Oppenheimer - who's seeing it?

ahalpert said:
But I think Collateral is kind of a nice thriller and character study. I wouldn't say it's the type of movie that gives me a lot to think about.
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Compared to Mann's other movies I'd say this is accurate, but I think the more you scratch the surface of Collateral (or any Mann film) the more you're likely to find.

But it certainly lacks the thematic depth—and scope—of something like Heat. Every time I rewatch that film I find something new to think about, or think about in a different way. Most recently I've been considering how Pacino's character is, in many ways, just as responsible for the carnage in the big shootout as DeNiro and his crew are. Both characters' hubris and desire to do things on their own terms and only their way lead to unnecessary death and suffering. Pacino had a clear chance to stop things but he chose not to because it wasn't how he wanted it to be.

Which is to say nothing of the absurdity of starting a shootout in the middle of the day over a bank's money. I think Mann makes this point even more clearly in the opening moments of Public Enemies (which I don't really enjoy), when a main character shoots a fleeing bank robber in the back.
 
I was going to see Oppenheimer, but now that you pointed out it is a Nolan film, I'll skip it. Dunkirk was a boring film I walked out of after 50 minutes. How many times can you watch a guy try to make tea in a boat for a guy they pulled out of the water and watch two guys cut in line to get a jelly sandwich and some other guys stare at their fuel gauges? But then, the only reason I went to see Dunkirk was because I thought "How can they make this interesting. There's no story here". So maybe I went in expecting to be bored and I was.
 
Paul F said:
I was going to see Oppenheimer, but now that you pointed out it is a Nolan film, I'll skip it. Dunkirk was a boring film I walked out of after 50 minutes. How many times can you watch a guy try to make tea in a boat for a guy they pulled out of the water and watch two guys cut in line to get a jelly sandwich and some other guys stare at their fuel gauges? But then, the only reason I went to see Dunkirk was because I thought "How can they make this interesting. There's no story here". So maybe I went in expecting to be bored and I was.
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Yes! Boring.
Plus the whole thing looked like a video game or something. None of it looked real. CGI from wall to wall.
 
Last month I finished reading American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It's long, dense, fascinating, and fantastic. The two authors, a scholar and a writer, wanted to create the most accurate and carefully researched bio of Oppenheimer, and present it in a readable and literary manner. It's magisterial, it won a Pulitzer Prize, and it's the man source (IIRC) for Nolan's film. 700 pages, with a lot of words on each page. Not a beach read. But, if you're at all interested in the atomic bomb, the Cold War, McCarthy, or just mid-century US politics, it's worth reading.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/b...artin-sherwin/

I can guess what parts Nolan will cut out, and which he'll emphasize (and perhaps overemphasize). That's fine. A film is not a book. But Oppenheimer is an important person in US history. I hope Nolan does him some sort of justice. Me, I'm looking forward more to Gerta Gerwig's Barbie film.

There's also Jon Else's 1980 documentary on Oppenheimer, The Day After Trinity. It too cuts out a lot, and it has the form of a straightforward historical documentary. But there interviews with several people who were at Los Alamos and worked on the bomb, or otherwise knew Oppenheimer. It feels dated, but it's powerful.

Info from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Trinity

The trailer: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thedayaftertrinity


So hey, after (some of) you all see Nolan's film, please let us know what you think.
 
ahalpert said:
Whoa whoa whoa. Nolan is famously opposed to CGI in favor of practical effects. For example, the extra soldiers on the beaches are cardboard cutouts. They definitely used less cgi than comparable films. The planes and plane action is real. https://www.google.com/search?q=did...-samsung-rvo1&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
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Maybe, maybe not. I don't really have the time or interest in looking into it deeper. Yeah, the airplanes might have been real, but all I can say is that the overall look and feel of film, specifically the ocean, beaches, buildings, etc. looked like an overly produced video game. When nothing looks real, you have gone too far, regardless of what process led you to that place.
 
Jim Feeley said:
Last month I finished reading American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It's long, dense, fascinating, and fantastic. The two authors, a scholar and a writer, wanted to create the most accurate and carefully researched bio of Oppenheimer, and present it in a readable and literary manner. It's magisterial, it won a Pulitzer Prize, and it's the man source (IIRC) for Nolan's film. 700 pages, with a lot of words on each page. Not a beach read. But, if you're at all interested in the atomic bomb, the Cold War, McCarthy, or just mid-century US politics, it's worth reading.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/b...artin-sherwin/
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Thanks for the suggestion. I just added it to my reading list on my iPad and will get to it later in the summer. Right now I'm making my way through book 4 (Sword Song) of the Last Kingdom series and trying to get into Lonesome Dove. Not sure I will continue with that one, but I'll give it a few more chapters.

