Zardnaar
Deity
$20 usd here covers popcorn, drink ice cream and ticket.
Barbie or Oppenheimer?
- Thread starter Caesar of Bread
- Start date
$20 usd here covers popcorn, drink ice cream and ticket.
Both! Going to see Oppenheimer first, with Barbie as an existentialist pallet cleanser
RobAnybody
Emperor
- Joined
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- 1,952
I recommend it. Just the first one. The second one is OK, not bad by any means, just not... recommendable, if that's a word. But the first one is highly entertaining.
Zardnaar
Deity
Be interesting to see what you think.
GenMarshall
High Elven ISB Capt & Ghost Agent
Perferabally, I’d want to see Oppenheimer.
From the first trailer of Barbie (I didn't approach the radioactive Ken song one 
) I gathered the main selling slogan was "If you like barbie, you will love this movie, and if you hate barbie, you will love this movie". This easily creates the possibility it will be the other way around.
) I gathered the main selling slogan was "If you like barbie, you will love this movie, and if you hate barbie, you will love this movie". This easily creates the possibility it will be the other way around.
EgonSpengler
Deity
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I'm unlikely to see either one in the theater. I've already added them to my Letterboxd watchlist, for when they eventually hit a streaming service I'm subscribed to.
Snerk
Smeghead
Hopefully both if they ever turn up on one of my streaming services. If not I'll probably just forget about them like all the other films where I go "I should see that some time".
I'd only see Barbie if someone paid me considerable sums to do so. The only flicker of interest I'd have is in seeing Margot Robbie, and that's not enough. Heck, I haven't even watched Black Swan, and that has both Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in it. Oppenheimer is a different story, since I'm interested in the subject, like the setting, and have respect for the director and some of the actors. I've heard it's very depressing and harrowing, though.
EgonSpengler
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I've found Letterboxd to be quite useful. I tried ReelGood and JustWatch before that, and I've found Letterboxd to be the best of them. Among other things, you can set a watchlist and set your streaming services, and if anything on your watchlist gets picked up by any of your streaming services, it notifies you, either by email or the phone app. So you can literally "set it and forget it." I subscribe to the $19-a-year level, but there is a free tier (and it's not just a trial, you can stay on the free tier as long as you like). I can't remember where the feature I just described becomes available, though.
Two drawbacks to Letterboxd, at least for me: They haven't expanded to include television series, it's mostly just for feature films. Also, they use a film's very first screening as its official release date, not its wide release date. So, for example, if you like to see a lot of movies that debut at film festivals, they use the film festival premier as the movie's official year of release. I find that occasionally annoying, but it's not 'game-breaking.'
‘Oppenheimer’: Explosive History
Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s haunting biopic stars Cillian Murphy as the father of the atomic bomb
‘
THIS ISN’T A NEW WEAPON. It’s a new world,” someone remarks as J. Robert Oppenheimer develops the atomic bomb in “Oppenheimer,” a brainy and breathless exploration of the rise and fall of a physicist dubbed, not without reason, “the most important man who ever lived.” Like Prometheus, the mythic figure to whom he is compared here, Oppenheimer suffered for his works, bedeviled from within and without. So a story that is essentially about a scientist who spent his life writing equations becomes, in the expert hands of writer-director Christopher Nolan, a boiling cauldron of drama.
Mr. Nolan’s utterly enthralling film lasts three hours. But despite being as talky as a math seminar, it crackles, hurtles and whooshes, generating more suspense and excitement than anything found in the alleged climaxes of the recent superhero pictures (which owe much to the director’s Batman films). Adapting “American Prometheus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Mr. Nolan has thought intensely about how to turn arcane material—not one person in 100 could explain the details of Oppenheimer’s method—into a popcorn movie, despite it containing only one spectacular scene.
“Oppenheimer” is divided into two parts. One is “Fission” (events as seen by the title figure, intensely brought to life by Cillian Murphy with grave arrogance). The other, “Fusion,” is set off by black-and-white imagery and centered on the scientist’s antagonist years after the war, a political figure named Lewis Strauss played by Robert Downey Jr., who puts his considerable charm on hold and assumes a startling midcentury look. Characteristically, Mr. Nolan chops up time to tell a nonlinear story, keeping most scenes to only a few minutes, as he wanders through the imaginations and memories of these two figures, one of whom perhaps does not deserve quite so much attention.
