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

i was pretty impressed w/it as a juggling act of sorts and enjoyed the spectacle.

Yeah it's fun if you see it as just a big heist movie with an unusual hook.

Anyway, I think he could probably do a good war movie if he kept his more pretentious impulses in check. He does bombast very well.

interstellar was alright. it was by no means great but it was ok.

― akm, Thursday, August 4, 2016 6:24 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is my review of the entire Nolan filmography. They do look nice, at least. Just imagine if the dude hired a screenwriter outside of the family.

I'm actually curious if Memento/The Following hold up at all now because everything post those have been pretty irritating (although I did like a significant enough amount of Interstellar--score, robots, planets themselves, effects in general--to rate it despite it's insane length and the mind-numbing stupidity of the characters).

Memento holds up really well, especially if you've (um) forgotten some of the surprises. I watched it with someone last year who had never seen it or even heard of it, and she had a blast.

I liked Intersteller a lot, for a lot of reasons. Much better than Inception, which I did not like, for a lot of reasons.

I never even understood the hype for Memento at the time. The only one of these things that I really liked a lot while watching it was TDK but pretty much none of the movie stuck with me afterwards and it was the first movie I ever saw in IMAX so I think I was just dazzled by the spectacle of it all.

Debord was right, dammit.

Anyway, I think this "Dunkirk" thing is misdirection, and it's either a sequel to "Blair Witch" or a spin-off of "Cloverfield."

The Prestige is still slept on as one of the better Nolan movies. IMO, anyway.

I can't keep track of the magician movies. That's the one with Wolverine, Bale and Tesla, right?

Prestige is pretty good. Memento I don't know I'd want to revisit at this point. I like the first two dark knight movies a lot.

Prestige is great.

M  O  V  I  E
by
BAD AND DUMB FILMMAKER
that will make
ONE BILLION DOLLARS
because
SOME OPPORTUNISTIC STUDIO
realized how easy it is to exploit
THE MASSIVE POPULATION OF NERDS WHO ARE OBSESSED WITH APPEARING TASTEFUL AND TOTALLY NOT ONLY INTERESTED IN BIG-BUDGET MOVIES BASED ON PREEXISTING IPs
using an
INTERMINABLE HYPE TRAIN A NEVER-ENDING SERIES OF THREE HOUR MOVIES WITH BOLD ONE-WORD LOOSELY KERNED TITLES
that are
BAD AND DUMB AND NOT ACTUALLY LIKED BY ANYONE AT THIS POINT
but
HYPE TRAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I DON'T KNOW WHAT OTHER MOVIES ARE CHUGGA CHUGGA

i think my point is actually that "christopher nolan" is now an IP in itself (in a way that nerd directors couldn't have been before modern IP-based movie marketing was hammered into hollywood)

and that the reddit/avcvlub/sdcc class of nerds is no longer able to develop an interest in any film that doesn't follow the marketing cycle

Pretige, Memento, Following, Batman Begins and TDK are all good to varying degrees. Prestige is prob my favorite tbh.

Best part of the Batman movies are probably Coogan/Brydon impressions of Caine and Hardy from the the third one, but I guess I'm not really audience for them...

Prestige is the best. Interstellar second best. I don't want him to do a straight war movie, though. That sounds dark and dreary and boring.

Prestige is the best. Interstellar second best. I don't want him to do a straight war movie, though. That sounds dark and dreary and boring.
--Frederik B

Maybe it'll be a musical comedy.

it would be interesting to see him try his hand at directing some kind of comedy actually

godawful robot banter in interstellar tells you everything you need to know about what the nolans think "humour" is

or should I say "their humour circuits are set to eleven percent"

"that's gold, johnny! now can you put in the exact same joke fifty more times?"

Anyway, I think this "Dunkirk" thing is misdirection, and it's either a sequel to "Blair Witch" or a spin-off of "Cloverfield."

