Cat's Away 2: Inception of a new festival

This is the first night of a personally curated film festival I'm holding for an audience of one while my wife is out of the country for nine days.

It's always useful to start a film festival with a movie whose title comments on the idea of commencement, isn't it?

My first Cat's Away film festival started on the 25th of July with Contact, a perfect title in that regard. I can't say for sure if Inception's title helped push me toward it as the opening night film of Cat's Away 2, but once the idea was implanted it took hold and grew like a virus (ha ha).

Rather, Inception was a contender for the first festival that never found a time slot. It had that in common with about 20 other films, some of which will get watched this time, some won't. But Inception penetrated through all the levels to make its way to the surface (ha ha) of Cat's Away 2.

It didn't make it here by virtue of how much it was deserving of a rewatch. This is actually my third Inception viewing, and in truth, I didn't imagine it as a film that would get watched three times by me in the first seven-plus years of its existence. Especially not after my first viewing, which I liked well enough but which left me just a titch disappointed, and not only compared to my expectations for it. I remember I had really, substantive issues with the movie, some of which still stand and some of which I may get into in this post. I wasn't yet ranking movies on Letterboxd in 2010 but I gave it a retroactive four stars, though that translated "only" to 26th for the year out of 109 films.

It was probably that second Inception viewing in May of 2011 that boosted it to those retroactive four stars (I started Letterboxing about six months after that). It might have only been three-and-a-half after my initial viewing.

I think I might have liked it still better on my third viewing -- maybe even pushing 4.5 stars, especially with my increased tendency to give out such a rating these days.

And suddenly Christopher Nolan has unwittingly given me a reason to watch Dunkirk again.

You may recall that I am not high on Dunkirk, if you read this post. And in the aftermath, especially on my podcast in which I was the only one not giving the film five stars, I rejected the notion that it would or could improve significantly on a second viewing. I should rephrase that. I didn't reject the notion that it could improve, but that a second viewing was required to fully appreciate it. I laughed at this, as any film that cannot convey its greatness on a single viewing is, in some fundamental way, not great.

But I am starting to think of Inception as a great film, even though it has taken me three viewings to get there. The third time was also the charm with 2001: A Space Odyssey, on which I was still not sold after a second viewing when I was 27 years old. I could get not getting it when I was only eight, or however old I was the when my dad took me to it, thinking I would react to it like I did Star Wars, but 27 should have been old enough to really love it. As it turns out, I didn't really love Kubrick's masterpiece until two days after my 40th birthday, which was the third and most recent time I saw it.

Why not the same with Dunkirk?

I guess the answer is, there has to be a kernel of something in a movie that makes you want to keep coming back to it. You can not get a movie, and be frustrated by the ways you don't get it, or you can just not get it and not want to have anything further to do with it. I suppose this last is me with Dunkirk.

But then again -- and I didn't really realize this until this viewing -- the structural tricks Nolan is doing in Inception are actually pretty much the same tricks in Dunkirk. The way time slows by a factor of 20, I believe it is, depending on the level of depth down into the dream is very similar to the way Nolan has three overlapping Dunkirk time periods whose action is either compressed or expanded depending on the story.

See the thing is, I didn't actually realize that's what was happening in Dunkirk when I saw it. Yeah, I saw that there were three title cards introduced by numerals near the start, and then a time period listed below. But, dummy that I am, and someone who didn't read any of the hype leading up to it, I didn't understand what that structure was actually doing while I was watching it. This core failure to meet the film on its own terms, unwitting as it may have been, could seriously have detracted from my appreciation of it. And yeah, the way I was much derided by my podcast mates for drinking four glasses of wine before my screening could indeed have manifested itself in this fundamental misunderstanding.

I don't think I will seek out Dunkirk on my own before the end of the year, but there is a chance I will see it again before ranking it, and that would be if my wife, who failed to see it in the theater, feels compelled to prioritize it on video. I may even go so far as to plant the idea in her brain, secretly, to try to make her think it was her own (ha ha).

I won't go too much into the details of Inception because there are so many, and that's one thing I do want to say about it. I once criticized, and do still sort of criticize, Nolan's decision to start on a failed example of a "mind heist," one that already introduces the dream-within-dream logic, when it would have been more conventional and more straightforward to introduce us to this world via a successful heist. I now realize, though, that Nolan had so damn much to do that he couldn't afford even ten minutes on an opening successful heist, before the botched one that sets the plot in motion. In truth, it's a miracle he was able to fit his every strand of an idea into two hours and 28 minutes, even as it. It's truly a notable narrative accomplishment, especially since there are very few loose ends and everything calls back to something we learned earlier. Not everything may make total sense, but there are no obvious cheats, no points at which something pops up just to write the plot mechanics out of a corner.

