Hello and welcome to The Weekly Planet Podcast. Your weekly dose of all things movies, TV, books and anything else we feel like talking about!
Behind the scenes we here at The Daly Planet have been calling this week a “soft relaunch”. All this really means is we’re pushing out some new ideas that we’ve been working about in secret for a while now. You saw one yesterday and you’ll get another tomorrow, but one idea both Matt and I have had for a while is a podcast in which we’d get together once a week to discuss random topics related to entertainment for your listening pleasure. Today we’re happy to announce the launch of this podcast, which we’re calling The Weekly Planet. It’s pretty clever.
For our first episode we’ve set our sights on Christopher Nolan. Almost a year ago I wrote what was supposed to be an introduction to a series of essays in which I explore Nolan’s filmography. The intent was, after the disappointment that was Interstellar, to try to figure out why I didn’t think I liked the filmmaker anymore. For various reasons, mostly including time this series never happened. But when it came time to pick a topic for our inaugural podcast focusing on Christopher Nolan seemed like the logical step. So click the player above and join Matt and I and special guest Michael as we work through Nolan’s filmography discussing what he does good, what he does bad, and why he doesn’t seem to like women very much.
This will be a learning process for us as we learn more about sound mixing, editing, and how to be more interesting people so please bare with us as we figure it all out. We’re also working on getting onto iTunes and will keep you all updated on that front. Thank you, as always, for all of your support!
Special thanks to the beautiful Elyse Rimmer for providing the Vocals and Music for the intro theme.
Interstellar is a good movie. It suffers from some clunky, on-the-nose dialog, but it aims to be a very big movie, and the film’s successes way outweigh its failures.
Interstellar does a better job of visually depicting space and space travel than any other movie. Ever. It looks better than 2001, Apollo 13, and Gravity.
Interstellar handles the science part of science fiction really well. The Nolan boys didn’t shy away from the realities of long-distance space travel, or wormholes, or even relativity.
The movie sounds great, it got three Oscar nomination related to sound and that wasn’t an accident. I really think Hans Zimmer deserved a win for his score on this film.
And in classic Nolan fashion, Interstellar takes on a big theme and shoves it in your face for 2 hours. For me, the main theme for this movie is second chances. Humanity screwed up one planet, but we’re going to get a second chance on a space station or a distant planet. Cooper missed out on being a great astronaut, but he’s going to get second chance. That second chance required him to miss out on being there for Murph, but he gets a second chance at that as well. Murph gets let down by Prof. Brand, but her “ghost” gives her a second chance. I could go on, but in this film, pretty much every character but Doyle gets a second chance (maybe in the sequel?).
I hope now that Scott’s done his dissection of Nolan, he can put Nolan and Interstellar out of his thoughts for a while. Come back to this movie in a year or two, wipe off the dust, and watch it with clear eyes. Because Interstellar, more than any of Nolan’s other films, deserves a second chance.