Dunkirk

To coincide with the release of Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan curated a season of films at the BFI which influenced his WWII carnival of trauma. "Our season explores the mechanics and uses of suspense to modulate an audience's response to narrative," Nolan explained, and while he might have sounded like some kind of emotion-curious automaton, that declaration of intent - alongside the films he chose - reveals much about Dunkirk's provenance and objectives. Speed's 'Die Hard in a lift / on a bus / on a train' mission statement, for example, can be transposed to Dunkirk's 'Die Hard on the beach / in the sea / in the air' approach; the visual storytelling of silent classics Greed and Sunrise is a key tool in Nolan's dialogue-light, action-heavy movie, and the impact of the climactic plane crash in Hitchcock's tremendous Foreign Correspondent is also blindingly apparent - although for different reasons, Nolan could just as easily have picked Hitch's Lifeboat.

But despite the umbilical connections to all these cinematic progenitors, Dunkirk is first and foremost very much its own thing: a unique, bold, experimental film which - while probably not quite Nolan's greatest achievement - could only have been made by someone with his clout and ambition. And given that, for me, Christopher Nolan's ambition often outstrips his storytelling abilities (unpopular opinion: Inception, The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar are all loaded with promise but trip over their own narrative shoelaces), it's a welcome relief that this time he's crafted more of an experience than a story. Virtually ditching characterisation and traditional notions of narrative, Dunkirk is less a movie than an ordeal. And I mean that, for the most part, in a good way.

Opening with the title in that familiar Univers Bold font and the sound of the director's own pocket watch ticking away with relentless urgency, Dunkirk is immediately and obviously a Christopher Nolan film. Tick-tick-tick mutates violently into a deafening rat-a-tat as a troop of British soldiers ambling through the deserted streets of Dunkirk are fired on by unseen German snipers, and there's no safety net in the casting to let you know who will or won't survive the attack: all these young men are anonymously similar. Most of the lead characters don't even get named - only in the end credits do we find out that one of our protagonists is wryly named Tommy, for whom ze var is most definitely not over.

That opening scene sets the tone for the next hundred minutes: tension, disorientation, a hidden enemy and extremely loud noises are very much the order of the day. A disparate bunch of unknowns spend the next week desperately trying to get the fuck out of France and back home in one piece while Nolan amusingly forces Big Names to stay in one place and do very little: Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy barely leaves the confines of his cockpit-set close-up, Cillian Murphy shivers with PTSD, Mark Rylance is stuck at the wheel of his fishing boat and Ken Branagh stands on a pier looking stoic. Even Michael Caine is relegated to a voice cameo.

The lack of complex characters might draw criticism from some, but it's a deliberate choice. Dunkirk is about the experience of survival, and Nolan strips away everything that might get in the way of us feeling on edge for the duration of the film. There are no moments of Spielbergian melodrama, no chances to get to know anyone's tragic backstory and certainly no attempts to show that hey, those guys trying to kill our boys are just flipsides of the same coin, man. We never cut to bloated generals pushing model planes around a map in Whitehall and we never see a single German face. Nolan isn't interested in war as a complex investigation of humanity, where the best and worst aspects of mankind can be found in the unlikeliest of places; for his soldiers, war is an endless, merciless death machine to be escaped from as quickly as possible, whatever the cost.

It's odd, then, that Dunkirk remains a bloodless affair. Nolan's decision to focus on suspense rather than the flying limbs and guts of, say, Saving Private Ryan's visceral opening and closing scenes lend it an incongruous air of false safety at odds with the thick seam of authenticity running through the rest of the film. It's a minor quibble, but the odd splash of claret could have upped the stakes even further. Instead, in an effort to heighten the tension, Nolan allows Hans Zimmer the freedom to carpet bomb the film with his most ludicrous, histrionic and distracting score yet. Barely a scene goes by without screaming strings or electronically enhanced horns blasting out at comically overblown volume, wilfully overlooking the dramatic effect that a well-placed moment of silence or two can bring.