The monster attack is right there in the trailer.

bet he's pissed he missed out on atonement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-eMt3SrfFU

this looks boring af

it'd be pretty funny if this had a sci-fi twist in the last half an hour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7O7BtBnsG4

gentlemen to the beach, for we leave at daybreak

There was a pretty decent docudrama style 3 part Dunkirk mini-series by the BBC from 2004 that I guarantee will be better than this shite.

It has one thing going for it -- Branagh NOT wearing his Poirot facial hair.

In a way it fits with the optimism Nolan has when he is at his best, but on the other hand it seems dull and straightforward, and Nolan is really not visually interesting enough to pull this off easily. Cautiously optimistic...

mmhm yeah this has cautious optimism all over it.

As a history buff, it's a story from WWII that deserved telling. 338k soldiers rescued, essentially by every seagoing boat in S. England volunteering. 338k is 28 divisions, more than enough to have arguably turned the tide at El Alamein, and perhaps the Burma/India front. An 11 day miracle that saved the world, and few (at least in the U.S.) know about it.

I do wish this subject was tackled by David Lean, in that era, with those actors. The problem is the lack of singular heroes to wrap a narrative around.

Weird seeing a war movie without chaos. The trailer looks like some purgatory allegory, as storyboarded by Rothko.

it's a commercial guys

Rewatching Memento for the first time in years, in a decade perhaps, and even with just a faint idea about where the plot is going it's kinda boring. There's not a lot to it.

coupla screens in the UK are going for the full 70mm thwack

https://lovinmanchester.com/news/manchester/manchester-one-of-the-only-imax-cinemas-in-the-uk-to-screen-dunkirk

Dunkirk is 106 minutes long! wonder how that happened, did he lose 3 reels?

The people that escaped dying of boredom watching them, self immolated in a pile of those missing reels!

not sure how a war movie can justify being 3 hours long if it doesn't also have grumpy batman or dream spies

I'm really pretty upset that my favorite theaters in town are selling tickets to this already but won't let me buy a seat for a Thursday 7/20 showing of Valerian

Early notices sound absolutely incredible but I still have only the slightest clue how it works. Seeing it next tuesday, and I kinda can't wait. Can't recall the last time I felt this way about a film, most films I look forward to are festival films, and I only get to see them after waves and waves of reviews, analysis, backlash, etc. This time, I only have scraps of information. It's kinda exhilarating.

UK reviews coming in; 5/5 in the Guardian, 5/5 in Telegraph, 5/5 Empire.

incidental to this the usually quiet girl at the counter of our local Vue/Imax offered unprompted that it's "Awesome".

critic in my FB feed just posted "well, it's loud"

saw a movie over the weekend and the trailer for this film didn't telegraph that there was anything plot-like? just an overwhelming sense of dread about war. maybe that's a good thing, but I was left with the impression it's just Nolan doing *horrible war scenes*

this time, its in the ocean

Bradshaw's 5 star rave reviews have become so devalued over the years, he even dished out 5 to Okja last week.

Yeah, this is really something... Looking forward to discussing this with all of you, it's probably best to see this one as cold as possible.

I was left with the impression it's just Nolan doing *horrible war scenes*

yeah

i know virtually nothing about this either but given nolan's track record i'm certain it'll be technically accomplished but utterly empty

I really don't want to spoil anything, but 'technically accomplished' is a massive understatement.

and 'utterly empty'? not getting much of a sense of characters from the reviews i've skimmed

There's so much stuff to think about afterwards, my head is spinning. It's not 'empty' in that sense...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod#Idiom

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b0/Green_Day_-_Nimrod_cover.jpg

not that i couldn't suspend disbelief but virtually every actor cast in this was gorgeous, looked like a Ralph Lauren advert or something; seas of perfectly coiffed, thick black hair and razor-sharp jawlines

i couldn't tell one floppy haired muscle faced twerp from another.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2419/2062471345_d821c3e87b.jpg

Maybe there was a golden age for British handsomeness.

yeah god not even a blonde or a ginger in sight on the beach there, army of brown haired abercrombie models

god that french kid aka Gibson was gorgeous

good god, this thread is full of vitriol. this movie is fucking beautiful... kinda felt like The Master, Bridge of Spies, and The Thin Red Line (w/o the monologues). Not a huge fan of Nolan - loved The Prestige, and this was just gorgeous. Why all the hate? it wasn't accurate enough?

