yanquiuxo: CHRIS NOLAN RANKED (Post Dunkirk)

Papa Universe 09.20.17	well... pretty much agreed..
Trophycase 09.20.17	Inception > Memento > Dunkirk > Batman Begins > Prestige > The Dark Knight > Following > Interstellar > Dark Knight Rises Haven't seen Insomnia. I felt that Dunkirk was less about characters and plot and more about the atmosphere. I really enjoyed the minimalism, the soundtrack was phenomenal and built tension so well, and overall the film felt so focused. The lack of any real characters felt pretty intentional to me, like they were there to give cohesion and perspective to the movie, but not really to be the main focus of it. I put Inception at #1 because it's honestly the most satisfied I've ever felt leaving a movie theater and is probably the best major blockbuster I've seen.
Spacesh1p 09.20.17	Prestige is very underrated agreed.
Trophycase 09.20.17	Totally agree with your critique of Interstellar. It's hard to explain but I know what you mean when you say he "forces you to cry". Makes me feel a little gross afterwards.
yanquiuxo 09.20.17	''Haven't seen Insomnia. I felt that Dunkirk was less about characters and plot and more about the atmosphere. I really enjoyed the minimalism, the soundtrack was phenomenal and built tension so well, and overall the film felt so focused. The lack of any real characters felt pretty intentional to me, like they were there to give cohesion and perspective to the movie, but not really to be the main focus of it.'' Seems fair, but this is just saying '' look how good i can do this technical shit '' that's something that Michael Bay would say, not Christopher Nolan. It's a good thing to a director to change, but not this way..
Satellite 09.20.17	thank god, another masturbatory christopher nolan list.
butcherboy 09.20.17	dark knight, the first three quarters of Interstellar (ending truly is shite) and Insomnia for me are his best.. Memento is not nearly as clever or cohesively complete as it makes itself to be..
Gyromania 09.20.17	I'm sorry but your criticisms of Dunkirk are really stupid and shallow. It wasn't trying to develop super engaging characters but rather be an honest portrayal of a terrible battle told through the lens of terrified men. It's a period piece and it captured the anonymity of soldiers in war very well tbh
Gyromania 09.20.17	Agreed with butcher that memento isn't that great. Who didn't see the twist coming a mile away?
yanquiuxo 09.20.17	i really can't see the ''honest portrayal of a battle'', seriously. If you want to portray only the battle, then make a documentary. Movies have characters, and if they're irrelevant, the movie is weaker. but that's just the way i see it
robotmagician 09.20.17	sorry gyromania but by far the most interesting thing about dunkirk, WHY we remember dunkirk, is the civilian led evacuation. nolan scaled down the evacuation dramatically, making the coolest part of the story a footnote. there were much better true stories he could have chosen and yet they made that. a boring, bloodless mess.
tommygun 09.20.17	prestige is best
Gyromania 09.20.17	It would have been nice if he focused on that, but that doesn't devalue the story of the soldiers cornered on the beach just waiting to die, and how it portrayed helplessness
Gyromania 09.20.17	Prestige honestly kind of blows now that I'm older. Loved it when i was 17 but now it just seems kind of mediocre
yanquiuxo 09.20.17	''Loved it when i was 17 but now it just seems kind of mediocre'' that's the way i feel about Insomnia and Inception, i really changed my opinion over the years, but i still really like Prestige
Gyromania 09.20.17	"Movies have characters, and if they're irrelevant, the movie is weaker. but that's just the way i see it" - this is such a narrow minded perception of film
butcherboy 09.20.17	insomnia does have that beautiful line when pacino says - you're about as mysterious to me as a blocked toilet is to a fucking plumber.. i've used that for years.. never gets bad..
trilo 09.20.17	what gyromania said re: dunkirk more power to you if think every movie needs relevant characters, but imo character development would have bogged the film down. it wouldn't have been anywhere near as intense or immersive if they did and that was, along with the cinematography and every other technical aspect of the film, one of its greatest strengths. idk i loved it and i'm not even that big of a Nolan fan outside of a few of his films.
