One part Great Man Theory with tons of navel gazing and genuflecting to a handful of star figures. One part Sorkin-esque courtroom drama.
Zero parts fun.
Three fucking hours long.
Don't waste your money on this shit bag, folks.
I'm starting to realize everyone on this site has baby brain movie opinions
Adults are not allowed to consume entertainment unless it is sufficiently ponderously grimdark. The arbiter of adulthood has spoken.
I think it’s a maturity thing. There’s an outward need to be contrarian, to be seen. And often just yeah baby brained poor analysis of film
There’s an outward need to be contrarian, to be seen.
Calling people "baby brained" is totally not contrarian whatsoever and there's no possible motive to be seen as superior for looking down on other people that aren't consuming "mature" enough treats.
My treats are actually really cool and underground you probably haven't heard of them because you're not cool like me
I don’t think it’s a commentary of the maturity of the treats. I think it’s going out of your way to say that there is zero value or anything interesting in a movie like Oppenheimer is just reductive and silly. It just speaks to having a pretty unrefined sense of film analysis. Notice here I’m not arguing for the merits of Oppenheimer. There’s often a sort of weird desire to compete with one another in left spaces to be more radical than others, like “oh that’s your opinion? My opinion is even more extreme than that. I win.” Which leaks into conversations like this in weird ways, and I think that’s a generally a of personal immaturity, not the maturity of the thing itself. And also, “baby brained” is just colloquial shorthand. It’s a silly little phrase, but it’s kind of straw man to be like “oh you used a widespread internet phrase, who’s the immature one now?”
I disagree; calling an entire community "baby brained" just seems arrogant to me and I stand by that.
"Just joking, unless" is an easy out for that, of course.
No "unless" was said by that person. I added the unless because that was the implication of the "just joking" excuses after the fact.
This really is getting tiresome at this point.
Yeah that’s obvious. I’m asking you what you’re implying with the “unless” because their comment doesn’t extend beyond just being tongue in cheek. If you’re tired, we can leave it. Honestly none of this matters
idk, I think calling things "baby brain" is an indicator of lacking maturity to a greater extent. Yeah young people can be reactant, but eh . . .
Only starting to realise now? This site has had the weirdest most out of touch opinions I've ever seen on general media. Like a bunch of millenial boomers. My favourite occurrence of this is when hexbear starts trashing on movies like black panther, saying it's colonialist/racist or something. Well in South Africa where I live, people absolutely love that movie series, black panther is massive over here. I'm talking about singing and dancing outside the cinema, holding watch parties, etc. I've yet to meet a single African here that has expressed a negative opinion of the movie in real life. Pretty much everyone under the age of 35 loves it and regularly makes jokes about "Wakanda", etc. Yet according to hexbear it's colonialist apologa trash that no one likes.
There also seem to be a bunch of cranky joyless users that hold eternal grudges bazinga style, like Sheldon Cooper from the big bang theory lmao. I don't quite understand that.
I liked black panther, but it portrayed CIA martin freeman as a core good guy for no particular reason which is not good.
I'd absolutely agree that vocal users this site as a whole will often will take a criticism of a movie like that and sprint with it to make it the center of their opinion of the entire movie (which sometimes they haven't even seen)
The day I take any of the rando media opinions on this site seriously is the day I walk out into the woods never to be seen again.
You're assuming a lot about me from what amounts to a mostly joking off hand comment I made because I get frustrated with how overly-critical and cynical people on this sight get about movies. I'm simply tired of people on here acting like every film that's not overtly calling for revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is evil and immoral and shit and you're bad for watching it. Like, yeah it'd be cool if every movie was as revolutionary as like Battleship Potemkin or Battle of Algiers but we still live under capitalism so they're unfortunately not. It just gets tiring here where it feels like people need to be so moralist about EVERYTHING they watch. Like it's ok to enjoy stuff that's not as progressive as us, enjoy art that was made by flawed people with flawed ideas. Sure, I'm not saying go out and listen to Skrewdriver, but most stuff is fine to like and enjoy and not necessary to decry as bad or wrong. It just feels like film/art opinions here are overly negative. Just because we don't like or vibe with something doesn't necessitate moral condemnation of it.
And for the recrod, if we're gonna talk about "toxicity" I find the original post and your reply to me way more antagonistic and hostile than my comment.
and you're bad for watching it
This is self-victimizing and very plainly not true of how people talk about things here. This is how boomers react to media criticism they don't like.
