Christopher Nolan’s new film is an absolute masterpiece. It’s breathtakingly gorgeous, in large part because Nolan—an obsessive who believes nothing trumps the real—rejected the flat and facile tricks that pass for so much of filmmaking these days and invested instead in a spectacle of tactility. His cyclops, for example, isn’t the bastard child of clever camera angles and thick layers of computer-generated animation: It’s a 60-foot animatronic puppet, so terrifying you can almost smell it. Nolan shot more than 2 million feet of film, using a specially constructed IMAX camera equipped with a 300-pound acoustic blimp, which meant he could silence the camera’s whirs and bring it very, very close to his actors’ faces, making even intimate conversations feel epic. The film is fast-paced, wildly entertaining, and deeply moving, and the first thing I did after leaving the theater was buy a ticket to see it again....

Continue reading →︎

A funny thing happened on my way back home from Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey,’ which I saw a few days ago in Berlin. Forgetting some anomalies in the local traffic signals, I crossed against the light and was bumped by a car. In the ambulance, my own odyssey began. German emergency medics, I discovered, pump you full of ketamine, so you can experience ego death on the way to the ER. I had fractured my femur, I was later told, but meanwhile I voyaged through a futuristic heavenscape located not in my head but across the universe, with my consciousness a mere pinprick. Was this the afterlife, I wondered, and—here was the odd part—if my ego had vanished, why was I dreaming about writing a truly epic essay, as I told the ER nurse, in which I would step into the role of world-famous Odysseus himself?...

Continue reading →︎