Come anticipate (I guess?) Christopher Nolan's Batman/One Direction prequel DUNKIRK oh wait I have that wrong

An exciting movie that left me pummeled and bored.

if I had a nickel for every time....

I loved this. (Though I actually like most of Nolan's movies so I'm definitely in the minority around here.) The eerie and beautiful ballet of the air combat was the highlight for me.

Peter Hitchens review: "It is just noise and action."

haha good review.

This was also 'good'. Take note 'noise and action' fanboys and girls, this is how its playing:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/it-is-not-our-finest-hour-but-brexit-must-stand-tlmkhkrdp

oh good I needed a post-lunch digestif

94% rating on Metacritic? really?!

for that - all technique and nothing much else - movie?!

overrated is an understatement.

the 1 hour/day/week is nothing but a gimmick. could've been also 2 hours/36 hours/week etc and no one could tell the difference.
it is not an "abstract film about fear/survival", just a shallow well made hollywood action movie.

on the other hand, Boyhood got 100 on metacritic, so it's not that a surprise..

I can't get that story to last a week. Seems about 24 hours to me.

shallow/deep is, as ever, kind of a worthless distinction with art. but people do love to prove how much smarter than nolan they are.

i was often quite lost as to the "when" of certain scenes, which could be intentional or im just bad at following this sort of thing. I'll watch this again and see if i do better.

as i said before, i like Nolan's movies, but this movie is his best because it takes his tendencies for portent and bombast and, paradoxically, makes them work because of how streamlined and simple the core narrative is (if not the structure of the narrative). the time stuff struck me as a necessary choice to address the experience the film is attempting to depict--a kind of constriction or dilation of lived experience.

as an action movie this kind of put me in mind of certain passage of Fury Road more than anything else, but im not quite sure how far i'd take that comparison.

"shallow/deep is, as ever, kind of a worthless distinction with art"

why?

if it is a worthless distinction, then any other opinion/distinction about art is worthless

sorry, worthless is too strong. my point is that i dont find it an enlightening or useful distinction in figuring out what's interesting or appealing about art. You can too easily flip them: "deep" becomes "pretentious," "shallow" becomes "stylish."

ok i hear you.

well, i should have explained why i think it is shallow, but i don't want to bore people here with a long rant..

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/jul/26/bloodless-boring-empty-christopher-nolan-dunkirk-left-me-cold

This guy's opinions are often shit, but a stopped clock etc...

I urge every youngster to go out and watch #Dunkirk pic.twitter.com/wxqap6a2dP

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) July 25, 2017

Have you seen the film?

oof this did NOT work for me, by and large

(and not because of the breathless fawning from UK conservatives)

in more words:

- The temporal device was intriguing at first but quickly grew tiresome for me. One of the beautiful things about film editing is that effective crosscutting across physical planes automatically "corrects" temporal schisms when done well, making the impossible or illogical "feel" right in a bit of what you might call (if you hated yourself and others) "movie magic." Instead, Nolan decides on the most didactic puzzle-box structuring device possible, which both served to annihilate tension and needlessly call attention to itself, over and over
- The desire to create a "grunt-level", even what you might call "modest" experience of war was repeatedly overshadowed by the aesthetic flash, with the worst offenders being the portions of Zimmer's score that consisted mostly of electronic buzzes slowly ramping up in tempo (the war-movie equivalent of a cheap jump scare in a horror film) and the *three* consecutive shots of sideways water a la Inception
- Speaking of spell-breaking, the expository dialogue from Rylance and especially Branagh was a huge problem for me
- Anyone who could tell all the young Brit brunettes with identical hair apart from each other has far greater facial recognition than I
- The most interesting portion of the movie is actually the closing five minutes, in which there are competing notions of failure and victory competing for space. But then it just ends.
- Those opening intertitles were a disgrace.

Fred - No. And like I said on the other thread I am not going to.

We can say its fawning by hard right politicians but how many times do you get these different constituencies in the same room? It's not nothing.

There’s a moment early in the brisk 100 minutes of Christopher Nolan’s DUNKIRK that struck me as rather false, and it kind of took me out of the movie, although in fact I stayed in the movie and saw all of it. Newcomer Fionn Whitehead, having reached Dunkerque beach, pauses to take a dump in the sand. But we don’t get a strenuous, epic Wim Wenders type defecation. It’s just a quick drop-trou, look nobly into the distance, and then pants up again jobbie. No troublesome, uncinematic wiping or anything like that. This made me worry for our hero’s comfort during the rest of the film, and I wished he’d waded into the cleansing English Channel to do his business.

I suppose you could argue that maybe Mr. Whitehead’s poo was hygienically solid, tough and tightly assembled, like MEMENTO. But I fear that after the foreign environment, army food and the stress of battle, it would be more likely to be splashy, explosive and incredibly protracted, like THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.

(I could take this comparison further. After days of tension and combat, Mr. Fionn Whitehead’s pooing would resemble THE DARK KNIGHT RISES in the way it would drown out dialogue, cause people to put on masks, and bring tears to Sir Michael Caine’s eyes.)

Worse, Mr. Whitehead defecates on a sand dune, gazing out to see, with the likely result that anything emerging from his bottom would roll downhill and end up in his trousers.

https://dcairns.wordpress.com/2017/07/21/beach-front/

Iirc the point of that scene is that he can't shit because he notices a guy burying a body nearby. I guess it's foreshadowing for Harry Styles' monologue on shitting at the climax of the film.

I also like that that guy doesn't know what a mole is. Clearly he should read the vox explainer.

Yeah, that's how I interpreted the moment.

