Ranking Christopher Nolan

Tenet is open in parts of my country right now. Not parts anywhere near me, as the state of Victoria is still under Stage 4 lockdown, and will be for another 12 days. After that, who knows really.

But some people in the world, even elsewhere in Australia, have seen this movie. It even has scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. I really never thought the day would come.

In the past, the relase of a new movie from a major director like Christopher Nolan would have been the occasion for me to consider the director's whole career. The distant past, increasingly. According to my records, the last time I ranked a director's whole filmography on this blog was in October of 2014, when I put the films of David Fincher under the lens, tied to the release of Gone Girl. (Which remains Fincher's last feature to date, though Mank will finally end that drought later this year.)

I could have waited until I saw Tenet -- it will happen, eventually -- before writing the post you are currently reading. But there's a couple reasons I didn't do that, as follows:

1) Before Tenet, Nolan directed exactly ten feature films. I love round numbers, something I suspect I have in common with most listmakers. Really, I should have done this when Dunkirk came out in 2017.

2) The Filmspotting podcast has just recently finished their so-called "ouvre-view" of Nolan's films, the end of which was supposed to coincide with the release of Tenet. It did not, but they still continued on as planned, and recently revealed their own rankings of Nolan's ten films to date, having watched them all again. (It was a month ago, but I'm a bit behind.)

So I thought this made a good opportunity for me to do the same.

However, I will take a little bit of a different approach than on my previous times doing this exercise, as when I ranked all the extant films of Pixar, Wes Anderson, Joel and Ethan Coen, Danny Boyle, Star Trek, and the aforementioned Mr. Fincher. (I'm asking myself now how Tarantino has escaped me so far.)

In those instances, I organically chose which movies should occupy which spots on the list, without any input from outside sources. This time, it will be all outside sources.

See, I can tell, at any given time, exactly how I rank the films of any director I choose, simply by doing a filtered search on my Flickchart. But I find that takes all the fun out of it. What fun is making a list if someone else makes it for you?

This time, though, I thought I would consider a different goal. I thought it was time to figure out if I am more of an Adam or more of a Josh.

If you don't know, Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen are the hosts of Filmspotting. Adam has been the host since the begining in 2005, and Josh is his third co-host, having started his own tenure at the beginning of 2012. While previous co-hosts couldn't hang on for more than three years, Josh ain't giving up this gig any time soon.

I've had my suspicions over the years which host was more aligned with my personal tastes, based on individual opinions I wholeheartedly agreed or disagreed with. But there are just so many movies out there that all three of us have seen, and so many exceptions to so many rules, that it's hard to say for certain whether I've more regularly agreed with one than the other. There really has been no perfect litmus test to figure this out.

Until now.

Christopher Nolan has made enough of a variety of different films, in enough genres and tackling enough varieties of the human experience, that he certainly seems to function in the way we want him to for the current experiment. Given how he's risen to be among the most successful working directors today, someone embraced by Hollywood but with a consummately iconoclastic approach to making movies, he's also the greatest common ground for the modern cinephile. In short, he's probably the director whose films you can be most certain the people you discuss movies with will also see. Some people don't like Tarantino's violence, or Apatow's juvenile humor, or Anderson's arthouse pretensions -- either Anderson, really. But most everyone is okay with seeing the new Christopher Nolan movie.

But the key is, if I'm going to find out whether I'm really an Adam or really a Josh, I can't let my own unconscious biases enter into it. After all, I've listened to that episode of Filmspotting and I know what they've picked. Armed with this knowledge, I could skew my own list one way or another if I picked it organically.

Enter Flickchart.

Using the aformentioned Flickchart filter, I can immediately see how I have judged Nolan's ten films relative to each other -- which best, which worst, and everywhere in between. And while a person's Flickchart may not feel 100% accurate at any given time -- changing its course can feel like turning the Titanic -- it's going to be pretty close when you're considering only the relative positions of ten films out of the 5,000+ on my chart. And because Nolan hasn't made a film since Dunkirk in 2017 -- not one that I can currently see, anyway -- I don't have to worry about the fact that I'm way behind in adding the movies I've seen to my Flickchart. (I'm still stuck somewhere in early 2019.)

