I can’t find a thread for Christopher Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER so here you go

I’m a little sad that Michael Caine isn’t in the cast list.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheimer_(film)

He plays the bomb.

We were only supposed to blow the … never mind.

You all do what you must, but I've started anticipating this. AFI Silver is promising a 70mm print and I just might go on preview night.

Christopher Nolan says people who’ve seen ‘OPPENHEIMER’ “leave the movie absolutely devastated. They can't speak.”

(Source: https://t.co/YBS069SoWn) pic.twitter.com/geozYO76qF

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) June 20, 2023

They know just what he's sayin'

Those are just his friends who hated it and couldn't think of a better way to avoid letting him know.

Nolan: "What did you think?"
Friend: (points to throat, shakes head no)

gonna go out on a limb here and suggest this will be visually accomplished but emotionally inert

Ya think?

it’s a bold claim but i’m standing by it

https://i.redd.it/9yxo9qcs4n541.jpg

https://thedisinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/tumblr_inline_ofd5z14OS51qdawwj_640.png

bit cruel of Nolan to incapacitate audience members like that

Stravinsky is so jealous of this cunt

I saw a trailer and it sort of looked like a mansplained version of that twin peaks episode from half a decade ago

Schrader’s on board:

fuck yeah, let’s go pic.twitter.com/QeAILCOtGx

— Brian Haley (@brianchaley) July 18, 2023

“This guy’s work mostly sucks but this one is great!”

Schrader wasn't absolutely devastated and rendered speechless, he's doing it wrong.

What a bullshitter

Most offensive Shrader shitpost yet.

anything he has to say on any other movies henceforth can be safely ignored, same applied when Badshaw gave 5 stars to Dunkirk.

If Oppenheimer cleans up I will expect Paul to issue another angry missive about how the Oscars aren't American enough anymore.

watched an Oppenheimer doc the other week. The suicide of his communist ex gf (who he was probably having an affair with while under FBI surveillance) seems really dodgy. She drowned herself in a bath "lying on a pile of cushions in the bathroom, with her head submerged in the partly-filled bathtub". Sounds like a very awkward method of suicide, if it was.

Be hilarious when film bros are in despair as this flops in comparison to Barbie.

Schrader be shillin'. Ehh...he's probably looking for his next script's Exec Producer.

watched an Oppenheimer doc the other week. The suicide of his communist ex gf (who he was probably having an affair with while under FBI surveillance) seems really dodgy.

I guess to be fair, Harvey Weinstein would have been all over this. https://t.co/HbtwF8XoDp

— Don Hughes (@getfiscal) July 18, 2023

If Oppenheimer cleans up I will expect Paul to issue another angry missive about how the Oscars aren't American enough anymore.

Wasn't this one of the movies that kept getting brought up as provisionally not meeting the AMPAS' new representation/inclusion standards?

https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-standards

I guess it might hinge on the definition of "significant supporting actor."

I will be going to an Oppenheimer preview tonight. But I will be dressed as Barbie.

if i ate one almond per day i’d also engineer an atomic bomb https://t.co/dYqK3umded

— Hadas Weiss (@weiss_hadas) July 20, 2023

What's the big deal, I could easily eat one almond a day.

Don't Tom, it will turn you into an Oppenheimer

I have become thin, consumer of almonds.

Wait he ate only one almond per day or he just randomly threw that on top of his daily meals

Jesus, there has already been enough preposterous director's hyperbole and self-praise around this movie. Shut the fuck up, actors... enough already!

(xp) The latter was my plan.

it wasn't just for his *transformation* into Oppenheimer, he's playing a squirrel in his next project

tbf Cilian Murphy was grossly overweight before he started shooting this film.

thing is when Nolan is creating his dark and devastating aesthetic, you need to look unhealthily anemic and like you haven't had a proper shit in a month if you are his lead actor.

there are other ways to lose mass amounts of weight in a short period of time that are more fun than eating an almond

one - ride in an OceanGate sub

Or sit through the entirety of Oppenheimer without popcorn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQlKjeTbcdg

What about the victims.

I've seen a couple of these and I'm more sympathetic than most. I think it's probably true that telling the story without (some) victims would be incomplete and less interesting. https://t.co/XpzpDymWM0

— jan (@janhopi) July 21, 2023

I just watched this and ugh, maybe I shouldn’t have? First time I have felt such a deep hatred watching a dramatisation, specifically at the dropping of the bomb. Just a primal “what have you done?” screaming from the inside. And then the whitewashing of oopy in the last hour and all the typical stereotypical roles of good guys vs bad guys within the whole game. This was just the encapsulation of that tweet “Americans drop bombs all over children in Vietnam and then make movies about how sad they all are about it”.

"How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?" - Bob Marley

The good news: The dialogue (by Nolan standards) is remarkably clear.

The bad news: The story is about the political backbiting and in-fighting around the U.S. nuclear program (with Oppy as their primary chew toy), and therefore Nolan had to employ nonlinear editing and blatant visualizations of Oppenheimer's thinking to keep this from looking like a random C-SPAN segment.

so it's like Herman's Head

i think i can skip the latest chuck nolan sad man movie

RDJ walks away with it. (Also forget the screen format debate, a sound system is more crucial.)

that too but i didn’t want to center my personal brown trauma

aarrggghh... I couldn't help it, I saw this morning in 70mm IMAX.

I was part-way into a long-winded critique but wtf? There's precious little here that's worth expending the time on multiple paragraphs as either writer or reader. Compare it to JFK if you dare, but there's no 16 minute scene with, say, Paul Giamatti as John "Dr. X" Von Neumann who explains to Oppenheimer how American Physics (and by extension American Academia) will be the unspoken and silent third partner in the military-industrial triad (or "trinity" if you like) from there on out.

Only way the movie could have been improved was if just before the closing credits each character was shown making a comedy exit along with a "where are they now" line like the ending of Animal House.

"Ernest Lawrence - loves hydrogen bombs and goes on to create the Big Science nation-state before ulcers eat him alive"

"Luis Alvarez - loves dinosaur extinction and the JFK assassination"

"Haakon Chevalier - whereabouts unknown"

According to the RLM guys, this movie was trailered by Paul Giamatti’s new film. We saw the 70mm print, onto which no trailers were attached.

Paul Giamatti as John "Dr. X" Von Neumann who explains to Oppenheimer how American Physics (and by extension American Academia) will be the unspoken and silent third partner in the military-industrial triad (or "trinity" if you like) from there on out.

I would watch the hell out of this film

In that document

PEOOOWWW

lay the Cold War

britishers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2023/oppenheimer-bbc-iplayer

(1980 miniseries newly on iplayer, saturdays on bbc4 from 12th aug)

According to the RLM guys, this movie was trailered by Paul Giamatti’s new film. We saw the 70mm print, onto which no trailers were attached.

― Glower, Disruption & Pies (kingfish), Tuesday, August 1, 2023 10:35 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i saw the 70mm version at lincoln center and it did have trailers, somehow. also the occasional bug and hair projected onto the screen haha

There’s also the American tv miniseries from 1989, with Brian Dennehy as Groves and David Strathairn as Oppenheimer.

Also Tony Shaloub as Enrico Fermi?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzhui_IJz3U

lol I am enjoying this oppiexploitation angle

We've lingered enough. It's poll time: Barbenheimer: The inevitable poll

(1980 miniseries newly on iplayer, saturdays on bbc4 from 12th aug)

Long before Nolan was mixing up B&W and colour 65mm, the BBC were bouncing between 16mm and videotape :)

Nice history/film chat

https://shows.acast.com/warcollege/episodes/what-makes-oppenheimer-great-and-why-it-sucks

The “they give you awards because you’re over” scene at the end hit harder on a second watch.

“Fake Han Solo” (as a podcaster calls him) was kind of a ridiculous device, as a few people noted upthread - what WAS that about? That character seemed like, I don’t know, a cheap audience surrogate or something, like the dude traveled back in time to clown Strauss.

Thought this was well done, and I was attentive the whole way. It reminded me a bit of an old Hollywood biblical film in one way: what Dwight MacDonald described as the "Look--it's Ava Gardner!" phenomenon. I was constantly spotting people and thinking "Look--it's that guy!" and trying to figure where I knew them from.

Haven't read the thread yet--or really anything about the film--but I'm pretty sure I know what the main objection will be, and it's fair: it sort of half-addresses the moral questions but doesn't really, and actual representation of the carnage is altogether avoided. (And there was an opportunity to at least get that on screen mediated, when Oppenheimer was in the screening room.) I guess the only thing I'd say is that you wouldn't go to a big-budget Christopher Nolan film to get that story; there are other films and lots of books. I think it would be chimerical to expect otherwise.

The “they give you awards because you’re over” scene at the end hit harder on a second watch.

I liked that too. (Was that a brief glimpse of LBJ giving Oppenheimer his?)

I think that WAS LBJ!

In real life it was.

Having read American Prometheus last month -- a terrific biography despite Kai Bird vulgarities like "French novelists such as Marcel Proust" or some such nonsense -- I was struck by how well Cillian Murphy projected intelligence, verve, literacy, the passivity that made him a sexual object, and the magnetism.

Murphy’s a very good actor who unaccountably thinks Nolan is a very good director.

Saw this over the weekend. Thought it was a crap movie, beautifully shot, and with a talented cast. I keep hearing people talk about how good Robert Downey Jr. was, but when I recognized that it was him after about 20 seconds of screen time, he was just Robert Downey Jr. from there on out to me.

Although it was already extremely long, I think a remedy for me would have been to go way longer - like, TV season longer. There was way too much expository dialogue. Brief exchanges that stood in for more interesting conversations that deserved to be fleshed out. Telling, not showing. There was so much jumping between characters that Robert Oppenheimer was interacting with, that in most cases, not enough time was spent with each to show how their relationships develop. Likewise, I had also gone into the movie hoping that we would spend more time with the science than we actually got. The visualizations of particle physics just felt like screen savers. The lack of attention paid to the people of Japan and New Mexico has been discussed elsewhere, but I agree that these were unconscionable omissions.

