(This article is pretty perfunctory—I’m just trying to plow through this list.)
Anthony McCarten and Joe Wright, 2017
#187, 2017 Skandies
So, just as The Disaster Artist is to a great extent about the stunt of James Franco disappearing into the eccentric Tommy Wiseau, Darkest Hour is to a great extent about the stunt of Gary Oldman disappearing into the eccentric Winston Churchill. There is a story here, though. After the Nazi blitzkrieg across Europe in the spring of 1940, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, synonymous with appeasement, was ousted and replaced with the more pugnacious Churchill. But at this point the war looked to have already been lost, with nearly all the British forces stranded at Dunkirk near the border between Belgium and France. Churchill faced immense pressure to negotiate a settlement with the Nazis. Darkest Hour is about his decision to opt for a daring evacuation of Dunkirk by commandeering all civilian vessels within range, sacrificing the garrison at Calais to buy time—dooming four thousand to try to save three hundred thousand. The big question is whether he will be considered a hero or a monster by the British public if he does make this decision—do the people want to fight on the beaches and in the fields, or would they rather try to seek the best deal they can get and live in a Britain they still recognize? So he hops onto a London Underground train for the first time in his life and discovers that the common folk in his car are all for fighting the good fight. Apparently this scene is completely apocryphal, making this movie into Churchill fanfic. I dread the movies of 2097, depicting Trump slinking incognito onto a New York subway train to verify that, yes, Americans do indeed want to fight covid by drinking bleach. (Though I guess that if I were forced to share a subway car with Trump the bleach option might not seem so bad.)
Christopher Nolan, 2017
#14, 2017 Skandies
This, on the other hand, isn’t a conventional story at all—it is a wodge of pure experience, or rather three interwoven wodges, capturing what the Dunkirk evacuation was like on land, at sea, and in the air. We follow a young British soldier trying to skip the line and find his way onto one of the few ships home prior to the launch of the “many small civilian vessels” strategy; an elderly man with a small boat, pressed into service to cross the channel and bring home whomever he can fit; and some fighter pilots trying with mixed success to prevent the Luftwaffe from picking off the stranded troops and the ships trying to ferry them back to Britain. It’s a whole lot of running around getting shot at and bombed, finding yourself trapped in torpedoed or bullet-ridden ships and planes sinking into the depths with our characters in them, arguments over what to do about wounded men, shellshock cases, or potential spies who might be holding back the group, etc., etc. Probably great if you’re into the way cinema captures the chaos of war, but a hundred solid minutes of that is a lot. Also, the three strands of the film operate on different timelines and therefore intersect in surprising ways—e.g., we see a group of men trying to get a beached ship afloat, only to realize that we’ve already seen that ship sinking, from the pilots’ perspective—but there was so much confusion inherent in the action that the added narrative confusion didn’t really register. Like, okay, we’re skipping around in time along with everything else. Gotcha. BOOM. Aaaggh, bombs! Run away!
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tumblr |
this site |
Calendar page |
|||