OT: Nolan's Dunkirk (MINOR SPOILERS)
I've seen it, and it goes like this:
I'm not the only one to have noticed this but: what gives with Tom Hardy not being willing to show his face on screen?
In Dunkirk, he keeps his face covered by his fighter pilot's mask for almost the entire movie(his eyes have it, but still.)
In Nolan's "Dark Knight Rises," Hardy wore a face-hiding breathing apparatus as "Bane," and only once, in a flashback at film's end, did we see his full face(like, for ten seconds.)
In "Mad Max," Hardy's face was in a jailer's mask about 1/2 of the movie.
Its starting to seem like an affectation. Doesn't he know that we like to see the FACE of our stars? And of people in general?
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I saw Dunkirk with a companion who found the film...awful. She could not understand who was who or what was going on, or why we should care. I remarked, "well, I think we've just seen the disguised art film of the summer." I liked the film a lot more than she did, but I sensed Nolan giving himself yet another "esoteric task" -- toying with time and space to create his own difficult-to-read reality.
As "Inception" unfolded in a series of "mind spaces," so Dunkirk cuts between the events of "One Week," "One Day," and "One Hour" and forces us to understand how these things can be happening "at the same time" on screen. Its headache inducing. Which reminds me: Memento. 'nuff said.
Not to mention: both The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises specialized in a cross-cutting technique so that scenes in the present and the past fused into one.
In short: this is Nolan's bag.
The vignettes are too small, but they have impact. The guy from Bridge of Spies gets a lot less to do here, but it all counts -- he's a "regular man" who sails his small boat to rescue soldiers on the high sea, and he has to make all sorts of life and death decisions while giving moral guidance to his teenage son on the boat. He's great.
Tom Hardy is in the air, the desperately-sought-after-guy who can save the soliders according to how many enemy planes he can shoot down.
And then there is Admiral Kenneth Branaugh and thousands of stranded soldiers trying to escape from the French shores back to an England "we can see from here."
Neither the Bridge of Spies guy, nor Hardy, nor Branaugh get enough to do to care too much, the movie falls to younger cast members, many of whom look too much alike.
But the film DOES capture the terrors and sudden-death endings for soldiers who can be strafed from the air, torpedoed in escape craft, or bombed. Drowning is the main killer...terrifying in itself. There are many "visceral" scenes of near-death and escape, and, indeed, a real nice homage to the Foreign Correspondent plane crash.
Good. Not great. Possible Oscar bait on the technical side, but the actors simply aren't given enough to do.
Oh..on the Hitchcock thing. Hitchocck's "pure cinema" techniques are much in evidence, but Hitch knew when and how to get character and great dialogue in his movies. We CARED about his characters.
Hitchcock's greatest lie was: "Other peoples movies are photographs of people talking." Yours, too Hitch. They talked a lot in Rope and Dial M and -- between pure cinema scenes -- Vertigo and Psycho and NXNW, too.
Dunkirk could use more of that.