No Hollywood biography's going to cover all the bases honestly, correctly. Within its constraints, it was pretty good or at least as good as possible. The Big Issues were touched on: the psychopathy of anti-communism, the related witch hunt and a whiff of Edward Teller's abnormal lust for nukes. One even gets a sense (IIRC) of Oppie's contradictions and stuff.
But unrelated yet more important, reality has caught up very close to Roy's riffs:
"errors in medication counts, illegible text, crossed-out text"
So The Formula might not be accurately documented? I kinda like the idea that it's an ad hoc program – a little a this, a little a that – keeps LOTUS on his toes.
I've got a hardcover book from the turn of the last century, <i>Non-Secret Recipes</i> (the edition I have includes as an appendix the full text of the just-enacted Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906) The American pharmacological scene in those days was an absolutely bonkers fleamarket of adhockery. My favorite recipes are those for asthma cigarettes, various ones of which include dried leaves of <i>Datura</i> (Jimson weed) and saltpetre. I could see either or both being congenial to LOTUS.
Ironically, from what I've read of datura trips on Erowid, one of the characteristic hallucinations is that you're holding a cigarette. Pretty exciting when you ARE holding a lit cigarette!
"ahead of overseas trips, the staff would prepare packets of controlled medications to be handed out to White House staff. "And those would typically be Ambien or Provigil and typically both, right. So we would normally make these packets of Ambien and Provigil, and a lot of times they’d be in like five tablets in a zip‑lock bag."
For some reason, I'm reminded of that book about the role amphetamines played in the Nazi Blitzkreig. Turns out all those Nazis were Blitzed, most of the time.
A very large share of crime is just White people doing other White people favors.
After the Iowa caucus, they had some video of the shockingly informal process of collecting votes in an Iowa Republican caucus, "Just throw your votes in this here popcorn bucket, folks!" Elie Mystal called it "This is what voting looks like when they're sure only White people can vote."
Also, this--“played by Robert Downey Jr. as a sort of vengeful lanyard”--is almost as good as Anthony Lane’s simile in his review of Waterland, “starring Jeremy Irons as a sad paintbrush.”
Dang. Was hoping I would not need to see this thing. Promoted like a bloated beached whale. Off-putting. Now you make sound mostly a worthwhile couple hours (which I gotta say would be substantially more worthwhileitude than I have been scoring lately).
Hey boss, can you enlighten us about your process? Do you prep by reading all about it? Watching youtubes of the director & the cinematographer? Read the reviews?
And when you do get around to watching it, do you just sit back and let it run the first viewing? Is there more than one viewing? On video, do you pause and make notes? Take screen saves of interesting or important shots?
Thanks for asking! I usually just start writing and just look up things that come to mind while I'm doing it. Thanks to streaming I can even revisit scenes if I'm not sure I remembered them right, and a surprising number of movie scripts are available online. But I don't prep or study up so much as check my intuitions against the record.
The thing that I've found most useful is grabbing screen saves on the second viewing – partly for propping up my deficient memory and partly just for the archive – you know, like when you find that box of old photos and go "wow"...
The second most useful thing about screen saves is finding those little gems that go by too fast at normal film speed, but with a little effort can bring out some brief-but-amazing bit the director (or the cinematographer or the editor) decided they wanted in there...an example is the "Racacoonie" chase scene in Everything Everywhere in which one maybe quarter-second of the action includes the only remnant of a long scene about a family of noodles (writing this makes me wonder how the hell they ever got this film done) that was (probably mercifully) completely dropped from the final edit. It is not possible to make it out in real time, but if you know to look for a miniscule hiccup in the action, and you can pause at exactly the right moment – there it is. Flying spaghetti.
Thanks Roy. Of course Chris Nolan can’t help but make a beautiful movie. I enjoyed it, and I liked all the performances. I think Cillian Murphy did a very good job, because I believe people operating at that level in any field but particularly in STEM are a little out-of-this-world. I’ve met a couple, not nearly of Oppenheimer’s caliber but very advanced guys, and the best I can describe it is they aren’t fully here with us, part of them is always on that other level.
Robert Downey Jr. must have been happy for any role that isn’t Iron Man. And I don’t always like Matt Damon but I really enjoyed him here. I think he does a better job when he’s playing tight-assed company men than when he’s doing his Affable Dude schtick.
Damon is good at that. You can feel both the power and the pathos in the "tight-assed company man" bit when he does it. ("Of course, I wouldn't clear any of those guys.")
One can sense your blood pressure going down as you write these reviews. You are very good at it and I bet it's a lot better for you then your usual right-wing sewer dive.
Have you seen the 1980 Sam Waterston/PBS Oppenheimer? I have real fond memories of that..
Holy shit, yes, I Claudius! I remember watching that AND Oppenheimer. I was far too young to be watching I Claudius, but my mother thought PBS was educational so it could do no wrong, lol. I was a nerdy kid.
