Review: "Tenet"

So.

Well.

…yeah.

This is what we waited almost half a year for? After seeing the entire spring and summer movie season swallowed by -- well, you know -- it was finally time for some big-budget, big-name movie-making.

Christopher Nolan -- “Dunkirk,” “Inception,” “Interstellar” -- yeah, that guy. His new creation, “Tenet,” with a $225 million budget (reputedly). John David Washington, Denzel’s boy and the rising star of “BlacKkKlansman.” A high-tech spy franchise supposedly with enough thrills to put James Bond to shame.

And my first trip to a movie theater in six months.

High hopes? Yes, certainly up there. Admittedly, probably, a bit too high. But this? This?

Nolan’s newest is a great big catastrophic mess. How messy? We’re talking toeing the line on sheer incomprehensibility, and often juking gleefully over the edge.

If you had trouble understanding “Memento,” then this movie is the “Hold my beer.”

“Tenet” is a strange, strange bird. It’s got tons of dialogue, long winding scenes of people jabbering away about inversion and freeports and grandfather paradoxes and plutonium 241 and Goya paintings and a bunch of other stuff.

And you. Cannot. Understand it. At all.

There are several reasons why. Primarily the over-complicated plot in which some evil mastermind wants to end the world using time travel. Well, not traveling through time per se, but reversing time. So objects and, eventually, people can actually move through time in opposite directions. More on that in a bit.

Then there’s Nolan’s well-documented penchant for having sound effects and thundering music drowning out the dialogue. (Ludwig Göransson subs in for Nolan’s pet composer, Hans Zimmer, though based on the thundering bass and dissonant chords, it’s mimicry rather than departure.)

And we have a sprawling international cast using all sorts of accent flavors, often spoken rapidly and underneath their full breath. There’s Kenneth Branagh’s vowel-twisting Russian arms dealer, Sator, who is (we think) the chief villain. And his kept wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), in clipped high-class British tones. And a warbling Indian power broker (Dimple Kapadia).

Heck, Michael Caine turns up for a bit, and he’s the most comprehensible of the lot.

Here’s how the movie plays out: there will be an exciting but bizarre action scene. Then a whole bunch of talking to explain what just happened. Then a bunch more talking to set up the next set-piece. But we can’t understand the talking, so we have to amble our way through the chases and explosions, trying so hard to make sense of what we’re seeing it carries no emotional weight.

Because it’s Christopher Nolan, the movie is sleek and shiny and moves well. Some of the bang-bang scenes play quite nicely, including a heist of a MacGuffin from a moving truck using a variety of other trucks. And a bungee-cord assault on a skyscraper.

Branagh brings genuine menace as a controlling monster who keeps his wife pressed beneath his very thumb. This, despite the fact the stork-like Debecki towers above him, and everyone else for that matter. She resembles a normal woman whom God stretched out like taffy.

“Tenet” is not actually the name of Washington’s character, who simply calls himself The Protagonist. As the story opens he has just passed a particularly cruel test to be admitted to the top echelon of spydom and entrusted with this Most Important Mission. Robert Pattinson plays Neil, a smirking playboy wingman who can pick the locks of a lot of closed doors. He’s got foppy hair and a floppy lilt. (Again, hard to make out.)

The science is left deliberately fuzzy, something to do with a nuclear blast inverting the flow of electrons so the object moves backward rather than forward in time, I think. So a bullet hole will appear before the gun has been fired, and so on.

This results in decidedly weird, borderline comical combat scenes in which one person is moving forward in time and the other in reverse. It’s a lot of fumbling around and actions that miss the mark wildly; reminds me of my early love life. Eventually we get entire battles scenes of this.

Everything’s so utterly serious in “Tenet,” as if the movie can’t see itself and grasp how ridiculous it is. “We’re living in a twilight world” is a passcode some of the spies use when they find themselves in a situation where they’re unsure of what’s what, and boy do I know how that feels.

Review: "The Aeronauts"

“The Aeronauts” has a great, rousing aerial adventure story to tell and a pair of engaging characters to carry it. It’s a thrilling piece of white-knuckle historical entertainment.

But there’s a big “but.”

It didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film, but it’s worth talking about. More on that in a bit.

