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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM9BWtppzko

i guess i'll watch anything he makes. nb haven't seen interstellar yet. was it stellar?

It was very inter.

Humanity almost dies but is saved by...LOVE.

ok apparently free on amazon prime i will watch it now

IT WAS LOVE ALL ALONG!

xxp Which to be fair is the plot of The Fifth Element. Except Nolan is in love with machines and black holes.

oh my god it's like 3 hours long

About half of which is McConaghey looking concerned.

welp, looks like everything that was once interesting about Nolan has finally been drained and leached away

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

I wanted to like it but tbh I've been avoiding it following reviews and the 3+ hours long and my general distaste for his last few movies

I mean DKR and Inception were SO BAD I kinda doubt he rebounded with 3hrs of McConaugheyhey (who can be enjoyable)

i think w/TDK he never let his ideas overwhelm his instincts as a director, which was the issue w/TDKR. I'm more positive about inception than most other folks at least on here, but i only saw it the one time. i was pretty impressed w/it as a juggling act of sorts and enjoyed the spectacle. i could see it falling flat on a second viewing on the small screen, of course...

anyway i like WW2 movies but i'll wait and see (which i'm doing w/interstellar still.)

i liked inception fine.

it finished #3 in the action movies poll a few years ago, which i thought was crazy but whatever i just count the ballots.

Movies That Were Probably Made By a Spasm of Six Year-Olds on Acid: The Top 75 Action Films Poll Results Thread

just finished interstellar. weird movie. kinda feel like he made the entire thing for that one sequence where they lose all that time and watch the videos from home. pretty uneven -- like i guess all his work. the ending feels like jury-rigged.

Well this certainly looks very Nolan.

Needs more WHOOOMP noises in the soundtrack.

Oh I don't think those will be absent in the final cut.

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...

Have vowed never to watch a Nolan again due to the same criticism as bg outlines, is there a reason to see this?

you might get to see harry styles get machinegunned by the filthy jerries?

There's that

Buddy of mine worked on this film, operating the model planes for the action and air battle stuff, and manning the drones etc. Still don't really feel like seeing it tho tbh.

Would love to see an angry, cine verite Battle Of Algiers type movie about Britain's brutal Mau Mau counterinsurgency released r/n. Just to piss off The Telegraph hack who came out with the " heart-hammering and heroically British" quote.

yes, I wouldn't say dunkirk is one of the more overlooked bits of recent history.

manning the drones

I just want to point out that I know what LBI means here but this phrase is oxymoronic and hurt my head for a bit.

Lol sorry

pedant! everyone says "drones" meaning uav. I hate it but that's where we are.

mh the u in uav stands for UNMANNED

tell that to the poor air force people guiding them and watching the video, buddy

maybe "manning the uav control board" is what I'm getting at

imo it's similar to "manning the torpedoes" which may or may not be a malapropism

Speaking of which, I bet Eye In The Sky is a better movie than this.

Human torpedoes or manned torpedoes are a type of rideable submarine used as secret naval weapons in World War II. The basic design is still in use today as a type of diver propulsion vehicle.

wise critic

There will never come a time that i will scroll down on this page pic.twitter.com/QbendaBHRK

— Jake Cole (@notjustmovies) July 19, 2017

Slant critic otmfm!

http://www.thestranger.com/film/2017/07/19/25297266/my-father-who-survived-dunkirk-would-not-have-recognized-christopher-nolans-dunkirk

lol I read the comments on jake's review earlier, good reminder that the internet was a mistake

weird obsession with his review coming out later than the rest of the mudslide, apparently that's a sign of bad faith

also a sign of bad faith: getting your negative review in too early, like all the DKR critics that got death threats on RT

Haven't seen this yet but really enjoyed that Stranger piece. I'd like to see Atonement again.

really liked this. there really isn't much of conventional plot (which I thought was a wise choice), mostly just depictions of the evacuation from three different (non-linear) angles. much of the dialogue is hard to make out and is little more than commands or shouted reactions to a deteriorating situation.

the 70mm print was beautiful too. wasn't really overdramatized either, I mean many intense scenes but not really due to the pathos of any character, more POV war sequences.

was kinda weird when Batman showed up and destroyed a few planes tho

much of the dialogue is hard to make out

Did he do his usual trick of giving the most important dialogue to the least intelligible actors?

