I was thrown pretty hard by that early Oppenheimer scene with the poisoned green apple. Actually a lethal apple, injected by Cillian Murphy‘s titular character with liquid cyanide. The intended victim is Patrick Blackett (James Darcy), a Cambridge University instructor and physicist whom Oppie despises.
At the very last minute Oppie comes to his senses, realizes that murdering a professor may impact his life adversely, runs back to the classroom and prevents the apple from being consumed. Except the guy who almost bites into it isn’t Blackett but Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh).
Post-injection my immediate thoughts were (a) “the fuck?”, (b) “What kind of loose-cannon psycho twerp is this asshole? Who does this kind of thing?”; (c) “Oppie almost killed once so who’s the next possible victim? Will he strangle Florence Pugh‘s Jean Tatlock after having sex with her? Will he stab Robert Downey, Jr.‘s Lewis Strauss in the back of the neck with an icepick?
Once you’ve opened the Pandora’s Box of premeditated murder, character-wise you can’t close it. And so the cyanide apple half-hovers over the entire film. Or it did for me, at least.
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.”
Posted on 12.2.11: Steve McQueen‘s Shame demands a spinach-eating looksee from all non-Eloi viewers, but hoowee, it’s a bucket of bleak.
Here’s my 9.5. Telluride Film Festival review: “Steve McQueen‘s Shame is a prolonged analysis piece that’s entirely about a malignancy — sex addiction — affecting the main character, and nothing about any chance at transcendence or way into the light.
“Michael Fassbender plays a successful Manhattan guy with a sex-addiction issue. He’s into slamming ham like a vampire is into blood-drinking, minus any emotional intimacy whatsoever. And at the end of the day, all the film does is show you how damaged and deranged he is. The guy is lost, tangled, probably doomed.
“Act One: Fassbender is one smooth, obsessive, fucked-up dude. Act Two: Fassbender really is a twisted piece of work, you bet. Act Three: Boy, is this guy a mess!
“This is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do. But Shame has a point, delivered with a methodical intensity, that sinks into your bones. And part of the point is that suppressed memories of incest…I can’t do this.
“But Shame has integrity, and is one of those films, like A Dangerous Method, that you might not like as you watch it but you think about a lot in the hours and days and weeks afterwards.
“The sex scenes are grim and draining and even punishing in a presumably intentional way. Fassbender walks around with his dick hanging out and flopping against his upper thigh, and I suppose it ought to be acknowledged that he’s fairly well hung.
Carey Mulligan, who plays his effed-up sister, has (a) a longish nude scene in a shower and (b) a song-singing moment that goes on for three or four minutes.”
Chilly and clinical as it is, it’s all but impossible to not think about Shame, a lot, after it’s over. Failing to see it means hanging your head in shame the next time an intelligent film discussion occurs in your circle.
On 9.30 N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis called Shame “another example of British miserablism, if one that’s been transposed to New York and registers as a reconsideration of the late 1970s American cinema of sexual desperation (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Hardcore, Cruising, etc.).”
From 11.10: “What if Michael Fassbender’s sex-addict character was called ‘Shame’? And if everyone called him that — all the girls he picks up, his sister (Carey Mulligan), his charmless boss at the office and so on? And what he if struck up a relationship with a 10 year-old kid who lives in his building, and what if the kid found out he was a sex addict and said, ‘I’m ashamed of you, Shame!'”
[Updated]. I don’t have time or the energy to write something deeply felt about each and every Scott film, but there’s absolutely no question in my mind the The Counselor deserves its #4 slot, that the first half of Matchstick Men is dead brilliant, and that A Good Year (ranked at #8) is a much better film that many people realize.
In this order…
1. Alien
2. The Duellists
3. Thelma and Louise
4. The Counselor
5. Blade Runner
6. American Gangster
7. Matchstick Men
8. Gladiator
9. Kingdom of Heaven (extended version)
10. A Good Year
11. Black Hawk Down
12. Black Rain
13. The Martian
I don’t feel that strongly care about the rest. Okay, I hate Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Ditto Legend. Someone to Watch Over Me is piffle. I found House of Gucci half-tolerable, but I’m not sure I’d want to watch it again.
The Last Duel was better than half-decent. I don’t even remember 1492: Conquest of Paradise or Body Of Lies. Scott’s Robin Hood was half-watchable, G.I. Jane is negligible; ditto Exodus: Gods and Kings, White Squall, Hannibal.
I was actually okay with All The Money In The World.
Herewith films that have always made me seethe with hatred, twitch with revulsion and convulse with contempt. I’m naturally excluding films that are merely dull or excessive or appalling…or so bad they’re funny (Irwin Allen‘s The Swarm).
1. Richard Curtis‘ Love Actually (’03).
2. Frank Darabont‘s The Green Mile (’99)
3. Peter Jackson‘s Lord of the Rings franchise, especially Return of the King (’03).
4. Stephen Sommer‘s The Mummy (’99).
5. Joel Schumacher‘s Dying Young (’91).
6. Sir Lew Grade and Jerry Jameson‘s Raise The Titanic (’80).
7. Jerry Jameson‘s Airport ’77 (’77).
8. Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots (’18).
9. Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus (’12).
10. Randall Kleiser‘s The Blue Lagoon (’80).
11. Steven Spielberg‘s Hook (’91).
12. George Stevens‘ The Only Game in Town (’70).
Special bonus: The animatronic baby scene in Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper (’14).
I’m not saying I would cross the street if I saw a guy wearing a pair of Bruno Magli mandals approaching, but the thought would certainly cross my mind. Man feet are inescapable on Belizean beaches and in Brooklyn bars frequented by Millennials and Zoomers during the warm months, but that doesn’t change a basic fact: they’re often horrible to glance at. Bordering on grotesque.
