Midway through a high-intensity spin session, a red-faced Peloton teacher slammed his film Tenet and apologised to Christopher Nolan.
Jenn Sherman, 54, bemoaned that she would never get the time back spent viewing the mind-bending film starring Robert Pattinson and John David Washington. In response, she promised the 53-year-old Oppenheimer director, Jenn Sherman, a “insult-free” exercise.
It happened after Christopher had made fun of the burn during his Wednesday night acceptance of the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Director award.
Talking about the importance of film criticism during his speech, the Memento filmmaker said: ‘I was on my Peloton doing a high-interval workout. I’m dying.
Laughing, he continued: ‘The instructor started talking about one of my films and said, “Has anyone else seen this? Because that’s a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back again.”‘
‘When [film critic] Rex Reed takes a s*** on your film, he doesn’t ask you to work out.”
‘In today’s world, where opinions are everywhere, there is a sort of idea that film criticism is being democratised. But I, for one, think the critical appreciation of films shouldn’t be an instinct, but it should be a profession.’
Christopher Nolan accepting the Best Director award at #NYFCC for OPPENHEIMER #FilmTwitter pic.twitter.com/eHGnmuOUMC
— Matt Neglia (@NextBestPicture) January 4, 2024
Jenn took to Instagram soon after realising she was the instructor in question and, while sticking to her guns on Tenet, praised Oppenheimer, which starred the likes of Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy.
In a clip, she grovelled:’ It’s a huge day for me when I come to find out the one and only Christopher Nolan one of the leading filmmakers of the 21st century knows who the hell I am. I was excited. And then I read the article.
‘Listen it was 2020. It was a dark time. I was up on the platform teaching my little class and I’m running my mouth off like I’m known to do and I make a random comment about a movie I’ve seen the night before.
‘What do you think the odds are that the director of said movie would take that ride some four years later? That would only happen to me.’
Then Jenn made an alluring offer to Christopher, letting him attend a class in a Peloton studio and using her performance as a free-for-all critique.
She continued: ‘So here’s what I want to say: I may not have understood a minute of what the hell was going on in Tenet, that ship went right over my head, but I have seen Oppenheimer twice and that’s six hours of my life that I don’t ever want to give back.
‘So Mr Nolan I’m inviting you to come take a ride with me in the Peleton studio. You can critique my class, we’ll have a great time, you can sit in the front row and I promise you it will be insult-free. Let me know. Take me up on it.’
The original clip of Jenn slamming Tenet also found its way online.
Her exact takedown was: ‘This song is from a soundtrack of a movie called Tenet. Anybody see this s***? Did anybody see this besides me? Because I need a manual. Someone’s got to explain this.
‘Yeah I’m not kidding, what the f*** was going on in that movie? Do you understand? Seriously, you need to be a neuroscientist to understand. And that’s two and a half hours of my life that I want back.’
Tenet, which will be released in 2020, centres on a former CIA agent who is hired by a covert organisation and given the mission of determining the origin of time-traveling devices and how they relate to an assault that occurs in the future but occurs in the present.
Other credits for Nolan include the Leonardo DiCaprio film Inception and the Dunkirk film, which earned him his first Oscar nomination for best director.