Baby, we're ALREADY goddesses, lol. Livia got a bad rap, there was no other path to power for women in ancient Rome. Plus, as I recall she had scores to settle.
Yes, much better for the mind to have something good in front of you, and to think carefully about what makes it good, instead of having something awful in front of you, having to think carefully about what makes it awful (because Roy, even in his eviscerations of right-wing morons, is never sloppy.)
I should mention the 2014 TV series “Manhattan”, then. Mainly concerned with workplace and family dramas of the people who lived at the Project, along with some spy intrigue and lots of science nerd cameraderie.
The outdoor set is remarkably similar to the “Oppenheimer” version and there are occasional trips into a lovingly rendered 1940’s New Mexico town. And they do touch more on indigenous land issues, which didn’t get much play in Nolan’s movie.
The series, only one season, ends with the first test. Nothing about the bomb’s subsequent use against Japan. IMO, the TV show did the fraught few hours leading up to the first explosion with a keener sense of tension and drama.
I saw it when it came out, but had forgotten all but the highest level details until reading your review, so I guess my short take on it would be “forgettable.” But it did keep me involved for the long run time, so the slightly longer version would be “entertaining, but forgettable,” which is fine.
As you point out, it was not without deeper meaning and we’ll see but 80 years isn’t much in the context of time. Do you really think Nagasaki will be the last of it? I’m guessing not by a long shot.
Great review Roy. This was a hit all around with my family, from my daughter (25) to my MIL (in her 80s) and I’m not surprised at the massive awards love it’s getting. At this point I think the Academy can just fedex the best picture and best director statuettes to Nolan’s house today, it’s that much of a done deal.
Of course, now that you’ve done Oppy, you have to do its sequel, Godzilla Minus One, which just became the first Oscar-nominated Godzilla movie in the 70-year history of the franchise! (And it’s also really good, not at all what you would expect!)
Instead of Barbenheimer, we could have had Oppenzilla.
(Ever see the original Gojira? Not the English-language recut that we used to show on network TV, but the actual? It is disturbing as hell, a clear allegory for Hiroshima with no silliness. Or with the minimum silliness, anyway, given it stars a guy in a rubber dinosaur suit.)
I don’t think there’s a date yet. It’s ending its theatrical run Feb. 1 but starting Friday it is debuting a new black and white version, ridonkulously called Godzilla Minus One Minus Color (no I’m not kidding I swear!) that’s getting a theater expansion in my area, so you might check around again.
"we get more biopic gush." Heh heh. I typically stay away from biopics because of all the expository gush. It's like product placement (at least for me): Once you see it, you can't unsee it. I wish I could. I want to enjoy these things like any normie.
Biopics are just impossible. Even the best of them have to boil down to “then this happened, then this happened, then this happened” -- greatest hit exposition dumps. I’m assuming that’s why Todd Haynes did what he did with “I’m Not There” (and gave it that title) -- under the best of circumstances, a straight-ahead Dylan biography can’t be anything but a hot mess.
And there's always "You'll never make it kid, why don't you just give up?" But once you can learn to laugh as the tropes are trotted out, those old musical biopics (Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman being the best two) are quite enjoyable.
But I think the lonely tortured genius is a more recent innovation? In the old ones, he's not successful, but not unhappy, and there's always the Plucky Little Lady alongside to pick up his spirits because she BELIEVES in him. That's all poor, sad Oppy needed, June Allyson.
There's an important lesson in the casting: If you die heroically in a war, as Miller did, you get Jimmy Stewart to play you. Die of natural causes, as Goodman did, and you get stuck with Steve Allen.
Miller's version of Chattanooga Choo-Choo was the first Gold Record. It was written by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon. Warren wrote a huge number of hit songs with a variety of different lyricists. C C-C was in the movie Sun Valley Serenade. Another great song he co-wrote for that movie was the Etta James standard "At Last" I was surprised by the number of Warren songs I knew.
Benny Goodman's famous quote about The Glenn Miller Story, starring Jimmy Stewart: "he keeps saying 'that sound, that sound' like he's looking for the fucking Holy Grail".
Well to be fair, Goodman already had Wilson and Krupa, and Basie already had the Best Rhythm Section in History, so Miller was chasing 4th or 5th place...
A formula tied to generations of received Great Man history, no doubt. What really can work is an absorbing film that incorporates biographic elements. Topsy Turvey is great. The biographic subject, so to speak: The Mikado, the personalities composing and performing it, and the era it's written and staged in. Along the way, the Gilbert and Sullivan biographic elements portray tensions in the artistic partnership and their individual states of being screwed up.
Topsy-Turvy is one of those rare exceptions to my dictum that biopics are an inferior art form because it has an idea, and it has to do with class consciousness. It's even in the title.
IIRC, it illuminated the personalities/struggles/triumphs etc. of the composers thru depicting one episode of their lives. Which seems to me to be the better way to do it.