One line that's been on a loop in my head since watching it is Kitty Oppenheimer's "I don't like your phrase". Emily Blunt delivered it very well, and I get the feeling it's supposed to be a banger of a quote, but it feels empty and irrelevant to me.

keep hearing people talk about how good Robert Downey Jr. was, but when I recognized that it was him after about 20 seconds of screen time, he was just Robert Downey Jr. from there on out to me.

Which....is a good thing?

I mean that he didn't blend into the character enough for me.

I found the Strauss section a distraction: an example of Nolan's refusal to trust the audience's intelligence. RDJ actually gave a performance, though.

Timing!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/08/oppenheimer-manhattan-project-radiation-atomic-bomb-declassified.html

This isn't anything new - downwinders have been talking about this for years. It's just that in a state that's so dependent on nuclear weapons and uranium mining, no one wanted to listen to them

https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/in-the-shadow-of-oppenheimer/

but when I recognized that it was him after about 20 seconds of screen time, he was just Robert Downey Jr.

If I'm not the only one, I guess I can blushingly admit I spent the whole film trying to figure out who that was playing Strauss (missed Gary Oldman, too--I avoid all reviews/social media beforehand). One character that perplexed me a bit was Strauss's right-hand guy, who a) seemed to spend all his time mocking Strauss, and b) looked too much like Leonardo DiCaprio to not have that be a distraction.

I spent the whole film trying to figure out where I'd seen the guy playing Oppenheimer's lawyer, it was literally his last scene when I realised it was Macon Blair (Blue Ruin, Green Room, both excellent films). He's a bit heavier in Oppenheimer than in anything else I've seen him in, I think that's what threw me.

Alden Ehrenreich. Xpost

That scene where Tony Stark was unexpectedly sonned by Freddy Mercury prior to getting a second chastising by Han Solo

True story: my Mom’s cancer doctor is also a physicist and said he had to stop hanging around with other physicists because they kept trying to sleep with his wife. “They are just not nice people" he said. https://t.co/XzFKSMmYgm

— Daley Haggar (@d_haggar) August 15, 2023

Took the kid to see this last night. Some assholes stole our seats so we sat right up front which was probably for the best because they giggled through most of it. Who knew scientists were such a hit with these Gen Z teens.

Lisa Martino-Taylor wrote a great book a few years back called _Behind the Fog: How the U.S. Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans_ about US (and Canadian) post-war experiments on veterans and civilians about fallout.

She mentions that the people who staffed up these labs deliberately looked for a certain kind of sociopathic over-achiever type, one who was all about grabbing results without any piddly ethics or common morality getting in the way of the Science. I can’t remember if this thinking was also in place during the war, but the types they hired certainly overlapped.

So fucking around on each others spouses was surely small potatoes compared to, say, lying to the press, the military, and other nation’s governments about the radiological nature of the weapons that were dropped and why weird symptoms were showing up in the Downwinders in America and “Disease X” killing Japanese survivors.

The Dollop just did a two-parter on Einstein and this describes him exactly as far as fucking around on spouses and generally treating everyone like shit. Absolute twat.

who would fuck Einstein?

Exactly

Well, actually, his cousin for one.

He had soulful eyes, or so I’ve heard

Just now remembering some anecdotal evidence of the physics majors I knew in college that I won’t go into.

A guy who graduated from the UC Irvine physics department when I was there later wrote a tell-all about how modern science practice makes everyone conservative and got kicked out of the profession for writing it.

The first college-level physics class I ever had was taught by a Nobel Prize winner who was in Feynman's group at Los Alamos. I never learned anything about the swinger's club, but it was clear that any working physicist back then, each "with an ego big enough to stab each other in the front for prestige," knew the Manhattan Project and subsequent post-war military budgeting was going to define American science. All of it. You were either in or out.

Oppenheimer's "well, I guess it worked" is accurate.

I mean, I am sure there were people who just wanted to be able to say they'd fucked Einstein.

all those Big Bang Theory fuckers were horny as shit.

E=MC splooge

Think about it, you have completely upended what everyone thought was true about the nature of the universe, what else is there to do but screw?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGczXkknl80

New film achievement unlocked per this post:

if you start oppenheimer and queensryche's operation:mindcrime at the same time your friends will leave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oku8ex_WsVs

if you start oppenheimer and queensryche's operation:mindcrime at the same time your friends will leave

DON'T LEAVEEEEEEEEEEEEE MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
DON'T LEAVE MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

*Oppenheimer enters conference room, head of commission looks up*

"And WELCOME..."

You bahstad

Related to Elvis’ post up thread, I recommend Lisa Martino-Taylor‘s Behind the Fog: How the U.S. Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans.

After covering all the really evil shit that was done w/r/t atomic and fallout radiation testing, she points out that a lot of the scientists recruited from the university departments were a particular personality type, one that wasn’t so caught up on empathy or the ramifications of what they were doing so much as technical achievement and in-group competition.

Shitty system and shitty incentives

lol I totally forgot to see this movie.