Eddie Redmayne plays James Glaisher, a noted scientist and “aeronaut,” which was the term for people who flew in hot-air balloons before there were airplanes. He was a pioneer of meteorology, arguing mankind had the ability to predict the weather.

As played skillfully by Redmayne, Glaisher is a bookworm with an obstinate streak, a hardscrabble young striver determined to show up his scientist elders who scoff at his crackpot theories. What he lacks in charisma he makes up for in mettle.

The uppity yin to his sour yang is Felicity Jones as Amelia Rennes. She is a celebrated aeronaut pilot who shows up to her launches in pure carnival mode -- including somersaults, doggie sidekick and crowd-pleasing boasts. Rennes understands that balloon flight is as much showbiz as science, and without an audience and financial backers, nobody goes up.

She’s a brash proto-feminist who knows how to please the masses while brusquely pushing aside the all-male power structures that would limit her achievements.

Jones’ is by far the more delightful and proactive character, and the bulk of the death-defiance is performed by Rennes. If you’ve seen the trailer for the film, directed by Tom Harper from a script by Jack Thorne, you already know about the scenes where she clambers up the side of the balloon while thousands of feet in the icy air.

Clearly, this film will prove a special challenge for those with acrophobia. I can’t even get up on a 6-foot ladder without getting the willies, so you can imagine how I felt during all the yawning shots of the ground staring at us from far below.

Trust me, the CGI special effects are very convincing.

The story centers on an attempt by the British to set a new height record in 1862, after the dastardly French had taken the crown. Aeronauts would plunge into the open skies without oxygen tanks, braving frigid temperatures, howling winds and mind-twisting atmospheric conditions. More than a few died.

It was a historic achievement by Glaisher, though not terribly well remembered today. So “The Aeronauts” gives us the pleasure of rediscovering a bit of forgotten lore.

You will notice I just mentioned Glaisher and did not write “and Rennes.” Here comes the “but.”
Rennes is a completely invented figure. Glaisher did not have a female partner during his ascent.

That’s fine as far as it goes – movies are wont to change history all over the place if it serves their storytelling purpose. (For example, the real Glaisher was an established scientist in his 50s in 1862, not a boyish Redmayne lookalike.)

And it’s good to recognize the overlooked role women have played in the advancement of science and discovery over the centuries. Rennes is based on some notable real-life women aeronauts, especially Sophie Blanchard. In the movie, Rennes lost her husband in an earlier ballooning tragedy, as did Blanchard.

Except Glaisher did have an actual partner for the flight, named Henry Coxwell. And he gets written out of the story entirely.

Coxwell was also middle-aged and a dentist to boot, so not nearly as exciting as a woman daredevil performing showstopper stunts.

I’m not sure how I feel about the switcheroo. Historians should be affronted – imagine doing a movie about Lewis & Clark and they swap out Clark for a nonexistent female explorer. Certainly if I was one of Clark’s descendants, I’d be pretty irked.

But I’m here to review movies, not get all intersectional on ya.

I say “The Aeronauts” is a terrific piece of entertainment, even if it treats the historical record as dead weight, like a sand bag to be untied so the balloon can soar higher.

Video review: "Yesterday"

“Yesterday” is a feel-good romantic dramedy that telegraphs all its punches, but even though you know everything that’s going to happen, it’s still emotionally satisfying.

The set-up is that a struggling Indian-British musician gets bonked on the head in a traffic accident. When he wakes up, he’s astonished to learn that nobody in the world but him knows the music of the Beatles.

It’s as if the greatest (in some people’s opinion) rock band of all time had never existed, except Jack (Himiseh Patel) still has all those iconic songs at his fingertips. So he sets out to become the greatest overnight sensation in the history of popular music, passing off the tunes of George, Ringo, John and Paul as his very own.

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Richard Curtis don’t bother with the metaphysical causes of this event. This isn’t science fiction, it’s a comedic pluck at the heartstrings.

Lily James plays Ellie, Jack’s erstwhile manager/best friend/secret admirer. She’s been driving him around to penny-ante gigs and bucking up his spirits for years. Of course, we all know this is going to build toward a big reveal of suppressed emotions.

How very British.

The story wearily treads through some of the staples of the romantic comedy genre -- misunderstandings based on overheard conversations, or building toward a big conversation that gets interrupted by a phone call or knock at the door.

