Movie Review

Christopher Nolan welcomes back moviegoers with baffling Tenet

No filmmaker revels in confusion more than Christopher Nolan. It started with his breakout film, Memento, in which a man with no short-term memory tries to find out who killed his wife, and continued in such brain-twisters as The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar. Even his more straightforward films, like The Dark Knight trilogy and Dunkirk, took approaches that few others would try with comic book and war movies, respectively.

All of that is to say that if you thought you were used to Nolan’s perplexing stories, Tenet has them all beat. Normally for a highly-anticipated movie like this, I’d do my best not to reveal any kind of spoilers in my plot description. In this case, it is literally impossible to explain almost anything that happens because Nolan apparently doesn’t want us to understand it.

What can be said is that John David Washington plays The Protagonist — no, really, that’s his character’s name as listed on IMDb, and he states as such on multiple occasions in the film. He is some kind of combination of spy and soldier who gets wrapped up in an international conspiracy led by Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) that could bring about the end of the world if The Protagonist isn’t successful in his mission.

Now, what that mission entails and how he goes about doing it, I haven’t the slightest idea. The film is so densely packed with dialogue and changing locations that to keep up is an exercise in futility. And that’s even before you get to the actual mind-melting part of the plot, which involves time. Not time travel, mind you, or at least not how it’s been used in previous time travel movies. The very idea of time comes into question, and to say that it’s baffling is the understatement of the year.

The story has the basic mechanics of a James Bond movie: The hero, aided by Neil (Robert Pattinson), a jack-of-all-trades, is trying to stop a Russian megalomaniac at all costs, especially when the Russian’s beautiful wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), comes into play. Beyond that, only Nolan truly knows the kind of story he intended to tell. At times it feels as if he’s making things up as he goes, claiming that they fit with the rest of the movie merely because the same characters continue to show up.

Now, there will be those who will say that the confusion is the point, that it’s the type of movie that shouldn’t be understood on first viewing, or even the second. To that I say: How does that translate into something good? It’s fine to make a movie confusing, as Nolan did with Inception, but that film was balanced with its massively entertaining and eye-popping action sequences.

Tenet has some of those, most notably when they crash a real 747 plane into a building, but they are few and far between. More importantly, the scenes leading up to the action are so difficult to comprehend that the subsequent action comes off as just random combat for the sake of having something exciting to look at. Nolan plays with time so that some parts of the film run in reverse, but more often than not those parts feel like someone playing around with a film technique instead of making some grand impressive point.

Still, the film (screened for critics in Nolan’s preferred IMAX format) is as visually stunning as we’ve come to expect from the filmmaker. Nolan may be one of the last directors influential enough to be able to film on location in countries like Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, India, and more. The grandeur of their landscapes is something that can’t be created in a computer, and Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema capture them in all their glory.

In just a few short years, Washington has gone from the “son of Denzel” to a full-fledged star in his own right, and he controls nearly every moment of this film, even if you don’t know what his character is doing. Pattinson, soon to be the envy of fanboys as Batman, is smooth and interesting in a smaller role. Debicki isn’t given enough to do to show off her talent, and Branagh hams it up in the villain role.

Nolan was right to wait for theaters to reopen to show off the visuals of Tenet the way they should be seen. However, his seeming obsession with making his films as complex as humanly possible is frustrating for those of us who would like at least a scintilla of clarity in our storytelling.

---

Tenet officially opens on September 3, but it is currently available for preview screenings in many theaters.

John David Washington in Tenet.

John David Washington in Tenet

Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon

John David Washington in Tenet.

RIP, Frank

Frank Beard, drummer of legendary Texas rock band ZZ Top, dies at 77

Dickies 500

Photo by Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images

He kept the tempo for the band’s biggest hits like 'Sharp Dressed Man,' 'Legs,' and 'Gimme All Your Lovin.'

NEW YORK (AP) — Frank Beard, the drummer for the Texas boogie-rock trio ZZ Top who kept the tempo for the band’s biggest hits like “Sharp Dressed Man,” “Legs,” and “Gimme All Your Lovin,’” has died. He was 77.

Beard was in hospice care when he died Tuesday, August 18 at his ranch in Richmond, Texas, near Houston, with family members at his side, according to publicist Bob Merlis. Band co-founder and guitarist Billy Gibbons, on tour with bassist Elwood Francis, hailed Beard in a statement.