It was an embarrassed and undelivered poo, like INCEPTION.

lol

Harry Piles

this terrible director still hasn't learned how to position cameras and cut action and ending on nimrod was baaaaaaaaaad. but it looked pretty at times and is one of nolan's less bad films because there was relatively little dialogue. i liked that it was short.

It's his least worst film since The Prestige. Brevity and lack of pompous dialogue help.

so if he sticks to making short, not too dialogue heavy, action orientated pics - at least steady mediocrity will be assured.

Alluded to it upthread, but I do like that the big thematic speech in this is about shitting.

I also like that that guy doesn't know what a mole is. Clearly he should read the vox explainer.

I went the whole movie thinking Fionn Whitehead was a spy because it said "The Mole"

Not sure what i was expecting but a combination of In Which We Serve, Titanic and a ‘Punchdrunk’ style immersive art installation wasn’t it. Easily one of the most intense experiences i’ve had in a cinema. Looked unbelievably gorgeous in 70mm Imax. The score is just insanely good. Was shook up/rattled for the rest for the day yesterday as a result.

Beach bits reminded me of Atonement. I think maybe it’s simply not possible to stage a WW2 beach scene and not look like Atonement.

Another piece on Dunkirk and political conservatism - from both the left and right of the political spectrum.

bunch of thoughts

- I could not tell apart the guy the movie started with and the guy who took the clothes off the body.
- setting up that one guy doesn't talk much doesn't work when half your movie lacks dialog.
- it spends a lot of time setting up the idea that a character might be a spy -- his intro, a title, his hiding under exposition man, his avoiding the mess hall because he's psychic i guess. but why would there be a spy in the place where everyone is getting killed ffs. it's a dumb idea with a tiny payoff.
- the air section is a generic bore. planes shoot at each other and at ships and go down. i did not care. also, did every pilot forget about their parachute?
- a ship is already sunken, a ship has one survivor, a red cross ship gets bombed, another ship gets torpedoed with a few survivors, another ship gets fired at by troops, another ship gets bombed with oil in the water, and i'm probably forgetting some other slight variations on the same. i don't know why the movie needed all of this.
+ land section works the best because it's the only one with some scale. you actually see how many people were involved and how the story characters were a minor part.
- the setup for the evacuation is done just with title cards, but then at the end of the movie the secret failurecess of the operation is brought up as one of the key points. i never thought about this through the movie because it spends like 10 seconds on the battle of france. the ending conveniently passes over the failures of the evacuation which was what the movie spent most of its time on.
- what was the point of this movie? it ends with the churchill speech, making it seem like a propaganda film for a war that ended over 70 years ago. that ending is way more forceful than the real british war propaganda i've seen.
- i saw this in digital and it looked bad -- all the pixels noticeable. i noticed the brightness flickering on the sandbar scenes -- haven't seen that film artifact in a while.
+ the sound was good. lots of range, and it got appropriately loud.

No title refers to anyone being a spy... They're standing on a freaking mole for a week.

I was looking at some stills from an amusing straight to rental knockoff version of Dunkirk. In that movie they have accidentally dressed the soldiers as Paratroopers(who didn't yet exist at Dunkirk). And it features a French spy storyline, and just so there is no confusion, she is dressed in a beret and stripey top!

I know the mole is the structure. It's designed to possibly have a double meaning.

I really don't get why people think that. It's just a mole?

It's his least worst film since /The Prestige/.

Ouch

from what I understand this film is about the search for the perfect mole sauce, kind of weird considering the setting but idk

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/01/indian-african-dunkirk-history-whitewash-attitudes

The echoes of modern politics are easy to see in the British-first policy of the initial retreat that left French troops at the mercy of the Nazis. In reality, non-white troops were at the back of the queue for evacuation, and far more likely to be caught and murdered by Nazi soldiers than their white colleagues who were able to blend into the crowd.

Nolan's whitewashing of history criticised here. I recall reading that De Gaulle also insisted on "whitewashed" parades after the liberation of Paris, typical racism of the era - I haven't heard Nolan's excuse yet.

I'd like to be erased from this. Thank you CL!

I don't think I've felt such a strong disinclination towards a movie than this one. I mean not just for the Nolan factor, but also for the ball of shit collection of Tory scum that admire it's myopic vision of it'll be all white on the night heroics etc...

You'll be missing out on Harry Styles' monologue on shitting though.

Ah, a bit of comic relief from the barrage of Nazi artillery Christopher Nolan.

b-but six stars!!

Christopher Nolan was almost made for Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, and they're predictably brilliant on Dunkirk:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2017/08/02/dunkirk-part-1-straight-to-the-good-stuff/
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2017/08/09/dunkirk-part-2-the-art-film-as-event-movie/

I am trying to imagine this movie with a cast of Trevor Francis clones playing the BEF and Tony Galvin ones playing the Nazis.

Mr Veg came out saying this was great & I walked out in a daze

i dont think I fully "got" it because I didnt really understand the context very well? i have delved into various areas of ww2 history but dunkirk seems to have eluded me so i had to get mr Veg to explain it all to me a bit more afterwards.

that being said, the air footage was gorgeous, really put you in the cockpit in a believable way

the sound design was excellent: screaming of the messerschmidts was A+, fkn terrifying

i think i need to rewatch at some point to really get the full effect & appreciate it more

now can we please talk about Tom Hardy's magical gliding Spitfire O_o

Very visceral, a bit corny and fast and loose with the idea of physics.
& I spent most of the film thinking the guy in the glider was Martin Freeman cos I haven't been indulging in the hype.

Shame Bobby Gillespie has such a cameo in this but at least he dies a hero.