#1560 The Oppenheimer Film as Cinema

We'll see, right? I'm not afraid of it. But to put Oppenheimer, a tragic character who built a weapon of mass destruction in the same equation as a plastic doll with oversized breasts. Seems a little perverse to me. But I get that we're living in a postmodern age, right? Anyway, I hope you agree that Oppenheimer is worth all this fuss. I've interviewed John Gowans twice now, he's the actor who plays Dr.

Ward Evans, one of the three members of the panel that sat in judgment of Oppenheimer in the spring of 1954, after which his security clearance was withdrawn. I've interviewed, of course, the great David McCandry. We saw it on the same day and we both texted each other. We must have a conversation. And of course, then we did, and now I've interviewed Niles Schwartz.

Niles has been a friend of mine now for a few years at the pandemic. He was one of the people who joined several of my online courses. And in every course he discussed cinema. There are three words here, like movies, film, and then cinema, and Niles knows a great deal about the history of film, and he's an expert at it.

I learn a great deal from him, I frequently write him a letter asking for lists. Lists of apocalyptic film, list of the greatest sci-fi films, list of the greatest romantic comedies, list of the greatest ancient epics about Rome and Israel. And Alexander the Great, and so on. And in this case, he's also provided me with a list of the great atomic films, of course. At the top of which is Dr. Strangelove. Stanley Kubrick's enormous satire, amazing satire for its time in the 1960s, and one of my favorite films. And by the way, in Oppenheimer, there is a tribute after a fashion, at least to Dr.

Strangelove Edward, Teller at the atomic Test on July 16, 1945, is seen slathering his face with Suntan lotion. This is true, by the way. And then he puts on goggles and when the bomb goes off, he says something close to wow.

I mean, it's clearly not just impressed and stunned, but thrilled in a way. So he's clearly the darth vader of the story, and so Edward Teller is clearly the dark star, the darth vader of the atomic era. And it's clear that Christopher Nolan, the director, is referring a wonderful little allusion to Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove in the film of that name.

Niles is really an amazing person, he has a kind of a completely different public job in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But, you know, there are very few people that I know who really know film, who study film, who are film historians, who know the vocabulary of film. Can't wait to get to Minneapolis one of these days to have dinner with him and go to the Guthrie Theater, you know, the famous Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis. I said, I hope it will be a Shakespeare, but I'm open to all sorts of other possibilities, too.

I've never met Niles except in cyberspace, but when I saw the film for the second time on Sunday, the 23rd of July, I thought I need to contact Niles. Because I keep thinking about this film, in terms of its history, its historiography, its accuracy, is it a compelling portrait of a tragic protagonist like J. Robert Oppenheimer? Why does it spend so much time on Louis Strauss?

Are there multiple layers of the film? You know? It's a study of Oppenheimer's life and achievement, it's a study of the making of the atomic bomb, it's a study of the security catastrophe that occurred to Oppenheimer in the early 1950s. And it's a study of Fall of Louis Strauss, the atomic energy commissioner, who was the nemesis of J.

Robert Oppenheimer So Christopher Nolan's trying to juggle a fair number of plates at the same time. And mostly I have focused on that. And then I thought, after coming out of it last time, you know, the person to talk to is Niles. And I wrote to him, and he wrote back and said, I'm just about to contact you.

You know, he said, I've been reading some of the stuff you've been writing about it. I think we should talk about it and so we lined up our discussion. Really. This is what Zoom has done to the world before Zoom and after Zoom. It's really one of the pivots of my life.

I now have the chance to interview scores of people from all over the country, all over the world who are willing to step up to a screen. But would have a harder time getting themselves to a public radio station. And, you know, we'd have to pay for the access to it, and then we'd have to have them send the files and so on. This is a whole new technological era. You see it on the cable news channels, you know, that during the pandemic suddenly allowed their talking heads to be anywhere.