- I'm supposed to be this site's resident "joyless scold"
Yeah, I wonder why. Alright pal, think whatever you want and compare what I said to making excuses for saying the n-word. But anyone who takes the phrase "baby brained" as some kind of serious, toxic insult is clearly as tightly wound as a watch. People like you and your asshole, attacking replies are an example of the exact reason WHY I'm so fucking tired of talking about and hearing media discussion on this site. You're right, I should have never voiced my displeasure at all, because then I wouldn't have had to deal with all your weird pent up anger.
your asshole, attacking replies
Count up the insults you've thrown in this reply chain alone, and then count up mine. No, saying "back at you" probably doesn't count because it's once again you throwing insults then playing the part of victim if you get any pushback at all.
exact reason WHY I'm so fucking tired of talking about and hearing media discussion on this site
So uncivil, unlike "jokingly" calling everyone with an opinion about media that you disapprove of "baby brained."
But anyone who takes the phrase "baby brained" as some kind of serious, toxic insult is clearly as tightly wound as a watch.
Yes, casual ableism is "some kind of serious, toxic insult." And it's not normalized to the extend of "stupid" or "dumb," so what does that tell us when you would stoop to casual ableism because people here are shitting on your favorite treat?
it's not normalized to the extend of "stupid" or "dumb,"
It actually is on this website
Show
Also, what is "casual ableism"?
I'm supposed to be this site's resident "joyless scold"
You come off to most people (myself included, though I have genuine sympathy and we've discussed this) as being more of an obsessive crank, which is a different genre of complainer. I say this as someone who gets called a joyless scold regularly because I'm really anal-retentive about almost everything, as evidenced even by this comment.
You really could work on coming off in a less presumptuous manner (who the fuck was talking about grimdark?, not her) though I think you otherwise tend to be correct.
I actually agree with your take, but this time, right now, look at what I have to work with in this thread.
EDIT:
(who the fuck was talking about grimdark?, not her)
Who the fuck was talking about the movie, or its consumers, being evil because it was not Battleship Potemkin? She was claiming that was here.
I mentioned that because of her assumption that disliking Oppenheimer/Nolan meant the person was "baby brained." The implication was that things had to be more ponderous and pretentiously serious (grimdark, in other words) to not be "baby brained."
So? It was a terrible sentence, and what followed didn't exactly change my mind about it.
So? It was a terrible sentence, and what followed didn't exactly change my mind about it.
Except you. You are Ms. AdultPerson, arbiter of maturity.
lol
Yes. I replied to the terrible sentence with a sentence of my own calling out the sheer presumptive arrogance of it, all in the name of generic defense of a Nolan movie. I stand by that.
She was being unreasonable on multiple counts and if you look at the replies you will see that I made almost the exact point in your edit, but you aren't helping to herd someone back into reality by ascribing all of this other stuff to them that might be true but most likely isn't. When someone else is going off the rails, that is all the more reason to try to be grounded about things.
She was being unreasonable on multiple counts
She was being ableist because people didn't like some shitty movie. Let's keep things in perspective.
I actually agree with you again. It may be too late for that but maybe you can argue that case instead.
In this case? I agree that it's totally too late, I just wanted to mention it for your future reference since you, like myself, will get into many more arguments with weird people about media.
I'm not a huge fan of Anthony Fantano, but I had some of his videos on in the background the other day and he has a couple from when he went on the Twitch stream of the "#1 Drake Stan" at the latter's invitation in order to discuss his negative-to-lukewarm ratings of recent Drake albums. I thought Fantano did an excellent job of not doing the "calmly DESTROYS crying Drake FANBOY with LOGIC" thing but treating him as a human being and trying to come to some kind of an understanding (though there was some ribbing and I'd be lying if I claimed I didn't enjoy that). If you're ever likewise looking for background noise with not the highest bar of quality, here's the first one. I've got a friend who is kind of like he was here, so I appreciated it.
You're assuming a lot about me from what amounts to a mostly joking off hand comment I made because I get frustrated with how overly-critical and cynical people on this sight get about movies. I'm simply tired of people on here acting like every film that's not overtly calling for revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is evil and immoral and shit and you're bad for watching it.
That’s generally fair if we’re talking about a Marvel or Pixar movie. But this is a historical drama on real events.
Except most movies are propaganda, there is atleast one military commisar in disney making them stickto ideological ortodoxy.
Boyond that narrative art reflects the general mood of a culture.
