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The One With The Dream Stuff Inside Oppenheimer

INCEPTION

This week TGTPTU reaches the timey-wimey center of Season 12 as the Nolan Void temporal pincer pairing movement ends with INCEPTION (2010), Sir Chris’s studio-backed super-successful non-supes cinema experience and his first Oscar nom for Best Picture--and finally winning pod-fav Wally Pfister his Best Cinematography trophy after being nominated for his previous three Nolan flicks.

Inception tells the story of blah-blah-blah, some (too many?) rules, not really all that dreamy, but hella cool. And to tell that story, Nolan brought in no one. Just himself, his first (and his second Oscar-nominated) solo screenplay since Memento and, since guerilla shooting on the mean (and friendly) streets of London for Following, his first property that’s entirely original (not based on another’s idea, unless the late-80s, two-season TV series Freddy’s Nightmares counts).

Fall asleep with cohosts Ken and Ryan as Thomas’s synopsis goes too long, wake up with their proposed needle-drops, trace when DiCaprio’s Dom isn’t wearing a wedding band, and wonder at the terror posed by the children’s song with the eternal question of Row-Row-Row-Your-Boat: What if life is but a dream?

Just like Dom’s ageless kids, we’ll be lurking around for a dramatic conclusion next week, which we welcome you to join us for discussion of Paprika as we wrap Season 12 like we did Season 11.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

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Ken: Ken Koral
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TGTPTU reaches the beginning of the end of Season 12 as the team covers THE DARK KNIGHT (2008), the penultimate NOLAN VOID film in our temporal pincer pairing movement.

Rebounding from the only moderate success of The Prestige, Sir Chris creates a mega-blockbuster with The Dark Knight, his follow-up to Batman Begins and a film that compresses at minimum two movie’s worth of story into one film in order to prevent promising Warner Brothers another sequel. (Spoiler for last week’s episode, Nolan makes a third Batman film that 75% of TGTPTU hosts think is great.) The Dark Knight is also a film that changed how the Academy compiled its Best Picture Oscar category.

Oddly, this season’s final pairing matches last season’s release years for Aronofsky’s pincered final middle pairing with The Wrestler released the same year as The Dark Knight and Black Swan the same as Inception. (No comment back from Darren’s people on his feelings for having developed so much of Batman Year One for the Warners only to be led into making his The Fountain for the Bros in 2006.)

Unfortunately, further research this episode was stymied by Jack stuck in France fighting extradition back to the States and unable to make our final The Dark Knight trilogy episode. Fortunately, our three consistent hosts are pretty good about guessing facts about flicks, like this pairing the first the entire season both shot by the great Wally Pfister (what? hardly even know her) with The Dark Knight being Nolan’s first film with scenes shot on Imax (but ignore Thomas’s misinformation about Inception also being shot on Imax; he’s like a dog chasing a car or a British colonialist burning down a jungle or brunch.)

Listen close, take lots of notes, and discover what words The Joker finds funny; how to make visual art summaries for an auditory medium; and why TGTPTU remains the Pacific Northwest’s still least listened to film podcast.

Why so serious?

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTU
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Buzzsprout: https://thegoodthepodandtheugly.buzzsprout.com/
Letterboxd (follow us!):
Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias

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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