And to think they weren’t even a factor after the collapse of the Roman Empire. They only returned in the mid to late ’40s when beatniks began wearing them in San Francisco and the West Village, and now, God help us, you can’t escape them between early May and late September.
Try to imagine John Wayne or Walter Brennan strolling around the set of Rio Bravo wearing mandals…Howard Hawks would take one look and deliver a withering expression. The thing that first turned me against Michael Fassbender was when he wore mandals during his first scene in Prometheus — that was the moment when I said to myself, “Wow, this guy could be a problem.” Never forget that Moneyball director Bennett Miller signalled his vague disapproval of Spike Jonze‘s husband-of-Robin Wright character by having him wear mandals. If I were to run into a name-brand film critic wearing mandals at the Cannes Film Festival…I don’t want to think about it.
If I had my druthers I would live in a zero-mandals world, forever and ever.
I despised Prometheus, of course, and thought that The Martian was way over-praised, but the following Ridley Scott films are totally approved and seriously admired: The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner, Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, Black Hawk Down, American Gangster, the directors’ cut version of Kingdom of Heaven, The Counselor and All the Money in the World. Oh, and the 1984 Orwellian commercial for the new Macintosh computers. So that’s 11.
Three and a half years ago I stated that Michael Fassbender was on the HE shit list (“Turning Against Fassbender“), and that his reign as a proverbial hot guy had begun to wind down. Fassy is still a respected working actor (his next film is Taika Waititi‘s Next Goal Wins), but he’s now regarded as a kind of perverse figure with a surly aura.
An early 2020 perspective allows an assessment of Fasbender’s hot six years (’08 to ’13) — Hunger, Fish Tank, Inglourious Basterds, Jonah Hex, X-Men: First Class, A Dangerous Method, Shame (his peak achievement), Haywire, Prometheus, 12 Years A Slave, The Counselor.
I got off the boat roughly five and a half years ago or starting in 2014 — Frank, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Slow West, Steve Jobs, Macbeth (hated it), The Light Between Oceans (meh), Assassin’s Creed, Song to Song (nothing), Alien: Covenant, The Snowman, X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
From “Lindelof = Uh-Oh, Here We Go,” posted on 10.9.14: “To me, the idea of Damon Lindelof being attached to a film or TV project…to me that’s a threat.”
The wifi in the Georgetown Airbnb where we’re bunking until tomorrow morning barely has a pulse, and so streaming the first episode of Lindelof’s new HBO Watchmen series is a dicey proposition. But sight unseen I’m scared, and the reason for this fear is Lindelof, a puzzleboxer and head-fucker from way back. I’m get around to it when I return tomorrow or sometime Wednesday, but until then….
Damon Lindelof‘s Watchmen (HBO, now streaming) “is here to shake you up,” writes Indiewire‘s Ben Travers. “To stimulate new discussions about age-old issues; to challenge preconceived notions by framing them from new perspectives. Admittedly, as a white critic, I can only imagine it’s easier for me to process a lot of these images and themes from a safe distance.
“The world of Watchmen is as important to absorb as it is fascinating to deconstruct. Having seen the premiere half-dozen times now, there are still new details emerging and more to come as the subsequent episodes roll out. Yes, there’s even more to admire if you’re familiar with the comic, but a deep understanding of the text doesn’t change the quality of the current story. It’s just a fun additional layer, for those who want to cover it.”
HE observation: Travers felt compelled to watch the opening episode six times? What does that tell you?
The first episode, titled “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out Of Ice”, “will beg the audience to ask, ‘What the fuck is going on?‘,” Travers writes, “and that’s before getting to the final twist, where one of the central characters, played by one of the cast’s more famous faces, is killed off.”
Travers summary: “Robert Redford is the President of the United States. He has been for more than three decades. The ‘Sundancer in Chief,’ as one radio caller labels him, passed a reparations bill where descendants of slaves don’t have to pay taxes.
“These three pieces of information are critically important to understanding many of the personal dynamics at play in the premiere. It’s why Topher (Dylan Schombing) attacks his classmate for bringing up ‘Redfordations‘ during Angela’s presentation. It’s why the Nixonville suspect probably shouldn’t have answered “yes” when Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson) asked him if all Americans should pay taxes. It’s why there’s a different, yet all-too-familiar, kind of tension at play when a black cop pulls over a white hick hauling a truckload of lettuce.
It says something for Ethan Hawke‘s charisma that I didn’t even blink when he appeared in a pair of flip-flops in Juliet Naked. Normally that would prompt am agonizing reappraisal, at least in my realm. The only other moment in which mandals weren’t an HE issue was when Spike Jonze donned a pair for that Moneyball scene that he shared with Brad Pitt and Robin Wright. That was because I knew they were being worn with a wink — because director Bennett Miller was saying to audiences (and to guys like me in particular) that “it’s okay if you don’t like Jonze’s character that much…given his footwear I wouldn’t blame you…you get what I’m saying, right?”
I honestly believe that the bad mandal karma has gotten around or you’d see actors wearing them a lot more. I can think of only four instances apart from Hawke and Jonze. Michael Fassbender wearing a pair in Prometheus — a moment that was probably pivotal in my forming a negative opinion of the guy. Billy Baldwin strolling around in bathroom flip-flops in Backdraft — if only Ron Howard had taken him aside and said “I don’t think they work.” Adam Sandler in 20 First Dates. And Colin Farrell wearing sandals during a kitchen chat scene in Miami Vice.
It’s not just mandals but footwear in general. Directors almost never allow an audience to consider whatever kind of shoe, boot or sandal…none of that. Even in the matter of really slick-looking shoes, like those polished lace-up cordovans Cary Grant wears in North by Northwest.
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