See my other posts in the recen thread about movie critisism. Its not about being moralist, i can both think that piers anthony is a pedofile and think that his girl and pony books are very creative and have cool concepts. Its about calling out literal reactionary propaganda.
People come here to complain about stupid capitalist propaganda in movies because this is the commie website and we have literally nowhere else to do it. I don't care what slop anyone likes really but if someone tries to tell me the slop is good actually then I'm probably gonna say
because they aren't nodding along like bobbleheads to Nolan slop, or "Prestige TV" or whatever has a sufficient amount of pretentious grimdarkness to meet your arbitrary standards of maturity.
How on earth did you get all this from that one single sentence?
In my language we have a saying that translates into something like "seeing ghosts in the light of day", and I think that applies here.
You can call it a presumption or "seeing ghosts in the light of day" but what followed after didn't exactly shoot down that presumption.
EDIT: What am I supposed to have assumed from the "just joking, unless" declaration that everyone on Hexbear (but that person of course) is "baby brained" about movies that was contextually in a thread that started because someone dared to dislike a Nolan movie?
You could have posted pretty much anything but yet another "you are obsessed/deluded/unhinged/seeing things" remark if you really wanted to persuade me of anything. I can't think of many scenarios where those win anyone over, even if they might feel good for you to say.
So much for "just letting it go" considering that's what you came here to do.
Finally saw it. It was good. I disagree with OP and many others ITT which is why I'm replying to you lol. It wasn't Sorkin-esque in my opinion because Sorkin-esque dialog is very quippy and punchy and smug and sarcastic, and this movie didn't feel that way at all. Nor did it feel very "great man theory" because there was a lot of focus on the other scientists, engineers, soldiers, and workers involved in the project. It was a biopic, but it was also about McCarthyism. Was it a communist movie, made for communists? of course not. But it was still enjoyable.
I liked it but it was such a Nolan movie. Every physicist is introduced like they're a superhero. JFK gets namedropped at the end like he's a minor Marvel character being set up for a future movie
They had an hour's worth of political ahem thriller around whether a guy gets a Senate appointment to the Eisenhower cabinet.
They completely ignored so much of the crazy shit that went down during the actual project.
- The Baker & Williams warehouses, where they accidentally started a nuclear fire with stacked uranium
- The Philadelphia Incident, when three scientists trying to fix a pipe full of uranium hexafluoride accidentally detonated it.
- The Demon Core experiments
- Site W, where the first Plutonium was developed, and the army would disect dead coyotes to measure the impacts produced by all their nuclear waste
- Bikini Atoll & Operation Plumbbob, two major sites of nuclear testing
- Eisenhower's Atoms For Peace speech and the development of nuclear energy, both for civilian use and military locomotion
All this shit was breezed over so they could make a movie about Oppenheimer not being a Communist.
This is the only actual good critique in the thread. However I'd add that they make clear that he was a communist-sympathizer. He betrays them however, morally speaking.
It also seems a bit reductive. These are legit points to make but they do strike me (and forgive me if this is not the case) as a very American thing were people judge a film based on whether particular 'cool' or 'important' things happened, whereas movies as an art-form and not just entertainment, and beyond highlighting everything political which we would like them to, can also use formal visual and musical language to convey other themes and ideas. I'd say the film has some clear strenghts in terms of the latter while agreeing with you that it has some clear weaknesses in terms of the former.
At the end of the day, I think the back third of the movie was a giant waste of time and talent.
Whatever you might say about Oppenheimer, spending a solid hour of filming on Lewis Strauss fuming over a Senate deposition was foolish.
Whether you want to argue that every movie needs Cillian Murphy picking up girls at a party for artistic merit or that spending more than five seconds of screen time on the Chicago Pile is going to make the movie about the advent of nuclear energy drag...
I agree that it slows down considerably in the final third. I enjoyed it, but it was more there to convey how he isn't going to escape some consequences, and that he won't have the glory he wants. By this point we've already seen some personal consequences, as with Jean and his relationship with his wife. The communists on the team at Los Alamos also face consequences, which is contrasted to his tragedy (which is rather more pathetic), of people both a world icon and deprived of the social power to correspond to the technological power he has helped unleash. The state turning on him was a necessary consequence, and I guess Nolan wanted to do his classic interweaving of time frames and narrative by having a key betrayal come from the narrator. He is also just a disposable human being, a weapon, for the American military industrial complex. This implies even more strongly the Red Scare climate of distrust. I enjoyed it but I agree it was the weaker part of the film.