Kate McKinnon, Joel Fry and Ed Sheeran round out the supporting cast, playing a mercenary music producer, feel-good buddy/roadie and himself, respectively.

“Yesterday” is a whipped sundae of a film -- not very substantial or nutritious, but engineered to deliver easy, sweet pleasures. That it does, along with a lot of great music.

Video extras are quite good. There’s an alternate opening and ending, a dozen deleted scenes and a gag reel.

Boyle and Curtis team up for a feature-length commentary track, and also have their own documentary featurette. There are similar shorts about McKinnon, Sheeran, a performance by Patel at Abbey Road Studios, and more.

Movie: 4 Yaps

Extras: 4 yaps

Review: "Yesterday"

“Yesterday” is a little bit daffy, a little bit sappy and lotta bit heartwarming.

This does not seem like something out of the oeuvre of Danny Boyle, the British director known for “Trainspotting,” “127 Hours,” “28 Days Later” and other dire portraits of humanity at its brink. But then he also made “Slumdog Millionaire,” a fairy tale-ish story about an Indian kid changing his life by winning a game show, and it’s to that more tenderhearted, hopeful skew that this film belongs.

But then, he is paired with screenwriter Richard Curtis, an expert heartstring-puller: “Love Actually,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral” as well as the criminally unseen “About Time.”

Himesh Patel plays Jack Malik, a 27-year-old Indian-Brit who’s been trying to make it as a singer -- and failing spectacularly. His gigs consist of street warbling for tips, dive bars and kids’ birthday parties. Pretty much his only fan is Ellie (Lily James), his childhood friend and erstwhile manager.

She drives him around, bucks him up and -- because this is a romantic comedy -- is ravishingly in love with him, despite Jack being completely blinkered about it.

He’s ready to pitch it in when a strange thing happens -- a worldwide electrical blackout, possibly caused by solar flares, during which he is clocked by a bus. When he wakes up in the hospital, he is astonished to discover that nobody else has ever heard of The Beatles. When he strums out “Yesterday” for his friends, they are entranced and wonder at how such a mediocre musician wrote a masterpiece.

Jack quickly realizes his opportunity: he can pass off the entire Beatles songbook as his own work, instantly catapulting to fame and fortune. Of course, there are bumps along the way, like indifferent parents (Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal), difficulty recalling some of the lyrics and the lack of recording equipment.

A nice local fellow named Gavin (Alexander Arnold) provides the latter, and Jack also gets a boost from Ed Sheeran, playing himself, who invites Jack to be his opening act and is quickly eclipsed by him. It’s an odd, anxious turn for a real-life star, who at one point challenges Jack to a speed songwriting contest, only to be bested by John, Paul, Ringo and George.

Patel is a winning presence and a pretty decent singer, too. I also liked James a lot, squishing up her face and doing a charming/frumpy thing that would’ve been played by Winona Ryder 25 years ago.

My patience wore thin at some of the obvious romcom baggage, like Ellie waiting a decade and a half to tell Jack that she cares for him, and then making unreasonable demands at the moment he begins to return her favor. Or the constant interruption of pivotal conversations by ringing phones or intruding people.

There’s a silent mode, Jack!

Kate McKinnon turns up fairly late as Debra, a mercenary producer from L.A. who is quite open about the fact that she views Jack as a “product” who will make her money. She sets him up with a bunch of phony marketing types and frets about his image. “Is this the best that you can look?” she asks.

Even though it’s totally a Kate-McKinnon-doing-her-SNL-shtick turn, I still welcomed the comic relief. Some is also supplied by Joel Fry as Rocky, who’s the dimwitted screw-up of Jack’s social circle but also kindhearted and genuine. Rocky becomes Jack’s roadie/body man/spirit guide, keeping him (mostly) on schedule and humble.

And, of course, there’s the glory of all that Beatles music. I risk eternal damnation and a Twitter pox by opining that I think the Beatles are a really good band that somehow got exalted to GOAT status. Still, toe-tapping will unavoidably commence.

“Yesterday” takes a lot of obvious turns, though there are a few unexpected ones that demonstrate a little more storytelling ambition. Jack is increasingly haunted by thoughts that he will be exposed as a fraud, which leads to a final act that is both farfetched and emotionally pleasing.

A few discordant notes aside, it’s a lovely tune of a tale.