“Today, Elwood and I lost a great friend and collaborator, and the world lost one of the most naturally innovative drummers and a great and true son of Texas. His signature backbeat was key to keeping ZZ on top. The band of which he was part for six decades is going to keep on keeping on as he had wished,” Gibbons said.

ZZ Top sold more than 50 million records and had six singles that reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart. Seven of their albums have been in the Billboard 200’s Top 10 and they earned three Grammy Award nominations.

“I’ve found the people I was meant to play with,” Beard says in the 2019 documentary ZZ Top: That Little Ol’ Band from Texas. “I never wanted to quit, and never wanted to get fired.”

Band's early days
Beard, from the East Texas town of Frankston, met Gibbons in a band called The Moving Sidewalks and later introduced bassist and vocalist Dusty Hill, a Dallas native, who had been in several bands with Beard.

The trio formed ZZ Top in 1969, naming themselves in part after blues singer Z.Z. Hill and influenced by the British power trio Cream and Jimmy Reed. They maintained their original lineup for more than five decades. Their signature look — long, bushy beards on Gibbons and Hill, and dark sunglasses for all — didn’t change much, either.

When Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards helped induct the trio into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, he joked: “These cats know their blues and they know how to dress it up. When I first saw them, I thought, ‘I hope these guys are not on the run, because that disguise is not going to work.’”

ZZ Top songs — with their sly and humorous lyrics — were popular in Hollywood, which used “Gimme All Your Lovin’” in “Happy Feet,” “Sharp Dressed Man” in “Evan Almighty,” “Legs” in “Air,” “Sleeping Bag” in “I, Tonya,” “Tush” in “Dazed and Confused,” “Mexican Blackbird” in “From Dusk Till Dawn” and “La Grange” in “Armageddon.”

“The best way to describe ZZ Top is we’re interpreters of a great American art form,” Gibbons told The Dallas Morning News.

Their debut release, “ZZ Top’s First Album,” came out in 1970. Their sound was described as a hybrid mixing elements of rock, blues and funk into a steaming-hot Houston stew. They called themselves a “Little Ol’ Band From Texas.”

Breaking through
Three years later, they broke through commercially with “La Grange,” a funky blues song on the album “Tres Hombres” that paid tribute to the Chicken Ranch, a brothel outside of the Texas town of La Grange that operated from 1905 until 1973 and was immortalized in the Broadway show and the film, “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” Gibbons has ascribed the power of “La Grange" to its simplicity — just two chords and a Robert Johnson-inspired guitar solo.

The band went on to have such hits as “Tush” and “Cheap Sunglasses.” But their 1983 “Eliminator” — named after one of Gibbons’ custom cars — added more production elements, synthesizers and drum machines to their stripped-down sound and yielded the hits “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Legs” and “Sharp-Dressed Man.” The band toured with a Texas-shaped stage, live rattlesnakes and a longhorn steer.

Long beards weren’t always part of the band’s look. Gibbons said it happened by accident: In 1976, the trio took a long break and scattered. Beard went to Jamaica, Hill went to Mexico and Gibbons went to France.

“Although we were speaking by phone, this was pre-video phone. And Dusty and I did not know that we had gotten so lazy that we had decided to forget to shave,” Gibbons told The Tribune in San Luis Obispo in 2010. “So after three years we returned and showed up, and lo and behold here was this sort of wacky-looking image. And it just kind of stuck with us.”

A boost from MTV
The band’s rock-chic cool played well on the nascent MTV crowd and their videos, featuring models in short skirts emerging from one of Gibbons’ custom roadsters, became a mainstay.

They kept the beards, hats and cheap sunglasses in the video trilogy of “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Legs,” made with director Tim Newman.

“ZZ Top reveled in the humor and ridiculousness of it all, busting their synchronized dance moves and spinning their white-fur guitars. These guys always got the joke, at a time when other bands were still just nervously lip-syncing in front of brick walls,” Rolling Stone said in 2021.

In 2012, superstar producer Rick Rubin helped update the trio’s sound with the band’s comeback album, “La Futura.” The album landed at No. 6 on the Billboard chart, their highest position since 1990's “Recycler,” some 22 years previously.

Hill died in 2021.

In March 2025, the band announced via Instagram that Beard would temporarily step away from the band’s tour to tend to foot and ankle problems. Beard died weeks after ZZ Top called off its August 5 concert at the Hollywood Bowl due to his health issues.

Beard is survived by his wife, Debbie Meredith, and three children.

obituary celebrities zz top deaths

Loading...