Christopher Nolan Said What?, IMAX, Apophenia, and the Shutting of the Piehole

Say what you want, dude gives a good interview. You may well be sick of hearing about Interstellar, the new nearly-three-hour opus from director Christopher Nolan that is, depending on whose critical take you favor, “a sweeping, futuristic adventure driven by grief, dread and regret” or “a spectacular, redundant puzzle.” This mostly flattering profile by Tom Shone in The Guardian is still worth a read for its colorful depiction of what I can only describe as breathtaking high-handedness. (I want to send flowers to Walter Volpatto, the DI colorist sitting on the wrong side of the computer from Nolan.) By the way, if you’re going to see Interstellar, you may as well drag your ass out to an actual IMAX theater running 15-perf 70mm, assuming there’s one near you. The picture quality is better than anything, and one day soon you know that one of these “real IMAX” releases is going to be the last one.

Apophenia. Thanks to Sam Adams (he runs the engaging Criticwire subsite at Indiewire) for the word of the day, a term I was unfamiliar with until he deployed it while defending Rodney Ascher’s The Shining interpretation documentary Room 237 from a dismissal by no less an authority than Stephen King* as “academic bullshit.” (The film is about interpretation, you see; representation does not equal endorsement; this seems as good a place as any to link to my own review, which set off a bit of a firestorm in the Film Freak Central comments section.) The Wikipedia entry on apophenia is a story in itself, tracing the word’s origins to an untranslated monograph published in German back in 1958 before characterizing the term as “a misnomer that has taken on a bastardized meaning.” Take that, apophenia!

* I’m kidding. Stephen King is a lousy authority on visual media based in any way on his books.

Piehole should be quiet. Here’s a street preacher getting served by an obnoxious little girl during Halloween season in Salem, MA.

Elsa Lanchester.

Elsa Lanchester on the set of The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)
via Film Noir Photos

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