See this is one where I think it’s EASY to show why you keep trying.
Gene Siskel said you know a movie is good if it’s better than a documentary about the same actors having dinner together. And I think Chinatown easily passes that bar.
This is why I have always seen his thumbs up review for “My Dinner With Andre” as a backhanded compliment to Gregory and Shawn.
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LMAO hmm 
I plan to watch Oppenheimer, but you won’t find much resistance from me to your broadsides at Nolan in general. I regard him as a good director, but not nearly the historically elite one that some seem to see him as. His stuff is hit-or-miss for me. My overall dislike for Inception probably automatically leaves me on the other side of some line of demarcation.
The Coens definitely have a higher hit rate for me, and with higher highs.
Re: Tarantino, I still haven’t seen Jackie Brown even though I’ve seen and enjoyed most of his catalog (didn’t like Hateful Eight at all, but that’s the only one I can think to speak of unkindly…Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, both Kill Bills, Django, Inglorious Basterds all get varying strong marks from me). I realize the failure to see Jackie Brown is a hole in my resume.
Go on 
It’s a huge hole.
It shouldn’t really be seen as a Tarantino movie. It’s an Elmore Leonard novel adapted by Tarantino. So I mean the enthusiasm and pacing of Tarantino, and then the rhythm and storytelling chops of one of the greatest western/crime fiction authors of all time.
Adaptations of his other works are similarly acclaimed. Out of Sight was adapted as an early Soderbergh movie. Get Shorty is an insanely funny movie (didn’t see the TV show).
Get Shorty as a movie is even more funny when you realize the Danny Devito character Martin Weir is presented as “what if the world reacted to Danny Devito as tho he were Dustin Hoffman.”
Who at the time was seen as a more dramatic but just as hot (and short) version of Tom Cruise.
That film found savvy Miami-based loan shark Chili Palmer (John Travolta) tracking a debtor all the way to the sunny/smoggy vistas of Los Angeles and eventually looking to leave his life of crime behind to start anew in the movie biz. It also found him learning the hard way that show business is every bit as cutthroat as the gangster game, with various industry “insiders” endlessly testing both his wit and his will. Those who’ve seen Get Shorty know full well that Chili’s Hollywood adventure is as dangerous as it is hilarious. And those who haven’t should know Get Shorty is a crime comedy masterpiece that should head to the top of your “must-see” queue with utmost haste.
Tarantino, as you’ll recall from Jackie Brown, is a HUGE Elmore Leonard fan and turned out to be the reason John Travolta accepted the role after turning it down twice.
However, according to the Los Angeles Times, when Travolta was offered the role of Chili Palmer, he surprisingly turned it down — twice. Turns out, the man who finally convinced Travolta to take the role of Chili Palmer was his Pulp Fiction director, Quentin Tarantino, who reportedly told the actor, “John, this is not the one you say no to. This is the one you say yes to.” Thankfully, Travolta did “say yes,” and he cemented his “comeback kid” status with a Golden Globe win to boot.
The sequel Be Cool is an excellent book referenced by no less than Stephen King in “On Writing” and William Goldman in “Which Lie Did I Tell?” Despite bringing back Travolta and adding BIG name music star cameos, the movie adaptation is absolute trash.
But the book? I love to quote the opening dialogue.
“Terrific movie. And you know what else? It was good.”
And hey you know that show Justified? Based on Elmore Leonard’s stories about Raylan Givens. The pilot still retains the title of the primary novel used as source material.
You should watch Jackie Brown and Get Shorty ASAP.
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Get Shorty is a good book and a great movie. Be Cool is a good book and a bad movie, imo.
A wonderful review or obituary on Leonard noted that violence is so common in his books that people die in dependent clauses.
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Oh I don’t have any particularly harsh words. I’ve just watched it twice and I found it uninteresting both times. It’s wild to me that it’s #15 in the IMDb all-time top 250. The only thing about it I really love is the musical score. (I suppose the really rabid Nolan fans, of which there seem to be many, probably would consider this tepid criticism to be “particularly harsh” since I’m failing to sufficiently genuflect or something.)
I’ve watched two seasons of Justified. It’s a good show. I knew that about the book since I think it gets mentioned in the credits or something.
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Inception suffered from its long action sequences where a bunch of randoms flie around like the A Team or something… the idea and execution is mostly great but could lose like 20 minutes.
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Inside with Wilem Defoe is about 40 minutes too long and has a garbage fucking ending.
Did he have magnet hands to climb up the inside of the verticle vent shaft?
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Yes. They were left over from the corn bin shaft he used to cure himself of vampirism.
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Now we are getting into it.
Other things I thought I liked about Nolan films that were actually due to other people:
The music? Hans Zimmer
The cinematography? Wally Pfister
The screenplays? Jonathan Nolan
The editing? Lee Smith
Say what you will about Nolan, but he’s one of the only people out there bringing big budget non-franchise films to theaters: Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, Oppenheimer
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Grinding my way through Criterion’s AI collection. I was hyped for John Carpenter’s early sci-fi- stoner comedy Dark Star, which had some interesting stuff going on but the humor didn’t quite land for me. You can totally imagine James Cameron taking notes for his Alien franchise I would bet real money this was an influence. I would for sure recommend this if you are super high, I mean even higher than I was.
I’m halfway through After Yang, so far a very sweet story about raising a family in the age of internet/technology addiction. If you liked Colin Farrel in Banshees, it’s a similar vibe.
Not much to say about Zardoz/Ghost in the Shell, those are obvious must-see cult masterpieces if you haven’t already seen them.
Nolan is my least favourite famous director but Oppenheimer is worth seeing. It’s his best movie since Dark Knight. Really it’s his only good movie since then imo.
I suppose I shouldn’t just remark on Inception being #15 all-time on IMDb without acknowledging the ludicrousness of The Dark Knight being #3. That’s a really strong movie, but c’mon now.
The Nolan fans, in a coordinated effort, tried desperately for The Dark Knight to be #1 overall, and in doing so knocked The Godfather from its rightful perch permanently. I remember when this was happening, I wandered into a message board somewhere with some poster giving a rallying cry to get people to keep making new accounts to do this. I distinctly remember the poster saying, “Let’s get fucking aggressive!” I was only left to hold my head in my hands in sadness that such people exist. I hadn’t encountered review-bombing before. And to think, this would prove to be the least toxic rendition of it, since then the nerd-culture fanbases took over and started bullying women/POC/members of the LGBTQ community every time a nerd movie included them.
Anyway, it does put it in my head that he has a bunch of goddamn weirdos in his fanbase, and while I try not to hold such things against him, these weirdos have invariably made themselves part of the discourse of every movie of his that gets released.
(To be clear: still going to see Oppenheimer. Still optimistic that I’ll hopefully like it. Still likely to watch Nolan’s movies in general. Definitely not participating in any us vs. them shit about Oppenheimer vis a vis Barbie, which I will also watch; it’s obviously not an either/or choice.)
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You didn’t think Interstellar was good? I enjoyed the hell out of that one.
Hard for me to understand how people don’t like Inception, but I think I just like most movies and others are more picky
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I loathed it. The sound mix is a crime against cinema.
At least Inception had a fresh sci-fi concept. It’s a heist movie where dudes break into someone’s dreams, dude what? I think if we’re going to be mad at the constant flow of repetitive Disney/Marvel stuff we have to be forgiving when someone comes in with a fun new idea.
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Sure, I appreciate the uniqueness of the idea. I would prefer the result be that I like the movie, which is why I tried twice.
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