Finally I wanted to mention three other movies that came to mind as I was watching it, none of which I believe I'd thought of on previous viewings, though I clearly should have. The most obvious is probably The Matrix, with the obvious visual echo of the group of people hooking themselves up to enter into a world that can be bent and shaped and where normal physical rules don't apply. But there's also The Cell -- and yes, it's the second time I've been reminded of The Cell this weekend, after It, which just goes to show you how awesome The Cell is. That's another film where people willingly enter someone's mind in order to fight their projections and extract information from it. Finally and perhaps least convincingly, I also thought of Flatliners, though I suppose that's primarily because I just saw a trailer for the remake when I was at the movies on Friday. Though this too includes "going under" to fight demons and dream-like figments of a person's memory and subconscious.

Okay, now that I've got the burden of themed titles out of the way, it's on to night two of Cat's 2.

Christopher Nolan bombs, and other Dunkirk thoughts

There are plenty of times I have been out of sync with the Metascore for a movie. That probably goes without saying. I'll come home, go to the site, and think "Huh." Baby Driver is one very recent example, as 86 seems extraordinarily generous for a film that is entertaining but quite flawed. Then again, I knew its Metascore before I even entered the theater.

I can't remember a time feeling as shocked by this disconnect, though, as when I came home from Dunkirk last night.

Dunkirk has a 94 on Metacritic. I think it deserves less than half that.

In fact, the one score of 38 on there -- and I sighed in relief that at least one person agrees with me -- might even be too generous.

I ended up giving the movie two stars on Letterboxd, but I wanted to give it 1.5.

What's wrong with Dunkirk? Where to start. This is one of the most dramatically inert films in recent memory. For all the somber energy invested in meticulously recreating a famous World War II battle -- is it even a battle? -- Nolan couldn't give a whip about character development or even mounting tension. Hans Zimmer's bludgeoning score -- seriously, it's even worse than the one for Interstellar -- tells us that every moment is overloaded with dread, but otherwise we'd have no idea that anything was at stake. Images are disconnected from consequences, things are happening for apparently no reason, and the little character arcs that are meant to occur make no impression whatsoever. Oh, it's not that Nolan disregards the notion of human drama altogether in opting for something more abstract and expressionistic -- it's that the dramas he chooses are utterly uncompelling.

What went so wrong? Nothing, according to most of you. When I went on Letterboxd to log my two-star rating, I saw a five-star rating from a person I trust on the landing page. Of the film's 50 positive reviews on Metacritic, 29 are grades of a perfect 100, including three critics whose opinions I've held dear throughout my career: Joe Morgenstern, Dana Stevens and Richard Roeper, all three of whom I've spoken to, and the last two of whom I've had my picture taken with (including Dana Stevens just in May).

Why did I see such a different movie than most of these people? It's hard to say. When you are in the minority on a film, the inclination is of course to view it as a "you problem." You figure you must lack some essential component of your critical faculties that allows you to appreciate what the film is doing. Or, you demand a film to fit into a certain conventional box, the inability to fit into that box being what makes it great. Maybe that is indeed the case with me and Dunkirk.

But I don't think so. This film is a fucking bore. Christopher Nolan is so impressed with his ability to film fighter planes moving in space -- an undeniable strength of the film -- that he doesn't seem to care whether he gave us any characters to relate to. I don't mind that we don't know their names, as there are some great films out there where we never learn any names. I mind the fact that they don't have names or personalities. They are just pawns in Nolan's desire to mount a moving Life magazine photograph. And that's all he's done.

And that's not enough.

I look forward to engaging with other people on this, figuring out the deficits in my character that led me to have so totally missed the boat, so to speak, on this film. But I can't do that for now. In fact, I can't even read Dunkirk's one mixed review -- thank you, Rex Reed -- or Dunkirk's one negative review -- thank you, Jake Cole -- for now. The reason for this is that I'm recording a podcast about this tomorrow night, and I want my bile to be untainted by the bile a few others have already spewed on the topic.

A very few others.

