Darren Mooney
@darrenmooney
As seen/read/heard at: Second Wind | The 250 | Irish Independent | NewsTalk | Q102 | Polygon | The Escapist. He/Him.
Obviously been thinking about "The Odyssey" all day. But thinking a lot about how, unsurprisingly given Nolan's influences and taste, you can see so much of "Excalibur", "Kingdom of Heaven" and "Dune" in it. While being entirely its own thing.
I’m not a huge “fidelity” guy, but as a kid who studied classics in nerd camp and who re-read “The Odyssey” recently, I was surprised at how keenly Nolan engages with what the poem is *actually* about. What becomes of a people that burns all rules of civil society to the ground?
“In an age of apparent magic…” In the same way that “Disclosure” is in part the movie you make after making “The Fabelmans”, “The Odyssey” feels like Nolan working through what “Oppenheimer” left on the table. A stunning study of the imperial boomerang rendered as an arrow.
It kinda rocks that Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta made the leap from “Cillian Murphy Scarecrow” to “J. Robert Oppenheimer down to the cigarette in his mouth Scarecrow.” Two of the best to ever do it.
#Moana is… not great. While better than the worst of the live action remakes it has all the same basic issues But what is staggering, to paraphrase @donaldclarke.bsky.social, is the extent to which Dwayne Johnson is miscast as himself. Dwayne Johnson cosplaying as Dwayne Johnson.
Shoutout to @lighthousecinema.bsky.social, just blaring the “Interstellar” soundtrack before the “Moana” premiere.
Been reading and enjoying the Ram V and Mike Perkins’ “The Swamp Thing” omnibus. Good comics. (The Swamp Thing #4.)
Really curious if Tom Holland's awakening under Nolan ends up sticking or if it's just like Robert Downey Jr.'s brief reawakening with Nolan and Park Chan-wook that ends up feeling like a weird interlude.
Revisiting "Oppenheimer", and thinking about how one of the movie's smarter creative choices is contextualising the revolution in physics to the revolutions in culture and politics. Socialism. Rite of Spring. The Waste Land. Modern art. The understanding of the world changing.
It’s been quite clearly reported that August was the latest date that Warners would allow “TENET” to open theatrically. (It eventually went to September, so it’s safe to say he was in no rush.) It’s also been made clear the claims he wanted to be the first film back in theatres is nonsense.
As a starting assumption, you’d have to prove that he pushed it. Which he has come out and explained that he didn’t. Warners made the choice. He’d have been happy waiting like Cruise did at Paramount.
I love that the part of Nolan's brain that went "there must be a reason why Batman's gauntlets have scallops?" is clearly the same part that asked "there must be a reason why Elizabeth Debicki is so tall?" And settled on, "So she can drive a car from the backseat with her feet."
The iconic "... we shall fight them on the beaches..." line, read by a kid with a wavering voice, plays over a shot of the body of a British soldier washed up on the shore. Nolan makes a point to build to the speech's real point - a desperate plea to "the New World." (America.)
Love the ending of "Dunkirk." Nolan puts Churchill's "... we shall fight them on the beaches..." speech in the mouth of a scared kid. Building to a shot of a burning British war machine, and silence as the boy realising he's going to be sent back out to war to die. Then black.
Apparently people are ranking the best comic book movies ever made, so here’s my ballot.
It is shocking to me, for example, the degree to which big flagship superhero blockbusters like "Avengers: Infinity War" and "Avengers: Endgame" seem so much smaller and so much cheaper, frankly. Actors who were never on set together green-screened into computer-generated voids.
It has always been disappointing to me that modern blockbusters even with vastly inflated budgets feel so anemic with this stuff. Even the action scenes on location (in, say "Tron: Ares") use only a couple of vehicles and a handful of extras, occasionally padding it out with copious CGI.
Rewatching "The Dark Knight Rises." Struck by the chase forty minutes in. It so much more effective as spectacle than anything most modern superhero movies will do, actually putting twenty-plus cars and dozens of extras in a real location shot at night. Not all in a CGI void.
This is not an empirical measure of anything, but I’ve had a couple of my younger sister’s friends text me over the past few days about “The Odyssey” and movie formats. I think we might be on the cusp of something special here. Gen Z, they yearn for cinema.
My movie-watching this year has focused on what the kids call "the big three."
Quietly, the most charming piece of corporate synergy in “Minions and Monsters”, which includes shoutouts to King Kong, Jaws and (not Lee Cronin’s) the Mummy, is the way it preemptively claims the Cyclops as a Universal Monster.