Mindless but great entertainment reviewed below
AMC has announced that its theaters will be opening soon with Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet”, a typical summer blockbuster. Social distancing will be followed with no more than 30 percent of the seats filled and the staff wearing masks. I suppose that Nolan will be a magnet for fans of his movies, an experience roughly equivalent to playing a video game while on methamphetamine. Every one that I have seen has left me cold, especially “Interstellar” that inspired this faux trailer.
I’ll probably get a studio freebie for “Tenet” in time for our yearly NYFCO awards meeting but I doubt it will be a hundredth as good as the films that have come my way as virtual cinema, a fancy name for VOD. Indeed, I have received more screeners this year than in recent memory. As it happens, the documentaries, the foreign-language films, and the off-beat indie films I cover never faced the same obstacles as the big studios. Film Forum, Laemmle, et al have simply gone virtual, all to the benefit of the filmmakers and their audiences for whose tastes I cater.
Although the films reviewed below vary in quality and interest, I am sure that CounterPunch readers will find something worth seeing. The price of a rental is generally lower than a physical theater ticket and should encourage to take a chance on some off-beat and even entertaining films, all of which open today.
Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist 
Tenet is not getting a warm welcome in Europe. Catherine Shoard’s takedown in the London Guardian, Aug.21: “[…] Tenet is not a movie it’s worth the nervous braving a trip to the big screen to see, no matter how safe it is. I’m not even sure that, in five years’ time, it’d be worth staying up to catch on telly. To say so is sad, perhaps heretical. But for audiences to abandon their living rooms in the long term, the first carrot had better not leave a bad taste.”’
Comment by Peter Byrne — August 22, 2020 @ 10:44 am
Tenet is not getting a warm welcome in Europe. See Catherine Shoard’s total takedown in the London Guardian, Aug.21: “[…] Tenet is not a movie it’s worth the nervous braving a trip to the big screen to see, no matter how safe it is. I’m not even sure that, in five years’ time, it’d be worth staying up to catch on telly. To say so is sad, perhaps heretical. But for audiences to abandon their living rooms in the long term, the first carrot had better not leave a bad taste.”
Comment by Peter Byrne — August 22, 2020 @ 2:11 pm