More like loves talking about Barbie being the end of masculinity.
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Lol probably true
Gerwig’s film is towering over Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the weekend’s other new wide release.
Barbie started off with a stupendous $70.5 million on Friday, including $22.3 million in previews. If early modeling is correct, the Warner Bros. movie is headed for a historic $155 million-plus opening domestically [and] a projected international debut as high as $120 million.
The next closest 2023 launch belonged to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ($120.7 million), followed by Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 ($118.4 million) and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ($106.9 million). Otherwise, many releases haven’t been able to inch past the $100 million mark.
Nolan’s movie earned $33 million on Friday for a projected $77 million weekend, which would mark the filmmaker’s third-biggest domestic debut behind The Dark Knight Rises ($160.9 million) and The Dark Knight ($158.4 million), not adjusted for inflation. It also will come in ahead of recent summer pics including The Flash, Elemental and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Barbenheimer isn’t making life easy for Tom Cruise starrer Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, which posted a five-day debut of $78.5 million after launching in U.S. theaters on July 12. Early estimates show the film dropping more than 55 percent to $20 million-$21 million in its second outing despite even better reviews than Barbie and Oppenheimer. Right now, it is in a close race with Sound of Freedom for third place.
Sound of Freedom
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/UnlawfulHeartyChanticleer-size_restricted.gif
Billed as a political thriller, the faith-based movie stars The Passion of the Christ’s Jim Caviezel as the real-life Tim Ballard, who worked as an agent for the Department of Homeland Security before embarking on his own quest to bring child traffickers to justice. While the conservative-leaning Sound of Freedom has been discussed on QAnon message boards, Angel says it isn’t a QAnon movie. In late 2021, Caviezel spoke at a QAnon convention in Las Vegas, where he invoked the QAnon slogan, “The storm is upon us.”
Damn that is a devastating paragraph for my love for twenty year old Jim Caviezel movies.
The South has gone WOKE???
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Last night I finished MI2 on Pluto. Took 4 sessions over a week. I’m not going to watch Oppenheimer in a theater. My favorite western is Rio Bravo. I guess I’m just not a movie guy.
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Good post. since you mentioned The Insider recently, I have to say that rewatching it last month was this for me, exact same feelings as when I saw it in high school : well-made but ultimately too predictable/obvious for me to care about any of it.
(On the other hand, I got a higher appreciation for many of the other Michael Mann’s I rewatched last year)
90% of the time a rewatch will have me feel the exact same, but it’s still worth to try…
And some of my favorite movies I only liked on my second watch (Vertigo, Heaven’s Gate), although this probably had a lot to do to only watching them on a small screen/bad quality the first time.
Speaking of rewatches, this is one I should try again. Old school Hollywood is something I wasn’t keen on when I was young, as I was more interested in movies where the director shows off with his visual style, or there is some sort of surprises/edginess, which you don’t see often in Hollywood 40s/50s. But for instance I rewatched “His Girl Friday” recently and loved it (unlike high school me). Maybe I’m at the point where I can understand why old school cinephiles adored John Ford / Howard Hawkes (neither really ever clicked for me).
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Wait is Mario Bros a 2022 movie?
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I mainly like Rio Bravo because it’s fun. Idk anything about movie making or acting. Wayne did it as a response to High Noon, so it’s political in some ways but I could have gone my whole life without knowing that.
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Oppenheimer really has a 15 minute sex scene?
Immediately after quoting the Bhagavad Gita post-nuke test, the movies cuts to a sex scene in which his orgasm is replaced by a replay of the nuclear explosion.
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For 15 minutes?
Well it’s 2 minutes of sex followed by 13 minutes of muted conversation in bad lighting with two fully nude men.
Who knew Oppenheimer had a secret gay lover?
No
I can understand that The Insider isn’t for everyone; it’s not like some movies where it genuinely confuses me when someone isn’t on board. In terms of “too predictable/obvious,” that just seems like a reality of movies based on true stories. Granted that most true stories are not Titanic and the audience isn’t basically all going to know “yeah, the boat is fucked, we’re just watching it happen,” so there are generally still unknown elements, but I do think The Insider relies on connecting to the performances. I much prefer 70s Pacino to modern Pacino, but along with Glengarry Glen Ross, Pacino in The Insider is one of my favorite post-Scarface turns by him.
Jurassic Park, that was another 0-for-2 from me. Revisited it last year, and felt that high school me was right. But there are rewatch success stories for sure; I basically didn’t care about Goodfellas until watch #2. I only thought The Godfather was “pretty good” on first watch, though I owe most of that to getting confused in trying to keep the different characters and families straight, etc.
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I’m pretty sure I’ve given Chinatown three shots. Can’t guarantee I won’t try again.
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That’s another one that whiffed for me and I’ve intended to try again on. I can’t imagine giving a movie a third go if try #2 missed though.
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lol @ New Mexico going all-in for Oppenheimer
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Hard one to guess with Americans being so famously anti-tribalism. 
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Good points.
I think with most stories, you have to connect with the experience unique to that movie, book, TV show, podcast, etc. Otherwise it may as well be a Wikipedia entry.
I can’t bring myself to care about Oppenheimer because Nolan is a visual auteur who unfortunately delivers the same story over and over again: a debate whether that one brilliant thing a man did redeems him from otherwise being a steaming pile of shit.
And Nolan, perhaps failing his own test, simply doesn’t add enough oh shit neat stuff to transform the experience of those men to surpass what I can get from reading Wikipedia while I watch earlier Nolan movies he made with his brother still co writing his scripts, eg Memento, The Prestige, Inception.
I mean yeah the fractured timeline narrative and immersive POV stuff is neat, but we’ve seen it all before and too often in Nolan’s own movies and now with successful imitators. Memento this is not.
For me, Nolan has become an emotionally empty Stanley Kubrick.
Other movies I didn’t get until rewatching a lot later include pretty much anything by the Coen Bros.
The Big Lebowski stunned me at how lol bad it was…until rewatch. It’s better every time.
No Country for Old Men baffled me, but within a few years I was presenting at academic conferences on why it was secretly a perfect neo noir.
Another one is Jackie Brown. Might have slowly become my favorite Tarantino over the years.