Nolan is still of course fixating on the tragedy of a 'human, all too human' man. Just because I can critique it as Marxist in whatever way that might be, doesn't really take away from any of the positives that such a story can still have. I've never really understand looking at art otherwise. People can still read the Iliad and come away moved and informed by its strengths as art without having to have a noncritical relationship to it or to the society it was created in and to the views of the social class whose ideals it represents. It seems to me reductive and immature when I see people claim that all art that isn't explicitly calling for revolution is evil/reactionary/shouldn't be liked, or whatever (I'm not saying that you think this). Art in the most basic sense is simply a social activity in which human beings produce meanings, ideas and narratives to give meaning to their lives. It can of course have other functions and properties, especially since it exists in a class society, and while one duty of art should be political, the latter in no conceivable way exhausts what art is. Sometime people want flowers and explosions because they are exhausted and alienated by their lives, and that's fine. The fact that people turn to art in their alienation is not at all necessarily an issue to me, no more than seeking psychiatric help.
yes, also the scale and the compartmentalization that the big science guys at the top famously did not have to heed.
"A 1945 Life article estimated that before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings "probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved." The magazine wrote that the more than 100,000 others employed with the project "worked like moles in the dark". Warned that disclosing the project's secrets was punishable by 10 years in prison or a fine of US$10,000 (equivalent to $163,000 in 2022), they saw enormous quantities of raw materials enter factories with nothing coming out and monitored "dials and switches while behind thick concrete walls mysterious reactions took place" without knowing the purpose of their jobs."
I thought it was fine, but there's already too much music in it. Maybe I'm just old but I frequently couldn't hear the dialogue for the score.
That's a well-documented problem with big-budget movie production
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJtb2YXae8
Yeah I remember the fuss about Tenet. I didn't see it in the cinema because Nolan decided to rush it out way too early during Covid to preserve his cinematic experience above the health of the viewers, but I played a 4k version on a pretty damn good home theatre system and I'm still of the conspiracy theory that thr audio mix on some of it is so bad to force you to really pay attention in a movie with pretty terrible pacing and exposition that would otherwise risk you tuning out.
That video is decent, although I'm aware of the technical side given that I've done a fair amount of sound mixing for video over the years. That it highlights Nolan specifically is interesting, along with his rationale which is basically he likes it that way so fuck the audience and is basically a dick about it. Which does track to be fair.
Ha, even that's better than my experience with it in the cinema. I'm guessing there's an Oppenheimer RLM review coming then.
I liked the movie (which frankly surprised me because, well, Nolan) but there are a few scenes where Oppenheimer meets famous physicists and they're treated with this -I think unintentionally hilarious- bizarre reverence.
For instance there's a scene where Oppenheimer goes to see a talk by Niels Bohr, and Bohr is standing in this packed room, all eyes on him, lecturing. I can't remember exactly now, but the blocking makes it look like he's standing over everyone, as if he were a literal larger-than-life figure, or something else similarly dramatic. It really was like an MCU superhero cameo. And there's similar scenes when Oppenheimer meets Einstein and Heisenberg, with slightly different emotional beats. (Heisenberg is presented as a villain, Einstein is a wizened mentor/death/fate figure (the whole movie is framed as a Greek tragedy, it literally starts with a card that says 'Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.'))
But, to be fair, this portion of the movie is supposed to be Oppenheimer's subjective view of the world, so it was probably meant to reflect Oppenheimer's own reverence for these men, and his ambition to one day be seen as among their number. Still pretty funny though.
Right now I like the movie, but I'm not sure how I'll feel about it when I watch it again in a year or two. I do think pretty much everything Cillian Murphy did was fantastic, but then there was stuff like the above, or as you say the senate hearing at the end. I think Ehrenreich's senate aide character even says something cheesy to RDJ's Strauss like "Oppenheimer had bigger fish to fry" right before Strauss is publicly embarrassed. So I doubt that'll look so good once removed from the spectacle of the movie theater and the first viewing. I dislike the term middlebrow, but unfortunately I think it's a pretty apt descriptor for Nolan as a director. Though he took a swing for the fences with this one, I'll give him that, but it's Murphy who really carries the whole thing. And the movie around him just doesn't live up to his performance (which, imo, is a running theme in Nolan films).
I dislike the term middlebrow, but unfortunately I think it's a pretty apt descriptor for Nolan as a director.
To paraphrase that one tweet, he makes "smart films" for people who don't actually want to bother with "smart films".
There are a bunch of unintentionally funny moments and it's just Nolan being crappy at conveying poignant shit, I'm sure some of these scenes will become Bane-tier once it's on streaming and people are able to edit shit into oblivion. It's already bona fide meme material.
Movie theaters are too loud man. I forgot my earplugs and now my tinnitus kinda flared up.
Yeah the movie was boring. The whole third hour courtroom drama was weak and stupid.
At least communists looked kind of sympathetic.
Listening to Richard Feynman's lecture about Los Alamos is way more fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY-u1qyRM5w
Yeah, but then you have to listen to a sex pest that didn't even remotely mind helping build nuclear weapons.
Well maybe not at the time but he definitely talked about how he thought more deeply about it after the war
Man who helps invent death machine becomes a little concerned about the morals of death machines well after he's done making them. I despise Feynman for being an overall piece of shit, I'm not going to make myself care that he thought a little more deeply about it after the fact.
His Wikipedia entry is the best I can really suggest, mostly because it's been so long since I formed an opinion on mr Feynman to remember where I learned how odious he was. Here's the choice part of his life that I'm specifically referring to, about one of his memoirs. I'm just quoting wiki here.
Feynman has been criticized for a chapter in the book entitled "You Just Ask Them?", where he describes how he learned to seduce women at a bar he went to in the summer of 1946. A mentor taught him to ask a woman if she would sleep with him before buying her anything. He describes seeing women at the bar as "bitches" in his thoughts, and tells a story of how he told a woman named Ann that she was "worse than a whore" after Ann persuaded him to buy her sandwiches by telling him he could eat them at her place, but then, after he bought them, saying they actually could not eat together because another man was coming over. Later on that same evening, Ann returned to the bar to take Feynman to her place. Feynman states at the end of the chapter that this behaviour was not typical of him: "So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up."
This passage does not mention his particular affinity for attempting to seduce coeds at Caltech. Or secretaries. Or basically any woman that moved.
Thanks. With stuff like that it is often good to ask, since people might have good sources. For me I remembered him being a sexist, which is not quite the same as sex pests, but depending on power situation "flirting" with secretaries is abuse of power.
I was immersed in physics for a while, so I'm familiar with some of the less savory aspects of the people that often get lionized. Feynman in particular draws my ire partly because of how adored he is by
users. I can't remember the provenance of this, but Feynman was known for always walking to lunch with the secretaries rather than has colleagues. I also recall that there was some more odious parts related to the quote I gave, more specifically about his relationships with undergrads while teaching at Caltech.
Movie theaters are too loud man.
I deliberately come late to skip the FWOOM FWOOM FWOOM noise gimmicks of every. Fucking. Trailer. Of. Every. Fucking. Movie. Of. The. Last. Decade.
I arrived semi-intentionally 15 minutes late and I think I still had to sit through another 5-10 minutes of annoying ads I hate it
Oppenheimer was bad because it didn't explictly indicate support for the 9 dash line like the Barbie movie did.
There was no reason to make it three hours. I was close to pissing myself by the second hour and had to suffer through the last part, hoping something interesting would happen, but instead I got an entire hour of dozens of characters I didn't give a shit about just babbling at each other while my bladder came closer and closer to blasting the entire audience.
Slowly expanding piss puddle to reflect my growing displeasure with the film
Damn this take so hot it burned straight through the bottom of the dumpster
a take so critical it became supercritical and underwent nuclear fission
Tell all the Oppenheimer nerds that Jean Tatlock (probably) didn’t kill herself and then force them to read the Church Committee.
If you watch the movie, there was a one second flash of her head being held underwater. It wasn’t the focus because Oppenheimer blamed himself instead of the feds.
That would make a lot of sense, considering it's really hard to drown yourself in a bathtub
Critical support for Oppenheimer being, apparently, among the least Nolan-y of the Nolan lineup when it comes to Great Man Theory, cryptofascist sermons/speeches, and BWAAAAAAAMs (it's a movie about nuclear weapons so I must give some allowance there for audio gimmicks).
That said, the toxic fandom around the damn thing (like pretty much anything Nolan) certainly put me off and made it unlikely I will watch it anyway.
Barbie was fun.
Barbie was fun
Glad to hear it. Still looking forward to that one.
Other Counterpoint - It was meh. Also, it was my own fault for expecting something else, but he really needs to turn down the music and atmospheric sounds. I thought it might be my ears but like really young people were complaining about not being able to make out the dialogue.
I heard a coworker describe their friend's evaluation of the movie. The only comment was " that was the loudest movie I've ever seen".
