Considering the summer's films here I have had little to say about either Barbie, or Oppenheimer--in large part because I have so much interested myself in films' box office prospects, and both those films lack the kind of reference points I usually really on in making my estimates. (Thinking about Indiana Jones 5 we could think about the other four Indiana Jones films--and we could think about, for example, Solo, which turned out to be more relevant. Considering this summer's Memorial Day weekend-released live action adaptation of a three decade-old Disney animated classic The Little Mermaid we could think about 2019's significantly parallel Aladdin--and watching the movie run out of steam before Aladdin could guess at how it would end up. And so forth. Nothing like that exists for Barbie, or Oppenheimer.)
Indeed, that the press has produced the silly portmanteau "Barbenheimer" out of the release of these two very unlike films says something.
Still, there seems something to be said about the pair.
Both, not being the most obvious blockbusters, were heavily promoted on the basis of the director's name and its associated critical cachet--Greta Gerwig, and Christopher Nolan.
Both, if not spectacles of the CGI-packed action-adventure and splashy animated types to which we are accustomed at this time of year, still rely on visual novelty for their interest, be it the plastic-toys-come-to-life pink-saturated images of Barbie, or the IMAXed avant garde-filmmaking of Oppenheimer.
And both in their ways harken back to that mid-century period so critical in defining American social and political and cultural life, with a toy of the 1950s that was to be an icon of the era, and the birth of the atomic age.
The last seems to me especially significant--a reminder that even when a big Hollywood movie is not a sequel the glance remains decidedly backward.
Island of the Dead
1 hour ago
7 comments:
I have seen Oppenheimer.
Thoughts?
Not a fan. It's technically impressive, and no more.
When you say "technically impressive," does that mean that you think of the film as holding together--the bits adding up to something--or that it was just a collection of superficially impressive bits that are less than the sum of their parts?
"a collection of superficially impressive bits that are less than the sum of their parts".
I think the film is hollow.
That's also how I feel about Interstellar and Dunkirk: technically impressive (all the staging, cinematography, production design...), but as a whole, they're hollow.
The scene of the Trinity test however isn't impressive. I thought it looked good whilst watching it, but afterwards saw footage of the real thing, and it's not the same haha.
The combination of high technical polish (in some areas at least) with hollowness seems to me all too characteristic not just of Nolan, but the more respected material Hollywood generally produces these days.
Incidentally the view of the depiction of the Trinity explosion--which would seem the main reason for the film's being shown on so many IMAX screens--as underwhelming seems to me striking given that Mark Hughes had the same impression. It will be interesting to see how the wider audience feels about the movie not just as a theatrical experience, but specifically an IMAX experience (with the extra money charged, and perhaps, the things that may annoy them about the movie magnified by the more "immersive" format).
Yeah, I saw it in IMAX.
People seem to like the film though? Very high rating, for both critics and audience. I'm clearly in the minority.
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