I have a photograph of J. Robert Oppenheimer up on the wall behind me. So I don't forget that this is a very, very, very, very, very complicated and interesting man. So let's go to the show This is Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson.

My conversation with Niall Schwartz about Oppenheimer as cinema.

Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. I'm really delighted to have sitting across from me virtually. Niall Schwartz of the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Niall's has been in a number of my online courses. And he always brings an extraordinary perspective in film, movies and cinema to whatever we're talking about, and Niall's. When I saw Oppenheimer the other day, I was the first person in my zip code to see it at noon on the 21st. I couldn't wait.

As I came out of the theater, I thought I got to call Niall's. And I want to see a if he's seen it, and B if he's willing to come on and talk about it.

You saw the full 70 millimeter, yeah, it isn't the 70 millimeter iMax, which is the proper way to see the movie, but you can only see it that way. I think in 30 locations in the world, I'm not sure. And in my younger days, I would have made the trek to Grand Rapids, Michigan or Indianapolis, but logistically, I couldn't work that out. Or not yet, anyway, maybe I will in the next month.

We'll see, we'll see. So, first question, How much were you anticipating this film? Very much I admire the work of Christopher Nolan.

I'm not a Nolan head, as they're called, because Nolan has his fan base. Thanks to the Batman movies and Inception and Interstellar, and so on. But I'm also, quite in part, thanks to you, I should say a J. Robert Oppenheimer fan, I find him to be a fascinating person. I love the book. American Prometheus Pandora's Keeper's Life in Twilight.

And I find him to be such a fascinating subject for film because he's such a rich character. And also just the subject matter of the bomb and its implications, to say nothing of what happened to Oppenheimer after the bomb. I mean, reading American Prometheus, as I was reading that book, I saw three or four different movies in it. And then, not half a year later, I think. Nolan announced that this is going to be his next feature film. And we are starved for big Hollywood movies about serious subjects.

And he went all out on this. I mean, it's rated R, it's about a third in black and white, there's no action scenes. I mean, a studio exec is probably scratching their head and saying so.

We're going to spend $150 million on this in this economy, in this environment. And, you know, dominated by intellectual property like Marvel movies or D.C. movies or sequels, and so on, and so forth. So I think we're starved for this kind of movie. And the Barbieheimer meme worked to get people interested. I think it was mutually beneficial for both movies. I saw a lot of Dressed in pink at my screening.

You weren't dressed in pink, however, I wasn't dressed in pink, but there were groups of people dressed in pink and other groups. You know, in the same group. There were people in suit and ties, and a lot of them were kids, you know, college kids and some high school kids. Really looking forward to this movie, and I have to say it delivered.

I love the brilliance of him, I love the ethical cauldron that he found himself in. I also love that he had this fall. That he's a truly a tragic character in the old Aristotelian, full sense of what a tragic protagonist is. I come at it with some interest, you know, considerable interest in cinema, but not your interest. And so I'm so interested to talk about it in two different ways.

One is Christopher Nolan took on a very big thing. Here. You talked about multiple stories. There are multiple stories. There's the story of the atomic bomb, there's the story of the life and psychology of this man. J.

Robert Oppenheimer. There's the story of his security clearance ordeal in 1954, when his security clearance was stripped by the Atomic Energy Commission. And then there's the story of Louis Strauss, who, even in American, Prometheus, is a relatively minor character in this story, but of course, a major character in this film. So my first thought when I was watching the film was, I've spent, you know, I've read a hundred books on this subject, I portrayed Oppenheimer a hundred times, and I've been to Alamogordo.

I've been to Los Alamos, et cetera. I wondered if the average viewer found the multiple storylines, the black and white, the color, the cuts confusing in any way.

There's a lot of stuff which, for the uninformed, are holes in the thing. Yeah, and it's really fascinating, and it's sort of still structurally brilliant. To bring up one important scene, which could serve as sort of a guide or a reflection to how Nolan makes the whole picture. It's where he has his first sexual rendezvous with Jean Tatlock, played by his Communist girlfriend, during his Berkeley years before he married Kitty.