Maybe Nolan isn’t so much a storyteller as a presenter. I’ve always been cold on him, anyway - perhaps I like to know what the other party thinks, even when they’re giving me a PowerPoint.
Given how history (not science) proves the atomic bombs were completely unnecessary except to satiate Americans’ racist bloodlust (and still failed at that), as we had cracked Japanese codes long prior and knew the war could end with three little words - “the emperor stays” - it’s all too much to have to listen to hours of arglebargle about This Great Science Man. And for Nolan to pull what feeble punches he has…it’s all too much. And too little. I Am Become Faff, Waster of Time.
When I was a young boy, I read a book in a school library called "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo." (I didn't realize there was a movie.) Until high school I misremembered it as being about Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I remembered it as being about the travails of a heroic crew member [Captain Lawson] after crash landing. Certainly not about bombing of any kind.
It wasn't until college that I read (entirely of my own volition) that the case for nuking Japan, as generally known, was bullshit. A mind-blowing book, then another. Then the sobering realization that most Americans would never hear these points of view.
I guess the moment has passed and they never will learn about it. The bombs what done it.
There’s a scene in the original Godzilla where Japanese schoolchildren about the right age to have been born in 1945 are singing as the atomic monster destroys their city. It said more to me about the Manhattan Project than Oppenheimer did (or maybe even could have).
Since you decided to go there, look up how many American soldiers would gave died in the invasion of Japan. Then go tell them their deaths were worth it. There's a reason War has a bad reputation.
Well, Mr. Fennell was the one who broached the topic. I'm sorry if I was glib. It's complicated.
We could as well ask the Japanese civilians if their deaths were worth it. A case has been made that they were combatants, too; however, we are not obliged, legally or morally, to view them as such. What choice did they have.
A case has been made that this people prepared to die for their nation at the behest of their emperor would be just as likely to obey his orders to stand down, if leadership so decided. And that is what they did, as soon as they were told to surrender and cooperate. There is evidently some case that the leadership was preparing not just for pitted defense of the homeland, but for a less costly, less uncertain way out. Both can be true - even given that the Japanese mode of war was apocalyptic.
In any case, I'm out of my depth. Thanks for reading.
No apology needed. It's just a quirk of mine that when the bloodthirsty racists Americans dropped the atomic bomb (twice!) for no reason trope comes up i have to remind people that War is Hell. There are very good arguments for either decision, but War does not care about arguments, good or otherwise. Blame can be fairly laid, but for me it needs to be laid on both sides, because War corrupts everything it touches.
The American war machine was fearsome in the extreme. But before WWII nobody knew we could become such a juggernaut. Nigh unimaginable. Hitler thought we lacked the blood, will, and productive capacity to compete with his Reich. Total defeat came pretty quickly.
The Japanese leadership saw all that. I think they had every reason to believe they'd lose, too. I see the nukes in this context.
Mr. Fennell brought up intelligence. I can't recall about it, but yeah.
Hell, Yamamoto Isoroku *told* them outright: "I can hold them [the Americans] for six months or a year. After that I'm unsure." But he did his duty anyway.
Everybody forgets about how Japan treated non-Japanese in the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere"; but Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans and Filipinos still remember. . .
In Truman's thinking about whether to use the bomb, weren't the Russians also a factor? I believe when the Trinity test was being planned it was understood that Truman wanted a positive result before the Potsdam Conference, to strengthen his hand. And then of course in the immediate after-war period, as Europe was being divided up, having the bomb in our back pocket would be an enormous help. But all of this depended on communicating the unimaginable power of the bomb, and nothing could accomplish that like using it on a civilian population.
I'm not saying Truman wasn't motivated by a desire to end the war sooner and save the lives of American GI's, how could he not be? It's just that I don't trust his judgement in this, knowing what other motives he had.
Alla the whining about the Russkis doin' this, or not doin' that, was/is ever the same. The idea that they shoulda declared earlier against Japan (when they were busy saving themselves and btw Europe from the nazis by grinding them to dust in the Place Where Armies Go To Die) is never gonna go away...
Thanks. I was aware of some of that. Not sure the decision-makers understood the matter from that perspective* or at that level of detail. My grasp of the counterpoints was likely never sufficient for serious discussion. Well, it's for the best that I read both strains (though never the Fussell, until now).
"... the important thing isn’t 'can you read music,' but 'can you hear it.'"
Alluding to a finer distinction. Some excel at hearing music then reproducing it; others at imagining it then producing it. Starting not at the level of the work, but with basic elements.
(I haven't seen the movie, and I'm not sure what this has to do with maths.)
I suppose it's like you say, getting at the distinction between being creative and "merely" understanding the work of others. That one word, "Algebra", grinds my gears, though. I doubt a real mathematician would use it, more likely to they would just say "math" (or "maths" if they're English.) Algebra is a specialty, and not close to the applied math that physicists need, it would be like Neils Bohr saying "Set Theory isn't like sheet music."
