watched Oppenheimer (2023). review:
I want to ask Christopher Nolan what a woman is. Not for transphobe fascist reasons, I genuinely can’t tell if he knows what they are.
Theoretically, a good movie, but Nolan feels so temperamentally unsuited to the story he has to tell here. Take a spectacular parable of mortal folly and the self-deluded perpetration of unconscionable violence, unsubtle in the way only real life can get away with, and multiply it by the most self-important filmmaker this side of the Dziga Vertov Group, and the result has to be at least a little facile. Multiply that by 181 God-given minutes and by the half-hour mark, once the entirety of Nolan’s point is laid bare once over, I’m not really looking forward to another Stalker’s worth of horse-beating. Not that I can’t skate by with a less-than-perfect movie! Most movies, one finds, are imperfect one way or another. It’s just, to paraphrase another leading mathematician and theorist of the past century, add audience surrogate Alden Ehrenreich to the mix and your chances of winning drastic go down. Sorry, Al. The numbers don’t lie.
Anyway, real quick I gotta say my piece: holy moly does Josh Trank’s Capone absolutely embarrass Nolan with how much better it executes on basically everything Oppenheimer is trying to do. I usually try to have a more “rising tide lifts all ships” mentality for direct comparison between films, but let’s be real, these two ships are not on the same level to begin with. I’m not firing off cannonballs as ballast, I’m lowering the paddle and diverting water through a culvert to create a rise. This is a canal lock situation here. I’m the only dedicated Capone stan in the world, please just let me have this.