And it's a sex scene. And she suddenly gets up and goes to the bookshelf and takes the Bhagavad gita off the shelf. And says, Translate this for me. And he's about to. He's going to say, Oh, this is where Vishnu. And she says, No, no, no, no, no, she doesn't want the context, she just wants the sheer translation.

And he gives that famous, you know, I am become death destroyer worlds. And, you know, on its face, you could say, well, that's everyone's heard that as regards to Oppenheimer. But it's very interesting that, you know, film with so many scenes that we're not necessarily given context as to where this person was from. You know, for example, the affair with Ruth Tolman, you can miss that, it's possible to.

And that's an aspect of Oppenheimer as a man, which you could project onto his failings as a as a man and as a tragic character. As you say, you know, when we think about his children and how they're sort of sidelined, they're compartmentalized. And, you know, not. Included in the film is what he said about his daughter Tony, after she was born to his babysitter. I don't think I could love her.

His daughter, Tony, had lots of difficulties committed suicide as a young woman in the Caribbean. Can't have been easy to be the children of the father of the atomic bomb, period. And then you have all the difficulties of family life and parenting in that household, that was a that was a troubled household.

So this in this scene, Gene Tatlock and Robert Oppenheimer have just made love. You get the sense. It's one of his first sexual experiences. She stands up, goes to the bookshelf, pulls out this volume, it's Sanskrit.

The big line in the whole story is I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. Which he has said to have thought about. When the bomb went off at Alamogordo on July 16th, 1945.

Christopher Nolan wants to set that up, right? He wants to anticipate that in this moment so that when it actually comes, we're prepared for it. Right? Because, you know, or you tell me, why do you think he has that happen with Gene Tatlock it?

And the whole sexual element, I think creative element and destructive element is underlying the whole thing. And because he, yes, at that Trinity site, I guess spoilers. We hear that line of dialogue again in his mind, and this is after Gene Tatlock has taken her own life in 1943. Of course, and I think that's also something that haunts Oppenheimer, by the way, of course, but that tells you something about.

So I thought that worked. I really appreciated Nolan's integrity. In other words, my biggest concern going in was Here we go Hollywood, and it wasn't. It wasn't a Here we go Hollywood story at all, and it could have been. I thought they were going to sensationalize the.

We're going to take a break. I'm talking to Niles Schwartz, he is my dear friend of the Twin Cities, who has taught me a great deal about cinema. And I have so wanted to hear your perspective on this film, which you have now seen twice. We'll be back in just a moment.

You're listening to, listening to America.

Welcome back to listening to America, Niles. Let's start with this. As a film lover, and and as a film historian, were there things in the film that you did not think worked?

I mean, for example, after Gene Tatlock dies, we see Oppenheimer mourning and Kitty coming in and sort of snap out of it. You know, this is your moment, this is, you know, you have to do this big thing and I and get ahold of yourself here. Yeah, and my tendency, the way I would stage that moment is just to stay with Oppenheimer a little bit at the same time.

When I think about that and Nolan's design for the whole thing, the movie would be four or five hours long. Because what he's doing is he's making a symphony, he doesn't really have all these long drawn out scenes, working up almost musically up to some sort of momentum. And I. I immediately fell in love with that style in his youth. To me, it was hypnotic and I was, I was almost in tears there, just in terms of awe.

And Oppenheimer is such a depressive youth, we almost see him murder Blackett, his professor, for example. Which, you know, brings up some really ominous implications for how we assess his character. This is someone who, and he has that kind of look in his eyes. Of, you know, I was thinking of James Holman, the Joker Killer, the person who shot a bunch of people in the movie theater in 2012. Who was also a genius, apparently a neuroscience genius, who didn't get help for the schizoid disorder that he had. But it makes you think about where J. Robert Oppenheimer, this young man, this confused, lonely young man, could have gone.

