Likes: Damn,you probably put more thought into this than Nolan. I dig your take and genuinely don't think he thought that deeply into it lol.Originally Posted by richardp
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Damn,you probably put more thought into this than Nolan. I dig your take and genuinely don't think he thought that deeply into it lol.
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Did anyone else find it weird when Albert Einstein randomly came out of the shadows in that one scene to deliver one line, and then the scene just ended ?
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Im getting pretty sick of not being able to understand any dialogue in Nolans films.
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I really don't get this complaint at all. I've seen all of his films, most of them in theaters, and never had an issue with the sound. I remember when people said you couldn't understand what Bane was saying in The Dark Knight Rises, and I thought "Really?" My hearing is definitely not the best either due to some slight hearing damage. I'll be seeing the film on Monday (getting proper IMAX tickets was a pain in the ass), so I guess I'll see if it's a problem.
I will say that most of the theater chains don't seem to give a shit about maintenance or proper sound mixing unless something really gets fucked up, especially after the pandemic. I know I've gone to a couple movies in the past where I could tell that the theater had actually turned the sound down, presumably to save on wear and tear with the speakers. It wouldn't surprise me if that was part of the issue.
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https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-co...er-230775.html
During the publicity junket for Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan repeatedly pointed out how his latest film doesn’t contain any cgi shots, leading many to believe that there were no digital vfx in the film. That interpretation of his statement is inaccurate.While Oppenheimer may not contain cgi – or computer-generated imagery that is rendered in the computer – it absolutely does contain digital vfx. A lot of it may be ‘invisible vfx,’ a style of vfx often used in period films and adult dramas where the goal is to enhance the authenticity of the setting but not call attention to the fx work as superhero and action films tend to do. With invisible vfx, if the crew does their job well, then audiences won’t even realize that vfx are being used.
We don’t know how Nolan employed digital vfx on Oppenheimer, and won’t know until (and if) the effects breakdowns are released, but we do know for a fact that vfx were used on the film. We also know that the vfx studio on the film was DNEG, marking the eighth time they’ve collaborated on a film with Nolan.
UPDATE: DNEG has provided further information to Cartoon Brew to explain how compositing was the primary use of vfx in the film:
[Production vfx supervisor] Andrew Jackson spent several months of the project in Scott Fisher’s workshop, working with him and his SFX crew to develop the various simulations and effects. The process involved shooting an extensive library of elements. They shot these explosions at high speed, slowed them down then brought layers of footage together in post-production. The final shots ranged from using the raw elements as shot, through to complex composites of multiple filmed elements. Almost all the VFX shots in the movie were recreated using only real elements combined together. Chris Nolan was determined to keep the VFX grounded in reality and maintain the raw feeling of the actual footage.Additionally, we now know that Nolan and Universal decided to not credit the majority of the film’s vfx crew. The film credits list 26 vfx crew, in addition to vfx supervisor Andrew Jackson. Ten of these roles are supervisors while fifteen are workers and support roles. This is a particularly high ratio of supervisors to workers, and it doesn’t make sense unless those in the management roles were overseeing a larger group of artists.
Indeed, it has now been revealed that a much larger group of people worked on the film than were actually credited. DNEG’s own website has a scrolling list of vfx crew who worked on Oppenheimer and it totals over 160 people. Meanwhile, people online have even created a spreadsheet to try and properly identify the roles of all the film’s vfx workers.
Thus, Universal and Christopher Nolan excluded over 80% of the film’s vfx crew from the credits. Why? Who knows. It certainly wasn’t a running time issue. At three hours in length, an additional 10 seconds of credits wouldn’t have made a bit of difference to the audience. But it would have meant the world to the workers who could have had a screen credit on a blockbuster film. (It’s telling that many of the workers who were left out of the credits worked at one of DNEG’s facilities in India.)
Not crediting the vfx crew is actually fairly common practice in Hollywood, and because vfx artists aren’t unionized, there is no recourse for the worker and no penalty for the studio when credits are omitted or misrepresented.
In a day and age when literally everyone connected to a film production gets a credit, from craft services to on-set teachers of child actors to random “production babies” who didn’t even work on a film, it is utterly incomprehensible that vfx artists, whose work makes possible the final images that appear onscreen, are routinely omitted from screen credits.
