I loved Following, highly recommended especially if you liked Memento (I liked it a lot more than Memento actually). I’m not a big Nolan fan, but I thought Following was a fine debut.
^ I think Following is his best film.
From one of the reviews last page: “And yet, ’’Matrix’’ is the last movie before ’’Inception’’ that dared touching that sacred concept of ’I’’, ’’Mind’’, ’’Perception’’ and ’’Thought’’.
Really? No film since 1999 has touched these concepts? I guess that might be true if you didn’t watch any films in between now and then.
@Josh
“I guess that might be true if you didn’t watch any films in between now and then.”
Nice.
‘’And yet, ’’Matrix’’ is the last movie before ’’Inception’’ that dared touching that sacred concept of ’I’’, ’’Mind’’, ’’Perception’’ and ’’Thought’’, all mixed in one big hollywood picture.’’
I guess you can read it two ways, but I took it as being the only big budget hollywood movie that tackled these concepts since the matrix, which is a little more believable.. But I don’t really care to look it up.
I think no matter how you parse it, it’s a big fat reduction.
All this moaning about the early review of Inception just makes me seem to get more excited for seeing it.
IUSTEFAN—Sure, I left off the Hollywood part of the quote, but it doesn’t diminish the ridiculousness of the reviewer.
But you don’t even have to look to films— there’s more of these concepts in the Battlestar Galactica television series than most Hollywood films.
wait a moment, isn’t this the director of the hideous abominable monstrosity Dark Knight? Has Nolan, like St Paul, been struck by some celestial light and shown the error of his ways?
I fear instead it is more a case of critics who are ignorant buffoons, but i’ll probably give it a try sometime when my mail rental list is running low
OMG a hate thread two pages in 10 hours about a film no one has seen !!!!!!
This was good :
heist film to keep less attentive audiences engaged
Some one collect the MUBI review points from this thread: it is already written !!!!
Here i’ll start it:
Not seen on iMax in a theater, this film sucks so bad…..
I haven’t seen it either, but it’s by far my least favorite film of 2010.
Bog off, Peabody, your superiority is showing again and it’s no more a pretty sight than Nick Clegg as Cameron’s fig leaf.
Flag me up, Dimitris rides again
Although people are justifying negativity and snark on this thread as being directed to the reviewer’s “hyperbole”, I am not so sure the same words written about a non-Hollywood reviewer would have been considered “hyperbole” until the film had been watched and disappointed. For instance, if the statement quoted in the title was about a new Frederick Wiseman documentary, I’m sure the statement would have been met with curiosity instead of snark, though it still shares the same amount of hyperbole.
—PolarisDiB
Well, to be fair to Nolan, i quite liked Insomnia, Williams much less obnoxious than in some of his films, and Memento was a whole lot better than Dark Knight, though both have had the hype treatment. I even looked forward to seeing Dark Knight! Will give the new film a fair chance, but general critical reaction is pretty meaningless. The praise of certain critics would interest me.
Nolan sometimes disappoints, but I find that he more often surprises. I really liked Dark Knight and was absolutely positive that I would hate it. On the other hand, I thought I would hate it because Begins was a piece of crap—which I was really looking forward to.
The trailer for Inception really grabbed me. The actors are good and Nolan seems to be getting more and more independence, instead of the opposite, with his success. I think it’s better to wait and see on this one than jump to conclusions now.
And remember that critics are more helpful if you already have an idea of the critic’s own style and perspective. Some random critic calling Inception a game-changer with exclamation marks may not mean anything if he says that about every movie that comes out every week (here’s glaring at you, PETER TRAVERS), but if he is one who seems to go out of his way to see a variety of movies and is rarely enthusiastic about any movie, it’s worth checking out, even if it’s bad, to try to see what caused such a reaction.
—PolarisDiB
I’ve never been a Nolan fan. His greatest achievement so far, it seems to me, is in getting out of Heath Ledger’s way on DARK KNIGHT, which might as well have been entitled THE JOKER. Otherwise there are way too many good movies out there to bother with his overrated trifles.
On the other hand, I’ll probably see INCEPTION, because, well, you know, it is summer and all…
I personally dislike all the films of his I have seen, I find them deeply problematic (especially the fascistic ideology of The Dark Knight) so I am not exited in the least about this
@ Kenji Bog off, Peabody, your superiority is showing again
t has nothing to do with my superiority – it was a humorous observation directed at people with a sense of humor.
I may or may not write that review with selections from this thread. If do, the end would be thus:
This movie is the worst piece of crap I have not seen. I can’t wait to spend huge sums of jing-jang to see it on iMax.
And Kenji, please stop referencing my superiority. My superiority is embarrassing to me.
bwahahahahahahahahahaha
“especially the fascistic ideology of The Dark Knight”
Welcome to the internal logic of all superhero narratives, a subject covered well in the comic book Watchmen (that did not translate so well on screen).
I’d go further into this but there are many threads devoted to discussion on the Dark Knight, and in the case of this one I’d actually rather keep the focus on Inception because I am looking forward to that movie and hope to return to this thread after it’s release to see if/how sentiments have changed.
—PolarisDiB
General statement directed at everyone, including me: any person who claims a single movie is about to change the way we perceive story-telling is due for some ribbing. I mean: at how many points in time has that been true? Breathless? Citizen Kane? Dark Knight? (“One of those things is not like the other?”)
Also: isn’t saying “your superiority is showing” a lot like calling someone a philistine or a typical bourgeois — as in if you call someone that, chances are you’re showing more about yourself than about them? (Answer: probably, yes.) Just sayin’.
Anthony, as it happens Peabody has already called me bourgeois on another thread recently.