But he finds in the quantum mechanics something that pulverizes him and art, you know, the way he, we have him. Looking at a portrait of Picasso, a Picasso portrait, a nude descending a stair, I mean, there's that.

So what I'm saying is that it didn't matter to me. It's the film is structurally brilliant because that momentum goes to the Trinity Test, which is drawn out and is magnificent. And you know, I was the whole theater for basically two thirds of this movie, I think, was hunched forward, just really engrossed. And then what happens after that? In the gymnasium scene, which is a scene that I'd love to talk about, it's one of the best things, no, it is the best thing that Christopher Nolan has ever done.

That's not the way that, that's not the way you apprehend this.

And as we get engrossed in the intrigues of these two hearings. And we are more just into the drama of, and, you know, the outrage of the red scare and things like that. It doesn't matter. We've forgotten that this fireball could come down and burn us all to bits and civilization into oblivion. And then at the end, we're sucked back into that quite brilliantly, I think, and it leaves us totally left me totally unsettled, as one should be. A friend of mine told me that she was in tears at the end and she didn't know why.

And I love.

And then Einstein appears to snub him as he walks by. And so this is part of Nolan's suggestion. That Strauss had it in for Oppenheimer almost from the beginning, that he somehow felt that Oppenheimer was his enemy or undermining him. Turns out, it wasn't true that what Oppenheimer did say to Einstein was this. Remember when we talked about the fact that this thing could ignite the atmosphere, this chain reaction, and that it could destroy the world? Which was a brief, you know, concern in the physics of the thing?

He says that I think we have started the chain reaction. In other words, that it's inevitable that at some point, a Putin is going to detonate the next one. And Oppenheimer's view was.

And well, why did they do that? But then later, when we see it in color, that's very important, that suddenly a scene, a moment in time, is in color. It's nuanced and we're taken into the intimacy of the moment and how private moments are different from public ones. As Oppenheimer tells his lawyer in the film, Who's sort of queasy about having Lloyd Garrison, this kind of ineffectual but very nice lawyer, Lloyd Garrison.

Garrison's sort of queasy about having kitty talk to Rob, played by Jason Clarke. Oppenheimer says Well, you know, no one knows any. The only people that know about people's relationships are adolescents and fools, and you're neither. And so when we assess someone from a distance, we don't, you know, whether it's a relationship or whether it's the inner world of a person. And Oppenheimer? What I love about him is that he's such a centripetal person. His trial people are like, Why are you being a martyr?

Well, it's almost like Socrates, there's a stoic resignation to him. You know what will be, will be. And I think that's an important thing to take into consideration. With this movie about a guy who was, as we say nowadays, hashtag cancelled. Which, you know, leads me to a very crucial, and I thought, magnificent scene. And that is the scene about Pot with Colonel Posh and discussing the Chevalier affair.

And Posh was is played by the actor Casey Affleck, who has is an actor who has sort of been again, as we say. Hashtag cancelled after he won the Academy Award for Manchester by the Sea for these allegations of sexual misconduct. I think in 2010 or 2011.

And Nolan deliberately teases this bad guy, Posh, you know, he doesn't show us to us, and when he does, show us to show him to us. The whole theater where I was gasped.

I mean, his, his, his sexual behavior enough to cancel him as a. As a significant Hollywood actor, I, I had forgotten all that. I'll just tell you this now is, it didn't work for me. When I watch a film and I can see Casey Affleck rather than Posh, or when I can see Matt Damon rather than Groves, it's not working for me, and those are the two characters that didn't work for me, especially Groves Damon's performance.

I think what he, I think, he just called it in you. You might disagree with me, but I thought Casey Affleck was miscast in this role. And if it, and if Nolan was casting him for all this other crap that's going on in Hollywood, then I think that's a pretty. That's almost a narcissistic thing to do.

He's a bully, he's irascible, he's irrational, he strikes out, he's mean-spirited.