But maybe "Algebra" is there as a signifier to the audience of "Really hard math"? And it fails even on that score, if I took the stuff in high school, how hard can it be?
Of course, movies about mathematicians always emphasize that notion of free-spirited improv as the thing that does it, rather than the patient assembling and connection of many, many ideas developed by thousands of other mathematicians (Andrew Wiles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is hundreds of pages long and is built through connecting multiple fields of mathematics, some seemingly unrelated. Yes, there's a brilliant insight there, it's in seeing that THIS piece of math done by someone else is connected to THIS piece of math done by yet another mathematician.) Nevertheless, all math movies have to have the scene where the brilliant mathematician learns to FEEL the math instead of THINKING it. It's the math equivalent of that scene in Star Wars where the ghostly voice of Obi Wan tells Luke to turn off his targeting computer.
"Yes, there's a brilliant insight there, it's in seeing that THIS piece of math done by someone else is connected to THIS piece of math done by yet another mathematician."
Along these lines, I've been thinking about the American layperson's flawed understanding of how scientists can be mistaken and/or biased. They don't realize that the methods themselves, and the communities of inquiry built up around them, have everything to do with incremental refinement, correction of errors, and mitigation of bias. None of it's perfect, but it's light years better than the old ways.
Consequently you get anti-vaxxers and so forth. They believe that someone not arising to the level of "dilettante" can critique or debunk scientific work. Critics who can't even grapple with the lowest-hanging fruit of flawed science.
Scientific ideas flash, fully-formed, into the brain of Brilliant Scientist. I'm sure if I just watch enough YouTube videos the same thing will happen to me.
I like to think of it as assembling something out of Legos, where each Lego piece is an idea that takes the smartest person in the world a year to understand. If you get to 10 Legos by the time you're 30, you might make something out of it.
Re: compartmentalization of Hiroshima - takes me back to the kerfuffle in 1995 for the 50th anniversary and the shouting about "Pearl Harbor!" and "A million soldiers needed!" and all that there in response to the quiet assertion that the bombing was unnecessary and was done mainly to scare the Soviets. It was particularly disturbing to see the continued hatred for Japan from some quarters even after so long.
(There's an interesting parallel here with the plot in Twilight's Last Gleaming, just sacrificing OTHER people instead of ours.)
Yes! I got strong climate change vibes, especially about the danger of not listening to scientists. “We listened to them then to save the world and mobilized everything on their say-so, but we’re not now!”
Having said that, idea of a Manhattan Project to stop global warming is bandied around on a regular basis.
I love that you always use “enormity” to mean what it actually means.
I come here for the wit and insights and stay here so I can learn big words and how to write good.
Me too, sometimes...
Gooder..
Betterer.
Fine. Finer…..finerer. Finerer!
Mighty fine, mighty fine...
https://imgflip.com/i/1adzi9
Biglier!
"A big, strong text came up to me, with tears running down its pages..."
Of course. Thanks for the correction.
And love to Juice and the pups.
the most unkindest cut of all
Edroso's Blog is the matchbook cover of the Internets!
Pfft.
No Hollywood biography's going to cover all the bases honestly, correctly. Within its constraints, it was pretty good or at least as good as possible. The Big Issues were touched on: the psychopathy of anti-communism, the related witch hunt and a whiff of Edward Teller's abnormal lust for nukes. One even gets a sense (IIRC) of Oppie's contradictions and stuff.
But unrelated yet more important, reality has caught up very close to Roy's riffs:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/the-white-house-has-its-own-pharmacy-and-boy-was-it-shady-under-trump/
"errors in medication counts, illegible text, crossed-out text"
So The Formula might not be accurately documented? I kinda like the idea that it's an ad hoc program – a little a this, a little a that – keeps LOTUS on his toes.
I've got a hardcover book from the turn of the last century, <i>Non-Secret Recipes</i> (the edition I have includes as an appendix the full text of the just-enacted Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906) The American pharmacological scene in those days was an absolutely bonkers fleamarket of adhockery. My favorite recipes are those for asthma cigarettes, various ones of which include dried leaves of <i>Datura</i> (Jimson weed) and saltpetre. I could see either or both being congenial to LOTUS.
Ironically, from what I've read of datura trips on Erowid, one of the characteristic hallucinations is that you're holding a cigarette. Pretty exciting when you ARE holding a lit cigarette!
"ahead of overseas trips, the staff would prepare packets of controlled medications to be handed out to White House staff. "And those would typically be Ambien or Provigil and typically both, right. So we would normally make these packets of Ambien and Provigil, and a lot of times they’d be in like five tablets in a zip‑lock bag."
For some reason, I'm reminded of that book about the role amphetamines played in the Nazi Blitzkreig. Turns out all those Nazis were Blitzed, most of the time.
As are at least some of the Russian conscripts being sent to certain death in "meatwave" attacks.
Didn't Elvis get his first experience with uppers in the Army?
Putting the blitz in blitzkrieg, yeah?
Our tax dollars at work.
