep dives on series that can help you curate your viewing without much effort. Here’s where to find it:

Film & TV: Field Notes.

Comments