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

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.

hi I have seen this 3 times now (saw it in 70mm IMAX on Sunday)

wish my 70 mm had been in IMAX, it was gorgeous all the same tho

Even before getting into what a garbage filmmaker Nolan is, pretending that there were no colonial soldiers present at Dunkirk is a crime imo.

Atonement isn't a great movie but at least the Dunkirk scenes made it look like there were more than a 100 people on the beach, and (gasp!) some of them were not white.

Sigh. There's a colonial soldier in Dunkirk.

What there is one?

Yeah. Amongst the French.

And even the screenwriter of Atonement admitted a black soldier in the regular British army was probably wishful thinking. Britain was quite racist at the time.

this movie is crudely patriotic (i.e. racist) and the lack of speaking parts given to non-whites is v consistent with that.

but "all-white production" (per the guardian article) is a bit much. there's a handful in a crowd scene (couldn't find a screenshot, but maybe 5?). normally that would be risible, but as you say, the crowd scenes make it look like we're dealing with a couple of hundred soldiers total.

fighting alongside the dutch and french is also a major plot point fwiw.

i remember them because when they are shown (quite prominently, wearing turbans iirc?) a few people in my screening literally snorted or laughed out loud. this was in southern california so they may have thought it was Political Correctness Gone Mad.

My official takeaway after 3 viewings is that Harry Styles' soldier better have lived to fight & win a bloody purple heart or something bcz he behaved in a v cowardly manner belowdecks on that trawler & all that boohoo self pity didnt endear him any further. French dude Gibson shouldve taken his place bc he was 10 times braver despite being just as scared

it seemed like maybe Gibson couldnt swim & that is why he ultimately drowned, was that the upshot? that is my theory anyway

I know for a fact there were numbers of Indian and African troops present, cos some book I read. These subliminal turbans you are offering don't inspire confidence.

The French guy speaks. Otoh, I don't remember any turban-wearing soldiers in a crowd scene? There was one Indian company on the beach, amounting to around 0,1% of the soldiers. And they famously didn't panic and bolt, which is kinda what everyone the film follows does, so they don't really fit in with the plot of Dunkirk, which basically deals with deserters.

yes there were apparently ~1000 present (out of 400,000). the guardian article you linked says " Some non-white faces are visible in one crowd scene, but that’s it."

There are 2 or 3 black faces among the French who are not being allowed into the queue for the British ship.

i am NOT going to rewatch this film to prove that it is very slightly less racist that it might seem at first though. it is garbage.

The African soldiers must have been on the French side? Nobody has ever found evidence of any black soldiers in the British army at Dunkirk. That doesn't disprove it, though.

Yeah. Amongst the French.

And even the screenwriter of Atonement admitted a black soldier in the regular British army was probably wishful thinking. Britain was quite racist at the time.

― Frederik B, Monday, August 21, 2017 3:43 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

britain was also quite white at the time

Not that white, though.

You might be able to say the Graun piece wasn't balanced with some justification or whatever, but considering grisly events, like the fate of the Senegalese Tirailleurs massacred by the Nazis after the breaking of the Maginot Line , and just the general whiteness of all WW2 films. I can understand the anger behind it and how some find this shite Nolan film, distasteful in other ways.

can I go back time-delay my post so that it's less poorly-timed

How does the general whiteness of WW2 films make the anger at this one more understandable? The fact that the anger could be leveled at pretty much every other film in the genre, and often with a lot more reason, only makes it more hypocritical for me. Yeah, someone should make a film about the Senegalese Tirailleurs, and about the colonial Indian regiments on the beach, but that is not what Dunkirk is about. And come on, nobody mad at the film is thinking about the Tirailleurs. They just want to shit on Nolan and use any excuse they can find.

The whiteness of this film didn't bother me at all. The clamor and having to listen to Kenneth Branagh did.

lol, sorry I'm not having a go at you or Veg. But Fuck this movie and Nolan. My fave war movie is Paths Of Glory - which is all white, but without the triumphalism that infects this pile of shit.