He's cruel, he's brilliant, and he was essential to holding this project together. But I felt that that Matt Damon was too likable and too sympathetic.

I thought Kenneth Branagh was going to do that too, and he surprised me. Did any of the acting not work for you in the film? Strangely enough, I was going to say, Branagh?

I mean, I thought I heard Branagh's accent slip a couple of times, but it didn't again, didn't bother me. I mean, a lot of people complained about Gary Oldman, who plays Harry Truman. I'm curious what you think about that scene? That scene, I thought, was very interesting. Because the first time I saw the movie, I thought that Truman was being very dismissive of Oppenheimer. The second time I saw it, I saw the darkness in Oldman's eyes.

You know, this is a guy who played Sid Vicious and Joe Orton and Dracula and Lee Harvey Oswald. And I saw a lot more ambivalence there, like a guy who maybe Oldman was like, Look, I dropped the bomb on these people. And I'm actually, this is on my part, this burden, it's not your thing, this is my thing, so don't tell me.

That was Niels Bohr's view, too, that our only chance was to share the information and not monopolize it. And so he thinks that Truman is not really even understanding. He looked down on Truman because Truman was a haberdasher and he had been an FDR guy. And Truman only learned about the bomb on the day that he took the oath of office, he had never even heard of it before, as the vice president of the United States.

So there's this meeting, and Oppenheimer says, After all, I have blood on my hands. And at that point, you see, and I thought, this was brilliant acting. I want your perspective, but you watch Oldman pull back and stiffen in a really powerful way, and then he, he ends the meeting.

And he takes, he leans back, and that's where I see that darkness, and and in the room, that's where, you know, to me, the scene became a lot more.

What do you make of the score?

And in the end, it works, because when he does take the music out later on in the movie, in a couple moments, there's magnificent sound work. By having music everywhere else, when you have it where it's not there, it's more efficacious. I agree with that criticism of the movie. And if it was me and not Christopher?

Yeah, it sounds like an inevitability that this momentum is building. And I think that that was very effective. Even. And it's meant to be disturbing, right? I mean, if the soundtrack doesn't disturb you in this movie, it hasn't.

And you realize that it's the stomping in this gymnasium and where Oppenheimer is giving a speech. And he's saying, I bet the Japanese didn't like what we accomplished here. And that's greeted with silence. We see the people screaming, but we hear a little girl scream just before it cuts out, and then the walls are shaking in the background. And what's happening here? It reminds me of, you know, the great sound and film editor Walter Murch, who did work for Coppola and the Godfather trilogy. Apocalypse. Now. And the conversation and the expressive way that you would use sound to draw you into this, almost.

You know, we want to say quantum world, you know the hidden world within a scene and what happened there, you know. You suddenly cut to this blinding light like a nuclear blast and see a closeup of a woman. A young girl played by Nolan's daughter, by the way, whose skin is molting. And it's not grotesque, but it is absolutely horrifying. And to me, you know, a lot of people have been complaining about this movie because it doesn't show the effect of the bomb.

I think the dissociation from the effect of what is happening versus kind of the psychological knowledge about what's happening, that you know, that gestalt, that is what actually makes the movie more effective. And to have just cut to say what, you know. What happened in Hiroshima may have undermined the power of the movie as a whole. And there are other movies you can see that do show the destructiveness of the bomb, like Hiroshima, Monomore or Kurosawa's I Live.

I want to talk about, of course, the star Gillian Murphy, and I want to talk about Robert Downey Jr. listening to a special edition of Listening to America. We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm with my friend Niles Schwartz. Let me just go straight to Emily Blunt. I've watched some of her films. Kitty Oppenheimer was a complicated woman.

She was an alcoholic, she had a lot of anger, the marriage, that was lots of tension. She was aware that there were other women in his world. Both from the past and during the Manhattan project, there are a couple of scenes where she's clearly drunk.