Gyromania 09.20.17	Not trying to dis yanq, just saying, not all films have to be super indepth character studies. That's like saying all music should make you happy
yanquiuxo 09.20.17	I wanted to say that the purpose of Nolan was to portray a war story, but a war story is effective when it tries a more profound narration of human feelings. In two words, I can see that the characters are scared, but I do not really give a fuck, especially because of the uninspired dialogues
butcherboy 09.20.17	yan, you ever read The Naked and The Dead?
yanquiuxo 09.20.17	''yan, you ever read The Naked and The Dead?'' Nope! btw, Gyromania, don't get me wrong, i'm not that narrow minded and i probably said that badly. it was more about the genre of the movie, I'm not saying it's not an original experiment, i can see its merits. But personally it did not gave me what i expect from a war movie.
butcherboy 09.20.17	you should give it a go.. for my money, one of the best war novels ever written, and it delves into the back story, motivation and personalities and morals of 50+ soldiers.. beautiful book.
yanquiuxo 09.20.17	Sounds really interesting
yanquiuxo 09.20.17	another thing i appreciated, was the absence of the enemy on screen. It's effective and it builds up the tension really well, along with the soundtrack. But again, i feel some tension because Nolan is a good director and captures the action very well, but the lack of empathy to me, damages it, and also i felt the soundtrack pretty inappropriate sometimes. Silence is always good in a war movie.
Faraudo 09.21.17	The Dark Knight Rises is better than The Dark Knight smh.
guitarded_chuck 09.21.17	irrelevant characters? tf you talking about you try hard lmao
Clumseee 09.21.17	Memento > Prestige > Inception > blah
neekafat 09.21.17	5 is 1 wtf
neekafat 09.21.17	"cinecomic" you pretentious fuck
Astral Abortis 09.21.17	Just my own views but if your movie has brilliant cinematography but boring characters or story, it's a failure. A good film can have brilliant writing and characters with sub par cinematography and still be a good film, but if all you have is pretty framing and dynamic lighting then it's not gonna be an interesting watch
butcherboy 09.21.17	there is an argument to be made for a movie that exists as mood, visual aesthetics and atmosphere being an end in themselves.. it's a tough thing to nail down and pull off for two hours though.. look at someone like terrence malick.. when he nails it, it's out of this world.. mostly it's blithering nonsense though, like a two-hour commercial.. i get why dunkirk falls prey to that.. it's a sub-par war movie..
guitarded_chuck 09.21.17	the thing is dunkirk wasnt meant to be a deep character study, it was a multi-plot strategic look at the evacuation of dunkirk to give the viewer a multi-perspective view of said historic event and for that i think not only was it well done, it might even be my favorite nolan film you dont need a fucking 10 hour detailed "what is your favorite color" character study for a movie to be good guys wtf, its the equivalent of saying a song is only good if it has a guitar solo
Rik VII 09.21.17	"patethic" I think the word you're looking for is "(over-)sentimental" or something like that. "cinecomic" ... shouldn't it be the other way around? Like, in this order it kinda suggests that the thing you're talking about is a comic in the style of cinema. Because I don't know why you'd call Dark Knight a "comic", with or without "cine" tacked before it. Disagreed with most of the list. I think Dark Knight, Inception and Prestige are his best movies, Dunkirk is his weakest. All of them are good, none of them is mind-blowingly amazing.
neekafat 09.21.17	I'll admit that I was a little let down with Dunkirk compared to the rest of his filmography, it's down there with Following
Astral Abortis 09.21.17	"you dont need fucking 10 hour detailed "what is your favorite color" character study for a movie to be good guys wtf, its the equivalent of saying a song is only good if it has a guitar solo" I haven't seen Dunkirk so my opinions are unrelated to this but anyway I don't think a good character or story needs to be amazingly in-depth or intense to be good. For example, I believe Ellen Ripley to be a brilliant character, Alien has a wondrous story, and it's all tied together with amazing cinematography. Whereas I think 2001: A Space Odyssey has incredible visuals, the worst story ever told in cinema, and characters who might as well not exist. And thus, because it fails on grounds of consumable CONTENT, it fails as a film. Then you have the inverse, Dark Star, a film that parodies 2001, has awful visuals and amateur direction yet is 1000x more engaging, enjoyable and better written than 2001, with some of my favourite characters in film history. So this is just a me thing, but forever and always, good characters and content over an artistic aesthetic any day of the week.
Rik VII 09.21.17	Concerning Dunkirk, I appreciated the attempt at doing something very different, but it had some weak points, especially regarding the plot with the boat (which was the only one that wasn't a non-stop fight for survival and therefore the only one where the characters mattered, which was one of its problems imo). It's still a good movie with some very interesting directing decisions (like not showing the Nazi's faces, letting them seem like a force of nature, etc), and it's unfair to dismiss it as just another war movie as far as I see it. But like I said, it's my least favorite, too. Nolan is like the embodiment of 4/5 and that one's maybe a 3.5 for me.