There’s no question which part of the film is more dynamic and involving: The study of Oppen- life, the development of the bomb and his accompanying self-flagellation about what he unleashed are all magnificently realized. Mr. Nolan does not get enough credit for his writing, but his screenplay should be taught in film schools. He turns abstractions into easily grasped images (at the Los Alamos laboratory, a large glass bowl gradually fills with marbles to indicate U.S. progress toward reaching its goal for enriched uranium), illustrates character in memorable yet succinct ways (Oppenheimer demonstrates genius when he visits Europe to give a physics lecture, opens his mouth and speaks fluent Dutch, a language he did not know weeks earlier), and packs both meaning and wit into crystalline lines of dialogue. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) is revered among specialists, but to explain his importance to the rest of us, Mr. Nolan has someone ask, “How many people do you know who proved Einstein wrong?”
Many of Mr. Nolan’s most sparkling lines go to the general overseeing the Manhattan Project, delightfully played by Matt Damon as the avatar of the try-anything American who combines easygoing confidence with self-deprecation: “I wasn’t confused before, but I’m certainly getting there,” he says, speaking for some in the audience. The interspersed other part of the film is not as compelling, though Mr. Nolan evidently feels it depicts a major injustice vital to understanding Oppenheimer and his times.
The chief drama here is the 1954 decision of the Atomic Energy Commission, amid a Red Scare, not to renew Oppenheimer’s security clearance after questioning his (many) ties to Communists, a matter linked to a betrayal by Strauss and the latter’s own failure to be confirmed in 1959 as secretary of commerce— the first Senate rejection of a cabinet appointee since 1925. Each of these situations triggers an ersatz trial, hence lots of courtroom- style sparring. But considering Oppenheimer’s mammoth creation, the details surrounding the withdrawal of a security clearance (a decision reversed posthumously just last year) and the fate of an obscure cabinet appointee seem like grains of sand compared to a mountain. Moreover, Mr. Nolan doesn’t sufficiently clarify the motives behind Strauss’s Judas turn.
(A dispute over exporting radioative isotopes is involved, though you may miss it.)
Such choices do not, however, prevent “Oppenheimer” from being one of the few standout works of cinema released this decade. Its centerpiece—the July 16, 1945, Trinity test in the New Mexico desert that proved both that the bomb worked and that it would not set the entire world afire— generates a level of awe, based in historical pre-eminence rather than fantasy, that we rarely experience at the movies anymore.
Amid the ensuing celebration of the grim deployment in Japan of the two A-bombs, instruments of slaughter that nevertheless probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Mr. Nolan beautifully captures what was going on inside Oppenheimer’s tortured mind: pride, triumph, horror.
Cillian Murphy, above, and Dylan Arnold and Matt Damon, right, in ‘Oppenheimer,’ which turns scientific talk into enthralling drama
Cillian Murphy (center), Robert Downey Jr.
(right) and other cast members
UNIVERSAL PICTURES ( 3)
Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s haunting biopic stars Cillian Murphy as the father of the atomic bomb
‘
THIS ISN’T A NEW WEAPON. It’s a new world,” someone remarks as J. Robert Oppenheimer develops the atomic bomb in “Oppenheimer,” a brainy and breathless exploration of the rise and fall of a physicist dubbed, not without reason, “the most important man who ever lived.” Like Prometheus, the mythic figure to whom he is compared here, Oppenheimer suffered for his works, bedeviled from within and without. So a story that is essentially about a scientist who spent his life writing equations becomes, in the expert hands of writer-director Christopher Nolan, a boiling cauldron of drama.
Mr. Nolan’s utterly enthralling film lasts three hours. But despite being as talky as a math seminar, it crackles, hurtles and whooshes, generating more suspense and excitement than anything found in the alleged climaxes of the recent superhero pictures (which owe much to the director’s Batman films). Adapting “American Prometheus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Mr. Nolan has thought intensely about how to turn arcane material—not one person in 100 could explain the details of Oppenheimer’s method—into a popcorn movie, despite it containing only one spectacular scene.
“Oppenheimer” is divided into two parts. One is “Fission” (events as seen by the title figure, intensely brought to life by Cillian Murphy with grave arrogance). The other, “Fusion,” is set off by black-and-white imagery and centered on the scientist’s antagonist years after the war, a political figure named Lewis Strauss played by Robert Downey Jr., who puts his considerable charm on hold and assumes a startling midcentury look. Characteristically, Mr. Nolan chops up time to tell a nonlinear story, keeping most scenes to only a few minutes, as he wanders through the imaginations and memories of these two figures, one of whom perhaps does not deserve quite so much attention.