It's hard to like Kitty Oppenheimer, but in the end, when Roger Robb is going after her, I think this is so brilliantly done. At first, she's sort of choked up and can't speak, and it's not clear she's going to be a successful witness at all. And then suddenly, Niles, she comes alive in a kind of controlled rage. And I thought that was one of the great moments in the film. What did you think?

And we'll talk about Downey soon, but yes, Blunt is perfect for that moment. It pays off that we'll get her a nomination.

Here's an interesting thing, you know, your perspective and my perspective. I don't follow film the way you do, so I'm looking at the film sort of in a naive way. You have this kind of complicated set of layers, you've seen them in other things, you know their signatures, you know how they are. Their range of emotion that enriches it for you, really makes it a complicated thing, a phenomenon. It's way more than just a film with its narrative lines, right?

There's also just the whole tension of.

I quibble with a couple of things, and one of them is with the argument Oppenheimer, in some sense, self-destructed so that he would be martyred before he had to face. The implications of how the atomic devices were going to be used in the Cold War and beyond. And I think that that's something of a stretch. I knew you caught the Dr. Strangelove moment with the Suntan lotion and the goggles on Edward Teller, right?

I mean, over the top. And it's true he did put on Suntan lotion. But it is clearly a tribute to Dr. Strangelove, the strangelove-ian element of him as he's smiling.

And he does a kind of a wow, remember? He's like, Wow.

Does it win?

Assess his acting and tell me the scenes where you.

I don't know, and I don't care. But there is something oblique about how he approaches people and talks to people. His body language, his mannerisms, they're all perfectly modulated. If you had to predict, do you think he wins at this stage? Yes, I mean, I'm happy that he's not. I know a lot of people know who Cillian Murphy is.

He's been in obviously a lot of movies, he's rarely been the lead, certainly in a movie this big, he might be the frontrunner. I know that, you know DiCaprio and Flower Moon, and you know Adam. Driver in Ferrari Michael Mann's Ferrari, so he'll have competition.

But again, people have seen Oppenheimer, and I'm not sure how many people will have seen those movies. At least in the numbers this movie will make, probably 250 million domestic.

They say, turn on the radio. Turns out that the bomb, of course, was successful. And he goes into this meeting. And I know I just read this again today. Instead of coming in the front door, he decides to come in the back door in a big, dramatic way.

People are cheering and oppy, oppy, oppy, oppy waiting for him. They go nuts. When he comes in, he stands up and he says those really stark things. Like, I bet the Japanese didn't like this, and I wish we'd had it in time for the Germans.

And they at that point, they go sort of into a release. I think, I think, going back to what you said earlier in this conversation, there's the only way you come to terms with this thing is some sort of cathartic laughter, crying, nervous. Breakdown alters your life. But everyone has come to terms with the fact that they have created this incredibly successful thing with an enormous esprit de corps. Which also evaporated almost 100,000 people instantaneously in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. And so they're all going to live with this in one way or another.

Like Oppenheimer, as played by Murphy in that scene, we're sort of well. Is this a moment of jubilation, or of devastation and annihilation? The sex underneath the stand suggests creation, procreation and everything else. You know, stepping on this ashen corpse suggests something quite the contrary. I mean, the movie begins with these ripples on water of raindrops, and then it ends with ripples of fire on the planet Earth. But this movie is all about theory versus what's real, and as viewers, we are.

Cinema is all about seeing the impossible and then going home and speculating on it from there, and that's why I love the lacunae in the movie, that hidden stuff that's not explained to us. Because just as we're thinking about global annihilation, we're also thinking about Ruth Tolman, we're thinking about the hidden world of Kitty and Oppie and Jean Tatlock. Chevalier's relationship to Oppenheimer I mean, that's it's really that, you know, back to the posh scene, and what's really interesting about that is we never see Oppenheimer say Chevalier's name. Give him name, the name, and it's almost like he can't admit to himself that he has named the name.

