May 10 2022 138 mins
005 - Interstellar
After a long sabbatical, Tim and Tola discuss the 2014 Christopher Nolan film "Interstellar" as well as historical dramas, cocaine and hookers, the dreaded 2021 heat wave (we actually recorded this conversation quite some time ago), the awesomeness of LEGO Batman, building your movie around your cinematography, Dylan Thomas, watching dystopia movies in 2021, small-c conservatism, retconning your own characters, fleeing your problems instead of solving them, giant awesome bookshelves, Dr. Mann The Best Of Us, Christopher Nolan not understanding how science works, speculative vs observed science, how to leave a planet, looking over the wing of the spacecraft again and again and again, little kids and rollercoasters, kilocals, Dylan Thomas, lithium-thorazine cocktails, film scientific consultants, Larry Niven, cinematic debt to "2001", Dreamchaser, Surface Tension, primordial New Orleans, wonderful images vs scientific nonsense, chivalry getting you killed, The Great Man of Science, why design reviews are important, a lie told by an Englishman, the Deep Space Network, Dr. Mann The Best Of Us, more weird tracking shots, James Cameron's worldbuilding, Jim Emerson's analysis of a Dark Knight fight scene, speculative xenobiology, David Grinspoon's analysis of the film, Dr. Mann The No Longer Best Of Us, saying stuff to stay stuff, expensive and delicate NASA hardware which is to say all NASA hardware, space vehicle structural design, orbital decay time as a function of altitude, Tim's space piloting, artificial urgency, anemic accretion disks, the loving caress of relativistic impacts, Christopher Nolan not understanding how rockets work, event horizons (not Event Horizon), letting the fifth dimensional beings be your copilot, communicating the grand unifying theory connecting general relativity to quantum mechanics using morse code, Ann Hathaway's Boyfriend's Planet, the passage of time changing how you view a scene, and sending information vs sending matter.
Final score: Science (60%), Fiction (73%), Film (83%).
Next podcast: Dune!
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