Nikola Tosic blog

metaphor

realism

metaphor beats realism because it allows the audience to connect to the material with their own feeling and experience, while realism narrows down the possibility of the connection to a minimum.

cristopher nolan is a technician and he wanted to solve the black hole technically, which is an error.

stanley kubrick solved the wormhole travel metaphorically and emotionally which allowed us to connect to it in our own way.

stanley knew when to be a technician and when to be an artist.

artist uses metaphors and technician uses realism.

at the end a painting of rothko will communicate more than an instagram photo of a breakfast, no matter how good the breakfast is.

i did my first standup at the pit underground in nyc on sunday 11 june 2017.

i checked out an improv and comedy sessions the night before and realize my material was useless. also none of the uber drivers reacted to my tests the week before. i seem to have missed the concept of a punchline. so i rewrote the whole material on sunday 11th and learned it while walking around. it worked out ok.

thank you irena, rafael, stefan, and stefan’s friend for support.

next stop: i hope they cast me in beverly hills cop remake.

when i was a kid i watched the eddie murphy snl white like me sketch where he paints himself white and experiences life as a white person. suddenly everything is free and everything is a party, when there are no blacks. it was funny but i never believed it. and through the years i always thought blacks are complaining too much. how they have to work harder and everything will be fine. i never witnessed any racism in my life, even during my many visits to south africa.

and then i stayed for more than a week with a usa white first generation immigrant family. boy oh boy! i was utterly shocked that blacks are clearly referred to as inferior in everyday normal conversation. and with their kids as well. at some point i thought: these people are isolated nutts. but then they had visitors who joined in. random visitors whom they did not know before. for them being a racist is like being a soccer fan, you can easily connect. my favorite quote is when dad asked his nine year old daughter: “are there any blackskins in your school? i hope there are none, otherwise we would need to move.”

so i have to apologize to all the blacks. i now believe that some whites really do not like you. they sit around their homes and really really do not want you anywhere near. i have to also question anyone who says that there is no conspiracy, no social problems, but only work problems.

this makes me think if there are people who hate the groups i belong to. scary!

is tom hardy mel brooks’ clone or son?

i rest my case.

i am not a fan of nolan anymore because he stopped making movies for the audience. he makes movies for himself. it is not so much that i dislike nolan. he seems like a smart and hard working guy. it is that i dislike all people who want to be artists after they make money. and they fail miserably. no one will ever be an artist after they make it commercially in something else. never! accept it. drunkirk is crap exactly because nolan pretends to be an artist and fails at it. dunkirk movie is not art. it is not entertainment. only third option is that it is crap.

here is a list of other things i dislike in dunkirk:

– glorification of the traditional european imperial social pressure which made average folk go into war to protect the interests of royals. humanity had to suffer through these nasty wars throughout 20th century. in 21st century we do not need this kind of nonsense anymore. that stupid “you are a coward for not killing the [insert enemy european nation state]” attitude has hopefully died half a century ago. but nolan brought it back in his 1930 propaganda movie dunkirk. bollocks. imho directors who want to make war movies should experience war, like oliver stone did. then try to motivate kids into an idiotic sense of nationalism (not patriotism!) which gets them to murder. fuck you nolan.

– dunkirk feels small. real dunkrirk involved almost half a million people. movie feels like its maybe 134 people on one beach. i understand nolan hates cgi, but he could have shot the movie in albania with 10,000 extras that cost half a euro. that would give it some “production value”.

– all the dunkrik escape ships and boats seem half empty. while 10 people on a boat might seem horrible for rich people, to an average chinese this seems like a luxury cruise. if i was running away from death i would squeeze about 14 times more people on those boats. for example, this is how a mob motivated to escape looks like (again thanks to albania):

– nolan seems to be unable to create any emotional effect. he is a technician. not a software but a hardware technician. there are no emotions in his films, just good hardware use. things happen, advertising convinces you that it is cool and you watch it, and that is it. i watched war for the planet of the apes which has a billion tons of emotion in every second, and even the best 5 mins of nolan’s work can not compare to the worst 1 min of that movie. nolan’s directing belongs to the 90s and 2000s. the future is reserved for real movies which return to the origin of the emotional moments. think battleship potemkin. spiderman homecoming is also amazing. best marvel movie so far. pure fun.

– the annoying copy paste hans zimmer music is all over the place. i was browsing my phone for most of the time, and then i hear the music and it tricks me into thinking something is actually going on in the film. i take a look and i see nothing. i see people dying, fighting, whatnot but nolan does not convince me to care for anyone or anything. it is amazing how a bad directing can make the most horrible images seem like watching the paint dry. it reminds me how good directing can make me care about the smallest thing, how it can transport me into a whole universe hiding in a nanosecond. i can at least thank nolan for a reminder of what is actually good.

– the first few minutes are the most unrealistic war scenes ever. i mostly felt sorry that the protagonist did not get to take a shit. watch it. you will see what i mean.

i thank nolan for insomnia. that is a movie he made for us. it is a masterpiece. now that he is trying to become an artist by making things for himself, he is really a bore.