There’s no question which part of the film is more dynamic and involving: The study of Oppen- life, the development of the bomb and his accompanying self-flagellation about what he unleashed are all magnificently realized. Mr. Nolan does not get enough credit for his writing, but his screenplay should be taught in film schools. He turns abstractions into easily grasped images (at the Los Alamos laboratory, a large glass bowl gradually fills with marbles to indicate U.S. progress toward reaching its goal for enriched uranium), illustrates character in memorable yet succinct ways (Oppenheimer demonstrates genius when he visits Europe to give a physics lecture, opens his mouth and speaks fluent Dutch, a language he did not know weeks earlier), and packs both meaning and wit into crystalline lines of dialogue. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) is revered among specialists, but to explain his importance to the rest of us, Mr. Nolan has someone ask, “How many people do you know who proved Einstein wrong?”
Many of Mr. Nolan’s most sparkling lines go to the general overseeing the Manhattan Project, delightfully played by Matt Damon as the avatar of the try-anything American who combines easygoing confidence with self-deprecation: “I wasn’t confused before, but I’m certainly getting there,” he says, speaking for some in the audience. The interspersed other part of the film is not as compelling, though Mr. Nolan evidently feels it depicts a major injustice vital to understanding Oppenheimer and his times.
The chief drama here is the 1954 decision of the Atomic Energy Commission, amid a Red Scare, not to renew Oppenheimer’s security clearance after questioning his (many) ties to Communists, a matter linked to a betrayal by Strauss and the latter’s own failure to be confirmed in 1959 as secretary of commerce— the first Senate rejection of a cabinet appointee since 1925. Each of these situations triggers an ersatz trial, hence lots of courtroom- style sparring. But considering Oppenheimer’s mammoth creation, the details surrounding the withdrawal of a security clearance (a decision reversed posthumously just last year) and the fate of an obscure cabinet appointee seem like grains of sand compared to a mountain. Moreover, Mr. Nolan doesn’t sufficiently clarify the motives behind Strauss’s Judas turn.
(A dispute over exporting radioative isotopes is involved, though you may miss it.)
Such choices do not, however, prevent “Oppenheimer” from being one of the few standout works of cinema released this decade. Its centerpiece—the July 16, 1945, Trinity test in the New Mexico desert that proved both that the bomb worked and that it would not set the entire world afire— generates a level of awe, based in historical pre-eminence rather than fantasy, that we rarely experience at the movies anymore.
Amid the ensuing celebration of the grim deployment in Japan of the two A-bombs, instruments of slaughter that nevertheless probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Mr. Nolan beautifully captures what was going on inside Oppenheimer’s tortured mind: pride, triumph, horror.
Cillian Murphy, above, and Dylan Arnold and Matt Damon, right, in ‘Oppenheimer,’ which turns scientific talk into enthralling drama
Cillian Murphy (center), Robert Downey Jr.
(right) and other cast members
UNIVERSAL PICTURES ( 3)
Ajidica
High Quality Person
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2006
- Messages
- 22,480
Gotta be honest, hearing someone concerned about Covid is definitely blast from the past.
sophie
Break My Heart
not really interested in spending 50 bucks to roll the dice on contracting a mystery chronic illness that we know next to nothing about but which appears to compromise your immune system and/or give you permanent brain damage
Not for a movie, anyway. I’ll just wait for it to come out on streaming
Really? Folks haven't stopped talking about it here, though the tone + impact on folks' activities is massively diminished.
Snerk
Smeghead
Seems like a subscription is required to pick streaming services so the free version is not of much use. But yeah I like the idea. I don't mind paying for these things if they're nice and useful, I just don't want to sign up for any auto subscription thing without knowing I'll use it first.
EgonSpengler
Deity
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2014
- Messages
- 12,260
A podcast I listened to this morning noted that Oppenheimer is about a man who has an affair with Florence Pugh and then marries Emily Blunt. Still probably not going to see it in theater, but my interest perked up a little at this news.
I suppose that if the movie was about Newton, it would mostly focus on how he was obsessed with piercing a schoolmate's skin with his pencil ^^
And I maintain that only bad things may come if the movie includes Feynman. Because Feynman being Feynman, was a self-hype type and there'd be more ridiculous stuff to include.
And I maintain that only bad things may come if the movie includes Feynman. Because Feynman being Feynman, was a self-hype type and there'd be more ridiculous stuff to include.
GoodEnoughForMe
n.m.s.s.
Barbie 12pm
Oppenheimer 4:30pm
We dressed up for both.
Oppenheimer 4:30pm
We dressed up for both.
Bamspeedy
CheeseBob
Just saw Barbie. 2 PM showing. Small, rural town theater, seats about 120, but only 25 there for the movie at that time. Rated PG-13, but it was mostly girls aged about 6-12 there, would be my guess of the ages. 37 USD total for 3 tickets, 3 large drinks, 1 large popcorn.
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