If you want a cool coffee table book that always gets the interest of my friends and family when they visit, check out How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb. Great pictures and technical info. I've had mine for about ten years. Some day I hope to put what I have learned to good use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to...an_Atomic_Bomb
 
Paul F said:
I was going to see Oppenheimer, but now that you pointed out it is a Nolan film, I'll skip it. Dunkirk was a boring film I walked out of after 50 minutes. How many times can you watch a guy try to make tea in a boat for a guy they pulled out of the water and watch two guys cut in line to get a jelly sandwich and some other guys stare at their fuel gauges? But then, the only reason I went to see Dunkirk was because I thought "How can they make this interesting. There's no story here". So maybe I went in expecting to be bored and I was.
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Oh that's funny. I think you said something similar in the original Dunkirk discussion on dvxuser which dissuaded me from seeing it. My wife asked if I wanted to watch it with her and I told her I heard it was really boring about a man on a boat making tea. After she watched it, she showed me the climax and I got hooked.

I think a lot of war movies are action films. Dunkirk isn't really an action film. I like it for its exploration of the feeling of powerlessness, for the many interesting character studies contained within, and for the sort of pacifist values of having the civilians be the heroes and retreat the goal.

I think he tried to shoot it Terence Malick style without a structure and his producer (who is also his wife I think) told him he needed to plan out the story more. With less capable cinematography and editing, I think it would have failed. But both were top notch.

In the course of this discussion, I've viscerally relived many moments in the film repeatedly. It made a bigger emotional impact on me than most of the other movies that have come up.

Also, the weaving together of separate timelines without explanation was simply flawless. Rare to get that level of clarity of time in a mixed-time situation and rarer still without titles telling you when things happened.
 
Doug Jensen said:
Maybe, maybe not. I don't really have the time or interest in looking into it deeper. Yeah, the airplanes might have been real, but all I can say is that the overall look and feel of film, specifically the ocean, beaches, buildings, etc. looked like an overly produced video game. When nothing looks real, you have gone too far, regardless of what process led you to that place.
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Eh it had a glossy look. I liked it. I also watched it on a laptop. Things make a different impact on different screens. I've seen people on Twitter mocking the look and effects of the original star trek and then they show a photo of their TV and the show is being horribly sharpened and upscaled. Looks awful. Not that that's what's happening here but who knows maybe I would have liked the look less on a larger screen
 
I don't need action; far from it. But I do want some sort of story or some sort of characters I can get interested in. For the 50 minutes I watched it, nothing happened. I learned nothing about the people on the boat, the two soldiers, nor the guys flying around. Seinfeld had a show about nothing that was interesting. This was a movie about something that had nothing.

Oh my, brains sure operate differently. When I read that one of us watched it several times..... I wonder if I would have had a better reaction to if it I were younger. I suspect so.
 
ahalpert said:
What makes you interested in the Barbie film?
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I really like Gerwig's Lady Bird film, she along with her partner Noah Baumbach wrote the screenplay for Barbie (and were inspired by they book Reviving Ophelia which my wife and I found thoughtful as we were raising our daughters), and I like DP Rodrigo Prieto's previous work. I'm guessing the art direction, costumes, and everything else will be great. And so, I just thought (rather, hoped), that this film could simultaneously play with and against type, avoid being a dull MESSAGE!!! film, and perhaps be a great big-screen film. I've been avoiding the early reviews/leaks because I want to be surprised.

Also, Barbenheimer. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbenheimer
 
Jim Feeley said:
I really like Gerwig's Lady Bird film, she along with her partner Noah Baumbach wrote the screenplay for Barbie (and were inspired by they book Reviving Ophelia which my wife and I found thoughtful as we were raising our daughters), and I like DP Rodrigo Prieto's previous work. I'm guessing the art direction, costumes, and everything else will be great. And so, I just thought (rather, hoped), that this film could simultaneously play with and against type, avoid being a dull MESSAGE!!! film, and perhaps be a great big-screen film. I've been avoiding the early reviews/leaks because I want to be surprised.

Also, Barbenheimer. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbenheimer
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Ah that's interesting. Looking up Reviving Ophelia now. My wife enjoyed showing me the Judy Blume documentary on Amazon as those books spoke to her as a young adult, as they did to many other young boys and girls. Slightly younger age group perhaps than the teenagers Reviving Ophelia addresses, but the idea of taking young people's problems more seriously reminded me of Blume and her approach to writing.

I'm a little leery of Gerwig and this project because she strikes me as a bit hipster and I'm suspicious of hipsters. I also have mixed feelings about some branches of modern feminism because they seem to tack in a careerist and classist direction as opposed to being purely liberationist and egalitarian. Now, I have very little idea what the movie is actually about. I also have no relationship to Barbies to begin with. None of my sisters played with them, etc. But hey maybe it will be an awesome movie
 
Paul F said:
I don't need action; far from it. But I do want some sort of story or some sort of characters I can get interested in. For the 50 minutes I watched it, nothing happened. I learned nothing about the people on the boat, the two soldiers, nor the guys flying around. Seinfeld had a show about nothing that was interesting. This was a movie about something that had nothing.

Oh my, brains sure operate differently. When I read that one of us watched it several times..... I wonder if I would have had a better reaction to if it I were younger. I suspect so.
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I don't know why it bored you and not me. I doubt it's an age difference thing. I thought young people were supposed to get bored more easily? I think it had enough detail about the characters for them to seem real to me. We never had much time to get to know them individually beyond how they responded to stress. But I was pretty invested in the scenario itself. The logistics and stakes of getting off the beach. All the ways they could die. The time pressure of the enemy bearing down on them.

