Jeffrey Wells
Wimpyheimer
As HE commenter Kristi Coulter noted a few hours ago, Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer has been, in fact, dishonestly sold and promoted. Because it’s basically a bait-and-switcher.
It’s not some kind of awesome, slam-bam-whammo atomic bomb film. It’s not a tale of acute scientific obsession or about a fine, fevered, steadily building madness. And it’s not a WWII horror film about the becoming of death and the destroying of worlds or even cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Instead it’s a dialogue-driven saga of a blindingly brilliant but conflicted and finally self-crippling Jewish physicist who oversaw and guided the building of the world’s first atomic bombs (Fat Man and Little Boy) but was mainly out to punish Nazi Germany…his European kin will have vengeance!
But when that quest ended and Japan became the target the physicist didn’t feel the fire as much, and then, in the wake of the deaths of tens of thousands, he turned into a “crybaby” (Harry Truman’s term) and a kind of squishy, under-motivated turncoat in the matter of the H-bomb’s development, and as a result he wound up being persecuted and devoured by Robert Downey, Jr. and the D.C. wolves in 1954 and thereby lost his “security clearance.”
That’s it — that’s what the movie is. The saga of a slender, pipe-smoking, genius-level candy-ass with cold blue eyes. A guy who built the bomb but didn’t want to know or even think about it after the task was completed. Treated unfairly and with cruelty, for sure, but who would argue he didn’t make his own bed?
And who believes that Cillian Murphy’s Oppie was able to feel sexual desire, or was even capable of attaining stiffie-hood? I didn’t buy it for a second, especially in the company of the stocky, short-statured, moon-faced and rather morose Florence Pugh.
On top of which my trapped legs were killing me in that third-row-center seat.
Keepsake
Lincoln Square ushers handed these out last night to every Oppenheimer patron. 70mm, 15-perf IMAX, man…knocked my socks off.
Brilliant “Oppie” Is a Tough Sit
During her 7.18 Oppenheimer screening in Burbank Sasha Stone was hugely bothered by a pair of 20something women who took out their phones around the half-hour mark and were pretty much texting all through it. They didn’t even turn down the brightness levels on their screens.
The first thing I texted Sasha when my Oppie screening ended last night at 10:20 pm was “as much as I condemn phone-surfing during a film and especially during a major blue-chip immersion like Oppenheimer, I understand why those women were texting.”
An unmistakably grade–A experience, Oppenheimer could be re-titled Oppenheimer: Interiors as it’s almost all super-smart dialogue, super-smart dialogue and more super-smart dialogue inside rooms (university classrooms, Los Alamos conference rooms, hallways, hotel rooms, dining rooms, the Oval Office).
Okay, the historic New Mexico test explosion of the first atom bomb (7.16.45. 5:29 am) happens under an open-air nightscape and there are several other moments that happen outdoors, but still…
The likely truth is that if you’re not at least half in love with the Oppie legend going in — if you haven’t done your homework by having seen The Day After Trinity (free on YouTube) and if you haven’t read “American Prometheus” — your Oppenheimer experience may (emphasis on this word) feel like a big fat Alaskan grizzly bear sitting in your lap, or certainly right next to you.
It feels (and is) long and demanding, and at three hours is certainly a proverbial tough sit. And yet it’s undeniably a first–rate, grand–vision, smart–person movie that absolutely surges with the spirit of semi-tortured genius (I was reminded of similar-toned portions of A Beautiful Mind) and is highly charged in every respect and is even emotionally engrossing during the persecution-of-Oppie finale (kudos to the “junior Senator from Massachusetts” for voting against the venal Robert Downey Jr.!!).
And I adored viewing this Christopher Nolan film on that tall-as-an-apartment-building, super-sized IMAX screen (I was sitting third-row center), but I’m afraid I’ll need to re-watch it at home with subtitles as I fully understood roughly half of the dialogue, certainly no more than two-thirds. That or I’m simply too fucking dumb to keep up with all the density and complexity.
Not to mention the fact that my poor right knee was aching and moaning in pain as I had no place to shift or maneuver within that tight IMAX seating area, and my knee massages began around the 45-minute mark and never stopped…one of the most challenging IMAX screenings I’ve ever endured.
At the one-hour mark I looked at my watch and said to myself, “oh, dear Lord, this is so brilliant and dense and tightly woven and sharply focused to a fare-thee-well, and God help me but there’s another two hours to go!”
And man, the Ludwig Goransson score is really loud in portions, and certainly during the final act. It throttles and hammers you into submission.
HE to friendo: “You didn’t feel a tiny little ‘yay!’ surge when it’s mentioned that JFK voted against Downey? I did.”
Friendo to HE: “Naah, that was just a little fun grace note of JFK nostalgia.”
Okay, That’s It…Done
I’ve written respectful, approving things about Sound of Freedom, and I strongly disapprove of all the lefty (or woke Stalinist) critics who’ve either panned or refused to review it because of the QAnon nutbag associations.
But I’m off the bus now.
Reason: Last night’s special Donald Trump screening at the Bedminster Golf Club, which was also attended by Freedom star Jim Caviezel. It’s a very decent film, and it’s just crested $100 million domestic, and they couldn’t leave well enough alone — they had to invite The Beast onto the bus.
I’m not saying “fuck this movie,” but I almost am. As far as I’m concerned Caveizel and associates have poisoned the well.
Truffaut or Bertolucci?
I happened upon these snaps (actually captures from a brief video) on Instagram…@alix_brown via keithmcnallynyc. Right away I was wondering if it’s from a ‘70s French film of some distinction. In and of itself the cigarette is unfortunate, but what the guy does with it is very Alain Delon in La Piscine or…I don’t know, Jean Pierre Leaud in Bed and Board. Back in the day I used to be that guy.
Gleiberman: “Oppie” Is “Urgent and Essential,” But Not As Good as Stone’s “Nixon”
Okay, that’s it, Paul Schrader oversold it and now the game is more or less over — Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer (Universal, 7.21) has been given a respectful-but-no-Cuban-cigar review by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman.
Even Nolan’s recreation of the Trinity explosion is a “letdown” Owen says…WHAT??
And then comes the funniest line in the whole review, a casual mention of “that damn Atomic Energy Commission hearing” which Nolan reportedly keeps cutting back to. As I chuckled I could see Gleiberman flinching in his seat: “God, man…enough with the damn AEC hearing already!”
And then Gleiberman really sticks the knife in by calling the second half “a doleful meditation” on atom-bomb morality and whatnot. Aaagghhh!! I’m melting…I’m melting!Cillian Murphy’s titular performance will likely result in a lot of Best Actor talk, Gleiberman implies, but along with David Ehrlich’s backhand across–the–chops reaction (“Nolan’s first biopic feels like some sort of grandiose self-portrait”) you can probably forget any serious Best Picture Oscar headwind. Murphy and Robert Downey, Jr., fine, but that’s where it ends.
Honestly? It isn’t Nolan who’s taken the big hit here — it’s Schrader.
Fierce Bryant-Ruimy Contretemps
I for one would pay top dollar to see an Elon Musk–vs.-Mark Zuckerberg cage match between World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy and the highly assertive (i.e., trans-agenda-driven) Zoe Rose Bryant.
The dispute is over Barbie, of course. Ruimy first and then ZRB…
Bryant tweet-slammed Ruimy, but she seems to be aiming her slings and arrows at the general anti–woke community of sensible, fair–minded, Kool–Aid-averse centrists, myself and Sasha Stone included.
