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.”

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.

Amy Taubin’s reaction to Barbie — petulant, enraged — misses the entire point, which is that for better or worse, Greta Gerwig’s film is infused with real–life 21st Century girlboss feminism.

One view is that Taubin is feisty; another is that she’s a snobby, short-tempered know-it-all.

I waited and thought about and generally settled into Jane Birkin’s passing, and I just couldn’t think of anything heartfelt to say other than I felt sorry for her family and friends. My only vivid imprint is the Blow–Up violet paper orgy scene (filmed when she was 19 or 20) and the very first glimpse of female pubic hair in a mainstream movie — a swingin’ Londön cultural benchmark if there ever was one.

Richard Roud’s embarassing Guardian review of Blow-Up.

This morning I read Seth Abramovitch‘s THR piece about Tatum O’Neal (7.17.23), titled “After Her Debilitating Stroke, Tatum O’Neal Attempts to Heal a Fractured Relationship With Dad Ryan O’Neal.”

Subhead: “Recovering from an overdose-induced crisis that nearly killed her and forced her to relearn how to speak, the actress looks back on her life and career: ‘Weird shit happened. It kind of went in the wrong direction to happiness.'”

The apparently ailing but buoyant-of-spirit Ryan O’Neal, 82, and daughter Tatum, 59 — posted on Instagram last April.

“Ryan O’Neal’s Five Untouchable Years,” posted on 8.4.19:

I prefer to sidestep the biological reality of Ryan O’Neal being 78, and to think of him as the guy he was in the early to mid ’70s, when things were as good as they would ever get for him.

I had two minor run-ins with O’Neal in the ’80s. The first was after an evening screening of the re-issued Rear Window** at West L.A.’s Picwood theatre (corner of Pico and Westwood) in late ’83. As the crowd spilled onto Pico O’Neal and his date (probably Farrah Fawcett) were walking right behind me, and I heard O’Neal say “that was sooo good!” Being a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan, this sparked a feeling of kinship.

Four years later I was a Cannon publicity guy and charged with writing the press kit for Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which didn’t turn out so well. I for one liked Mailer’s perverse sense of humor.

I did an hour-long phoner with O’Neal, and my opening remark was that he was becoming a really interesting actor now that he was in his mid 40s with creased features. He was too good looking when younger, I meant, and so his being 46 added character and gravitas. O’Neal was skeptical of my assessment but went along — what the hell.

In fact O’Neal’s career had been declining for a good five or six years at that point. He knew it, I knew it — we were doing a press-kit-interview dance because there was nothing else to say or do.

O’Neal’s last hit film had been Howard Zeiff and Gail Parent‘s The Main Event (’79), which critics panned but was popular with audiences. He had starred in four mezzo-mezzos before that — Peter Bogdanovich‘s Nickelodeon (’76), Richard Attenbrough‘s A Bridge Too Far (’77), Walter Hill‘s The Driver (’78) and John Korty‘s Oliver’s Story.

Consider this HE anecdote about some 41-year-old graffiti on a New York subway poster.

O’Neal’s career peak lasted for five years (’70 to ’75) and was fortified by a mere four films — Arthur Hiller‘s Love Story (’70), Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? (’72) and Paper Moon (’73), and Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon (’75). (The Wild Rovers and The Thief Who Came to Dinner, which O’Neal also made in the early ’70s, were regarded as mostly negligible and therefore didn’t count.)

O’Neal has said for decades that his career never really recovered from Barry Lyndon — Kubrick had changed the film entirely in editing, and had made him look like a clueless and opportunistic Shallow Hal of the 18th Century. Plus the film had lost money.

I still haven’t seen Barbie, of course, but being reminded yesterday of Greta Gerwig’s co-authoring of Disney’s seemingly woke-as-fuck Snow White bummed me out. This plus her reported interest in directing a Chronicles of Narnia film and her apparent general leanings as a writer-director since 2019’s Little Women, which seemed to signal an ardently feminist chapter…a proverbial turning of the page as she began to swim in a politically ideological stream…

Gerwig is obviously an inventive and visually exacting filmmaker, but I’m less taken with the incarnation that has come to be seen, felt and heard over the last four or five years than who she seemed to be (and with whom I fraternized two or three times) during her Obama-era output…her Greenberg, Frances Ha, Mistress America and Lady Bird period (2010 to 2017) when she was radiating a curiously appealing take on 21st Century life…truly imaginative and wonderfully peculiar…among the most idiosyncratic and organically rooted creative minds out there.

“Antonioni Gerwig,” posted almost exactly ten years ago:

Posted on 11.16.16: