Craig Mod reviews Oppenheimer:

Strauss and his kangaroo court and Oppenheimer’s philandering all become (quite frankly) sort of meaningless things in the greater context of quantum matter, in the context of splitting the atom, in the context of briefly running a nuclear reactor beneath a football field in Chicago, in the context of somewhat arbitrarily vaporizing a few hundred thousand civilians. I couldn’t but feel heartbreak that the miracle insights of our consciousness (we are the eyes of the universe looking back at itself and all that), the ingenuity of our skull-protected meat-lumps, played a distant second fiddle to (an admittedly well-acted) Downey Jr. as Strauss and his bafflingly pea-sized ego.

Could not have said it better myself, and not for a lack of trying.

🍿 Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023) is a better sign of Pixar’s fall from relevancy than their box office bomb that wasn’t (and which, NB, we haven’t seen yet). Ruby…, you see, is one of many recent animated movies influenced by Spider-Verse… for style and The Mitchells… for substance. I would rather have watched either of those for the umpteenth time than Ruby… this once, but it was set under water so the kids liked it.

1. It wasn’t the movie I wanted to see. The best, most dramatic parts, the ones that people (where by “people” I mean myself) actually cared for were in Los Alamos and centered around the atomic bomb. So Nolan chose the wrong book to make into a movie: it is all about the bomb, not the man.
2. Or, if you are to be so anthropocentric, why make it about only one man? The Manhattan project featured so many colorful, smart, obnoxious characters that it would have been the perfect ensemble movie. Have Wes Anderson do it (although, yes, he kind of did). Have Aaron Sorkin do it! Because Nolan will inevitably turn everything he touches into a puzzle box, and…
3. this time, his puzzle is pretty puny. There is a moment near the end of the second act which felt like a parody of an M. Night Shyamalan twist. “I knew it, it was X all along”, she screams and throws her glass on the floor in a culmination of… nothing much, actually. Because what is revealed was obvious, and there is nothing leading up to that moment that would make you think anyone was even paying attention to some milquetoast backdoor machinations. It felt like a piece of film got lost on the cutting room floor. Maybe that’s the twist?
4. Hans Zimmer was not involved in the making of the score, though you could have fooled me. Having a movie set in the 1930s through the 1960s feature only the migraine-inducing synthetic throb of Gotham’s best instead of some period music, even during the (many) party scenes, was a choice for choice’s sake and a stupid one at that.
5. To be clear, the cinematography is wonderful, the casting of Mr. and Mrs. Oppenheimer perfect, and dear oh dear wasn’t that scene with Gary Oldman just marvelous? They deserve all the praise and awards they will likely get, if the juries still remember them by the time the awards season comes because there are at least two more potentially great movies to watch out for. What a great time for cinema.

🍿 Rewatched Gone Girl (2014) solely because of my dad, who remarked how Ben Affleck had never been in a good movie, which reminded me of this one. And yes, it took all of David Fincher’s and Rosamund Pike’s skills to make Affleck watchable, but it is the end result that matters!

🍿Mary Poppins (1964) is 139 minutes long! This may explain why I had never seen it beginning to end until recently. Did children actually sit in the movie theater for more than two hours back in the 1960s to watch this?

Don’t get me wrong, it is a good movie. But much too long.

Via Kottke, a mashup poster of the upcoming Oppenheimer and Barbie movies, and it looks… mostly like Barbie.

It reminded me of that saying about putting a tiny bit of something into something else and getting mostly that first thing. Snobbish of me, I know, and I am sure both will be great!

If there was my type of a long-form article, it would be the making-of any complex project. Like of The Last Unicorn (via Robin Sloan), or Back to the Future (warning: Twitter thread), or Frasier (to which I keep coming back).

And I have never even seen the first one — though I do plan to now!

“After ‘Barbie,’ Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox”:

I.P.-based filmmaking has become so commonplace that Gerwig—who made her name acting in tiny mumblecore projects—was caught off guard by complaints that she’d sold out.

I.P. being, of course, the acronym for intellectual property — amusing, since there is absolutely nothing intellectual about the properties in question. The movies have never been so colorful yet depressing as they are now.

Vulture: Spider-Verse Artists Say Working on the Sequel Was ‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’:

“Phil [Lord] does have good ideas. He speaks creatively really well, and listening to Phil can be inspiring. But the process is not inspiring.”

Sure, if it were that easy then everyone would do it, but there are no excuses for making people around you feel tiny.

🍿 The Godfather (1972): even better than I remembered it. Somehow, the best of the late 1960s and early 1970s has aged much better than the 1980s’ top of the crop (with all due respect to Back to the Future).