Fortunately, Nolan's eye for a shot more or less makes up for his cloth ears. There are images in Dunkirk of such aching wonder - especially if witnessed on the appropriately majestic scale of an IMAX screen - that blow the mind. Dogfights between the RAF and the Luftwaffe are reminiscent of George Lucas' best X-wing moments (ironically, since Lucas shoved footage of WWII films into Star Wars before aerial sequences were finished), the beaches of Dunkirk stretch off into infinite bleakness and the scale of everything is brain-boggling. Tiny figures of men dot the vast expanses of sand, ridiculously tiddly fishing boats pootle across miles of unforgiving English Channel to aid the rescue, and even those Spitfires and Messerschmitts find themselves almost lost against the beauty of a clear, bright sky. The idea that all this is somehow cosmically futile is expressed with elegant awe.

Nolan lays all this out in typically tangled fashion, cutting between the week-long experience of the stranded soldiers, the day-long mission of the "little ships" that stepped in when the Navy was found lacking, and the hour-long airborne skirmish with a deliberate disregard for temporal sense. It's a technique that boosts the tension, but on a first viewing it's also unnecessarily confusing for too long, distracting attention from the story while your brain tries to hop between timelines. And while I'm nitpicking, I have no idea what the mechanics of Dunkirk's ostensibly climactic moment were: Nolan spends most of the film avoiding cliché, but then inserts a late flourish of heroic action which is unexpectedly directorially bungled.

Nevertheless, Dunkirk is quite an achievement even by Christopher Nolan's standards. It's a commendably original, ruthlessly effective sensory assault that pushes mainstream cinema further than anything else has for a long time, and that's not to be underestimated. It's also subtly patriotic without being jingoistic, especially in its treatment of the ordinary folks back home who risked their lives sailing their rickety tugboats across the Channel to pick up complete strangers in dire need. The Dunkirk spirit soaks through every frame, and it's a timely reminder that if we're so desperate to get away from Europe then we're going to need every drop of it.

LFF 2016: Arrival

Denis Villeneuve's second film to hover menacingly over cinema audiences in the space of twelve months is light years away from the grounded, nail-troubling thrills of 2015's Sicario, just as that film was nothing like his Enemy, or Prisoners, or Incendies before it. If Villeneuve - master of the one-word title - has spent his career thus far on an eclectic jaunt through a selection of genres, then Arrival might just signify his, uh, arrival at his natural home: intelligent, thematically grand sci-fi.

Plunging us into an apparent alien invasion, pausing briefly to introduce Amy Adams' introspective linguist Louise Banks, Villeneuve dangles potential, familiar threads which may or may not have red herrings attached. The mysterious appearance of a dozen extraterrestrial crafts around the globe suggests all-out Independence Day-style war might be on the horizon, while the recruitment of experts in their field (including a maths boffin called Ian) to assist with the kind of scientific breakthrough that only happens in the movies recalls Jurassic Park with tentacles. On the flipside, Banks' melancholy - and Villeneuve's deliberate, measured pacing - evokes Tarkovsky's Solaris. But Arrival is none of these things; sitting somewhere between arthouse and popcorn, it's refreshingly and joyously original, though it takes its sweet time explaining how.

"I speak aylien very wail, I lairn eet from ay boook"

Banks - one of the world's foremost experts in language - is tasked with establishing communication with the visitors, and it's not a quick or easy process. Her methods are complex and hampered by only sporadic contact with her subject, and her apparent lack of progress leads to nervousness around the world, especially high up in the Chinese and Russian military (it feels a little uncomfortable that Eric Heisserer's otherwise classy script has to fall back on racial stereotyping here, especially in a story about trying to understand a foreign culture, but the payoff warrants it). In all honesty, the pace may also incite restlessness in audience buttocks: as beautiful as Arrival's visuals are, and as terrifically weird as it sounds (it's often impossible to tell where Jóhann Jóhannsson's score ends and the sound effects begin), after ninety minutes you might find yourself itching to be amazed, rather than merely impressed. But then the last act drops, the rug you've been comfortably standing on is whipped away, and all is forgiven.