Of course fPOTUS is famously a non-drud user per his incredibly honest self.
If a doctor gives it to you, you’re not a degenerate.
The Formula lives!
Now I’m thinking that the dope found a few months ago was leftover from the prior administration.
Dope left over from the previous administration? How dare you talk about Jerome Powell that way!
Rope-A-Dope Left Over From The Previous Administration
A very large share of crime is just White people doing other White people favors.
After the Iowa caucus, they had some video of the shockingly informal process of collecting votes in an Iowa Republican caucus, "Just throw your votes in this here popcorn bucket, folks!" Elie Mystal called it "This is what voting looks like when they're sure only White people can vote."
Also, this--“played by Robert Downey Jr. as a sort of vengeful lanyard”--is almost as good as Anthony Lane’s simile in his review of Waterland, “starring Jeremy Irons as a sad paintbrush.”
I love Anthony Lane.
Dang. Was hoping I would not need to see this thing. Promoted like a bloated beached whale. Off-putting. Now you make sound mostly a worthwhile couple hours (which I gotta say would be substantially more worthwhileitude than I have been scoring lately).
You won't be bored.
Even with its epic length, it really gallops along.
Hey boss, can you enlighten us about your process? Do you prep by reading all about it? Watching youtubes of the director & the cinematographer? Read the reviews?
And when you do get around to watching it, do you just sit back and let it run the first viewing? Is there more than one viewing? On video, do you pause and make notes? Take screen saves of interesting or important shots?
Asking for a friend.
Thanks for asking! I usually just start writing and just look up things that come to mind while I'm doing it. Thanks to streaming I can even revisit scenes if I'm not sure I remembered them right, and a surprising number of movie scripts are available online. But I don't prep or study up so much as check my intuitions against the record.
Yup, yup.
The thing that I've found most useful is grabbing screen saves on the second viewing – partly for propping up my deficient memory and partly just for the archive – you know, like when you find that box of old photos and go "wow"...
The second most useful thing about screen saves is finding those little gems that go by too fast at normal film speed, but with a little effort can bring out some brief-but-amazing bit the director (or the cinematographer or the editor) decided they wanted in there...an example is the "Racacoonie" chase scene in Everything Everywhere in which one maybe quarter-second of the action includes the only remnant of a long scene about a family of noodles (writing this makes me wonder how the hell they ever got this film done) that was (probably mercifully) completely dropped from the final edit. It is not possible to make it out in real time, but if you know to look for a miniscule hiccup in the action, and you can pause at exactly the right moment – there it is. Flying spaghetti.
And that, my friend, is FILMMAKING!
Thanks Roy. Of course Chris Nolan can’t help but make a beautiful movie. I enjoyed it, and I liked all the performances. I think Cillian Murphy did a very good job, because I believe people operating at that level in any field but particularly in STEM are a little out-of-this-world. I’ve met a couple, not nearly of Oppenheimer’s caliber but very advanced guys, and the best I can describe it is they aren’t fully here with us, part of them is always on that other level.
Robert Downey Jr. must have been happy for any role that isn’t Iron Man. And I don’t always like Matt Damon but I really enjoyed him here. I think he does a better job when he’s playing tight-assed company men than when he’s doing his Affable Dude schtick.
Damon is good at that. You can feel both the power and the pathos in the "tight-assed company man" bit when he does it. ("Of course, I wouldn't clear any of those guys.")
I assume they worked in his famous love of Hershey bars?
One can sense your blood pressure going down as you write these reviews. You are very good at it and I bet it's a lot better for you then your usual right-wing sewer dive.
Have you seen the 1980 Sam Waterston/PBS Oppenheimer? I have real fond memories of that..
Yes! I was remembering that: the titles music stuck in my heard, and I wish I could find it...
I remember it was on Saturday or Sunday nights and afterwards they ran I, Claudius.
An amazing several hours of entertainment. For free. And commercial free!
Holy shit, yes, I Claudius! I remember watching that AND Oppenheimer. I was far too young to be watching I Claudius, but my mother thought PBS was educational so it could do no wrong, lol. I was a nerdy kid.
I'm hoping to do a Livia on my deathbed: [with wistful fear] "I want to be a goddess...."
Baby, we're ALREADY goddesses, lol. Livia got a bad rap, there was no other path to power for women in ancient Rome. Plus, as I recall she had scores to settle.
Sian Phillip's was a goddess!
https://youtu.be/Q-prpMKQboA?si=C-Nv33ycPFeGmEwJ
Yes, much better for the mind to have something good in front of you, and to think carefully about what makes it good, instead of having something awful in front of you, having to think carefully about what makes it awful (because Roy, even in his eviscerations of right-wing morons, is never sloppy.)
Art's good for all of us.
I should mention the 2014 TV series “Manhattan”, then. Mainly concerned with workplace and family dramas of the people who lived at the Project, along with some spy intrigue and lots of science nerd cameraderie.