It's sort of like, when you've done something bad in your life, whether it's infidelity or, you know, betraying a friend, it's something that you don't want to address. And face in the mirror. That's what I love about Murphy's performance.

And Strauss's world is black.

I think there's no question about that. I think it's possibly, but you'll tell me what I think. It's maybe the greatest performance of his career, I think it's frankly the greatest performance in the film. There's a scene when he comes apart after it becomes clear that he's maybe not going to get approved. I almost was wanting to hide the.

He's just a stuffed shirt, a self-made man who got very powerful, self-made man like Oppenheimer's father. But he's just all about surfaces, all about public presentation, and then when it hits him that I'm not going to get it.

It's just animal comes out and it climaxes really with that smile about which I spoke when he has to face the reporters. And that's such a it's like a trademark Downey Jr. smile, you know? And I think that's a perfect capstone for, you know, his man, you know the actor whose career has gone up and down, you know, from less than zero. And shortcuts and natural born killers, and then his drug problems. And then reascending with Zodiac, where he's magnificent in tropic thunder.

And then he just, he had the wonderful turn in Iron man. Am I over praising this performance? No, this is a perfect antagonist. I was so happy because the marketing of Oppenheimer was great, because if you just saw the trailers for Oppenheimer, you would have thought it's all set in Los Alamos. And I wanted Strauss, because, you know, reading American Prometheus. Yeah, he's not a big part of it, but he's a perfect heel.

He's a perfect antagonist, a perfect foil. And, uh, I find the the, you know, red scare stuff to be really, really engrossing, really fascinating. And him fulfilling. That was. And Nolan spent not only just featuring him as much as he did, but making him kind of the the second. You know, the antipode to to Oppenheimer, and you know, the movie begins with section one is fishing, and that's Oppenheimer's point of view in color, and section two is fusion.

And that's Strauss's point of view, and that's in black and white, and I was so happy that we had that much of Strauss. And yeah, it is a great performance, I think that he will be.

Rewarded for it, we will see, though, people are saying, and this is a whole other conversation. That, uh, Ryan Gosling as Ken and Barbie is going to give him a run for his money, and I will say that Gosling is terrific and Barbie. I didn't like the movie, but I did.

You see them both on the same day. I did the second day, I saw Oppie, uh, in the afternoon. And then I thought about it and I thought, Okay, I'll just get this over with. And I saw Barbie in the evening, and, uh, that Barbie didn't, it didn't play that.

Well, for me, it didn't land. It felt like a 100 minute SNL sketch. And I like Greta Gerwig's other films. But there was some great stuff in it, you know? Some great homages to Singing in the Rain and, uh, Vincent Minelli's Uh, American in Paris and things like that.

And Gosling, as Ken, was terrific. He stole the movie and when he's not on, it's, Yeah, Margot Robbie's great, but, you know, the movie itself didn't land that well for me. I will see it.

This is this will be one of the greatest films this will rank with, you know, and and and words like Citizen Kane come up and so on. I when I heard all that, I thought I got to do a reality check with Niles on this. It's impossible to know, of course, but but what do you think this film winds?

I can't say if it's going to be in the canon, but I will say that it had. I totally think it's a four star excellent, if not perfect, not perfect, but nothing's perfect, but an excellent film. And, uh, ultimately, I have to say I loved it, and so it's.

Um, everyone knows there's an atomic bomb. Most people have heard of a guy named J. Robert Oppenheimer. Some people think, oh yeah, he had a fall or something, or he was a he was a security risk. What is it about this film that's grabbing the attention of the American people at this time, much as I say?

And by we, I mean general audiences and more high brow audiences in some cases. And you know, when a film can do that, that's success thumbs up.

I plan to have a piece on Oppenheimer at the point, at the point mag.

Com within the next few weeks, uh, slowly bringing all my past writing to this sub stack. So um, we'll see. Since the pandemic.

AI.