Rewatching some bits now silently with my phone dimmed while baby naps on me... you guys are all crazy. The cinematography and editing are fantastic. The aerial cinematography alone is worth the price of admission.

It's just super clean filmmaking. Excellent economy of shots. Excellent flow. Nolan is one of the best directors working today. I think Inception and Interstellar really missed the mark for me because they went crazy and were overly complicated. I didn't feel invested in the characters or the plot. Dunkirk limits Nolan to a smaller scale of time and place. I'm expecting good things from Oppenheimer and hopefully a powerful humanist theme.
 
By the way, Tarantino called Dunkirk is the 2nd-best movie of the 2010s.

“Dunkirk” is his second favorite movie of the 2010s. Tarantino has yet to reveal his top 10 movies of the last decade, but he says he’s been revisiting a ton of movies over the last month in order to finalize his personal list. “Dunkirk” had been in the number seven position but rose to the second slot after a third watch.

“I had an interesting experience with it the first couple of times,” Tarantino said of the film. “The first time I saw it, I don’t know what I was thinking the first time. I just dealt with the spectacle of it all. I couldn’t deal with anything else but the spectacle of it all. I liked the movie, but the spectacle almost numbed me to the experience. I don’t think I felt anything emotional. I was awed by it. But I didn’t know what I was awed by. … It wasn’t until the third time that I could see past the spectacle and into the people the story is about. I finally could see through the trees a little bit.”

Nolan’s “Dunkirk” screenplay cuts together three narratives that are each happening over different periods of time. “Oftentimes, you see a film where the style is about the adrenaline of it,” Tarantino explains. “The style is an immersive experience, but by the third or fourth viewing you get past the style and you realize the magician’s tricks. In the case of ‘Dunkirk,’ it rewards Nolan’s efforts to see it more. There’s a point, by mid movie, he can’t do it wrong. … It’s a symphony. Nothing doesn’t work.”
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https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/tarantino-dunkirk-best-film-decade-ad-astra-1202200041/
 
Just watched the Barbie trailer, albeit with the sound off. The production design indeed looks amazing. It's hard to see how it avoids being didactic... But that might be fine if I agree with the message. As always, I think it will succeed or fail on the basis of the writing-- if the jokes land, if it keeps you curious about what happens next, etc.
 
Oppenheimer is available on streaming now. In a word, masterpiece. The CGI was thankfully minimal, the bomb a backstory. But the subtle techniques only a filmmaker would recognize, like distortion as the art form to express the emotional dynamic of the moment. The camera tight on the character's face, just slightly wide, just slightly distorted revealing the extreme emotional distress, and then pulls back ever so slightly, so slight and slow you don't notice but enough that the distortion erasure conveys the subject's changing state of mind, from intense internal pressure to external situational awareness, so masterfully executed. Superb acting, believable, gripping and poignant, incredible range. Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr and of course Cillian Murphy, many other fine actors.
 
Doug Jensen said:
Oh it be.
I can't name all 499 war movies that are better than Dunkirk, but here is my personal top 20.

Band of Brothers (the series)
The Thin Red Line
The Hunt for Red October
Patton
Lawrence of Arabia
Bridge on the River Kwai
Saving Private Ryan
Last of the Mochicans
Apocalypse Now Redux
Braveheart
Platoon
Letters from Iwo Jima
Flags of our Fathers
Paths of Glory
A Bridge Too Far
The Great Escape
Stalag 17
The Big Red One
Deer Hunter (if you consider it a war film)
The Best Years of Our Lives (if you consider it a war film)
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I'd go along with all of those, Doug, but I'm surprised seeing your list that Hacksaw Ridge isn't in there. Based on the life of Private First Class Desmond Thomas Doss Medal of Honor. It stands as one of the best in my list. An outstanding portrayal of an outstanding man of strong belief and incredible valor.

Chris Young

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/private-first-class-desmond-thomas-doss-medal-of-honor

 
Tom Roper said:
Oppenheimer is available on streaming now. In a word, masterpiece. The CGI was thankfully minimal, the bomb a backstory. But the subtle techniques only a filmmaker would recognize, like distortion as the art form to express the emotional dynamic of the moment. The camera tight on the character's face, just slightly wide, just slightly distorted revealing the extreme emotional distress, and then pulls back ever so slightly, so slight and slow you don't notice but enough that the distortion erasure conveys the subject's changing state of mind, from intense internal pressure to external situational awareness, so masterfully executed. Superb acting, believable, gripping and poignant, incredible range. Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr and of course Cillian Murphy, many other fine actors.
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+A1 to all that. Definitely one of Nolan's best movies, for sure. I did enjoy the story and the film craft involved. And all in film, 5-perf Panavision System 65 and 15-perf IMAX) and finished in 70mm IMAX, and 70mm 5-perf.

Chris Young
 
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