Drunk-kirk

On this podcast, my fellow podcaster will insist that the reason I didn't like it was that I was drunk when I saw it. And the reason he will say this is that I told him I was drunk in a text message about 20 minutes before the movie started. And the reason I know he liked it, even though we don't usually share our opinions on the films before we meet for the recording, is because he pleaded with me to go the next day to an IMAX screening when I was sober, rather than seeing it on Friday night with four glasses of wine in me, at a theater that has no really big screens.

The four glasses of wine -- and a beer -- were courtesy of a volunteer thank you party for my contributions to the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (HRAFF) earlier this year (though mostly last year, when most of the heavy screening occurred). I had expected this to be a tame little affair that I could quickly skip out of -- it had been held in the organization's tiny office the year before -- and I planned to stay no longer than 30 minutes, leaving in time to watch a 6:40 showing of The Beguiled before my 9:20 Dunkirk.

But this year the party was held in a private room at a pretty cool bar, and when 6:30 rolled around and I was still enjoying myself, I gave Sofia Coppola's film with the middling reviews (at least among my friends) a pass. And got into one of those rambling, animated cinephile discussions with two women about films we love and hate, using the thinnest of connective tissue to jump from one film to the next -- the kind of discussions that are especially well lubricated by wine. I became so engrossed that I nearly didn't leave in time for Dunkirk.

Given my thoughts on the film, I am immensely glad I did not sacrifice that experience for the movie, and also that I did not shift around a Saturday with my family in order to see Dunkirk on IMAX (and pay for it out of my own pocket, something I wasn't having to do on Friday night on the smaller screen).

But the question is, did being "drunk" -- how far along on that spectrum I was is debatable -- impact my enjoyment of the film?

As I am biased here and predisposed to endorse my own decision making, I'm going to say "no." But I guess I can't really say for sure, because I can't see it for the first time sober as a point of comparison.

What I can say is that falling asleep was not a problem as I watched the film, which I always figure to be the biggest danger in a film starting at 9:20, whether you're drunk or not. As I said, I was bored, but it was not because the alcohol was making me distractable. It's because Christopher Nolan made a boring film.

I don't even think IMAX would have helped. I was able to appreciate this film's visual accomplishments just fine on the screen where I saw it, and I honestly don't think this is a case where those accomplishments, given a proper showcase, would have rendered some of the film's shortcomings less important. In fact, even in a state of somewhat compromised perceptions, I was glad to feel clear-headed enough not to be swayed by the sweet persuasions of impressive visuals. A film needs to either have a compelling story to be a success, or if not that, then just be a straight art film with no story whatsoever. Nolan's middle ground in Dunkirk is a bad place to be.

July 20th -- again

Methinks Christopher Nolan needs to concentrate more on making a good movie and less on making sure that movie comes out on July 20th.

And incidentally, how can July 20th fall on a Friday every single year?

July 20th was of course a Thursday this year, but movies get released on Thursdays in Australia, so the 20th was its release date indeed.

It may be a Warner Brothers thing, but Nolan's movies have long been perceived as a late-summer sort of counterprogramming, or maybe just a delayed infusion of prestige to a season that has already included its share of Pirates of the Caribbeans and Transformerses.

The July 20th trend got started in 2008 -- on July 18th. That's when The Dark Knight hit theaters. Its predecessor, Batman Begins, was a June release, but I guess The Dark Knight felt right in late July.

So right, in fact, that they duplicated the release strategy for Inception in 2010. It being two years later and without the benefit of any leap years in between, Inception could not land exactly on July 20th either. So July 16th was the chosen release date.

We finally get to an exact July 20th release date, with the benefit of a leap year, two years later for The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. That date may of course be etched into your memory for being the night of the horrific theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

Warner Brothers deviated from the strategy with a November 2014 release for Interstellar, but it's back with Dunkirk -- a film whose awards aspirations might have more logically dictated a November release date than Interstellar. Though I suppose some of these things have to do with when a film is actually ready to go to print.

What relationship does the release date have to the quality of the film?

None, of course. And I'm sure my criticisms of Dunkirk don't seem very substantive, since I haven't delved in to why I dislike it so much.

I could. Believe me, I could. But I guess I already feel like enough of a grinch for raining on the parades of readers who may have already bought their tickets for a screening at some point later in the weekend, but happened to do their Friday check-in with my blog before then.

But as a wise friend told me last night when I texted him my initial reactions and then apologized for shitting on a movie he was excited to see, "Maybe I will love it, maybe not. It will have nothing to do with you. When any movie comes out, there will be people who don't like it."

In the case of Dunkirk, just not very many of us.