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.
For 15 minutes?
Well itâs 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 isnât for everyone; itâs not like some movies where it genuinely confuses me when someone isnât on board. In terms of âtoo predictable/obvious,â that just seems like a reality of movies based on true stories. Granted that most true stories are not Titanic and the audience isnât basically all going to know âyeah, the boat is fucked, weâre just watching it happen,â 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 didnât care about Goodfellas until watch #2. I only thought The Godfather was âpretty goodâ on first watch, though I owe most of that to getting confused in trying to keep the different characters and families straight, etc.
Iâm pretty sure Iâve given Chinatown three shots. Canât guarantee I wonât try again.
Thatâs another one that whiffed for me and Iâve intended to try again on. I canât imagine giving a movie a third go if try #2 missed though.
lol @ New Mexico going all-in for Oppenheimer
Hard one to guess with Americans being so famously anti-tribalism.
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 canât 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 doesnât 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 weâve seen it all before and too often in Nolanâs own movies and now with successful imitators. Memento this is not.
For me, Nolan has become an emotionally empty Stanley Kubrick.
Other movies I didnât get until rewatching a lot later include pretty much anything by the Coen Bros.
The Big Lebowski stunned me at how lol bad it wasâŚuntil rewatch. Itâs 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 itâs EASY to show why you keep trying.
Gene Siskel said you know a movie is good if itâs 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 âMy Dinner With Andreâ as a backhanded compliment to Gregory and Shawn.
LMAO hmm
I plan to watch Oppenheimer, but you wonât 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 havenât seen Jackie Brown even though Iâve seen and enjoyed most of his catalog (didnât like Hateful Eight at all, but thatâs the only one I can think to speak of unkindlyâŚPulp 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
Itâs a huge hole.
It shouldnât really be seen as a Tarantino movie. Itâs 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 (didnât 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 âwhat if the world reacted to Danny Devito as tho he were Dustin Hoffman.â
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 âinsidersâ endlessly testing both his wit and his will. Those whoâve seen Get Shorty know full well that Chiliâs Hollywood adventure is as dangerous as it is hilarious. And those who havenât should know Get Shorty is a crime comedy masterpiece that should head to the top of your âmust-seeâ queue with utmost haste.
Tarantino, as youâll 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 â 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, âJohn, this is not the one you say no to. This is the one you say yes to.â Thankfully, Travolta did âsay yes,â and he cemented his âcomeback kidâ status with a Golden Globe win to boot.
The sequel Be Cool is an excellent book referenced by no less than Stephen King in âOn Writingâ and William Goldman in âWhich Lie Did I Tell?â 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.
âTerrific movie. And you know what else? It was good.â
And hey you know that show Justified? Based on Elmore Leonardâs 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.
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.
Oh I donât have any particularly harsh words. Iâve just watched it twice and I found it uninteresting both times. Itâs wild to me that itâs #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 âparticularly harshâ since Iâm failing to sufficiently genuflect or something.)
Iâve watched two seasons of Justified. Itâs a good show. I knew that about the book since I think it gets mentioned in the credits or something.
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.