For a start the jingoism is unbearable, and some of Mail/Express cheerleaders for this garbage made it easier to hate. The sense of scale is all wrong as well, it should be subtitled 100 people on a beach.

I mean there are lots of old jingoist war films from that era that I like. But Nolan doing BE nostalgia in '17 makes me want the Nazis to develop a nuke.

wait this is based on a true story?

yeah, a classic good vs evil story. I wasn't expecting something to better Rossellini's War Trilogy from a clown like Nolan. But even taken as a basic action movie, this is very poor imo.

love2Churchill

The sense of scale is all wrong as well, it should be subtitled 100 people on a beach.

― calzino

also, Mail/Express cheerleaders? not sure what you're referring to exactly.. (my apology)

these are right-wing tabloids in britain that loved the film's alleged jingoism

glad to see the pure cinema minimalist Nolan doesn't need special fx, stop it lol!

One of my favourite war movies evokes the Western Front without casts of thousands or CGI. But this just does look like 100 actors pissing about on a beach at the best of times. Atonement isn't a particularly great movie but it's Dunkirk evacuation scenes are least evocative, CGI and all.

This was good twouldnt make me take the soup or anything

The bit where branagh looked through his binoculars to see already clearly visible and anticipated boats just so he could say "heaume" was shit

The rest was good

"This was good twouldnt make me take the soup or anything"

fucking puddle watter has more nutrients than Nolan soup.

Ah now of all ilxors not to get a historical reference

I'm just talking bout Nolan here, y'know. I do get BE imperialism and the famine etc..

Nolan eh? That's not a very English name now is it?

he's obviously a product of fucking diminished tatty watter!

Cast also tbh

i watched this a couple weekends ago, familiar war-movie sentiments in a gaudy package

that boy soldier on the run gave a fine silent-film-style performance tho

i love him, he was v good

finally got around to seeing this, it was almost exactly what i was expecting, which i guess says something about me or nolan or both of us

it's very handsome, it's very pleased with how cleverly-structured it is, and it is almost entirely emotionally inert, which is quite an achievement given that it's the story of hundreds of thousands of desperate men standing on a beach waiting to die

you might imagine would that would be hard to make into anything other than gripping, flopsweat-drenched human drama but this is christopher nolan baby and he can make distant, stories filled with numb robotic characters out of even the juiciest raw material

the air combat scenes were indeed gorgeous to look at and tom hardy was great but nolan manages to hamstring himself in this section with his own cleverness by having the three timelines converge and then diverge again, intercutting hardy running out of fuel with the soldiers coming home, which makes it seem like hardy's just been gliding back and forth across the skies over dunkirk for the entire night

kinda appropriate tho that a movie so metaphorically bloodless should be so literally bloodless too - you'd expect there to be some claret spilled when soldiers on the beach are being hit point-blank by bombs but iirc the only actual blood we see is when the enid blyton kid on mark rylance's boat falls down and whacks his noggin

also hans zimmer's ever-present score was like tinnitus

just watched. I actually found the music score annoying and a tad innapropriate in most scenes. Apart from that it's a decent movie.

Finally saw this. Thought it was pretty good! Agree the aggressively modern white noise soundtrack was a little ... discordant, but I'm not sure I would have preferred a more predictably rousing score. I also agree with a (neither here nor there) criticism that everyone is just a little too handsome, but whatevs. Also agree that it was a surprising decision to make the movie virtually bloodless, but given so much of it is kind of metaphorically bloodless (by design) it kind of goes with the cold theme, like the entire movie is being experienced through a haze of shock.