Microblog Memes

Chekhov’s dog: if it shows up in Act 1, it’s definitely not just going for a walk.

If you listen carefully, there's someone speaking in Norwegian in that scene. If you translate it it says: watch the movie and information is revealed

I'm never watching Mulholland Drive with that bitch.

I didn’t find TENET confusing at all. I feel like it makes perfect sense if you actually pay attention.

ME: I dunno Hon, let's watch and find out.

THE HON: [Pulls out phone to look it up] Siri says it's because ...

Everybody talking about Tenet and I'm just here wondering when the hell there was a theatrical screening of The Thing that I missed. 🫤

There are types of Tenet watchers

One who doesn't know what the fuck is happening.

And the other who doesn't want to admit that they don't know what the fuck is happening.

Then there's Christopher Nolan laughing at us, because he made the movie as confusing as possible, because one upon a time, he witnessed someone committing the horrific sin of watching Interstellar on a 720p 4.5" Android Phone¹, so he decides to enact this revenge arc by making a movie in the 5th dimention that nobody but his 5d brain can understand.

¹Yes I did that 👀

When this happens to me, I think it’s a bit of a mental decision between “They’re going to explain it, it’s meant to be mysterious now.” and “They explained it poorly”.

Biggest pet peeve is when the plot centers on one key character that people only talk about, and you never see. Or when one key piece of information is muttered in a heavy accent during five other things happening.

I of course love the former. I’ve been burnt by the latter many times, like “Oh, I should’ve rewound the movie.”

My wife is the worst about asking a question during a movie or TV show that gets answered within like 30 seconds of her asking. We call it pulling a [wife's name]

Tenet is an anti-film. You watch it and lose information as it goes on.

Tenet isn't terribly difficult to explain, though it's been too long since I've seen it for me to do it now. I remember watching it and being able to say, ok, it's not airtight, but I know what Nolan was trying to do with the movie at least. It's a very interesting idea, but while the execution has a normal amount of plot holes, they're exacerbated by a story that uses what seem like plot holes as a story device.

It hurts our brains because effect is preceding cause, and because most sci-fi stories with time travel use it in the same way as they might use a space ship: to travel to a different place that has only tangential effects on the main location (even though they may make a big noise about the Butterfly Effect, in reality it's rarely that severe) or to make nonsense shenanigans happen (things that have no basis in logic from any direction). Tenet actually did come up with a really interesting concept, and tried to give it interesting stakes, but got distracted by the shiny of "backwards bullets" and so let the logic suffer.

In that lady's defense, I'm pretty sure the opening scene of The Thing was intentionally written to make people go "what the fuck? why are they shooting at that dog?!"

Tenet reminds me of the game Braid.

Braid is a platformer where you can reverse time on demand. At first it seems so easy. Just reverse time any time you make a mistake. But then you encounter items that don't get reversed in time. At first this seems like an annoyance, but you have to learn how to utilize this odd behavior to advance in the game. It's a clever mechanic that's difficult to fully grasp.

It turns out that having some things exempt from the normal flow of time gets really complicated.

I had a friend once who, if I'd seen a film and they hadn't, would ask me questions every few minutes throughout the movie about things it was foreshadowing but hadn't fully shown yet. If not being omniscient is that painful, run to the bathroom, read the plot summary on Wikipedia, and come back – ruin the film for yourself on your own time.