Arrival has so much to recommend it - Adams is restrained yet captivating; her character's story is as vital as the global crisis at the centre of which she finds herself; aliens are well cool - but its USP is the kind of narrative chicanery that blows away even the most deep-rooted cynicism of audiences who think they can't be surprised any more. It's reminiscent of Christopher Nolan's faux-Kubrickian efforts in Inception and Interstellar, but benefits from not being as wildly overambitious or unnecessarily complex. More than that, though, Villeneuve and Heisserer take a century of established cinematic storytelling and use it against you to create something so ballsy, it's almost as if you've been introduced to an entirely new language. Look very carefully and you can see what they've done there.

Probably worth mentioning that Jeremy Renner's in it too

A second viewing should be included with the sale of each cinema ticket, so that all of Arrival's sly genius can be appreciated in full. With hindsight, seemingly innocuous lines of dialogue take on new meaning, scenes that initially seemed irrelevant become crucial, and those red herrings can be fished out at an early stage. What's more, you can wallow in the respect afforded to you by a director who assumes you're smart enough to work with him in decoding the film's mysteries while simultaneously schooling you in linguistic theory and cinematic audacity.

Were it not for that somewhat protracted mid-section, Arrival would easily perch atop any sensible cinemagoer's (i.e. mine) top ten of the year so far. It's rescued by its dazzling finale, but there's still plenty to love about its freshness, its elegance and its refusal to cram in a car chase or ten. Almost certainly Denis Villeneuve's best film, the success of this sci-fi lullaby bodes extremely well for his next film: 2017's tantalising Harrison Ford / Ryan Gosling-starring Blade Runner sequel. Here's hoping to see more things you people wouldn't believe.

The Girl On The Train

If the number of girls on trains reading The Girl On The Train over the last couple of years is anything to go by, then the film of the book of the girl on the train is already on the fast track to box office success. Which is a shame really, because despite a first class performance from Emily Blunt, it really is a load of derivative, mediocre and frequently lazy old rubbish; if Southern Rail made movies instead of pretending to operate a train service, this would be the result.

The Girl On The Train

Full disclaimer: I haven't read Paula Hawkins' book. I don't know anything about it bar its Da Vinci Code / Girl With The Dragon Tattoo / Gone Girl-esque ubiquity among commuters, although that fact in itself should have alerted me to the film's distinct averageness. So whether its flaws are inherited from the source material or are entirely down to Erin Cressida Wilson's script, I don't know. But even if you were to approach it with the blissful ignorance of the novel's very existence, you'd know it was a literary adaptation before it's barely pulled out of the station.

Much of the first act is smothered in Emily Blunt's voiceover, explaining who her character is and what she's looking at from her vantage point on her daily slog to and from Manhattan, and it's a fair indication that the film is destined to go off the rails. It might be an old-fashioned point of view but I like films to show, not tell, and lengthy voiceovers are almost always a signal that somebody, somewhere, doesn't have the artistic chops to craft a truly cinematic experience. The fact that the voiceovers disappear once they've set the scene, returning only for a cringe-inducing sign-off, just drives the point home.

The Girl On The Balcony

Before too long then, we know that Rachel (Blunt) is an obsessive alcoholic who thrives on twice-daily gawps at the house she used to share with her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux), who's now married to Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). A couple of doors down live Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans), an initially anonymous couple who Rachel envies for their apparently perfect life. All these characters' stories are presented to us in a relentless tumble of flashbacks and captions, some of which are polite enough to let you know when you're back in the present day, if director Tate Taylor can be arsed.

Flashbacks - along with voiceovers - are another dangerous filmmaking tool, and Taylor wields them like a child with a chainsaw, hacking his story to bits and leaving you to piece together the tattered remains. Now I don't mind the odd bit of deliberate misdirection and cinematic sleight-of-hand that flashbacks can provide (Christopher Nolan's Memento and The Prestige took the device to new and thus-far unparalleled heights), but here they just come across as unnecessary. One notably egregious example occurs during The Girl On The Train's climax, pointlessly depicting at length (and in dubious taste) events we've already had explained to us. There's a high-profile film out soon that uses flashbacks with startling ingenuity, and it shunts Wilson and Taylor's film into the sidings; one can only hope that they watch it and think long and hard about what they've done.