The outdoor set is remarkably similar to the “Oppenheimer” version and there are occasional trips into a lovingly rendered 1940’s New Mexico town. And they do touch more on indigenous land issues, which didn’t get much play in Nolan’s movie.
The series, only one season, ends with the first test. Nothing about the bomb’s subsequent use against Japan. IMO, the TV show did the fraught few hours leading up to the first explosion with a keener sense of tension and drama.
Worth seeing if it’s still out there.
Remember it being on cable on "WGN America" just as the Tribune Company, then-owners of WGN, was being broken into smaller pieces by Sam Zell (spit).
I saw it when it came out, but had forgotten all but the highest level details until reading your review, so I guess my short take on it would be “forgettable.” But it did keep me involved for the long run time, so the slightly longer version would be “entertaining, but forgettable,” which is fine.
As you point out, it was not without deeper meaning and we’ll see but 80 years isn’t much in the context of time. Do you really think Nagasaki will be the last of it? I’m guessing not by a long shot.
So far, so good.
Bestest
Great review Roy. This was a hit all around with my family, from my daughter (25) to my MIL (in her 80s) and I’m not surprised at the massive awards love it’s getting. At this point I think the Academy can just fedex the best picture and best director statuettes to Nolan’s house today, it’s that much of a done deal.
Of course, now that you’ve done Oppy, you have to do its sequel, Godzilla Minus One, which just became the first Oscar-nominated Godzilla movie in the 70-year history of the franchise! (And it’s also really good, not at all what you would expect!)
Love the idea of Godzilla as the sequel to Oppenheimer: THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL
The mash-ups have all over YouTube the last few weeks.
https://youtu.be/ZHLSnl-s5u8?si=ZbDatll26ZSgsc32
That's hilarious!
LOL. Also this, with Akira Ifukube score https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEb01i7ke94
Yup that one is great too!
That's funny but it also shows how important Göransson's score is to the effect.
Because I'm weird I heard this when the bombs started exploding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkpOSzcy0Vk
Life is so unfair. Barbenheimer gets all the attention, but OppenZilla not at all.
"How you like me now?"
Instead of Barbenheimer, we could have had Oppenzilla.
(Ever see the original Gojira? Not the English-language recut that we used to show on network TV, but the actual? It is disturbing as hell, a clear allegory for Hiroshima with no silliness. Or with the minimum silliness, anyway, given it stars a guy in a rubber dinosaur suit.)
I really want to see it but it was theatrically unavailable in Baltimore, which is just stupid. When does it stream?
I don’t think there’s a date yet. It’s ending its theatrical run Feb. 1 but starting Friday it is debuting a new black and white version, ridonkulously called Godzilla Minus One Minus Color (no I’m not kidding I swear!) that’s getting a theater expansion in my area, so you might check around again.
"we get more biopic gush." Heh heh. I typically stay away from biopics because of all the expository gush. It's like product placement (at least for me): Once you see it, you can't unsee it. I wish I could. I want to enjoy these things like any normie.
Biopics are just impossible. Even the best of them have to boil down to “then this happened, then this happened, then this happened” -- greatest hit exposition dumps. I’m assuming that’s why Todd Haynes did what he did with “I’m Not There” (and gave it that title) -- under the best of circumstances, a straight-ahead Dylan biography can’t be anything but a hot mess.
And there's always "You'll never make it kid, why don't you just give up?" But once you can learn to laugh as the tropes are trotted out, those old musical biopics (Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman being the best two) are quite enjoyable.
Genius/talent that is so beyond no one else can understand, rendering our hero/ine lonely. So, so, soooo many tropes.
But I think the lonely tortured genius is a more recent innovation? In the old ones, he's not successful, but not unhappy, and there's always the Plucky Little Lady alongside to pick up his spirits because she BELIEVES in him. That's all poor, sad Oppy needed, June Allyson.
June was no Commie!
Are you kidding? The Life of Emile Zola is like that!
I don't think I've seen it? (Or if I have, I sure don't remember it.) But I checked, and it's a Warner Brothers Production, so you know it's QUALITY.
(Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman being the best two) - I'll put em on my to-watch list.
There's an important lesson in the casting: If you die heroically in a war, as Miller did, you get Jimmy Stewart to play you. Die of natural causes, as Goodman did, and you get stuck with Steve Allen.
Which is not Goodman's fault necessarily, tho the flick was made whilst he was still alive. Allen just looked like him.
Allen's fine in the movie, even inserting some bits of humor that lighten things up.
Miller's version of Chattanooga Choo-Choo was the first Gold Record. It was written by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon. Warren wrote a huge number of hit songs with a variety of different lyricists. C C-C was in the movie Sun Valley Serenade. Another great song he co-wrote for that movie was the Etta James standard "At Last" I was surprised by the number of Warren songs I knew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Warren
Yeah, I know Warren and Dubin from some of the 30's musicals I love.