The whiteness of this film didn't bother me at all. The clamor and having to listen to Kenneth Branagh's crypto-Churchillisms did.

calzino, you must really hate almost every war movie? I mean, 'triumphalism'? Dunkirk ends with a dirge-like rendition of funeral music, and one of the heroes being captured by Germans after setting his own plane on fire. It's hardly Rambo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUpvEgJEn94

my prior: if your movie includes nimrod and approvingly quotes churchill i'm going to assume it's racist unless proven otherwise. so, while a few black soldiers in a cast of a few hundred is not of itself a problem, in the context of what the film is about it is, even if it's statistically accurate or whatever.

also nolan is an unbelievably bad filmmaker.

That's in and of itself an incredibly dumb prior. Churchill happened to deliver a very famous speech about Dunkirk, which is used. No 'approvingly'.

that dirge-like rendition of funeral music is a variation (ha) on nimrod. there's not a more patriotic piece of music.

perhaps your interpretation of his intent in quoting churchill (while nimrod, a theme you didn't notice, plays) is different to mine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lol. Deer Hunter ends with the cast singing 'God Bless America'. What a triumphalist piece of crap, huh?

And of course I noticed Nimrod. Which is used at funerals and memorial services.

lol

The BBC did a 2004 Dunkirk mini-series with the very good actor bloke who plays Beria in the forthcoming Death of Stalin, playing Churchill. That was much better than Nolan's, because it included Nazi's executing captured British and British shooting their own for cowardice. And it actually gave you a sense of the scale of the operation and the horrors of the dying wounded being left behind.

Fred do you happen to live in the same country as the conservative party from calzino's country who have been singing this movie's praises to the heavens since it was released?

oh nevermind you're an idiot

Someone bring this dysfunctional family together

Lol. Deer Hunter ends with the cast singing 'God Bless America'. What a triumphalist piece of crap, huh?

― Frederik B, Monday, August 21, 2017 7:45 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And of course I noticed Nimrod. Which is used at funerals and memorial services.

― Frederik B, Monday, August 21, 2017 7:45 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i am standing and applauding

when do we get our Fred & Morbs Hate You For Hating Mediocre Movies podcast, with a 10 minute politics break in the middle

Yeah, clearly no better argument against triumphant nationalism than shitting on someone for not being British. For fucks sake.

The movie does not become shitty because tories like it. They're idiots. Reagan liked Born in the USA.

Guys. Show go on!

There were hardly any colonial troops on the beaches at Dunkirk, at least up until the events depicted in the movie. The BEF was almost entirely English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish, though there were four companies of unarmed Indian Muslim mule handlers, three evacuated (a few hundred men). The French initially opposed the evacuation and mostly evacuated after the BEF, after the events of the film. As far as I can tell, only one major French unit at Dunkirk was colonial, the 8th Zouaves regiment, of Algerians of European descent.

I have seen you posting very authoritative sounding bollocks before San, what are your sources here?

lol

I know for a fact there were numbers of Indian and African troops present, cos some book I read.

― calzino, 22. august 2017 00:53 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imo if you hated nolan before youre prob going to hate him more

the clamor is necessary for tension, for immediacy... but i expect clamor in a movie like that. you can't have torpedos and air strikes without the aural terror
that goes with it.

imo the simplicity of the storytelling was a way to explore the whole via a very narrow view - the narrow view obv leaves out a lot, and i realize that nolan's choices of who then tells the story, and who he wants us to see is telling. but in and of itself it's a good story. idk.

it's imo sort of pointless to make Nolan the punching bag bcz he didnt make the movie you personally wanted to see. We all knew he was never going to make that movie. He's Whitey Whitington from White-On-Whiting! This is a movie from the Keegan-type historian hit parade, designed to make men who smoke pipes in tweed jackets misty-eyed. Yes there's been a thousand of those movies. Maybe we don't need more? But this IS a really good movie within that very expected and very done-over genre.

imo

and the planes were fucking cool as fuck

I feel where you're coming from with that, kinda, but he even whiffed making a "simple" film with all that timeline fuckery. I have no idea what on earth he was thinking with that.

it was kinda cool imo! i liked seeong the timelines intersect esp towards the end it made the tension more palpable for me imo

Calzino, you can read about the four companies of Royal Indian Army Service Corps here. I went through the order of battle for the French units involved in the defense of the perimeter on French wikipedia. Were there possibly some other colonials present amongst the French Army? Yes, but in units smaller than that ~3000 strong Zouaves regiment, perhaps serving logistics roles like the RIASC companies.