War is hell (on the ears). Is there a shot where a loud noise blows out someone's ear drums, and the rest of the scene plays out in a muffled haze with a high-pitched ringing?

nope

does chris nolan's insistence on casting tom hardy then covering most of hardy's face with a mask have a basis in sexual fetish y/n

Lol, I thought about that as well. I love how many weird Nolanesque details that are in this film. It's not wrong that he always has had way too much exposition in his films, and in general way too much focus on legitimizing everything he does, which probably has obscured how weird and personal his films are. This time it's just all there, without bothering to explain why.

how weird and personal his films are

the weird thing for me is how impersonal his films are - i can't really think of any standout characters from any of his films, they've always just seemed more like pieces to be manipulated in service of the plot, never more so than in the infamously impersonal unemotional reunion at the end of interstellar

the only exception i can think of is the joker, but even then he's not really a 'character' per se, more a memorable performance which doubles as a device for driving the story

Not to danesplain the English language, but that's not usually why something is described as a 'personal' film. Everything he does seems more informed by his own weird obsessions than anything else. It's personal the same way the use of blonde women in Hitchcock films seems like a personal thing for Hitchcock to work through.

You better believe Hitchcock's preference for blondes was personal.

lol

Not to danesplain the English language, but that's not usually why something is described as a 'personal' film.

phew, good thing my response wasn't related to your basically unverifiable assertion about how 'personal' nolan's films are to him then

Hitchcock had a strong authorial voice... and that voice was saying, "heck yeah, blondes"

having a set of obsessions/recurring themes counts as personal, I guess?

personally I'm finding this a tedious detour

I won't believe it's really personal until you make 4 films about it

hauteur theory

I've yet to read a review that hasn't given this movie 5 stars

Well obv you haven't read Fred's then, cos he's give it 6 stars!

Here you go: http://pov.international/en-impressionistisk-filmoplevelse/

lol i thought that was a joke but no u really did give it 6 stars

Of course.

slant gave it 1.5 and are getting predictably pilloried for it, I've seen a few less than glowing writeups elsewhere as well

I have a fairly idiosyncratic rating system, probably, but Dunkirk is so much better than it needs to be, and also hits that spot where even the weird stuff that might be seen as flaws adds to my enjoyment of it. So... could hardly be better. Although I don't really like Hans Zimmer.

xp. the wrath of the empire magazine reader

which aspect of it did you compare to beyonce? (my danish is a little rusty) xp

That it's very very good pop-art.

lol i thought that was a joke but no u really did give it 6 stars

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S11E03/688760.jpg?b64lines=IAogIk5JTkUgVEhVTUJTIFVQIj8gV0hBVAogVEhFIEhFTEwgSVMgVEhBVD8g

Most of Danish media uses six stars, so it's not that crazy :)

i like six starpoints on my raspberry danish

if I ever see this I suspect I will give it six thumbs down lol

xxp

mostly cuz Nolan hasn't made a half-decent movie since the 2nd Batman movie and I'm not sure what would be different about this project to elevate it above his other recent garbage. but idk I can't read Danish either...

You guys do know that google translate exists, right? And Duolingo.

The WWII film Dunkirk lasts less than two hours. The heroic rescue mission went on for days - The Washington Post [More: Dunkirk]

I'm not going to stick up for this movie, but this is some real pathetically premised Newsnow clickbait. Goodness me, Shoah only 9 hours long etc..!

For the record I think Paths Of Glory is the greatest war film ever, and the temerity of Kubrick to make it 88 mins long!