Benny Goodman's famous quote about The Glenn Miller Story, starring Jimmy Stewart: "he keeps saying 'that sound, that sound' like he's looking for the fucking Holy Grail".
Well to be fair, Goodman already had Wilson and Krupa, and Basie already had the Best Rhythm Section in History, so Miller was chasing 4th or 5th place...
Wilson, Krupa, and Louis Prima!
Miller just had the hits
That's a funny line if you ever saw the movie.
I love "greatest hits exposition dumps." Just pitch-perfect.
A formula tied to generations of received Great Man history, no doubt. What really can work is an absorbing film that incorporates biographic elements. Topsy Turvey is great. The biographic subject, so to speak: The Mikado, the personalities composing and performing it, and the era it's written and staged in. Along the way, the Gilbert and Sullivan biographic elements portray tensions in the artistic partnership and their individual states of being screwed up.
Topsy-Turvy is one of those rare exceptions to my dictum that biopics are an inferior art form because it has an idea, and it has to do with class consciousness. It's even in the title.
IIRC, it illuminated the personalities/struggles/triumphs etc. of the composers thru depicting one episode of their lives. Which seems to me to be the better way to do it.
Maybe Nolan isn’t so much a storyteller as a presenter. I’ve always been cold on him, anyway - perhaps I like to know what the other party thinks, even when they’re giving me a PowerPoint.
Given how history (not science) proves the atomic bombs were completely unnecessary except to satiate Americans’ racist bloodlust (and still failed at that), as we had cracked Japanese codes long prior and knew the war could end with three little words - “the emperor stays” - it’s all too much to have to listen to hours of arglebargle about This Great Science Man. And for Nolan to pull what feeble punches he has…it’s all too much. And too little. I Am Become Faff, Waster of Time.
When I was a young boy, I read a book in a school library called "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo." (I didn't realize there was a movie.) Until high school I misremembered it as being about Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I remembered it as being about the travails of a heroic crew member [Captain Lawson] after crash landing. Certainly not about bombing of any kind.
It wasn't until college that I read (entirely of my own volition) that the case for nuking Japan, as generally known, was bullshit. A mind-blowing book, then another. Then the sobering realization that most Americans would never hear these points of view.
I guess the moment has passed and they never will learn about it. The bombs what done it.
There’s a scene in the original Godzilla where Japanese schoolchildren about the right age to have been born in 1945 are singing as the atomic monster destroys their city. It said more to me about the Manhattan Project than Oppenheimer did (or maybe even could have).
Naw, Tokyo we just firebombed. 😬
Since you decided to go there, look up how many American soldiers would gave died in the invasion of Japan. Then go tell them their deaths were worth it. There's a reason War has a bad reputation.
Well, Mr. Fennell was the one who broached the topic. I'm sorry if I was glib. It's complicated.
We could as well ask the Japanese civilians if their deaths were worth it. A case has been made that they were combatants, too; however, we are not obliged, legally or morally, to view them as such. What choice did they have.
A case has been made that this people prepared to die for their nation at the behest of their emperor would be just as likely to obey his orders to stand down, if leadership so decided. And that is what they did, as soon as they were told to surrender and cooperate. There is evidently some case that the leadership was preparing not just for pitted defense of the homeland, but for a less costly, less uncertain way out. Both can be true - even given that the Japanese mode of war was apocalyptic.
In any case, I'm out of my depth. Thanks for reading.
No apology needed. It's just a quirk of mine that when the bloodthirsty racists Americans dropped the atomic bomb (twice!) for no reason trope comes up i have to remind people that War is Hell. There are very good arguments for either decision, but War does not care about arguments, good or otherwise. Blame can be fairly laid, but for me it needs to be laid on both sides, because War corrupts everything it touches.
Absolutely. A few more points, not contra you ...
The American war machine was fearsome in the extreme. But before WWII nobody knew we could become such a juggernaut. Nigh unimaginable. Hitler thought we lacked the blood, will, and productive capacity to compete with his Reich. Total defeat came pretty quickly.
The Japanese leadership saw all that. I think they had every reason to believe they'd lose, too. I see the nukes in this context.
Mr. Fennell brought up intelligence. I can't recall about it, but yeah.
Hell, Yamamoto Isoroku *told* them outright: "I can hold them [the Americans] for six months or a year. After that I'm unsure." But he did his duty anyway.
Everybody forgets about how Japan treated non-Japanese in the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere"; but Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans and Filipinos still remember. . .
In Truman's thinking about whether to use the bomb, weren't the Russians also a factor? I believe when the Trinity test was being planned it was understood that Truman wanted a positive result before the Potsdam Conference, to strengthen his hand. And then of course in the immediate after-war period, as Europe was being divided up, having the bomb in our back pocket would be an enormous help. But all of this depended on communicating the unimaginable power of the bomb, and nothing could accomplish that like using it on a civilian population.
I'm not saying Truman wasn't motivated by a desire to end the war sooner and save the lives of American GI's, how could he not be? It's just that I don't trust his judgement in this, knowing what other motives he had.
