by breedinglikelarva
I missed the chance to make this post on Christmas Day so I am taking back that chance now. Because, what’s the difference anyway? Christmas, New Year? When you realized that the “new year” only gives you a false sense of discontinuity, as if the time is a timer that resets every three-hundred sixty Continue reading “Top 10 Porn for Christmas”
If the turnstiles were real and people could really go backwards in time, wearing oxygen masks driving cars in reverse (as if finally finding the perfect solution for the traffic infested metro), I’d go back to the time when I watched Tenet only so I could watch it backwards. No, not so that I would understand Continue reading “Tenet (2020)”
Praise Nolan for making Dunkirk a one of a kind experience – an unconventional war movie with three separate narratives in addition to its main narrative (the exodus of 300,000 soldiers cornered by enemies in Dunkirk), a supposedly anti-Hollywood war drama that isn’t really anti-Hollywood considering its not so modest budget.
Nolan plays with mirrors, contrasts; that old officer wanting to send his armies home and the other older guy wanting to take them in his boat; Cillian Murphy’s traumatized soldier who doesn’t wanna go back to hell and the eager young boy George who hasn’t been to war and hasn’t seen it all; Tom Hardy’s heroic pilot vs. the cowardly soldier who just wanted to poop. And also, Tom Hardy’s pilot who successfully completed his mission but got caught by the enemy and his buddy who couldn’t finish the mission and got rescued by the friendlies.
Technically, this is better than his Batman movies. It’s a great piece of filmmaking that, I hope was also equally thrilling. An epic filmmaking for a not so epic way of telling a story based on actual events. Nolan wanted to keep it small, personal, but also big and epic at the same time. How did he do that? He spliced the narrative, tinkered with the timeline.
It’s a film that thrills the eyes, the ears, sometimes the brain, sometimes the heart. But not something that thrills the eyes, the ears, and the brain at the same time, and better leave your heart at the door because there’s little use for it. The three way climax makes for very little emotional build up; Nolan wants you to calculate it, time it, instead of feel it. And since I’m not good at math, my biggest emotional response was “Shucks! That guy from One Direction didn’t make it!”
You Could Have It So Much Better
If I have to pick my favorite scenes or sequence in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, one would be the part when Batman failed to save Rachel Dawes, second would be the opening bank heist, Heath Ledger’s Joker bombing the hospital would be third and lastly, Batman interrogating the Joker.
Continue reading “Revisiting The Dark Knight (Almost) Ten Years After”
Batman Begins (2005). Details, lots of details. As if Nolan has written a book, a manual on how to be Batman. It’s a good comic book origin story, but still, it’s got nothing on my favorite origin movies—Spider-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Irreversible (2002). A friend once told me of a movie about an amnesiac, in which the story was told in reverse—or something like that. I forgot what the title was and so when I saw this movie with the woman from Malena standing nude on the cover, I thought this was the movie he was referring to. I was wrong. He was talking about Christopher Nolan’s Memento; and this is by Gaspar Noe, a guy who surely knows how to shock.
Memento (2000). Not sure whether this or Batman Begins was first Nolan movie I saw. Here, Nolan cuts his story in the middle, then cut it further into pieces and spliced them like a puzzle. Only that, after all the pieces were in place, it kinda feels pointless. That’s it? It didn’t blew me away.
If you want something that’s really hard to follow, try Shane Carruth’s Primer—now that is one mindfuck movie!
The Prestige (2006). Based on Christopher Priest’s novel about two magicians engaged in a stiff one-upmanship. Some critics bemoaned the lack of showy flourish, but I like it nonetheless, it’s my favorite among Nolan’s films. The story employs multiple flashbacks, shuffling the sequence of events. Yet, unlike in his other films, the non-linear storytelling is fluid and doesn’t feel like a gimmick. Also, it’s got David Bowie as the great Nikola Tesla and that Thom Yorke song at the end credits is just perfect. While the secret to Angier’s final magic act was pretty much given, I didn’t realize Borden’s trick until it was revealed. It was also quite obvious though, if one carefully pays attention. But maybe Cutter (Michael Caine) was right, I wanted to be fooled.
The Dark Knight (2008). A friend once defended this film by saying that critics nitpick on things Nolan wasn’t particularly good at—like staging good fight scenes—that it wasn’t his forte, and that the movie was great nonetheless. Well, I don’t know. Aren’t well staged fight scenes of primary importance in movies like this? Hellboy 2, Spider-Man, Kick-Ass, and Blade 2 all have memorable fight scenes. Heck, even the third X-Men movie has at least one memorable action sequence. And despite all the detailed upgrades on the Batsuit, both looks and functionality, Christian Bale doesn’t improve much on Michael Keaton’s Bat-Stiff.
Inception (2010). Despite its multilayered narrative, some people find Nolan’s dream within a dream movie, linear and literal. And I tend to agree with them. Aside from the arresting visuals and one inspired sequence, this was just as problematic as Memento. Unlike Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, Inception is hardly “dream-like”. Near the end of this quite long movie, when it looks like Dom Cobb will succeed anyway, no matter what the odds are, I thought that it was probably more meaningful to snuggle, take a nap and dream for real; instead of the two plus hours I just spent, inside Nolan’s shared world of daydreaming.
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