Christopher Nolan Vs. Darren Aronofsky

Nolan is as experimental as Aronofsky, except for the last 6 years he has been able to experiment on much larger budgets. Nolan's earlier low budget work was a paradigm of experimental cinema too.

I like the Aronofsky movie where the main character's life spirals out of control.

I don't think they're comparable even in themes.

I'll go for Nolan, but I wonder why you decided to pit these two directors against each other. Do you feel that these are the two best directors from the current crop and hence the comparison? If so, I'd like to throw another name in, Paul Thomas Anderson. I prefer his work over either of them.

Hell yeah. Out of all the great directors today, P. T. Anderson probably has the cleanest record. He hasn't made a film yet that hasn't been noteworthy.

Nolan just seems very limited by his tendency towards action sequences. I get it for Batman, but I don't get it for Inception.

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I'd pit PT Anderson against Wes Anderson.

Regarding why I put these guys against each other, no idea.. just felt like.

F*cking do it.

Polls threads > list 10 ____ threads

I think PT Anderson would win hands down.. have never seen anyone speak against his films around here.

Well, none of these peoples careers are over, so it might be preemptive to judge, but PTA producing a letdown would surprise me the most.

I just want to see PTA do a Holden Caulfield film.

Hell yeah! I'm not sure if Malick is quite right for the job.

Malick is making a Holden film?...
A 3 hour metaphysical film about Holden against a phoney universe... I'll watch that!

I'd put PTA as the best director of his generation of directors, 40-50 years of age with 5-10 movies under their belts. This includes Nolan, Fincher, Aronofsky and Wes Anderson.

I agree.

It is old news that Malick was rumored to be interested in adapting The Catcher in the Rye for a film, but I don't think that he has the rights to make the movie.

My old teacher is writing a book on PTA

I don't like them too much myself. However, what makes me enjoy Aronofsky more is it would seem that he is much more brazen than Nolan, artistically speaking. Nolan's made interesting work, but it's always been at a discretion, not taking things far enough is the issue. Maybe the discretion is the enchantment of the entertainment factor, for which, different stokes for different folks.

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Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

-Stan Brakhage

Preach on, Yoda! I totally agree with you, Aronofsky's movies are hit or miss for me - but Nolan has been putting out consistently impressive work. I mean, the guy goes to work looking like a f***ing BOSS:



...and this guy shows up to work lookin' like this:



But seriously, like Yoda, there is a satisfaction guarantee (at least for me) with Nolan's movies. No buyer's remorse here.

Hmm, i'd have to disagree with that. I think he took things as far as he possibly could with Memento and to a lesser extent Following. Inception is as daring as a blockbuster can get.I think Aronofsky's work APPEAR to take things far, but like Yoda said, he doesn't always hit the mark. Nolan will take something and he'll rinse it out until it's nothing less than decent. He's so consistent that very few people can imagine a Nolan film being less than 4 stars. That type of reputation doesn't just appear out of nowhere, he earned it and did so with a lot of risk taking.

I agree with Dog Star Man. There's not much after thought in Nolan's films, although thoroughly entertaining, I never get the impression there's any more to them than entertaining. Even Following, there was that main theme but it wasn't anything compared to Pi. Memento was just a disorder, sucks for that guy, nothing else to discuss because Nolan didn't take it any further than relationships and crime. People don't give credit to Aronofsky because he's more brazen, and therefore easier to pick apart, but the things in his films where other people think he loses it I feel I understand so sue me for getting him. This argument isn't really about who's better but I think it's simple enough to give Darren the more artistic achievement.

In other words Nolan can easily fake intelligence and depth. Sometimes it's actually there.

I don't even enjoy Nolan half the time. Especially in Inception which had so much potential to say something... anything... about psychology and it spend half the time shooting bullets nonsensically in a totally uninteresting way. Not to mention how it failed to exploit just what a dream was versus a simple virtual reality environment. And no, I don't think he was being subtly impressionistic by making the action sequences inconsequential and monotonous filler.

But Aronofsky I enjoy always. His films aren't exactly inaccessible either. They're all very fast paced, lucid, and filled with interesting visuals.

If P. T. Anderson were in this poll I would vote for him in a heartbeat. He's superior to both of them.

But Nolan would be a fair second.

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