Rik VII 09.21.17	"And thus, because it fails on grounds of consumable CONTENT, it fails as a film." If you don't like the lyrics of a song, does the song fail on grounds of "consumable CONTENT" and "thus" fail as a song?
Astral Abortis 09.21.17	If the lyrics are really bad, yeah. But that's not an apt comparison, because in this case if 2001 were a song, it would have brilliant, dynamic production with an amazing musical aesthetic that's drawn out over 3 hours with little to no instrumentation and then all of a sudden the last thirty minutes is a jangly guitar solo and a bunch of china cymbals splashing into silence. And you're left like wow I mean the production was top notch but the music itself was the worst thing ever.
Rik VII 09.21.17	Eh, I think the visuals, the "composition" (there's a reason why it's called that), the editing (you could say the "rhythm" of the movie") are the equivalents of what makes a good melody of a song. That's the character, the personality of the movie. It's expressed through stylistic choices. The story is part of that, but only one part in a web of stylitic decisions, and that's the film itself. And if you see it that way, 2001 has a lot of amazing melodies, slow but brooding, aesthetic, like post rock, comparable with a Godspeed album or stuff like that. It isn't close to being one of my favorite movies (I think it's kinda overhyped by film fans tbh), but it is a atmospherical, aesthetical, beautifully filmed movie, and that's the equivalent of a beautiful, moody experience of an album. And if you think that's what makes the "worst thing ever", I don't think you really got the point of it (not wanting to treat "you didn't get it" ground here, but it is possible to just miss the things that are actually good about a movie)
Astral Abortis 09.21.17	I disagree entirely, and since you insist on comparing film to music, my view would be this: screenplay/story = composition, direction/visuals = production, editing = mixing/mastering. And now that you've also brought up actual music, let me just say that 2001's soundtrack is also sooooooooooooo bad
Astral Abortis 09.21.17	But you're also comparing it to Godspeed, a band I dislike for similar reasons. They sound nice and have a cool aesthetic but their content is so lacklustre and drawn out to a fault that it makes them a chore to listen to!
Rik VII 09.21.17	But if you say it like that you're basically saying you're watching films for the stories and not for the film itself. It's like wanting the Mona Lisa to tell you a story. Sure, the difference is that due to the temporal nature of the medium, film is >able< to tell stories, and possibly good ones, but you can't just go and dismiss every artistic aspect of a movie in in favor of mere story-telling. You can just read the wikipedia summary for that. Or - which is funny, since you mentioned Alien - Ridley Scott once said "If you want a good story, read a book", which I think is still a wrong way to approach literature, because a lot of amazing books don't have amazing stories, but an amazing way of handling language and the possiblities of expressing things with it. Art is about expression, and telling stories is one way of expressing an emotion. Showing a picture is another one. Combining all these things is yet another one. You just choose what fits the film. Wanting a film to decide for one specific thing essentially means refusing to be open to all its aspects and all the things it wants to express. And I don't think that's a good way of approaching a piece of art.
Egarran 09.21.17	Memento is a great movie. Interstellar and Inception should have been awesome movies. The rest, eh. In some ways, Nolan is a superficial storyteller. His movies are littered with style exercises and plotholes. Every time I wish Fincher had been the director.
Astral Abortis 09.21.17	Maybe I just like stories because I intensely disagree with everything you said and if a painting doesn't portray a story then it's a boring ass painting that serves no purpose other than a passing glance, just like a beautiful film will bore me to tears if there's no engaging story or content, just like a book won't draw me past page 100 if it's trying way too hard to create gorgeous prose rather than engross me in its story. And Ridley Scott can't say shit because his stories suck and he destroyed the Alien franchise. He didn't write Alien and I'd hardly ever give him the credit of having it be "his" film.
Egarran 09.21.17	"Ridley Scott once said "If you want a good story, read a book"" Citation please.
BeyondCosby 09.21.17	I really don't know how to feel about Memento seeing as I've only watched it once, but my initial reaction to it was that it was overly complex without any real payoff or emotion. I don't agree with your assessment of him losing his ability to create meaningful characters. Look at inception. There might be one or two characters that are just there for their roll (I'm talking about the guy who can change his faces/ weapons dude), but everyone else has a purpose in the film and ultimate gravitate around Cobb. It almost plays out as an intervention of sorts, where they are all entertaining and trying to help this clearly sick man through the guilt that he feels towards his wife's death, and the addiction that caused it.
