Send us a Text Message.

This week, the TGTPTU’s untrademarked “temporal pincer movement” catches up with the boys as THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012), Sir Christopher Nolan’s conclusion to his Batman trilogy, gets covered before his penultimate The Dark Knight. Sir Chris has been quoted as saying, “There are no good third sequels, basically—Rocky III maybe,” and this week Ken, Ryan, and returning former host and editor Jack gang up to defend the film against Thomas’s lackluster appreciation for the film that ends the Nolan franchise.

Additional to Sir Nolan and Dame Emma Thomas expressing feelings that they were content with where and how The Dark Knight ended, production of a sequel was complicated by the death of Heath Ledger as Joker, a major draw of the preceding film and the basis for a rough idea Sir Nolan had if he decided to make a third film. Instead of whatever might have been, the Brothers Nolan wrote a movie about Batman’s retirement inspired by the French Revolution as told by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities that brought us Nolan-versions of Catwoman (Anne Hathaway who will star in Interstellar, Nolan’s next film and part of TGTPTU’s previously pairing) and Robin (Joseph Gordon-Levitt who had starred in Inception, Nolan’s previous film covered in TGTPTU’s next and final pairing).

It’s a race against the calendar clock as Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has to heal himself from a back broken by big baddy Bane (Tom Hardy) in order to escape an underground prison-hole in the desert by making a leap of faith and back to Gotham before an atomic bomb set to explode in a mere five months can go off and destroy the city he’s sworn to protect, a city with the majority of its police squad trapped underground, a city judicially administered by a kangaroo court presided over by Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) while Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is laid up in a hospital bed working with the Boy Wonder who consults the Gotham permitting office and discovers Bane’s nefarious plan. Or, as Jack suggests, the plot is simply a proper British gentleman with stiff upper lip seated cross-legged on the plush carpet of his country manor smashing action figures together.

Listen for technical difficulties band-aided on mic by the show’s former editor Jack; to Ken lose his cohosts with American football jokes; and bat scrotum. Also for your ears’ pleasure, each host cycles through their impersonation, allowing the listener to judge who does the best Bane impression… for you.

See you next week for the exciting concluding pincered pair of Dark Knight and Inception. Same Bat time, same Bat channel.


THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTU
Instagram: https://instagram.com/thegoodthepodandtheugly?igshid=um92md09kjg0
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thegoodthepoda1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6mI2plrgJu-TB95bbJCW-g
Buzzsprout: https://thegoodthepodandtheugly.buzzsprout.com/
Letterboxd (follow us!):
Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias

Send us a Text Message.

TGTPTU Book Club returns this week with Sir Christopher Nolan’s first and only adaption, i.e., THE PRESTIGE (2006), with bookworm and repeat guest Shannon joining from The Bunker.

Post-Batman Begins, Sir Nolan returned to his love of puzzle-box stories to bring to life the work of another Chris (Christopher Priest) while casting a third Chris (Christian Bale) as a rival magician to a non-Chris (Hugh Jackman) to make one of top three magician rivalry movies wide-released in 2006.

Sir Nolan omits the present-day framing story around Priest’s novel to focus on the period and the rivalry between magicians Angier (Jackman) and Borden (Bale) as the former seeks revenge on the latter for his wife’s death (yes, it’s another rare Nolan movie with a dead wife but you actually get two dead ladies—BOGO (Bury One, Get One)—for your money ). Keeping with the novel, each magician has a secret that allows him to perform a teleported man trick, with Borden’s secret seeming to be the anticipated, singular trick of the movie until the rug-pull at the end when the Great Sir C. Nolan the Magnificent abracadabras Angier’s clone-killing conclusion for a prestige of his own .

Uncontroversially, Scarlett Johansson is poorly used as the rivalling magicians’ assistants while David Bowie gets one of the best entrances in cinema history portraying Nicholas Tesla, a man with his own bitter professional rivalry and a last name that is impossible to say 18 years after this movie premiered without thinking of the car, much like what once beset my great-grandmother Edsel and our uncle PT “Cruiser” Koral.

Listen along as Jason Statham pops in, award-winning thespian Michael Caine is put on blast by our special guest, and the hosts break down why this might be the most “Nolan-y” Nolan film Sir Chris has made.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTU
Instagram: https://instagram.com/thegoodthepodandtheugly?igshid=um92md09kjg0
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thegoodthepoda1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6mI2plrgJu-TB95bbJCW-g
Buzzsprout: https://thegoodthepodandtheugly.buzzsprout.com/
Letterboxd (follow us!):
Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias

Send us a Text Message.

INTERSTELLAR

In this week’s episode of TGTPTU, director-writer-producer Sir Christopher Nolan adds space to his repertoire of time-bending narratives as we venture deeper into The Nolan Void with INTERSTELLAR (2014).

The Nolan brothers return with cowriting credits, Nathan Crowley on production design, and Lee Smith as editor on this tale of global dust bowl devastation and human hope through American derring-do as the U.S.’s secret space program saves the planet (or at least itself, or perhaps only some of its elite, it’s not clearly defined) by reaching again for the stars (celestial bodies, not celebrities). But new this time to the Nolan crew (at least in this entropy-forward timeline of your hosts’ dimension, that being the same in which these notes are composed), the making of Interstellar brings on a new cinematographer, replacing pod fav Wally Pfister who’d been part of the creative team since Memento with the bear of a man and no slouch himself: Double Hoyte (aka Hoyte van Hoytema). Hoyte will stick with Nolan from this film on through the remainder of the later films already covered this season (again, frame of reference being an entropy-forward continuum) and who’ll provide this week’s Nolan innovation to shooting on IMAX when he lifts the somewhere just short of 100 lb (45 kilo) camera to film handheld.

With Interstellar, Sir Nolan becomes the marketing of the flick and a multidimensional threat as he joins hard-ish science fiction with his timey-wimey narratives. His rewrite of Jonah’s script, which was owned by Paramount and originally set to be directed by Steven Spielberg (a notable, still-living, Boomer American director; see our Season Six for further info on this influential movie brat), introduced into the story sacrifices of duty and fatherhood, the vagaries of time, and Matt Damon and omitted the original version’s People’s Republic of China robots and the discovery of fractal alien creatures who absorb sunlight to instead have its protagonist Cooper return to his daughter (and their farmhouse rebuilt as a museum on a spaceship playing unused Ken Burn’s documentary footage, it’s a whole thing) as a man-out-of-time with his robot (actually, Sir Nolan prefers the term “machine”) ex-soldier buddy TARS. Oh, and possible predestination with interdimensional book-nudging and coded dust.

Special for this week’s ep, listen to hear first-time pod guest Champlain Amy’s hot takes before they’re censored by the alphabet soup of the deep state; host Ken’s longest Tarantino rant to date; other host Ryan fake it ‘til he makes it; and third host Thomas stump hard for CASE in that ongoing, friendship-ending, family-shattering, international debate between Team CASE or Team TARS.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTU
Instagram: https://instagram.com/thegoodthepodandtheugly?igshid=um92md09kjg0
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thegoodthepoda1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6mI2plrgJu-TB95bbJCW-g
Buzzsprout: https://thegoodthepodandtheugly.buzzsprout.com/
Letterboxd (follow us!):
Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias