“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s most recent film, begins and ends in a circle. In the first image, rains fall and cause puddles to ripple. Three hours later, we see the Earth starting to burn as nuclear explosions erupt all around the world. In “Inception” (2010), city streets fold like paper under the weight of dreams, and the film ends with a spinning top, demonstrating Nolan’s fascination with both the vast and the minute. The movie “Oppenheimer,” which shows marbles accumulating inside a goldfish bowl to represent the gathering of enriched uranium for the creation of an atomic bomb, does a good job of satisfying this concern with scale. Can you withstand too much roundness?
J. Robert Oppenheimer is the solution to this circle. (Despite being named after his father, Julius, He argued that the “J” stood for nothing at all, with typical Prufrockian politeness.) He has gone down in history as the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where the bomb was produced. Lean, sticklike, gaunt, and too smart for comfort—either his own or anybody else’s—Nolan is trying to pull him out of the past. Cillian Murphy portrays Oppenheimer, who is characterized by his quiet skepticism and his tobacco-softened speech. His blue eyes are blazing, but instead of candor, we see an undiminished amazement, as if he were peering straight through us at something that ordinary humans cannot see. He casually asks during a party, “What happens to stars when they die?”
Berkeley party. There he meets the fiery Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), with whom he later makes love while translating a Sanskrit manuscript at her request. There is never a small chat with Oppenheimer.
The book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin in 2005, served as the basis for the movie. I hate to tell it, but you’ll have a better time if you read the entire 600 pages of the book before watching the movie. The adaptation leaves out a lot of information; for instance, the fact that Oppenheimer was born into significant money is not even mentioned. However, the screenplay’s author, Nolan, has an excellent eye for the delectable detail. During a young man’s visit to the
Oppenheimer doesn’t just pick up Dutch in six weeks in the Netherlands. He picks up enough knowledge to provide a quantum physics lesson. The irony is that a surplus of political paranoia, rather than the scientific theory, which is presented in a diplomatically light manner, is what makes the movie hard.
Similar to “The Social Network” (2010), “Oppenheimer” is organized around two interrogations, each of which aims to overwhelm us with details and set off important flashbacks. If doing so makes us feel dumber and dumber, that’s okay. First, Oppenheimer’s security clearance is revoked in a closed hearing in 1954, an insult from which he will never fully recover. His left-wing sympathies before to the conflict are targeted by the revocation (which was not formally revoked until this year), although it has already been
manufactured by the F.B.I. and a few individuals who only had Oppenheimer’s detriment in mind. The second event takes place in 1959 before a Senate hearing to confirm Lewis Strauss’ (Robert Downey Jr.) appointment as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. And what does that have to do with blowing things up, you ask?
The solution is not straightforward, and I was very conflicted by the confusion. The plus side is that Downey gives the least mannered and most intricately detailed performance of his career now that he is free of Marvel’s control. In Downey’s depiction, Strauss—the head of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—is shown as the most ruthless of Machiavellians. He is polite, bespectacled, and immune to terror. the fact that he is all but
takes over the movie. Even Oppenheimer’s rocky but enduring marriage to Kitty (Emily Blunt) seems to pass by in snatches when compared to Strauss’ hostility, who feels that Oppenheimer has degraded him. Addicts of Cold War conspiracy will be in heaven, but I doubt that everyone will be enthralled by the agitation of former Communists in West Coast universities. People seek value for their money.
Trinity, the first nuclear bomb to be detonated, was the bang in July 1945. Oppenheimer picked the name as an homage to a sonnet by John Donne. (To hear Oppenheimer’s tortured aria from John Adams’ 2005 opera “Doctor Atomic,” which contains the entire poem, click here.) Two hours into the movie, there is an explosion that pierces the heart.
of Nolan’s striking visual style. For once, the talking stops in the middle of this talky movie. General Leslie R. Groves, Oppenheimer’s superior (Matt Damon), is among the several spectators who are sprawled out on the ground. One scientist stands in front of the explosion while sporting sunglasses and sunscreen as if he were at the beach. Finally, all music is turned off. Human breathing can be heard only once. Time slows down as the clock counts down, and then fire begins to bloom.
It’s a terrifying sequence, and as you might guess, it’s breathtaking to see. The question of moral decorum emerges in the wake of such images: What can you or ought you to demonstrate? Some individuals look aside when Hiroshima slides are presented at Los Alamos because they can’t look. to acknowledge what their devoted efforts have produced. Nolan relies on his leading man to feel the effects in spirit even though not a single shot of the movie is set in Japan. There are close-ups of Oppenheimer that take up the entire screen and show him seemingly tormenting himself. Every now and again, the air around him trembles in response, as if his convulsions of conscience were sending shock waves out into the world. Described by Harry Truman as “that crybaby,” Although the grandeur is wonderful, it needs to be surrounded by the little details since it is a Nolan film. Groves meets Oppenheimer for the first time in a classroom while he is looking for someone to supervise the bomb-making process. To his face, he describes Oppenheimer as theatrical, pompous, and unstable. Smiles Oppenheimer.
He wins the position.
