The Sound of Metal, Tenet, Mank

Hey guys,

Some new things:

1. Tenet. Christopher Nolan and his favorite things. Espionage, memory, playing with time, visual gimmicks, minimalist adrenaline-pumping mood music, and lots of stoic dry dialogue that in this case you probably need captions to follow. Definitely intriguing, just not sure it adds up to much without reading the fan theories and essays.
   
   I miss Interstellar. Transcends reality more than his other efforts, maybe because it's built more directly from it.
   

2. Mank. Dialogue followed by dialogue. As is the case with so many Fincher films. What's cool about this experience is the tremendous effort he and the sound team went through to simulate old low-fi movie dialogue and our memory of experiencing it.
   
   Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross went more old school too - listen to the score.
   
   I wished the film used its techniques to say something more about the private, truthful things hidden by artificiality, style, and the demands of the time. See Far From Heaven depicting a classic suburban household and real-life taboos shattering through.
   

3. Mank is about the Citizen Kane writer. Check out this piece on Kane's place in the great cinema pantheon. I saw Kane at a crucial time, in high school, in Modern English class, when my tastes were starting to become more adult and the possibilities of storytelling were mammoth and terrifying. It had a huge impact on how I thought about structure and theme. It was dethroned from the pedestal of "greatest film" by Vertigo, and no complaints there; I saw Vertigo in Film Studies class 2 years later and liked it just as much. This is what high school education should be like.
   

4. The Sound of Metal. Don't let it get lost among the more high-profile flicks. It moved me the most. Very well-crafted structure, hitting its beats in the right places and hitting them well.
   
   Writer/director Darius Marder is one of the credited writers on The Place Beyond the Pines, which was pretty good, though I know from early drafts it could've been better.
   
   After watching Metal, you do question some logic and realize the simplistic turns it takes. But that doesn't detract from Riz Ahmed's and Olivia Cooke's performances or the chance to observe life in a deaf recovering addicts community. It's a film about a musician that loses his hearing, and it really does communicate that experience through the sound mix.
   

5. Listening to this. Wim Hof is amazing. For anyone that wants to explore more, here's the Wim Hof Method.

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Chris