WASHINGTON—In an effort to provide moviegoers with the information they need to determine which films are appropriate for them to see, the Motion Picture Association of America announced Tuesday the addition of a new rating to alert audiences of movies that are not based on existing works.

According to MPAA officials, the new “O,” or “Original,” designation will inform viewers that a particular film contains characters with whom they are unfamiliar, previously unseen settings, and novel plots. The rating will also reportedly serve as a warning of the potentially disorienting effects associated with having to remember characters’ names for as many as two hours and the discomfort that can occur when one is forced to keep track of narrative arcs for an entire film.

“It’s simply a value-neutral designation intended to protect consumers, ensuring that they are fully informed about a movie and are able to make their own decisions about how much artistic and narrative originality they are comfortable seeing.”

Havoc1st wrote: ↑

March 5th, 2018, 4:40 am

Nothing but respect for my Best Picture.

#Oscars

After taking in twenty-eight films over #ADIFF18, I’m beginning to properly sink my teeth into the backlog of work I have to get through.

Dunkirk seems like a good place to start. I’m finishing something left over on my plate going back to November.

If you ever need to demonstrate Nolan’s capacity as a visual storyteller, his ability to provide plot information without superfluous dialogue, keep in mind that the fleshed out secondary lead in Dunkirk doesn’t reveal that he’s French until the final twenty minutes.

I’d argue Dunkirk is as relevant to 2017 as nominees like Get Out and Shape of Water, in that it’s a film fundamentally about empathy.

You don’t know any of the characters beyond the suffering they endure, but the film asks you to engage with them in a visceral, tangible way.

As with the rest of Nolan’s films, Dunkirk is anchored in the idea that fear is the most universal of human sensations, particularly fear of time and fear of loss.

We don’t know much about these people, but Dunkirk asks us to engage with him in a primal, emotional way,

It’s no coincidence that drowning/suffocating is a common Nolan anxiety - Insomnia, The Prestige, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar.

And that it is practically a leading character in Dunkirk.

Drowning is literally a fear of running out of breath.

Dunkirk believes that it can convince the audience to emotionally invest in these characters through nothing but fundamental empathy - to feel compassion, having watched them struggle and endure.

For all Nolan’s called a cynic, that’s a very optimistic and hopeful perspective.

There is some truth in Truffaut’s observation that there’s no truly anti-war film, as all war films glamourise the struggle and the heroism in some tiny way.

But it is quite pointed that Dunkirk is about a bunch of characters RUNNING AWAY from battles. Even the opening scene.

Also worth noting Dunkirk is one of the rare mainstream war films where the soldiers actually look like teenagers. (Accurately.)

I mean, Charlie Sheen in “Platoon” and Matthew Modine in “Full Metal Jacket” looked like young men.

Fionn Whitehead and Harry Styles look like boys.

A wonderful example of Dunkirk’s empathy.

The film never shies from the fact that the situation brings out the worst in people, plotting murder and execution. (“Survival isn’t fair.”)

But it declines to judge these people who have lived through hell. They still deserve empathy.

Dunkirk’s handling of the anonymous Shivering Sailor is another example of this.

He kills a kid (one of the primary characters) while refusing to go back to help his fellow soldiers.

And yet the film does not respond to him with contempt, but with compassion.

Another reminder of how misguided is the argument that Nolan is a “cold” filmmaker.

Even with a character like the Shivering Sailor, there’s compassion.

An understanding that the filmmaker and audience will never endure what he has, and so can’t sit in cold judgment of him.

And even in these awful, worst moments, there’s a sense that people are not the person that they are on their worst day.

Alex tries to get Gibson killed to save his skin, but only a few minutes later reaches out to save him during their evacuation of the sinking boat.

#Dunkirk

Another very 2017 touch: Dunkirk consciously and repeatedly rejects the sort of “great man” narrative of history embraced by right wing populist historical narratives.

((An example of this form of storytelling would be, say, Darkest Hour.))

Dunkirk doesn’t have a single clear heroic character.

Many characters are anonymous. More might as well be. Tom Hardy wears a mask over his face. The lead British Soldier is called “Tommy.”

Dunkirk is pointedly not about “great men” saving the day.

Instead, Dunkirk is the story of a set of lives that happen to overlap in one incredible moment, a community or collective functioning as one for one brief point in time.

This is why the slipping time scales are important; to emphasise how enormous that moment of overlap is.

The sliding timescale emphasises just how much had to align to win the day, how many moving pieces had to be in place.

Dunkirk is a momentary intersection of lives that are literally moving at different speeds. Indeed, they disentangle just as quickly at the end.

One of the smarter subtler touches in Dunkirk is that time continues to move at different paces after the climax. The point of intersection is finite, limited.

Tom Hardy’s final scene is minutes later; Mark Rylance’s that night & into the next day; Fionn Whitehead the next day.

Nolan’s tendency to play with time is a thematic element, but also emphasises the subjective.

Time is an objective and measurable construct, but our experience of it is subjective.

At the climax of Dunkirk, every shares the same “time”, only to disconnect again once it passes.

This subjective/objective contrast in how people perceive time as compared to how it is measured is, incidentally, similar to how Nolan thinks about film.

Nolan is very invested in subjective narratives, but also in the technical specifics of how it is presented.

To hear Nolan talk about film (as opposed to digital), he’s invested in the tactile aspect of it as something that physically exists.

At the same time, his stories are often tied up in abstract and subjective perceptions of reality, both for characters and audiences.

Anyway, time for bed.

Dunkirk is still great. A wonderful piece of work from one of the (if not THE) most consistent working director.

The best film of 2017.

Soundtrack If Dow is up:

100 - 200 points: Harry Potter
200 - 500 points: LOTR
500 - 1000 points: Star Wars

Soundtrack if Dow is down:

100 - 200 points: Inception
200 - 500 points: Interstellar
500 - 1000 points: Dunkirk