Peabody looks down on us looking down on Nolan worshippers, like John Cleese looking down on Ronnie Barker looking down on Ronnie Corbett.
I shall insult to my heart’s content and with clear conscience any disciple of Harry Lime and the benefits of conflict.
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
but trouble is that insulting such people is like giving a masochist a damn good thrashing
@ Kenij called me bourgeois on another thread recently
I didn’t call you bourgeois Kenji, I called your idea bourgeois.
I subscribe to criticizing the idea, not the person.
KJ called me a Nazi once. I’m sure you all agree.
@Robert and @Kenji: I’m gonna leave this between you two. I obviously don’t know enough about either of your posting-histories to really comment one way or the other.
I’m not saying we should all sterilize our comments to the point of only speaking objectively. I’m not saying we should take everything personally, either. In fact: I’m not really saying much of anything.
What I don’t like about this kind of intra-board stress is that it tends to cut off any thread to a full discussion. Maybe call each other names, label the other’s argument a certain way, point out critical failings when they exist, but keep talking about movies, regardless.
Back to Nolan.
We do, Anthony.
On another thread I just complimented Kenji’s wonderful description of Comrades.
So we do circle around films…..
It’d be more worth our while to watch Kenji and Peabody bicker than to give Nolan more attention. Like somebody said earlier, the Tarantino-like fanboyism spreading for Nolan is disquieting and while I’m not discounting his work (completely), I am saying that the last thing he needs is more attention. Let them get philosophical about Nolan on CHUD. Not Mubi.
WHAT I’M REALLY CURIOUS ABOUT:
Does anyone see any “recurring visual style” in Nolan’s films? I haven’t seen them all, so am probably not in a position to have much of an extended opinion.
I mean: his films are well-shot and practically well-set up for clear story-telling (action scenes: debatable), but I’m curious: is he one of those directors whose films we see on late night tv and immediately say “THAT’S A NOLAN” in a big wake-up-the-kids voice?
That’s as hyperbolic as Pauline Kael’s famous rave review of Last Tango in Paris.
Miasma is a big hypocrite who’s going to talk about it anyway cause he’s at work and seeks distraction.
@Anthony: I wouldn’t say he has a “visual style.” What I see in Nolan is an interest in story and narrative that is +1 from, perhaps, a modicum of lukewarm material in American films. Yet I think Nolan is perversely concerned with cleverness and oneupmanship, and I think he really likes his own scripts. I think that for Nolan there is an element of eroticism in the pleasure of creating tricks, slights, that magic silliness. Filmmakers have been compared to magicians, but if Nolan is like that, he’s equivocal to David Blaine – any trick is a spectacular paegent. The Dark Knight cost $250 million and Inception cost $200 million. How much visual style can one expect for money like that? His bluster, perhaps, will be noted. Maybe he’s a fun version of M. Night Shyamalan.
I regard him as pretentious. The Dark Knight is a good example of a film that takes itself enormously seriously, and expects the audience to do so as well. I don’t have a source for this, but I had a friend who said he heard Nolan in a radio interview during the theatrical run of TDK, and Nolan earnest admitted that he considers TDK an art film (I really wish I had a source for this, but I do believe my friend). Whether or not TDK is an “art film” can be debated (or can it?), but personally speaking, I think that if Nolan is the type of man who considers a $250 million action project to be an art film… then I simply draw the line, stop, and do not take him remotely seriously.
Sorry, Anthony! Don’t mean to diss you. But that’s me talking about Nolan.
“Like somebody said earlier, the Tarantino-like fanboyism spreading for Nolan is disquieting and while I’m not discounting his work (completely), I am saying that the last thing he needs is more attention.”
Still strange to me to be feel “disquieted” by other people enjoying a director’s work, whether it be Nolan, Tarantino, or much worse directors out there. Besides, whereas Nolan and Tarantino may be similar in that they have fanboys, I do not see much more similarity than that, even in the type of fanboys they have. Finally, I believe that the attention Christopher Nolan is getting is what allows him the ability to make movies like The Prestige and (optimistically) Inception with big budgets, wide releases, but still singularity of vision and freedom from studio control. As well as, Nolan is the exact perfect type of director to get people interested in broader ideas of cinema that can then be a gateway into other movies—I rarely find it difficult to push a Nicolas Roeg movie onto a person who likes Memento.
So again, Inception may or may not be a good movie—we do not know because we have not seen it yet. However, it is rather absurd to criticize it based on critics’ hype and audiences’ excitement, even if the argument for such criticism resides in the hype and excitement itself. On that note, I have always believed that if you let hype bother you, it is just as bad as letting hype excite you. Until this movie is seen, everything in this thread is speculation, not even opinion. That said, my speculation is that negativity in approach will inform the viewing, so that many here will dislike Inception because it was over-hyped—again, not because “hype set expectations high” but because it was “over-hyped”, which is two different routes to the exact same cliff.
The trailer was mesmerizing and compelling, the actors are good, the director has shown a strong ability to make engaging thrillers whether you prefer his early cinema or later or whatever. I haven’t seen anyone here discount his filmography entirely, so I do not see the problem in being excited or hopeful about his next movie.
—PolarisDiB
Ben Simington
Ach….well, there goes that. I liked INSOMNIA fine, too, but it’s nowhere near as good as the original. And just rewatched MEMENTO a couple weeks ago to gear up for reconsidering SHUTTER ISLAND and the whole “super-unreliable narrator” trend in stylish Hollywood neo-noirs over the past decade. MEMENTO holds up pretty well and features much better cinematic thinking than anything since by Nolan, as far as I could tell. Any thoughts from anyone on FOLLOWING, which I have yet to see?