So ... before I lose you on endless preamble, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I will reveal my Nolan rankings according to Flickchart, and then I will figure out whether I have a greater absolute difference in my rankings from Adam's chart or from Josh's chart. So that means if, say, I rank Dunkirk #6 and Josh ranks it #3, that's an absolute difference of three. Of course, if he ranks it #9 that's also an absolute difference of three. The least absolute difference is the one who has more similar tastes to mine ... at least, using only this flawed Nolan litmus test.

Shall we begin?

Here's how Josh ranks the films:

10. The Dark Knight Rises
9. Insomnia
8. Following
7. Interstellar
6. Batman Begins
5. The Prestige
4. The Dark Knight
3. Memento
2. Inception
1. Dunkirk

And here are Adam's rankings:

10. Following
9. Batman Begins
8. Insomnia
7. Inception
6. The Dark Knight
5. The Dark Knight Rises
4. Dunkirk
3. The Prestige
2. Memento
1. Interstellar

And here's a bit more, but not too much, on my rankings and their order.

I should say, before I start, that even though I have not very recently rewatched any of these movies -- I saw Memento back when they started the ouvre-review in April, for probably the fourth time -- I've seen six of these movies more than once. That means that percentage-wise, I might have a greater familiarity with this filmography than with any of the others I've considered in this forum previously. Which just means this post has been longer overdue, and my thoughts are, for the most part, still fresh.

According to my Flickchart:

10. Dunkirk (2017). 3613/5249 (31%). Adam #4, Josh #1. The harshness of my response to Dunkirk is a residual of that first viewing, when my former editor said I was crazy to see it after a couple glasses of wine. I talked about that here. But my second viewing last year or the year before did not significantly improve my impression of this movie. It still feels like a frequently confusing experiment with a bombastic score and too little payoff, plus too little character development. The latter was the point, I guess, but not everyone wants the same from Nolan as I do.

9. Interstellar (2014). 2335/5249 (56%). Adam #1, Josh #7. Every time I tell myself I should like Interstellar a little more than I actually do, I remind myself that Matthew McConaughey spends the last 25 minutes of this movie yelling "Murph!! MURPH!!" Or at least it feels that way. However, there are also some totally blow-your-mind moments in this film, like when they lose all that time down on the wave planet. Damn, space-time can be a bitch.

8. The Dark Knight Rises (2012). 2251/5249 (57%). Adam #5, Josh #10. I like The Dark Knight Rises pretty well, but I don't take it very seriously -- certainly not as seriously as Nolan wants me to take it. The thing I like best about it, for example, is how fun it is to do an impersonation of Tom Hardy's ridiculous Grandfather Bane voice with its absurdly comical high pitch combined with muffled incoherence. But it's a decent conclusion to the trilogy. Anne Hathaway is the best part about it.

7. Insomnia (2002). 2209/5249 (58%). Adam #8, Josh #9. The first time the Flickchart rankings are letting me down a little bit. If I were making this list organically, I probably would have put Insomnia at #9, but what are you going to do -- these three movies are all within two percentage points of each other on the chart, so it's not that far off. Yeah nobody really loves Insomnia but it has its moments. I prefer villain Robin Williams in One Hour Photo from the same year.

6. Following (1998). 1582/5249 (70%). Adam #10, Josh #8. That this is this high up on my Flickchart tells me two things: 1) I've been pretty generous in this movie's duels over the years, and 2) I am by no means a diehard Nolan fan. This basically means that a full half of Nolan's films are a bit shrug-worthy to me. I do like Following and I remember thinking it demonstrated some real cleverness on Nolan's part, cleverness that would fully bloom over his coming films, but I have little interest in seeing it again.

5. Inception (2010). 1001/5249 (81%). Adam #7, Josh #2. And here's where we start getting to films I really like. I actually didn't love Inception on the first viewing, but the second and third have increased my appreciation significantly. I always thought it was a narrative mistake to have the movie introduce us to the world on an atypical and ultimately botched version of the core premise -- don't you know you have to demonstrate a successful incarnation before starting to throw curveballs? Of course, this complaint ultimately pales in comparison to Nolan's many ambitious concepts and their execution. It's really good.

