Paul Haine | Tales from the city
Everything tagged with “Christopher Nolan”
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Inception
Inception plays as if Christopher Nolan was in a pub one night and an angry drunk shouted “Oi! Nolan! Think you’re clever with your intertwining narratives and chronological playfulness? I bet you can’t juggle five different threads at once though, spacially, temporally and in a coherent and entertaining fashion!”, and Nolan went off and did it, just to prove a point. He succeeds, but at the expense of characterisation and a sense of any meaning or purpose.
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Trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Inception
Very excited about this one. Christopher Nolan returns with what looks like it might be his best film yet.
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I am already bored with 3D
And I haven’t even seen a 3D film yet. I’d been holding out for a film that I wanted to see, and so far pretty much everything has looked like crap. No, I haven’t seen Avatar. No, I don’t intend to. It doesn’t look like a good film. I’ve spent too much money at the cinema seeing bad films over the years and I’ve heard nothing about Avatar that makes me want to see it as a film, not as a gaudy spectacle.
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Reboots and remakes
I’m not sure where the habit for using the word ‘reboot’ came from but when people use it when they mean ‘remake’, I start getting angry in the same way I get angry when people spell it ‘loose’ when they mean ‘lose’.
Look, it’s perfectly fucking simple; you reboot a franchise. You don’t reboot single films. When you reboot a single film, you’re remaking it, not rebooting it. Thus, Christopher Nolan rebooted the Batman franchise. He didn’t remake Tim Burton’s Batman or any of the others, he started again from scratch, discarding all that came before him. Similarly, JJ Abrams did not remake any particular Star Trek film, but he did reboot the series, giving it a new direction and reshaping the character origins and all that jazz.
Total Recall and Barbarella are both due to be remade, but they can’t be rebooted because they were both standalone films. On the other hand, Robert Rodriguez is perfectly able to reboot the Predator franchise (two films) and Darren Aronofsky can reboot the Robocop franchise (several films and a TV series). Everybody thought that Bryan Singer was going to reboot Superman but what he actually did was neither reboot nor remake — instead, Superman Returns is basically a sequel to Superman II.
So, a sequel is a sequel and a reboot is not a remake, just as a remake is not necessarily a reboot. Furthermore, a prequel is neither a reboot nor a remake; it is what it is, a prequel. Thus, the Alien franchise is not due to be rebooted by the recently-announced, Scott brother-endorsed prequel story. Nor are any of the existing films being remade — the prequel is just another film set in the same universe.
Am I being petty? Possibly so, but to me this rubs against exactly the same bit of my brain that is able to distinguish when people are using ‘less’ when they should be using ‘fewer’, so there you are.
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The Prestige
Along with Aronofsky, Raimi and Singer, Christopher Nolan is one of the very few directors who I can really rely upon. A film with one of those names attached is, to me, a guarantee that I’ll be enjoying myself.
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Following
Christopher Nolan is currently in my good books. His career so far has been limited to less than a handful of films yet I’ve loved them all — Memento, Insomnia and Batman Begins; all have delivered darkness, tension with just a spot of black humour where needed and I find them all hard to fault.
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Batman Begins
This was the one I’ve been waiting for. Not since the original Tim Burton/Michael Keaton outing has there been a good Batman film; the franchise style has been slowly whittled away by Joel Schumacher’s love of dry ice, naked male torsos and high camp. Batman Begins was to be the one that redressed the balance. Did it?
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The Shape of Things to Come
With 2004 nearly over, and fewer opportunities to be disappointed by awful films that promise much yet deliver little this year, I thought I’d have a look ahead to see what’s in store.
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