Yeah, but that was like three hours in 1950s minutes.

(Actually, for the '50s that's relatively short, too!)

thanks Google Translate!

"Calling Dunkirk for a perfect blockbuster hits by, because it would hide how many artistic templates the big movie breaks. Frederik Bojer Bové gives full six POV stars for a truly unique film experience from a culture on the top of his ability: Visually lavish, narratively ambitious, and generous with emotions and experimental images.

It is quite difficult to report Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk without destroying the reader experience. Perhaps a bit surprising considering that the film is about the evacuation from Dunkerque, and although it may not be all who know the historical event in detail, most people know that the mission succeeded and that Nazi country did not win the battle. But two things mean that you should go to the cinema without knowing too much about the movie.

First, Nolan has created an incredible impressionist experience; He captures the horror, adrenaline, absurd and heroic in the scenario with 400,000 men fighting for survival.

Second, Christopher Nolan is by far the closest we come to an author in the original sense of the word; An instructor working within the study system - within the rules of the current genres - yet it is almost always possible to do something 100% personal and self-contained. Dunkirk is amazingly a Nolan movie, on so many plans and with so many details that I do not have to flush the surprises."

Uh can a mod get that voldemort

I thought this was very good. It's the best Nolan movie of the ones I've seen. I didn't always like the nonlinear editing, but it isn't bewildering in the way the Slant reviewer says, and it allows the film to maintain an exciting pace. Seeing the same events from the ground's point of view and from the air gives a unique spatial sense, where I felt like the camera was ranging over a big and coherent expanse of space. The fact that we hardly see the German army adds something to the sense of scale. The heroics are moderate and appropriate, especially in the subplot following the civilian rescue boats.

this was indeed loud.

whenever someone picks a historical setting for a film i wonder why, and despite being light on cliche plotting & having a some unheroic activities & meaningless death, idk what this tried to achieve

I really liked it. Incredibly taut, relentless and tense all the way through. I liked the unconventional plot and the fact you never see the enemy. The only problem I had was Hans Zimmer's jackhammering score tbh.

Is the narrative structure meant to resemble a clock? Three different plots, like clock hands - one sweeping across a week, one a day, and one an hour - and converging at a certain point. There's a ticking clock in the score.

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.

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.

Update, elements of the 1st Moroccan Division were among the French troops evacuated June 2-5, before being landed at Brest to continue the fight. The 2e division d'infanterie nord-africaine also fought on the perimeter before being captured with others at [Poche de Lille](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poche_de_Lille), 60 km to the south.

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.

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), 22. august 2017 03:43 (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's stupid. A film can be simple in scope while complex in form. And the wonderful timeline fuckery does allow him to narrow it down, to have three plotstrands converge on just one moment.

"i noticed you did a thing"
"yes, i did"
"i guess that's good then"

that really works for every nolan film doesn't it. close thread please

maybe

"i noticed you did a thing"
"what a smart boy you are! let me ruffle your hair"
"this... this is a modern classic..."

I didn't mean to sound rude San. But once I quoted something from a painstakingly researched economic history of Nazi era Germany by Tooze, and it questioned some of the received wisdom that you get on wikipedia, on that era. And you tried to rubbish it by quoting blocks of wikipedia, I'm just saying your sources on history are not up there with your science posts.

Wargamers/armchair generals are really meticulous with orders of battle and the like, and seem to be the ones responsible for the French Wiki, which covers the battles of 1940 in far greater detail than English wiki does. One can drill down the French OoB here for regimental subcommands and battle histories, to a much greater extent than I've seen with US and UK OoBs on English Wiki (where the Soviet OoB is a horrible mess).

Dunkirk is amazingly a Nolan movie, on so many plans and with so many details that I do not have to flush the surprises.

dying

fred can you write all your posts in danish filtered thru google translate? thx

Wait, what do you think I've been doing until now?

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.