2. Christopher Nolan
You all hate me right now don't you? Or maybe you already hate me because of what I said about The Big Lebowski? Either way I'd like you to remember what I said at the beginning of this article about the Beatles and Shakespeare. Personally I think Christopher Nolan is one of the greatest directors alive today and should have gotten more respect than he did at previous academy awards- but this doesn't mean he isn't over-rated. Let's start off with the negatives so I can end on the positives. I kind of enjoyed watching Nolan's Memento, but if I am being completely honest I found this film to be more about having a great concept than really having a great story. I actually found the story fairly boring and forgettable, though I was impressed by the way Nolan presented this film to us (told backwards) and in that respect I found the viewing experience was refreshing and unique and obviously a film by someone who knows what he is doing. Insomnia should have been better than it was. It was in no respect a bad film, but considering my favorite actor of all time (ALL TIME!) is....
no, not Al Pacino... Robin Williams, I was still left feeling slightly cold my this remake. Both actors were great in the film and the story was gripping enough, but this film was not an instant classic, and I guarantee, other than Nolan's first film The Following, this is probably his least watched movie. The thing that annoys me most about Nolan, and this isn't really his fault, is the credit he gets for so called "saving" the comic book genre and making comic book movies cool again. First of all I'd like to state that I loved The Dark Knight and genuinely think that film should have won best film at the academy awards that year (though it wasn't even nominated) and I also loved the first half of Batman Begins... but that is really where my love of Nolan's Batman saga stops unfortunately. But onto my original point... Stop saying Nolan saved comic book movies and made them dark and cool again. First of all, despite the Batman movies trailing off into some camp fantasy land with Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, Tin Burton's Batman and Batman Returns were both really great films, which by the way were just as dark (arguably darker) than Nolan's. Not only this, but both Burton's Batman and Catwoman were played far superiorly than in Nolan's films. Second of all, are we just forgetting that X-Men 1 and X2 never happened... those were the films that made superhero films dark and cool again in the 2000's, and they both came way before Nolan's 2005 film Batman Begins. If you want to thank someone for saving the genre, thank Raimi, Singer and then Nolan... in that order. That said, I can't really fault Inception and The Prestige (although this film had very obvious plot twists) was also a pretty great film.