On Friday it was Dunkirk at the imax. I find Christopher Nolan invariably lets me down. This was better than Inception, but was let down by some sentimentality and dire dialogue. As always some magnificent images though nothing to match the planetary wave in Inception. Nice to see a war film that was neither ‘war is hell’ nor ‘rarara soldiers’. I think that’s the British (non-Brexit) influence. Tom Hardy was superb and Mark Rylance played Mark Rylance as seems to increasingly be his shtick.
On Saturday, Baby Driver watched in the Gold Screen at Midvalley where you get a lounge chair, pillows, duvet and five drinks of your choice served to you (I had the worst tea I’ve ever had and a bottle of water). Another British director, this time the one who did Sean of the Dead which I’m quite fond of though am unlikely to actively choose to rewatch. No pretensions to depth, which gave it an advantage over Dunkirk. The first half of the film was fantastic, the second half enjoyable though there was a tediously long sequence with people hitting each other with cars. The moll was slightly less mollish in that she had a small active role, but otherwise was very stereotypical. Drive was the better film though the Baby Driver was the better driver.
Both films decisively failed the Bechdel test, and in both cases it was obviously directorial decisions more than anything. You could argue that soldiers on the Dunkirk beach were going to be largely male, but there were women there too, in fact they were among the last to be evacuated. And for Baby Driver there was not even that excuse. It’s a fairly facile ‘test’ which makes it all more dispiriting how many films fail it.