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.
See this is one where I think it’s EASY to show why you keep trying.
Gene Siskel said you know a movie is good if it’s better than a documentary about the same actors having dinner together. And I think Chinatown easily passes that bar.
This is why I have always seen his thumbs up review for “My Dinner With Andre” as a backhanded compliment to Gregory and Shawn.
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LMAO hmm 
I plan to watch Oppenheimer, but you won’t find much resistance from me to your broadsides at Nolan in general. I regard him as a good director, but not nearly the historically elite one that some seem to see him as. His stuff is hit-or-miss for me. My overall dislike for Inception probably automatically leaves me on the other side of some line of demarcation.
The Coens definitely have a higher hit rate for me, and with higher highs.
Re: Tarantino, I still haven’t seen Jackie Brown even though I’ve seen and enjoyed most of his catalog (didn’t like Hateful Eight at all, but that’s the only one I can think to speak of unkindly…Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, both Kill Bills, Django, Inglorious Basterds all get varying strong marks from me). I realize the failure to see Jackie Brown is a hole in my resume.
Go on 
It’s a huge hole.
It shouldn’t really be seen as a Tarantino movie. It’s an Elmore Leonard novel adapted by Tarantino. So I mean the enthusiasm and pacing of Tarantino, and then the rhythm and storytelling chops of one of the greatest western/crime fiction authors of all time.
Adaptations of his other works are similarly acclaimed. Out of Sight was adapted as an early Soderbergh movie. Get Shorty is an insanely funny movie (didn’t see the TV show).
Get Shorty as a movie is even more funny when you realize the Danny Devito character Martin Weir is presented as “what if the world reacted to Danny Devito as tho he were Dustin Hoffman.”
Who at the time was seen as a more dramatic but just as hot (and short) version of Tom Cruise.
That film found savvy Miami-based loan shark Chili Palmer (John Travolta) tracking a debtor all the way to the sunny/smoggy vistas of Los Angeles and eventually looking to leave his life of crime behind to start anew in the movie biz. It also found him learning the hard way that show business is every bit as cutthroat as the gangster game, with various industry “insiders” endlessly testing both his wit and his will. Those who’ve seen Get Shorty know full well that Chili’s Hollywood adventure is as dangerous as it is hilarious. And those who haven’t should know Get Shorty is a crime comedy masterpiece that should head to the top of your “must-see” queue with utmost haste.
Tarantino, as you’ll recall from Jackie Brown, is a HUGE Elmore Leonard fan and turned out to be the reason John Travolta accepted the role after turning it down twice.
However, according to the Los Angeles Times, when Travolta was offered the role of Chili Palmer, he surprisingly turned it down — twice. Turns out, the man who finally convinced Travolta to take the role of Chili Palmer was his Pulp Fiction director, Quentin Tarantino, who reportedly told the actor, “John, this is not the one you say no to. This is the one you say yes to.” Thankfully, Travolta did “say yes,” and he cemented his “comeback kid” status with a Golden Globe win to boot.
The sequel Be Cool is an excellent book referenced by no less than Stephen King in “On Writing” and William Goldman in “Which Lie Did I Tell?” Despite bringing back Travolta and adding BIG name music star cameos, the movie adaptation is absolute trash.
But the book? I love to quote the opening dialogue.
“Terrific movie. And you know what else? It was good.”
And hey you know that show Justified? Based on Elmore Leonard’s stories about Raylan Givens. The pilot still retains the title of the primary novel used as source material.
You should watch Jackie Brown and Get Shorty ASAP.
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Get Shorty is a good book and a great movie. Be Cool is a good book and a bad movie, imo.
A wonderful review or obituary on Leonard noted that violence is so common in his books that people die in dependent clauses.
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Oh I don’t have any particularly harsh words. I’ve just watched it twice and I found it uninteresting both times. It’s wild to me that it’s #15 in the IMDb all-time top 250. The only thing about it I really love is the musical score. (I suppose the really rabid Nolan fans, of which there seem to be many, probably would consider this tepid criticism to be “particularly harsh” since I’m failing to sufficiently genuflect or something.)
I’ve watched two seasons of Justified. It’s a good show. I knew that about the book since I think it gets mentioned in the credits or something.
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Inception suffered from its long action sequences where a bunch of randoms flie around like the A Team or something… the idea and execution is mostly great but could lose like 20 minutes.
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Inside with Wilem Defoe is about 40 minutes too long and has a garbage fucking ending.
Did he have magnet hands to climb up the inside of the verticle vent shaft?
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Yes. They were left over from the corn bin shaft he used to cure himself of vampirism.
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