4. The Dark Knight (2008). 725/5249 (86%). Adam #6, Josh #4. Taken in comparison to Batman Begins -- which you'll note you haven't yet seen on this list -- I found The Dark Knight to be a mild disappointment. By any other standards, it's a remarkable accomplishment with a truly frightening villain performance at its center and a genuinely dangerous tone of anarchy for such a mainstream film. It's probably telling that this is the only of the three Batman movies I've seen more than once. It gets under your skin.

3. The Prestige (2006). 530/5249 (90%). Adam #3, Josh #5. I've been on the Prestige train since the beginning, as each of the remaining films on this list cracked my top ten of the year they were released. I might even like it better than my #2, but more on that in a moment. This is the most pleasurable type of puzzle box, the one that rewards repeat viewings and isn't afraid to go off the rails a bit in terms of your expectations. Adam and Josh described it in a way as the ultimate Nolan film, and that may still be true nearly 15 years later.

2. Batman Begins (2005). 288/5249 (95%). Adam #9, Josh #6. This ranking may be very problematic as for some reason, I have only seen this film once, the only one in my top five of which this can be said. I guess that first viewing really made an impression on me -- and I don't think it was just the circumstances, seeing it in Paris on a day of rest after a lot of walking. I got on board with Nolan's Batman right from the start and found the ensuing films to be a case of diminishing returns, though not significantly. I'll watch it again sometime to see if it truly deserves to be ahead of The Prestige.

1. Memento (2000). 119/5249 (98%). Adam #2, Josh #3. Nolan has never been better for me than when he first came out of the chute -- and though he actually came out of the chute with Following, I hadn't seen that so it was coming out of the chute for me. Even if Nolan makes another ten films I doubt he will have a chance of eclipsing one of the most ambitiously structured, faithfully adhered to, and philosophically rich narratives I have ever seen. (Just don't ask the premise to stand up to much nitpicking.) This is also the Nolan film I've seen the most, probably four times all the way through.

So I mentioned diminishing returns in terms of the Batman movies. It seems I also have diminishing returns in terms of Nolan on the whole. My top seven films are the first seven films he made, with the last three, chronologically, occupying the eighth, ninth and tenth spots on this list, in that order. I'd blame a reverse recency bias, but I've seen both my #9 and my #10 twice, to give them a chance to move up. They didn't.

Still, I wouldn't say this means I'm down on Nolan. I'm just as eager to see any new movie he makes as when I saw Insomnia after Memento. I know there's the opportunity for my mind to be blown any time out.

Now, the important question -- how do I compare to Adam and Josh?

I won't bore you with a film breakdown, but here were the absolute differences:

Adam = 6 + 8 + 3 + 1 + 4 + 2 + 2 + 0 + 7 + 1 = 34

Josh = 9 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 0 + 2 + 4 + 2 = 28

So I am more of a Josh, I guess!

How do I feel about this?

Well, a friend of mine, the friend who introduced me to the podcast, doesn't like Josh very much as a Filmspotting host, in part because he's never really forgiven him for replacing the host he liked best, Matty Ballgame. Plus, Josh is capable of some very eccentric preferences, the kind that sometimes go so far as to undermine his credibility. Adam, on the other hand, tends to hew slightly more to the critical mainstream in his views on films, though his tastes skew a little more independent as well.

Because of my friend, I've thought I'm not supposed to want to be a Josh, but I don't mind it. I have always liked a critic who will go out on a limb and champion something he loves that others don't, and Josh does that. So I'm okay with it.

Interestingly, though, I did have my biggest difference on any Nolan film with Josh. He worships Dunkirk, having it as his #1, while I've got it entirely on the other end of the spectrum. Outside of that, though, we are very much in sync, having no greater than a four-ranking difference on any film. Whereas with Adam, we've got three different films with a ranking difference of six places or more.

If you'd care to do your own Nolan rankings, I'd love to hear them in the comments. Whether they make you an Adam or a Josh is optional.