The Girl On The Front Lawn

Eventually, as you can imagine (or know full well having read the book), there's an unpleasant turn of events for the characters, and the whole shebang becomes a '90s psychological thriller riddled with plot holes. Not least of these is a staggeringly inept police investigation headed up by the usually-formidable Alison Janney, wasted here as a detective who - in any other similarly-themed movie - would have had the case wrapped up by the hour mark, instead of doing dumb things like conducting half an interview with a prime suspect before inexplicably breaking off because an underling shook his head at her. I too found myself shaking my head, and not for the last time.

Tate Taylor's approach and visuals suggest a man who's watched Gone Girl quite a lot and thought, well, that worked, let's do that. But in attempting to mimic David Fincher, he's merely highlighted the difference between a director who truly understands the potential of cinema and a journeyman lumbered with a creaky script. Roughly ten percent of The Girl On The Train is made up of things happening, while the remaining ninety percent consists of people telling other people about things that happened, and frankly it's a waste of film. If you want someone to relay the story's events to you just read the book, because on this evidence, cinema is entirely the wrong platform.

Christopher Nolan's Parting Shots

If there's one thing Christopher Nolan knows well, it's how to finish a film. Not in the sense that his ability to sit through the whole of a motion picture is exemplary, even I can do that. What I mean is that nearly all his films have great endings.

Instead of wrapping everything up neatly in the final act before adding a cosy epilogue just so you know the story's definitely over, Nolan uses his final scenes to take the plot somewhere else entirely. A showboating Shyamalanesque twist is one thing, but Nolan's denouements are so much more than that - either extending the story beyond its own boundaries to the point where it feels like the credits are intruding on the rest of the film, or squirting the whole thing back up its own bottom, forcing you to reappraise everything you've just seen.

So here are six great Christopher Nolan films with six great endings, plus the coffee-flavoured chocolate in the packet of Revels that is Insomnia, which buggers up an otherwise perfectly good hypothesis.

*** Obvious statement: CONTAINS SPOILERS, duh. Including a
little one for Inception, but nothing too fun-destroying.***

Following

It's only in the film's final minute that we discover what the whole plot's been leading up to, and it's a far more devious and sinister double reverse counterbluff than we thought it was. In the final shot the bad guy literally disappears into the crowd and you can't quite believe that's how it's going to end. But it is.

Memento

In a film so back to front, upside down and inside out, Memento's ending isn't even anything as simple as the beginning of the story - in the chronologically re-edited version this shot comes over half an hour in. But it's in this scene that our absent-minded hero does the unthinkable to himself, setting up the action for the preceding two hours and leading up to the very first (literal) shots. And that final line: genius.

Insomnia

As if being a distinctly average thriller and, ironically, a good cure for insomnia wasn't enough, Insomnia is the only one of Nolan's films not to follow the pattern that forms the entire basis of my incisive observations. There will obviously be repercussions from the events of the last scene, but they're pedestrian in comparison to, say, Memento's mind-squootling finale. Bad Nolan.

Batman Begins

It was always Batman Begins' job to set up a sequel, and after seeing what Nolan did with a lesser villain like The Scarecrow, to tease The Joker as the next bat-villain was only ever going to cause uncontrollable fanboy tumescence for three long years. No superhero origin film would be complete without a final shot of a man in tights zooming towards camera, and Batman Begins does its duty in a classic shot that, as you can see, doesn't work as a still at all.

And take note, Marvel - this is how you tee up the next chapter: before the credits.

The Prestige

The final reveal through a room full of drowned Hugh Jackmans reveals the terrifying extent of his character's desperation to be a better magician than Christian Bale's, and is so disturbing that you almost forgive the clichéd scene that precedes it in which Bale shoots Jackman and then explains the whole plot to him in the exact amount of time it takes for him to cark it. Almost.

