Ahh, the movie event of 2023!
What? What do you mean? Of course I participated in it... just not until 2024. What's the rush, right?
Barbie
First things first, full disclosure, any movie with a heavy dose of Margot Robbie is going to innately be more entertaining than movies without Margot Robbie. That doesn't mean I can't be objective, but there's a baseline value we're working from here.
Going into the movie, I was expecting a couple things:
- Margot Robbie will look perfect. Check.
- Ryan Gosling will be entertaining, but I won't like him as much as everybody else did. Check.
- There will be a couple of jokes that are subtle and not laugh-out-loud funny, but I will laugh out loud at them. Kind of check (there was one).
- There'll be 2-3 moments where the feminism of the movie feels like it overrides the story. Kind of check (there was, again, one).
Overall I enjoyed the movie. I thought that despite effectively portraying Barbie as a kind of clueless, blank slate, Robbie did a good job of making the character relatable. Setting big business against her did a lot of that legwork too. Gosling did well too, Ken just became the sort of antagonist that I have no patience for. Those of you who know me in the real world would be able to draw pretty simple comparisons to other folks who irritate me.
Hint: It's the same people who reduced the movie to that one heavy feminism scene and dismissed it out of hand.
Click here to see where you can watch Barbie today!
Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan is a serious filmmaker. I've only seen a couple of his films so far (including watching Interstellar literally hours before I wrote this!), but he's a very gifted storyteller. The Dark Knight is one of my absolute favorite movies of all time, and you have to wonder if The Dark Knight Rises might've been even stronger if not for Heath Ledger's tragic death; rumors abound that the Joker might've played an integral role in that last film of the trilogy.
But we're not here to talk about The Dark Knight (this time). Oppenheimer was alright, but it was... something less than the other Nolan films I've seen. Not length-wise; it was very long, and you felt every minute, something that sets the movie apart from Nolan's best work. I think that impression wasn't helped by jumping around the timeline unnecessarily, and this might seem sacrilege, but I think Robert Downey, Jr.'s role could've been eliminated from the movie almost entirely and it would've benefited the story.
And somehow, in a movie about a literal nuclear bomb, the scope of the effort somehow felt not large enough? I'm not sure what it was missing exactly, but even after the movie ended, I felt like I was still waiting for *something* else to happen. It's entirely possible that it was a movie you gotta see in a theater, for the (spoiler alert) nuclear explosion; maybe that puts a bow on the story better than when you're in a living room.
I will say that the acting was tremendous, particularly Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt. I would've been happy to spend another half hour with Blunt's character. She seemed to perfectly capture a quiet internal torment while absolutely eviscerating people who cross her. Florence Pugh was good, depressing, but that was the point. And Downey did well, too; I just think his part in the story wasn't necessary.
Tune in over the next couple weeks to read what I thought of Interstellar!
Click here to see where you can watch Oppenheimer today!
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