I’m dreaming of Cillian Murphy and his 1930s curly moptop haircut and that same damn look he wears throughout Oppenheimer in every damn scene, and I just can’t watch it a third time, I tell you…I can’t go again! Isn’t it enough that I’ve sat through it twice? I awake at 3:30 am and my pillow is damp. It’s a dense and accomplished film but it doesn’t breathe and it feels like work. I struggled so hard the second time…please, not a third. I’ve paid my dues, leave me alone, etc.

My reservations aside, I think it’s really great that Oppenheimer has performed as well as it has. It’s one of the best things that has happened theatrically since the all-but-total devastation ushered in by the pandemic.

I’ve never derided Oppenheimer as any kind of bad or less than immaculate film. It’s clearly a top-tier smarthouse thing — brilliant, ultra-cerebral. It’s never less than “impressive.”

I just found it strenuous and chilly and rigid…an under-oxygenated forced march with a lot of overly wound-up, perturbed academics and a few upper-level bureaucrats.

Not to mention the arduous company of two very angry, brittle and neurotic women who constantly seethed and lashed out. When Florence Pugh’s subordinate character (Oppie’s Communist lover) committed suicide, I honestly felt relieved. I muttered to myself “one down, one to go.”

The world agrees that Nolan should henceforth steer clear of sex scenes. I didn’t believe that Murphy’s Oppie was even capable of sexual thoughts, much less arousal and much, much less actual coitus.

Thank God for Matt Damon’s brass-tacks “what are the basic dynamics?” scenes with Murphy.

It’s quite the vivid, you-are-there symphony and I felt genuine respect and even awe at times for Nolan’s herculean efforts, but at the same time I felt trapped. It started to wear me down, man, and you’ll never convince me that omitting the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right way to go.

And I really didn’t care for Murphy’s company. I tolerated his frozen eyes and aloof, twerpy manner but I kept saying “what is it with this fucking guy? I’m stuck hanging out with a Martian.”

If you’re checking your watch at the one-hour mark (as I did during my initial 70mm IMAX viewing at AMC’s Lincoln Square) and going “dear God, there’s another two hours to go”…if you’re saying that to yourself there’s something wrong.

Yes, it improves during the second hour and I felt more and more sorry for the poor guy when the D.C. wolves did their level best to taunt and persecute him, but Oppie cooked his own goose by alienating Truman (I’ll never forget that look of rage and disgust on Gary Oldman’s face) and failing to understand that longstanding sympathies and allegiances with Communists would land him in trouble, especially given that he’s repeatedly warned about this throughout the first two-thirds.

I just found Oppie an extremely odd duck and quietly arrogant to boot. If I didn’t know the whole story backwards and forwards I would’ve felt no investment in his fate whatsoever. I felt much more rapport with Russell Crowe‘s John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (’01) or Eddie Redmayne‘s Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (’14).

But he still founded Rolling Stone 56 years ago, and over the succeeding decades helped to shape and promote rock culture like few others. Steven Gaydos didn’t do squat in this regard.

Post-Toronto Oscar Poker: Read the time code checklist and weep…

American Fiction, TIFF: 2:44
Drew Barrymore: 12:42
Lauren Boebert: 18:26
TIFF People’s Choice Award: 34:12
Russell Brand + Me Too: 35:37
Kristi Noem/Corey Lewandowski affair + Biden and Harris 50:36
Best Picture + Pot Au Feu: 63 mins
Killers of the Flower Moon: 70 mins
Mississippi Burning: 72 mins
The Parallax View: 75 mins
JFK and anti-government/paranoid movies: 83 mins

…is “what an arrogant, exhibitionist, beyond-egotistical low-rent moron…not to mention that ridiculous Venice canal water taxi incident…talk about the very personification of déclassé.

Has any TIFF-attending journo written a concise, HE-styled, straight-from-the-shoulder capsule assessment of Cord Jefferson’s film? It’s a racial satire but how effective? Just asking.

Jordan Ruimy: “It’s very good…reminded me of Alexander Payne’s movies.”

THR’s Scott Feinberg predicted this win.

Review excerpt by Film Stage’s Jordan Raup:

Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers was 1st runner-up.

Two good things happened last night after I watched Richard Dewey and Michael Lewis‘s Radical Wolfe (Kino Lorber), a decent, mildly approvable documentary portrait of the magnificent Tom Wolfe, who passed in mid-May of 2018, during that year’s Cannes Film Festival.

One, it prompted me to read the Vanity Fair article that inspired the doc — Lewis’s 2015 article about the celebrated writer (“How Tom Wolfe Became Tom Wolfe“). And two, it convinced me to order a copy of Wolfe’s “Hooking Up,” a compilation that contains Wolfe’s wicked 1965 satire of The New Yorker, called “Tiny Mummies.” (I’d bought a copy years ago but left it in West Hollywood when I moved east.)

HE to friendo about Radical Wolfe, which I saw last night: “I thought the Wolfe doc was pretty good or, you know, not bad. It covered what needed to be covered, and was properly descriptive and reverent and enthused in an acceptable sort of way.

“But after decades of reading Wolfe’s stuff the doc didn’t (and perhaps couldn’t) deliver all that many bong highs. Wolfe’s writing has been giving me bong highs since the ’60s, but there were only a few (and mild ones at that) in Dewey’s film.

”Honestly? I got more enjoyment and enthusiasm…more in the way of the sheer euphoric love of delicious, sugar-rush writing…I got more of that from Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review of Radical Wolfe than from Radical Wolfe itself.

“Of all the stories and sides of Leonard Bernstein that Bradley Cooper decided to leave out of Maestro, the most infamous is surely “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” (6.8.70)”, Gleiberman notes. “Wolfe’s New York magazine cover story, described in delectable you-are-there detail, focused on a party thrown by Lenny and his wife, Felicia, at their Park Avenue apartment to raise funds for the Black Panthers.

“Several of the Panthers were there, mingling with the swells of aristocratic liberal New York, and Wolfe captured the contradictions of that evening in a tone of such scathing perception that it was as if he’d defined the concept of bourgeois political correctness, disemboweled it, and danced on its grave, all in the same moment.”

I watched Radical Wolfe with a faint hope that it might deliver several cinematic equivalents of Wolfe-ian prose highs. For a filmmaker to have managed such a feat…a kind of Adam Curtis-like re-experiencing of the Wolfe panorama…well, who knows if such a thing would be possible? But he/she would have to get really ambitious & UNCORK THE BOTTLE & REALLY GO TO TOWN in terms of creating a cinematic corollary.

Such a doc would have to be a four- or five-parter…180 or 240 minutes…and it couldn’t really be about just Wolfe’s unique literary experience, but about what he saw and felt and imagined and disapproved of and found fascinating…the whole raging sea of American life and culture from the late ‘50s, 60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s….a mad, churning, sweeping history of pre-boomer, boomer and GenX America….the whole tornado as witnessed and processed by a single gifted fellow but also all of us.

If President Biden insists on wearing old-man comfort shoes, he could at least wear the all-black kind that would at least simulate the black leather Presidential footwear tradition that has been in place since the days of Abraham Lincoln if not before.

Biden’s wearing of whitesides is appalling — a symbolic degradation of the dignity of the office.

Nicolle Wallace: “Where are all of the Republicans who still have little slivers of a following in the cesspool that is the MAGA base?”

Special Trump prosecutor Jack Smith has asked a judge to place Orange Sociopath under a limited gag order for attempting to publicly intimidate potential witnesses. Smith’s filing says the “narrowly tailored” order would prevent harassment of witnesses. It seems likely that sooner or later a MAGA wacko will try something violent.