Oppenheimer is yet another example of how live-action filmmakers like Nolan denigrate and misrepresent the work of vfx workers to the media, and then add insult to injury by not even acknowledging them in the credits. The fact that over 125 people who contributed to Oppenheimer’s success aren’t listed in the credits is a reminder of how the vfx industry is a corrupt and broken enterprise that undermines and disrespects its workers at every juncture.
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I too have never had an issue with this either. I even worked at a movie theater chain during the release of TDKR and Interstellar and worked both as theater manager/projection during this time and funneled complaints daily about it. I followed the projection instructions for audio TO A T, and even back in the noisy ass projection booth I could clearly understand the audio. I especially never understood how people couldn't understand Bane, as he was always mixed so much further out than any other characters. As for Oppenheimer, the ONLY time in that movie I had any difficulties whatsoever understanding what was said was the "I Believe We Did" line at the very end and even then I didn't need to hear it to understand what was being said. I never saw Tenet in theaters but did not have any issues understanding any of the dialogue on the blu-ray on a tv using 2.0 stereo output.
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Finally saw the film in IMAX, and I thought it sounded just fine. There was one moment when Robert and Kitty are talking outside where I missed a line, but I got the gist of what was being discussed. To be honest, I do appreciate that Nolan does as little ADR as possible on his films. ADR always irritates me. It's a necessary evil, but it just never sounds as good as proper production audio.
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When I watched it, the music was so loud through the entire thing and the dialogue was super low. maybe it was just the theatre, but ive seen plenty of shows there from the same exact seat and it was always fine.
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Honestly, I think a lot of films these days are mixed more with streaming in mind than theatrical showings. Everything is just turned up high and compressed together.
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I feel the same way.
I've never noticed an issue with Nolan's movies, personally. I saw Oppenheimer in IMAX and I don't remember missing any dialogue. And it also irritates me whenever I hear ADR. Takes me right out of the movie/show.
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The only time ADR really bothers me is when you're behind the person speaking and the jaw movement clearly doesn't match the words. It's like watching a PS3 cut scene.
Though sometimes you get great ADR - and I don't mean to start a whole ADR conversation with this - like in Galaxy Quest.
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Overall I liked it, but not as much as I hoped I would. I think the pacing was a bit frantic at times. At certain parts it felt like we were getting thrown snapshots of scenes in succession very quickly. It felt like someone was writing an essay, realised they were running out of time, panicked and was furiously trying to cram everything in the remaining time, but this was happening erratically throughout the film. I understand it is probably a deliberate choice to create tension, but I thought it was a bit too much. It also felt like it dragged towards the end. I think you could shave off 20-30' overall (across the film, not just at the end) and it would still be fine, which is weird because it ALSO felt frantic. Some scenes were great to be sure, and performances were on par with what you would expect with the actors involved. Masterpiece? Not sure.
EDIT: Finally, there was music at all times, even at low-key character moments, to the point it felt overbearing.
Last edited by Alexandros; 08-30-2023 at 07:32 AM.
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I finally saw this, and just got the memes, I watched in on the back of a headrest on an airplane. MAYBE IT WOULD HAVE BEEN GOOD IN IMAX
It was super duper alright. Barbie was easily the better movies. I knew it going in and now I know it for sure: I've seen a thousand movies like this. The gritty man history bio pic. There's pretty much nothing special about this. Nolan adds some sex perhaps self conscious of prior accusations of his sexlessness and misogyny, but it ends up turning this movie into the exception that proves that rule. It's the same Nolan who thinks women are a bother and really just wants to focus on the cool dudes in the suits. Cillian Murphy I thought did a good job... But he was better as scarecrow. The plot and pacing are all over the place. There's definitely that phase of the movies that feels like the avengers of science class, but little is done to give any of these figures life or dimension... They are merely represented here.
I did love learning about all of the communist stuff and the political meetings, that was the most interesting part of the movie and I think they ultimately failed to really deliver on it in a deep way it's really just window dressing for the second half, which abandons the tension of the build up to the bomb and gives way to what turns out to be a really pathetic masculine pissing contest. *Oh no! Oppie lost his Q clearance!!!* Very difficult to care about, even if the movie itself does a fine enough job of portraying the stakes and the drama. The way the beaurocracy and politics came down on him was pretty frustrating to watch.
To it's credit the movie was mostly entertaining, although I'd say far from my favorite Nolan film.