The Russian entering the war against Japan was probably a big part of the reason the Japanese surrendered
Could be.
Alla the whining about the Russkis doin' this, or not doin' that, was/is ever the same. The idea that they shoulda declared earlier against Japan (when they were busy saving themselves and btw Europe from the nazis by grinding them to dust in the Place Where Armies Go To Die) is never gonna go away...
https://davidlabaree.wordpress.com/2021/08/09/paul-fussell-thank-god-for-the-atom-bomb/
Thanks. I was aware of some of that. Not sure the decision-makers understood the matter from that perspective* or at that level of detail. My grasp of the counterpoints was likely never sufficient for serious discussion. Well, it's for the best that I read both strains (though never the Fussell, until now).
*Well-argued but also visceral?
I'd forgotten that essay! Thanks.
"... the important thing isn’t 'can you read music,' but 'can you hear it.'"
Alluding to a finer distinction. Some excel at hearing music then reproducing it; others at imagining it then producing it. Starting not at the level of the work, but with basic elements.
(I haven't seen the movie, and I'm not sure what this has to do with maths.)
I suppose it's like you say, getting at the distinction between being creative and "merely" understanding the work of others. That one word, "Algebra", grinds my gears, though. I doubt a real mathematician would use it, more likely to they would just say "math" (or "maths" if they're English.) Algebra is a specialty, and not close to the applied math that physicists need, it would be like Neils Bohr saying "Set Theory isn't like sheet music."
But maybe "Algebra" is there as a signifier to the audience of "Really hard math"? And it fails even on that score, if I took the stuff in high school, how hard can it be?
Of course, movies about mathematicians always emphasize that notion of free-spirited improv as the thing that does it, rather than the patient assembling and connection of many, many ideas developed by thousands of other mathematicians (Andrew Wiles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is hundreds of pages long and is built through connecting multiple fields of mathematics, some seemingly unrelated. Yes, there's a brilliant insight there, it's in seeing that THIS piece of math done by someone else is connected to THIS piece of math done by yet another mathematician.) Nevertheless, all math movies have to have the scene where the brilliant mathematician learns to FEEL the math instead of THINKING it. It's the math equivalent of that scene in Star Wars where the ghostly voice of Obi Wan tells Luke to turn off his targeting computer.
Yes!
"Yes, there's a brilliant insight there, it's in seeing that THIS piece of math done by someone else is connected to THIS piece of math done by yet another mathematician."
Along these lines, I've been thinking about the American layperson's flawed understanding of how scientists can be mistaken and/or biased. They don't realize that the methods themselves, and the communities of inquiry built up around them, have everything to do with incremental refinement, correction of errors, and mitigation of bias. None of it's perfect, but it's light years better than the old ways.
Consequently you get anti-vaxxers and so forth. They believe that someone not arising to the level of "dilettante" can critique or debunk scientific work. Critics who can't even grapple with the lowest-hanging fruit of flawed science.
Scientific ideas flash, fully-formed, into the brain of Brilliant Scientist. I'm sure if I just watch enough YouTube videos the same thing will happen to me.
Hash it out on The Joe Rogan Experience, where error and bias find no purchase
We ask ALL the questions, especially the stupid ones!
Grappling with fruit
So a Math movie should look more like a conspiracy theorists wall? A bunch of strings connecting up ideas?
I like to think of it as assembling something out of Legos, where each Lego piece is an idea that takes the smartest person in the world a year to understand. If you get to 10 Legos by the time you're 30, you might make something out of it.
I took Algebra in 8th grade so it can't have been that hard. I also did 7th and 8th grade math in one year
Well, there you are, Oppenheimer was apparently still struggling with it in grad school.
All I gotta say is "Algebra"!
[skittering back under the bed]
[shakes fist impotently]
Possibly slightly TMI, Mr B
[still under the bed, now snickering]
Cleanup on ¶ 8: Lewis Strauss was the AEC guy. Richard was the composer.
Whoops thanks!
Cillian Murphy as the central figure haunted by his own accomplishment reminds me of his role in Peaky Blinders. Which was tops.
Re: compartmentalization of Hiroshima - takes me back to the kerfuffle in 1995 for the 50th anniversary and the shouting about "Pearl Harbor!" and "A million soldiers needed!" and all that there in response to the quiet assertion that the bombing was unnecessary and was done mainly to scare the Soviets. It was particularly disturbing to see the continued hatred for Japan from some quarters even after so long.
(There's an interesting parallel here with the plot in Twilight's Last Gleaming, just sacrificing OTHER people instead of ours.)
Yes! I got strong climate change vibes, especially about the danger of not listening to scientists. “We listened to them then to save the world and mobilized everything on their say-so, but we’re not now!”
Having said that, idea of a Manhattan Project to stop global warming is bandied around on a regular basis.
I'll take mine with a lemon twist, thanks.