What distinguishes Greta Gerwig’s most recent endeavor, “Barbie,” from her last film, “Little Women” (2019)? One is based on a Louisa May Alcott book, and the other is based on a beloved Mattel classic toy. (I won’t reveal which is which to avoid spoilers.) Jo, Beth, and the other girls didn’t spend a lot of time using their bright Rollerblades, if memory serves. Their misfortune.
The new movie is based on the premise that Barbie Land is a wonderful realm where all the Barbies live, not least the Barbie (Margot Robbie), who is pleased to identify herself “stereotypical.” She rests in a bed that is shaped like a heart in a home that is so openly left wide open for inspection that J. Edgar
Hoover would grunt in glee. Barbie begins her day with a dry shower because she is a doll. She also skips breakfast and floats down to the ground floor instead of using the stairs. Pink is the prevailing, but not oppressive, color that characterizes her. This film’s opening thirty minutes are comparable to a Pepto-Bismol waterboard.
Ken, a male friend of Barbie’s played by Ryan Gosling, wishes he were more. He runs the phrases together to say, “We’re girlfriend-boyfriend,” to her. Smooth. They cannot engage in sexual activity, though seeing “Team America: World Police” (2004) might provide them with some useful advice. They can still have fun every night. Everything is fine until Barbie begins to consider suicide.
Unsure of what that might be, she consults Weird. Kate McKinnon’s character Barbie, who lives on a hill, performs the splits, argues that she is “sad, mushy, and complicated,” and suggests going back to reality.
In essence, what we have here—under layers of stylization—is a typical voyage of discovery. Barbie travels from Barbie Land to Los Angeles along the pink highway like a shrimp-colored Dorothy, accompanied by the unwanted but eager Ken. She meets Barbie’s former owner or current owner, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and her mother Gloria (America Ferrera), who are both responsible for Barbie’s depression and mental instability. Gloria happens to work at the corporate office.
that Mattel. She sums up the movie’s plot by saying, “Barbie in the real world—that’s impossible,” imitating the hero of “Oppenheimer” when he discovers that German scientists have split the atom. That is not feasible, he asserts. Although you can’t have everything, I was expecting he would exclaim, “Fission: impossible!”
Another parallel is that Gosling draws a potentially dangerous amount of the emotional energy in “Barbie,” much like Downey threatens to throw Nolan’s movie out of orbit. He continually surprises you with his line readings; a late-night solo dance outside Barbie’s house has a melancholy shimmy; and he is the recipient of Gerwig’s most brilliant joke, which is that Ken discovers—and completely digs—the patriarchy in California. “I just want to stop by the library.”
and see if I can get my hands on any literature about vehicles,” he says. Then he returns that leathery masculinity to Barbie Land and renames it Kendom. He argues with the other Kens, plays the guitar for Barbie rather than himself, and (this has to be peak Gosling) stops talking to her in the middle of a sentence to smirk at the size of his own biceps.
All of which pose challenges for the plot’s overall balance, but the movie as a whole, like Barbie when she gives up her high heels, has trouble gaining momentum. Gloria and Sasha are brought into Barbie Land, along with the irate CEO of Mattel, as the barrier between the real and magical worlds becomes meaningless and porous.
Along with a group of his corporate goons, (Will Ferrell). In every way, “Barbie” is disjointed. Because it’s “A Mattel Production,” as the opening credits tell us, it wants to have its cake and eat it, mock it, smear it on the manufacturers’ faces, and still sell a ton of dolls—or, as a recent Times article suggested, “drive near-infinite brand synergies,” a phrase that makes me want to emigrate to Bhutan and raise goats.
There’s no denying that “Barbie” is fun, but the fun is sporadic. You leave with a head full of fragments, interruptions that are strewn like glitter throughout the story. We’ve heard that depressed Barbies frequently watch “Pride and Prejudice” on the BBC for the sixth time.
then a video of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy appears on the screen in its entirety. Even sillier is a sequence when Barbie bemoans the fact that she is no longer beautiful; a voice-over (Helen Mirren) barges in to say that casting Margot Robbie to play unattractive is poor casting. When I watched the movie, this made me giggle, but you have to wonder: Who is it for? Will young girls watch the movie repeatedly like they watched “Frozen” (2013)? In that case, how will they interpret the dialogue’s references to “sexualized capitalism,” “rampant consumerism,” and “cognitive dissonance”? What will they do when Barbie is called a “you fascist” by Sasha?
The film might be intended for Greta Gerwig. Additionally, for anybody who is as incredibly clever as her—preferably former Barbiephiles who have grown up and stored away childish things. If the outcome is a profound disappointment after “Little Women,” perhaps depth is the wrong thing to demand. Nobody else would even bother to blend a feminist colloquium with a plug for a bit of plastic. Consider the little child in Charles Baudelaire’s essay “The Philosophy of Toys,” who repeatedly rattles and knocks a toy until finally prying it open out of frustration. “But where is its soul?” With that, Baudelaire continues, “This moment marks the beginnings of stupor and melancholy.” Sometimes the gleaming exterior is sufficient. Or Kenough, as Barbie’s boyfriend would say.
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