I’m slated to be part of a panel discussion about Oppenheimer on campus in mid-February, a couple of days after the movie will be playing at Proctor’s Theater. This took a bit of organizing effort, and will hopefully do a bit to address my mild annoyance at the lack of discussion of the movie over the last several months.
This will be the first and likely only Oppenheimer event of the year. In contrast, there have been a bunch of panels and events about the other big summer blockbuster, Barbie. These have been widely promoted by various departments and the high-level administration, to the point where I decided that I really ought to give it a shot so I would have something to say because it inevitably gets brought up. So I threw it on while riding the exercise bike a week or two back:
And, more or less as I expected, this really just confirmed that the movie is Not My Thing. It was reasonably okay as a distraction while biking to nowhere for 45-ish minutes (I turned it off just after the first scenes with Will Ferrell), but it very much triggered my Inverse Mike Ford problem.
The late, great John M. Ford (“Mike” to his friends and folks in SF fandom) was the author of some unjustly obscure novels that many people find confusing. There are a lot of bits that seem to come out of left field if you’re reading them quickly (and he’s a good enough writer that they’re often fun to read quickly), but that turn out to be foreshadowed and hinted at in a bunch of places, upon close inspection. Sometimes very close inspection.
According to a story told by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, one of his editors (probably her) called him on this once, saying “Nobody’s going to understand this, you have to make it more clear to the reader.” His apologetic response was “I have a horror of being obvious.” (To which the response was “Well, you don’t need to worry about that here…”)
Kate and I joke that I have an Inverse Mike Ford problem: I have a horror of other people being obvious. That really affects my ability to enjoy a lot of books and movies that are otherwise widely praised, particularly things intended as satirical, because I find them so crashingly unsubtle that it makes my skin crawl.
And that was pretty much my reaction to Barbie. The production design is great, there’s some clever writing, and the actors have committed to the dippy premise to an impressive degree, but the Message of the movie is so thumpingly obvious from the get-go that I kept rolling my eyes away from the screen. I feel like the point was pretty thoroughly made in the first half-hour, and didn’t feel much need to continue. I wasn’t really enjoying it in a way that makes me want to finish it out the next time I’m on the exercise bike.
In parallel with this, The Pip has been on a bit of a Christopher Nolan kick for Movie Nights, specifically requesting to watch Interstellar and Inception and then Tenet. All of these are famously supposed to be difficult to follow, but with the exception of Tenet, I found them pretty clear. There’s some time-looping in Tenet that gets away from me (I watched it when it first came out, then again this past weekend with the Pip, but I was extremely tired this time, and zoned out for a chunk of it), but the other two seemed perfectly obvious to me. I’m sometimes a little puzzled when people talk about them as really hard to follow, or talk about Nolan as a chilly and distant filmmaker— the biggest faults in Inception and Interstellar are a kind of core sentimentality that threatens to tip over into “mawkish.”
The Pip has asked a couple of times to watch Oppenheimer, but I am not entirely convinced that he’s going to be up for three hours of people talking in rooms (he’s 12). We debated it for a bit on Sunday when Kate and SteelyKid were out for the afternoon, and opted for a different Very Long Movie, albeit one that has some shootings and explosions in it. I’m talking, of course, about Killers of the Flower Moon:
This is also Not A Subtle Film, particularly if you come into it knowing anything at all about the history. It’s really obvious from the start what’s going on, and Robert De Niro is pure smarmy malevolence from the first moment he’s on screen. It’s a terrific performance, and I’m also impressed with DiCaprio’s commitment to playing a bumbling idiot.
Interestingly, though, it doesn’t really trip my Inverse Mike Ford thing in the same way. This is partly because there’s just a tiny bit of ambiguity about whether Ernest is actually evil or Just That Dumb. But I think some of it is also the fact that it doesn’t seem impressed with its own cleverness— it’s just presenting a realistic story that unfolds with a kind of horrifying inevitability, where Barbie seemed to be constantly elbowing me in the ribs saying “Hey, didja see that? That’s making a point!”
(There’s also, and I forget who I heard say this on a podcast, a sense in which the obviousness of the plot in Killers is an essential part of the point. The Osage murders are all so stupidly blatant that the minute somebody who isn’t on the take shows up and starts poking around, the whole scheme unravels in fifteen minutes. It’s as damning an indictment of the system as anything else in the movie.)
Which brings me around to another Best Picture nominee, American Fiction, which I’m a bit conflicted about. On the one hand, some parts of it look interesting; on the other, I very much worry that the satirical elements will strike me as crashingly obvious in a way that makes it hard to enjoy. I’m also a little worried about things raised in this review, which as it notes are kind of perennial problems for media about the media industry. I’m not sure if I’ll check it out or not; it may depend on whether we get an extended stretch of bad weather that forces me to get my exercise indoors.
To my surprise, SteelyKid expressed an interest in watching Barbie at some point, so I guess there’s an outside chance I give it another shot. Watching it with someone else who’s reacting in real time (and SteelyKid is not a passive watcher of movies…) might lift it past some of the more thumping bits. Or it might make them even more annoying; it’s really kind of hard to say. And, of course, The Pip and I might take a run at Oppenheimer after all. For the moment, though, that’s where I stand on the state of current cinema1.
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The Pip’s reviews, for the record: Interstellar and Inception both got “Damn! That was a good movie!” Tenet got “That was pretty weird, but I think I got most of it.” And Killers of the Flower Moon got “I can’t believe that was three and a half hours,” in an admiring way. He agreed that the acting was great, and the characters were a pack of idiots.
Admittedly I miss a lot of things in books and movies (and I'm not much of a re-read/watch-er), but even I thought Barbie was much too unsubtle. I think they were trying to split the pot between making a point and a fun movie when leaning harder into "fun movie" would've made the point just as well.
I had exactly your Inverse Mike Ford problem with Tenet. Time travel (and especially any sort of time travel where we visit the same moment more than once, either in a loop or from another perspective) is one of my favorite storytelling elements, especially in movies. So I've watched a LOT of time travel movies. And I was so excited through the first 3/4 of Tenet, I kept telling myself "wow, he's playing all the time travel tropes REALLY straight, it's going to be SO COOL when he subverts them." And then he didn't. It has one novel conceit, and you get that from the trailer, and then when you watch the movie you get to explore a few weird side effects of the novel conceit, and if you think about them too hard you start bumping into how nonsensical the conceit is, but beyond that it's an extremely by-the-book time travel movie, and every twist and turn is the most obvious way of handling things. I had basically your Barbie reaction to Tenet - it was like Nolan was constantly elbowing me, saying, "isn't this time travel BLOWING your MIND" and I was like "can we just watch Primer again? I'm still trying to figure out where the third Aaron comes from."
The biggest struggle I had with understanding the movie was that almost all the dialogue was mixed so low, but I solved that by watching with captions.