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While I don't think Nolan is misogynistic... i do agree here. Plenty of women involved in the Trinity project according to the book and would've been interested in seeing those stories... that said.. the film is already 3 hours and is missing a TON of things from the book. So I can see it being difficult to add more to this film to make it less-"misogynistic" without it being insanely long. It IS about Oppenheimer AND a bunch of "dudes in suits". :shrug:
So I get what you are saying but thats kinda like saying Ron Howard is misogynistic since Apollo 13 focused on a bunch of dudes in spacesuits.
All of that said, I think Kitty got the shit end of the stick in this story. She was an insanely smart woman and I think they did not do her justice. In that time she was unable to move forward in her career like Oppie (due to the times) and think the little bit of her they did show, just made her look like a bad, drunk mom without showing MORE of WHY she was going down that hole. Def wish Kitty had been more prominent.
Side bar - I highly recommend the book 'American Prometheus' that the movie is based on
Last edited by Reznor2112; 06-05-2024 at 10:51 AM.
BADGERS
He just consistently does this throughout his whole body of work, from memento to batman to inception.
Stubby Member
At least in Memento Carrie Anne Moss feels like a real human being. Later down his career he started both somehow getting terrible performances out of his actresses and giving them the worst dialogue in the entire script. Like I legit felt bad for Anne Hathaway in Interstellar,she tried to say that godawful dialogue with at least some weight.
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Yeah I don't think I am qualified to comment on his other films (since I am a guy) aside from saying that films like the Batman franchise have always been male-heavy throughout history. Catwoman has always been horribly written which is a shame. Dunkirk, well that was genuinely a mostly male story. I did genuinely LOVE Elizabth Debicki's role in TENET.
I think (at least for me as a male who went to film school to be a filmmaker) you write from what you know. And it can be difficult to write/direct a story about a strong female character IF you have never lived in those shoes. Not discounting it by any means, because Hollywood is over saturated with male lead roles, directors, writers, producers etc... and has been. Please do not confuse my comments as defending misogyny - simply saying that i wouldn't lean towards that opinion about a male director just for creating films that are male centered. But I do agree that it would be great to see a Nolan film with a female lead for a change. Cormac McCarthy finally did it with The Passenger/Stella Maris and it was great. Think some of these dudes need to dive into their feminine side and I think they will discover something cool.
Hopefully, with the rise of very influential female writers, directors, actors, etc.. we will slowly start seeing a much needed shift in the stories that are being told at the cinema.
Side bar: I think this hits a personal note for me since I was raised by my mother for the majority of my life and have a wife, a son, and daughter. Recently I was called "misogynistic" at work during a group discussion over a very innocent, (for comedy purposes only) joke aimed at Taylor Swift. Something along the lines of "when will the song about the football player come out?" An entire group of women I work with said I was being misogynistic for saying this and was then given a history on all the great things TSwift has done. I have no issue with TSwift other than her aggressive fan base. That said, I was extremely worried and even my wife was too when I told her. Her response was "Do those women not realize that them calling you that in front of co-workers and leadership could get you written up or fired in 2024?" So all of that being said, again...NOT defending... but just as the Me Too Movement can be taken away from victims and weaponized so can calling folks misogynistic (even if not intentionally).
Hopefully this doesn't offend anyone and just creates a good conversation. nervous even posting this as I have no intention of upsetting anyone.
Last edited by Reznor2112; 06-09-2024 at 08:43 AM.
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I don't have a horse in this race, and I didn't take any time to think about Nolan specifically, BUT :
I don't think it's about writing strong female characters, in this instance, so much as writing poor ones. With Nolan, female characters are plot elements at best. They just don't matter much.
When I watched Villeneuve's Dune with my brother, we went to eat a bite afterwards and talked about the changes made from the book. One thing that was striking is that suddenly, the female characters had their own agenda, agency, a personality independent from that of the main character. You believed they had an inner life, their own thoughts and opinions, something that was relatively absent from the books (but old sci-fi didn't quite care about three-dimensional characters, and Herbert's not that bad in that context.)
Even though Villeneuve's a guy, he cared enough to give his female characters actual weight. Nolan doesn't seem to care much, but I think it's more of a reflection of how he treats characters in general. Even his main characters aren't that deep, their struggles and goals feel like strings that carry them along the plot, while Villeneuve has always made character-driven movies. Actually I think the comparison is apt, as they're both filmmakers interested in unique concept, while their priorities are opposite. Nolan uses characters to illustrate a concept, Villeneuve uses concepts to present his characters.
Nolan isn't probably interested in female characters, because he isn't very much interested in characters at all.
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