The Dark Knight

Commissioner Gordon unwillingly sends the entire police force after Batman when he sacrifices himself for the good of Gotham by taking the rap for Harvey Dent's dastardly deeds, and the dark knight goes on the lam for what looks like four more years of geek frustration. In the space of a couple of minutes you realise this superhero is even more heroic than you thought, and you just want to give him a hug. And a Strepsil.

Inception

Everything's wrapped up, Ellen Page has stopped asking silly questions and you can finally stop frowning like Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island. And then, just as you're reaching for your coat and accidentally tipping the remains of your popcorn over your neighbour, Nolan drops that final shot on you. What a bastard.

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Meh

Following last week’s entirely unshocking news that readers of The Incredible Suit voted Pulp Fiction the greatest Quentin Tarantino film, like, ever, I fully expected you to vote for The Dark Knight as the number one Christopher Nolan movie, if only because I thought you were all as predictable as the quality of Shia LaBeouf’s future career.

However, you proved me to be a cynical, imbecilic bumwit by voting for Memento instead, which was a very splendid thing of you to do, even though any sane cynical, imbecilic bumwit knows the correct answer is Batman Begins. So I phoned Chris, great mates that we are, to give him the good news, and guess what he said? He said, right, get this, “Suit Incredible The of readers, much very thanks!” Geddit? DO YOU GET IT?!!

All right, look, it’s Friday, I’m tired. I couldn’t even think of a good idea for this week’s poll, so to celebrate the awesome averageness of The Hurt Locker (see this post), I’ve randomly chosen five perfect examples of mediocrity that you’ve hopefully seen, and you can vote for the most average of all of them. Not the best, not the worst, just the one that makes you go “meh” with all the enthusiasm of Sean Connery by the time he made Diamonds Are Forever.

Now a while ago I posted a clip from Charlie Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life, which I expect enriched your lives to the point where you thought, “it surely can’t get any better than this. Thanks to The Incredible Suit my life is as perfect as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo”. Well, if that’s the case my work here is done, but because you can never have too much slapstickery, here’s the end of Chaplin’s 1916 short The Pawnshop, in which Charlie gets his head stuck in a double bass. I got my head stuck in a kettle once. It was quite painful but I was in my element.

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Bum-Chinned Corpses

Not entirely unpredictably, you lot have voted for Pulp Fiction as The Greatest Quentin Tarantino Film, Like, Ever. Now Pulp Fiction's OK, but let's not forget that one of its biggest contributions to cinema was the re-activation of John Travolta. Is that something to be proud of? The success of Pulp Fiction gave Travolta the power to do this:

2.3 out of 10 on the Internet Movie Database. That's Tarantino's legacy. Not such a messiah now, is he?

Anyway, this week's poll is about a much more deserving director who's in the news this week (i.e. he was mentioned in The Incredible Suit) and hasn't re-animated any bum-chinned corpses as far as I know; Christopher Nolan. In fact Nolan is in no small part responsible for some of Michael Caine's finest work since the 1960s, so he should at least get an Oscar or a Nobel prize or be made Prime Minister for that. So tell me: What's The Greatest Christopher Nolan Film, Like, Ever?

Now I realise I've been banging on about trailers a lot lately so I thought I'd leave you over the Bank Holiday weekend with a few of my own. They're trailers for forthcoming posts which I've written in advance but haven't got round to posting yet. In the spirit of all trailers I've chopped the posts up into nibble-sized chunklets and strung them together in a haphazard and incomprehensible fashion to make them appear far better than they actually are. I hope they lubricate your juice glands to the point where you're bursting out of your underpants to read the full posts even though you know they'll be crushingly disappointing. So…

Coming soon to The Incredible Suit...

Reconstituted Pork Content
Time and time again I’m asked the same question. Costas the Greek in Shirley Valentine. There was a noisy sex scene in it. Painfully unlistenable. Window washer, nude model and sperm donor. Semi-digested meat expulsions. If Roger Moore had his way.

Playing Havoc With My Midichlorians
An endeavour riddled with an infinity of possibilities. One of those undertakings, the success of which continues to elude mankind. So bad it had Shia Labeouf in it. “Mummy, am I adopted?” TEN BILLION DOLLARS. I don’t even know what to say about these. We’ll draw blood if we have to.