Rik VII 09.21.17	Yeah, reading that first paragraph I'm certain that there is no way we come to an agreement. I think your way of perceiving art is prone to let important things slip by and therefore doesn't do it justice most of the time, but I obviously won't be able to change your mind. I don't know if it adds anything to the discussion, but I might add that I myself am a story-telling fanatic who has developed his own theories for things that work and things that don't because of years and years of writing books and short stories, so it's not like you're the only one who "likes stories". But I still think that it is important to acknowledge that stories are one way of expressing something, not the only one.
Rik VII 09.21.17	@the "characters in Nolan films" discussion, I also thing that Cob is one of his best characters, along with Wayne, Gordon and maybe one or two from Prestige
BeyondCosby 09.21.17	And again, looking at Interstellar, the heart of that film is the relationship between a father and his child and an allegory for having to choose between your job and your family. Even if that job is to save the world, the fact that he sacrifices his family to do it is really the moving part of the movie and what makes it emotionally gripping. In the end, the person who should hate him the most forgives him and even encourages him to continue.
guitarded_chuck 09.21.17	memento is interesting and thought provoking but i am definitely more entertained personally by a dunkirk or interstellar or 2001 different tastes guys which is fine but pls leave out the pretentious language, you are not film gods
Astral Abortis 09.21.17	You need to understand that i'm not disparaging other elements in film, I'm just saying that the key engagement I find in any film is in the story it's telling. I may be drawn in by beautiful direction but if there's no substance beyond that I will get bored. Because if there's nothing there to actually stimulate my brain then it's pointless to me.
Astral Abortis 09.21.17	"different tastes guys which is fine but pls leave out the pretentious language, you are not film gods" What pretentious language? Plus there's only one film god on the planet and his name is John Carpenter.
Egarran 09.21.17	"looking at Interstellar, the heart of that film is the relationship between a father and his child and an allegory for having to choose between your job and your family" barf
DoofusWainwright 09.21.17	'Most relevant cinecomic'? Relevant to the times? Sounds a bit of a sniffy description
Astral Abortis 09.21.17	Interstellar was a very enjoyable film
Egarran 09.21.17	I sure could have lived without the job/family allegory.
BeyondCosby 09.21.17	Well it's literally the reason why the movie was written so...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Egarran 09.21.17	No it isn't. It's an unnecessary part, shoved in to make the movie more relatable to the average moviegoer. MURPH!
yanquiuxo 09.21.17	^^^
BeyondCosby 09.22.17	Alright man, I'll help you out. Christopher Nolan writes a letter to Hans Zimmer about how much he loves his daughter and sends him a watch. Hans Zimmer composes a theme surrounding the letter. Christopher Nolan writes movie script for Interstellar based on that theme. It's all good man, I've got your back.
Faraudo 09.22.17	You sound exactly like the type of person that would use a photo of Tarkovsky as it's profile pict... Oh.
Egarran 09.22.17	I like the passive aggressiveness, BC, but you're not convincing me. A huge movie made from theme inspired by a sentimental letter? Ehh. Your anecdote doesn't say anything about a job/family conflict. More likely, the producers noticed how those elements made it possible for the movie to speak to the average consumer who don't understand or care about time/space mechanics.
Rik VII 09.22.17	I think the 1 hour long exposition makes it pretty clear that the movie cares more about the family conflicts than about time/space mechanics tbh
guitarded_chuck 09.22.17	"You sound exactly like the type of person that would use a photo of Tarkovsky as it's profile pict... Oh." cringe
BeyondCosby 09.22.17	http://www.businessinsider.com/how-hans-zimmer-wrote-the-interstellar-theme-2014-11 Don't worry friend, Once again, I'll help you out. http://www.indiewire.com/2014/10/christopher-nolan-says-interstellar-is-about-what-it-means-to-be-a-dad-plus-check-out-new-pics-271196/ And there's another. Sometimes I use google to help me understand things I'm not sure about. ;)
Egarran 09.22.17	Waah I just don't want it to be true. I'll just curl up in a fetal position and accept that I live in a world where Interstellar is a movie about a mundane father/child-relationship rather than an exploration of space and consciousness like 2001.
BeyondCosby 09.22.17	It's alright man. You'll watch it again and realize how brilliant of a movie is. Then you'll say "Cosby, you were right, this is now my favorite movie" and I'll say "I knew you'd like it man. Sometimes we just can't be afraid to express our emotions".
Egarran 09.22.17	Let's not go overboard now.
neekafat 09.22.17	Don't all Nolan films have a 1 hour long exposition? Idc, he's still my favorite director