Recent Viewing Part IV

Wouldn’t that slowness itself count as a challenge?

Not on the level of EX MACHINA, but definitely one of the best films of the year so far. Loved it!

A Quiet Place

ok, but too similar in tone and style to countless other dystopian movies. it made me want to watch "I am Legend" again.

I've heard a lot of good and bad things about A Quiet Place; often within the same review(!).

Memento

really, really good. So many movies botch a good premise with bad execution, others do their best to salvage a bad premise with good execution, Memento is one of the few that takes a brilliant idea and fulfills it's promise. A completely satisfying movie. I wish Nolan still made stuff like this.

He’s probably a bit better than your average Hollywood director, but I find most of his movies fall into the former camp I mentioned, badly executed movies with a good premise.

I think the most prominent example would be inception, which takes the idea of infiltrating dreams and turns the "dreams" into, essentially, video games. There's very little surreal or sublime in these "dreams", just standard heists and shootouts with occassional twists. The whole movie can be summed up in the part where Tom Hardy, after saying, "Don't be afraid to dream a little bigger", pulls out a massive grenade launcher. In "Inception's" world, dreaming big means getting a bigger gun.

Not at all. It's the sheer mise-en-scene of each dream level -- the amount of kinetic energy and ingenuity in them -- that makes his films. The stories are pretty straightforward, even those that are told in unusual ways; it's what goes on inside each segment that is riveting.

I disagree. I think it's all highly visionary. Nothing "standard" about it at all, which is a rather bizarre claim to have for a director who never resorts to standard genre tropes.

Love the fight scene in INTERSTELLAR; such tense editing. He's so brilliant at tempo, drawing out when necessary (with looming threats, like the sea planet), and then more rapid when needed.

So far, I haven't seen any mise-en-scene in a Nolan film that didn't impress somehow, both in its ambition and execution. He is one of the very best directors in Hollywood at the moment. Although I wasn't as thrilled with DUNKIRK as seemingly everyone else. That's the exception for me. Still a great film, but a bit more lacklustre in that particular area.

Well, it's Hollywood. It's not David Lynch. I don't expect dream sequences in big Hollywood films to adher to the same logic as actual dreams.

Ha! I could maybe understand the 'standard' thing if you were talking about Rob Cohen or Jon Turtletaub or Jon Favreau or something -- all capable, but pretty standard genre journeymen. But Nolan? Nah. Makes no sense.

To be a bit of a devil's advocate here: Carl Gustav Jung (contrary to Freud for whom dreams were essentially wish fulfillment) analyzed dreams in context of Aristotle's Poetics. Putting it simply, for Jung dreams had a strong narrative structure. The symbol theory used and explained in Inception is more rooted in that tradition than in Freudian, like the irrational and downright oneiric David Lynch. Lynch is more complex than that, but applying Freud's theories to Eraserhead definitely made it make a bit more sense thematically (whatever we are looking at is about the fears of parenthood) and Mulholland Drive (though paradoxically the "dark" reality of the film is much more nightmare-like than Betty's dream world) could be definitely explored in these terms.

While it may sound a bit weird that Nolan's film about dreams is one of his most impeccably logical and rational in terms of storytelling, something has to be said about him being somehow able (contrary to Interstellar) to muster up so much from something that is constant exposition. I know that Thor will find a lot of his beloved visual elements (though frankly, never as deep as his references are, and I am saying it as a Nolan film. And, except Dunkirk, Inception is possibly his most immersive film. Interstellar is his most beautiful, but part of that comes from how the farm scenes are informed by Terrence Malick's visual style), but the film constantly explains everything via dialogue. However, it works in this world, because it also reminds what the stakes are.

^
Yes! Not sure how it would go down with a younger audience now but I love it.

By the way, I don't often post my own viewings in this thread, or similar threads at other boards, as it's kinda my job to view and write about films in a more professional capacity elsewhere. But if anyone's curious, I keep updated lists about what I view -- both new films and ALL films -- in these two places:

2018 films seen (ranked):

https://mubi.com/lists/2018-films-ranked

All films seen in 2018 (not ranked, latest first):

https://mubi.com/lists/all-feature-films-seen-in-2018