An Incomprehensible Robot And A Massive Hairdo
If I had a time machine I’d go back and do blah blah blah. A load of slushy old chickery flickery. Having her drool all over you like a rabid mastiff. To explain it would be like turning your brain into spaghetti and noodles. A naked woman in the woods. A hammer, some nails and a map of the stars’ homes.

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Mildly Crackers Weirdery

I’m well aware that this blog is fast becoming little more than an excuse for me to have a geekgasm every time a new trailer is released, but it really isn’t my fault if people keep puking out exciting trailers is it? IS IT?! No. So stop going on about it.

Today’s miniature slice of microtainment comes in the shape of one solitary minute of mildly crackers weirdery from Batman Begins / The Dark Knight director Christopher "Yet to make a bad film, although Insomnia wasn't all that" Nolan. Imagine the trouble he has squeezing all that onto his passport.

His new film, Inception, is probably so called because it’s so far from a cinematic release that it’s practically still at the inception stage. In fact it’s not due to wallop your nearest big screen for 11 months, so don’t get too excited after watching this:



Described in possibly the most pretentious sentence ever written as a "contemporary science fiction tale set within the architecture of the mind", Inception looks to be just as spanky as Nolan’s other non-Batflicks (Insomnia excepted). Memento is endlessly rewatchable thanks to its barking backwards-forwards-backwards structure and The Prestige, despite having a twist you could see from the cinema car park, was also an atmospheric and disturbing winner. Even Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s sporting that expression that looks like he's trying to calculate a complex equation while holding in a potentially violent fart, might not be able to sink this one.

The filming of Inception is so secretive that rumours started flying round that Nolan was actually making a third Batman film, which is so outrageously mental that it could be true. However, this trailer seems to have dispelled that idea… unless it’s all a cunning ruse; an Inception deception, if you will (you won’t), a magic trick as wicked as anything we saw in The Prestige. Whatever, if it wears a cape and growls like a laryngitic lion it’ll be ace, if it frowns a lot and stubbornly refuses to follow a linear plot it’ll still be ace.

Come back to The Incredible Suit soon for more pointless frothing over ludicrously premature blipverts. I know I would! Well… I might.

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A Big, Cheesed Off Fish-Man

Good news, everyone! Not only has this week’s poll seen a record-breaking TEN votes, but the winner is a film of which The Incredible Suit heartily approves!

Yes, you, The People, have voted in numbers to rival viewers of The X Factor, and by crikey it was close. The search for The Greatest Remake / Reboot / Re-imagining, Like, Ever has seen Moulin Rouge!, Casino Royale and Something Else I Hadn’t Thought Of come an excruciatingly close joint second place to Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s unspeakably good update of the Batman franchise which was left twitching in a puddle of its own liquid faeces by master job-botcher Joel Schumacher in 1997’s Batman And Robin.

This was a difficult vote because, as Satine pointed out in her comment, I failed to specify whether you should be voting for your favourite film from the list or the film which most successfully updated the original / previous version, and in the end I just left you to it. You’re big boys and girls after all.

And while I believe that Moulin Rouge! is a better film overall than Batman Begins, I do think that Nolan’s film performed a near miracle in resurrecting a franchise so devastatingly rogered into oblivion that nobody expected to take it seriously until some time in the 2030s.

So well done Bats, and on a personal note I should like to open myself up (not literally you understand, that would be horrible) and tell the world that the scene in which a young Bruce Wayne tells Alfred that it’s his own fault his parents died, my vision goes a bit misty and I feel a sudden urge to breathe in sharply through my nose. Make of that what you will.

With my recent witterings about aliens in the movies fresh in your minds, this week’s poll is: What’s the greatest movie about aliens, like, ever? The Incredible Suit’s Top 5 (and therefore the only five that matter) are:

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Alien
3. Aliens
4. E.T.
5. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

I would have put Cloverfield in there but there’s some debate over whether or not the monster is of alien origin or just, you know, a big, cheesed off fish-man.

Happy voting!