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Friday number whatever (pg. 2)
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| DJ RANN |
Friday nights suck these days. Literally, or at least the two week old kitten I'm bottle feeding does.
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Went to see Dunkirk in the cinema with some friends. Can rarely remember being so bored and unengaged by a film. |
Really surprised by that. Most people I know that have seen it said they loved the lack of dialogue and that Nolan allowed the film to breath the dread of the situation, rather than sub stories and character driven plotlines. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
I was just not engaged with anything happening on screen, at all. I found I was drifting off and thinking about other things mid-way through dramatic scenes of ships sinking and the lead "characters" struggling to escape with their lives. I realised I was so bored that I actually weighed up walking out of the cinema, and spent probably five minutes deciding whether it would be rude to my friends to do so.
The problem is not so much the lack of dialogue/characters, although without any knowledge of the people on screen it's certainly hard to care about them. The film just lacks any kind of coherent narrative thread. Nolan couldn't resist some high-concept, this time in the "three timelines" conceit, but this is neither as innovative as he thinks it is, nor does it actually come together in a clever way. The pacing is terrible. I cancelled my aforementioned "to walk or not to walk" dilemma because the film appeared to be picking up at long last, and I figured we were about 2/3rds of the way through. 10 minutes later, the credits rolled. The structure is all over the place. Events do not build to any kind of suspenseful climax. You can't hear half of what little dialogue there is. Some of the meagre performances still manage to be extremely wooden.
The cinematography is great, but I'm bored of praising films for having nicely composed shots. A big problem is the film lacks scale. There were 400,000 men on the beach, something like 40 Royal Navy destroyers and hundreds of civilian boats. I've been in bigger festival crowds than what we actually see on screen. You never see more than about two ships and three planes at any one moment. Nolan has tried to do some auteur-istic shunning of CGI, but it just feels like a low-budget film re-using the same few props and sets from different angles to try and fool the audience. The film lacked a sense of climax because the threat from the Germans never intensified. There's a few dive-bombers in the first scene, and that's about how the danger stayed right until the end, likely because Nolan insisted on using the few real aircraft he could scrape together.
Honestly, it was dog. |
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| Lews |
| Very surprised to hear you say that, Jack; I thought you'd never go see another Nolan film! :p |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lews
Very surprised to hear you say that, Jack; I thought you'd never go see another Nolan film! :p |
Ha. Well, I certainly won't be seeing another one in the cinema after this!
I do think Nolan is a good film-maker on a technical level. All of his films have things I enjoy in them. What I don't like is their patronising high-concept intellectual card tricks propped up by silly plot holes and contrivances. I figured that a war film about a real event couldn't possibly go in that direction. And to be fair, this is probably his least condescending film since Insomnia. It just doesn't have any of the character development and attention to detail he generally does quite well, either. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jon_Snow
I didn't think you were old enough to be into the Pet Shop Boys. |
I almost was. I was born in 1983 and, as you correctly guessed, I was a bit too young for "Always on My Mind", but "Go West" came out after I got into electronic music in the 90s.
Information Society is the outlier here, but that's because, for whatever reason, they were really popular here in Brazil, and the fame lingered on through the 90s... giving me the opportunity to get to know them.
And old CDs are totally time capsules, yeah, that's a good way of putting it :) |
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| Trance-M |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
I almost was. I was born in 1983 and, as you correctly guessed, I was a bit too young for "Always on My Mind", but "Go West" came out after I got into electronic music in the 90s. |
Do you have Introspective? That was a great album, among the first cd's I bought.
'Left to my own devices' still is one of my favorite tracks. |
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| Lews |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Ha. Well, I certainly won't be seeing another one in the cinema after this!
I do think Nolan is a good film-maker on a technical level. All of his films have things I enjoy in them. What I don't like is their patronising high-concept intellectual card tricks propped up by silly plot holes and contrivances. I figured that a war film about a real event couldn't possibly go in that direction. And to be fair, this is probably his least condescending film since Insomnia. It just doesn't have any of the character development and attention to detail he generally does quite well, either. |
I was really surprised to read good reviews of the film and found myself thinking that perhaps I would break my Nolan embargo... until I heard word of the 'multiple timelines'; then I just immediately said ' it' and moved onwards. He always needs some ing high-concept bull to move forward his films. Or at least make them more appealing to the questionable middle classes.
I'm not sure I'd say he's a good technical director, actually. A lot of his direction is 'look at this face' 'look at this face' 'look at this face' 'look at this face' etc ad nauseum. I also vehemently disagree about his attention to detail; I can point out large plot holes in many of his most prominent films.
However, all his films do have scenes that I enjoy, which makes it all rather annoying. It's really the high-concept bull that completely kills it for me. I can deal with the poor direction and the plot holes; it's made worse by the fact that, as you note, his character development is very, very good, which is often other directors problem.
I think Insomnia and Batman Begins are his best films :o |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Trance-M
Do you have Introspective? That was a great album, among the first cd's I bought.
'Left to my own devices' still is one of my favorite tracks. |
It's the one she's got! We took a long travel through nostalgia road listening to it :D |
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| SYSTEM-J |
I just pointed out the plot holes in that same post, so it should be clear that's not what I mean. I mean that the things I enjoy in his films most tend to be the smaller things. In Interstellar, for example, I got the most enjoyment out of TARS the robot, and the pompous self-justification of Matt Damon's character (his demise is particularly hilarious). These aren't the bits people usually pick out to assert Nolan's supposed auteur credentials.
Perhaps you're right that he's not actually that technically strong. His films tend to look nice and he handles big visuals well, but I can definitely agree that a lot of his staging and editing is lazy or sloppy. But he has definitely proven he can pull off some very difficult pieces of film-making, a lot of them in Dunkirk. |
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| Lira |
Things I liked in Interstellar: It had Michael Caine in it :D
Things I didn't like in Interstellar: Did it really have to be that long? If I wanted a 5 hour long build-up, I'd have just listened to Xpander instead :p |
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| Sushipunk |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
In Interstellar, for example, I got the most enjoyment out of TARS the robot, and the pompous self-justification of Matt Damon's character |
Matt Damon was in Interstellar? Must have been brief, because I missed it :p |
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| Lews |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
I just pointed out the plot holes in that same post, so it should be clear that's not what I mean. I mean that the things I enjoy in his films most tend to be the smaller things. In Interstellar, for example, I got the most enjoyment out of TARS the robot, and the pompous self-justification of Matt Damon's character (his demise is particularly hilarious). These aren't the bits people usually pick out to assert Nolan's supposed auteur credentials.
Perhaps you're right that he's not actually that technically strong. His films tend to look nice and he handles big visuals well, but I can definitely agree that a lot of his staging and editing is lazy or sloppy. But he has definitely proven he can pull off some very difficult pieces of film-making, a lot of them in Dunkirk. |
Apologies, my friend. My reading comprehension is not what it used to be.
I will agree, Matt Daemon was my favourite part of Interstellar. All his [edit: Nolan's] films have really good moments - and I will say, that I have enjoyed all of them on the first viewing (I have not seen Dunkirk). It's just that when I think about them later on, I find all the plotholes and I hate them. And then I rewatch them and I find how awful the direction has been. |
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