Talking Nolan

It's time to depart from the macabre world of Tarantino and walk into a world filled with wondrous spectacle brought to you by Christopher Nolan.  The one man that is tied with Quentin as my favourite director.  He has managed to reinvent the Blockbuster film as a film that can balance action and story simultaneously while keeping the audience wanting more.  His films, like Quentin, have a tone that he has mastered.  You know when you are watching a Chris Nolan movie that you should expect an epic experience.

I would be remised if I didn't mention that this past July, Nolan and company brought us the epic conclusion to his Batman saga, The Dark Knight Rises.  The people reading this that know me well enough are probably rolling their eyes right now.  Truth is, I'm a gigantic Bat-Fan.  I'm a comic book fan and Batman is undoubtably my favourite superhero.  I've read countless Batman graphic novels and am enamoured with the mythology that surrounds the character.  So, I suppose you may think that I'm biased in general to Nolan's Batman films as some of my favourites simply because they're Batman films.  That isn't the case.  Chris Nolan is somebody that truly knows how to get this icon across on screen.  He takes the best parts of the comic books and puts his own spin on it to the point where fans have coined the term "Nolanize" (e.g., How will Nolan Nolanize Catwoman?).  As in taking something from a comic book, normally considered unrealistic making it more realistic.  He finds the happy medium between fantasy and realism, which is why he (in my opinion) was responsible for creating the perfect Batman trilogy.  

Lets pump the breaks a minute and go to Nolan's first mainstream foray into cinema; Memento (2000).  Starring Guy Pierce, this is an innovate neo-noir film about a man with short-term memory loss trying to track down his wife's killer.  If anything, it's incredibly different than the movies that Nolan makes today.  Likely due to the $9,000,000 budget that he and the crew were working with.  Yes, that amount seems like a lot, but when comparing it to the estimated $250,000,000 budget of The Dark Knight Rises, it doesn't really hold up.  Even so, Memento was Nolan's true introduction to movie-going audiences.  I mentioned earlier that the film was innovative.  That word is thrown around freely these days, however I honestly couldn't think of a better word to describe this film. That's because Memento is presented backwards.  You may be wondering how this could be, but the best way to understand is to sit down and watch the movie. 

There's a lot more I could say about Chris Nolan, so perhaps I'll save it for a later blog entry.  I'm somewhat ashamed to call him one of my favourite directors without having seen his first film Following (1998) and The Prestige (2006).  Something I plan on doing something about in the next few months.  With that said, he is another director that seems to top himself every time he puts out a new film.  I appreciate a director that evolves and takes risks.  Nolan's style takes a turn towards old Hollywood where the audience can marvel at a film with tremendous scope and storytelling that once the credits appear at the end, you know that you have witnessed something special. 

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0634240/?ref_=sr_1