Griselda 

from The Upstream: https://cvhsnews.org/16313/arts-entertainment/griselda-review-netflix-and-vergara-take-on-la-dona-gris/

By Joseph Mutagaya

The story is all too familiar by now. The feared drug lord who came from rags and rose above even the farthest reaches of the American dream into the fabled one percent. Yet this story has become, (in my humble opinion), played out.

Now to be fair, what attracted me to this show was the idea of a female drug lord. I’ve seen the treasure trove of stories and media about the men who made their fortunes on the slopes, but not too many about the women. Typically, these men are the pinnacle of male chauvinism to every single woman they meet with the obvious exception of their darling mothers. Say what you will about Freud…

That being said, I know for a fact I’m not the only one that loves these stories. From “Narcos” to the hilariously named “Cocaine Cowboys,” there has been story after movie after TV show glorifying drug lords; their lavish lifestyles, their charisma, and usually, their women, and we eat it up.

And who can blame us? If there’s one thing humans love in a sort of sick, animalistic, way, it’s violence. From the beginning of motion pictures, no matter how big the screen, we have seen, (and oftentimes applauded), pieces of media as much for their shocking portrayals of wealth as their portrayals of violence. But what happens when the victims of our curiosity are real? What happens when we are forced to confront the fact that there are real people whose lives have been destroyed by these kingpins? How can we hold these people and the studios that profit from their telling, are held accountable? I want to answer those questions and more in my review of Griselda. But first, what’s it all about?


“Griselda” follows the story of the legendary Colombian coke dealer and her rise to the top of the Miami drug scene. The show starts with a bang. Played by the eminent Sofia Vergara, Blanco hobbles desperately into her home, hands covered in her blood. She urges her children to pack their bags as she rushes into a restroom and reveals a gruesome gash on her side.

We get a glimpse of her firm, almost forceful personality as she invites herself to her friend Carmen’s home in Miami. Carmen (played by Vanessa Ferlito), initially hesitates until Griselda reveals she is fleeing her violent husband. Fighting through the pain, Blanco scrubs what little of her existence she can from the home and rushes with her young boys, (Uber, Dixon and Ozzy), to the airport; to America, to safety.

If that didn’t get your blood rushing, you’re either heartless or I’m a bad writer (and I’m not a bad writer). All jokes aside though, that opening scene is a strong example of how to start a TV show. And trust me, “Griselda” had all the tools to be an amazing show.

In my opinion, the acting is the biggest appeal. The performance of Sofia Vergara is seen by many as a refreshing departure from the stereotype she’s usually pigeonholed into, but I disagree. There are, (of course), glaring differences between her role as ‘Gloria’ in “Modern Family,” for example, but the two characters share many of the same struggles.

Both are underestimated because of their beauty, their accents, and their womanhood; both are never truly accepted by the WASP-y people they’re surrounded by; and both are fiercely dedicated, (albeit imperfect), mothers.

While I understand wholeheartedly the reason some criticize Vergara’s typecasting, particularly in her iconic role in “Modern Family,” there is as much merit in that performance as this one. Adding a sepia tone doesn’t immediately increase the quality of the actor’s performance. What differentiates these two performances is how the makers of the show choose to present this archetype.

Her performance was spectacular; Vergara inhabits Blanco perfectly, capturing her tenderness, her business savvy, and her rapid descent into callous violence and greed. The show makers worked hard to make sure that we, (the audience), didn’t see the actress Sofia Vergara, spending hours applying makeup and prosthetics but in reality, I, (and I think most people), still only see Vergara, and that’s O.K.

Although Netflix has certainly been successful in marketing the legend of, ‘Griselda, Queenpin of Cocaine,’ one thing stood out to me as I watched this show. The violence.

In real life, Griselda Blanco was famous for her brutality. Most armchair historians believe that her status as a woman in a male-dominated industry played a large part in shaping her leadership style, including her proneness to violence. Perhaps she felt a need to prove herself; to prove she could be just as cold and calculating as her testosterone-afflicted contemporaries. Perhaps she was psycho. Perhaps she was just a little bit of a jerk.

Whatever the cause, if Blanco was one thing, it was bloody. And I’m not talking about “a few unlucky people get caught in the crossfire” bloody, I’m talking about “implicated in almost 200 murders throughout her career” bloody.

But from time immemorial, we’ve told tall tales about the lives of historical figures. Just think about George Washington and that cherry tree. Although most of “Griselda” is historically accurate, there were some changes made to her tale.

First and foremost, if Griselda Blanco’s life was anything, it was poorly documented. Much of what I could find on her comes from anecdotal folktales and hearsay about her brutality, but we do know a little.

We know for a fact she was born in Colombia in 1943 and got her start as a sex worker. Through this line of work, she reportedly met her husband. According to the BBC, her time in Miami was not her first in the States; she moved to New York with her husband in the 60’s, where she allegedly sold marijuana.

While the show portrays her separation from her first husband as the result of a passion-induced double homicide, some sources say she divorced her husband and had him killed much later.

A few creative liberties were taken here and there, but each one seems plausible enough for it to retain the show’s otherwise dedication to accuracy. Her love affair with Dario, the suave hit-man turned Blanco henchman, was very real, but her travel agency-owning friend Carmen wasn’t. There is, however, one plot point that, (realistic as it seems), was very obviously added for kicks.

In the fifth episode of “Griselda,” ‘Paradise Lost,’ Blanco holds a raucous, luxurious birthday party for Dario that exposes the deep flaws in the fabric of her business, her family, and her character. Throughout the episode, Blanco begins abusing cocaine and later, crack cocaine.

This sends her spiraling off the edge as the party descends into a hedonistic bacchanal and the effect of the drugs combined with increased pressure from the Miami PD and FBI, kicks up her paranoia to a ten.

Vergara’s performance in this episode was, (in my esteemed opinion), nothing short of Emmy-worthy. She, (the actress), can shift, even from the paranoia that already grips Blanco in later episodes to a level of truly terrific, primal, illogical and unreasonable fear and anger that is a true delight to watch. To put it briefly, she loses her ever-loving mind. But it has no basis in reality.

From my research, the party was a complete fabrication and there is no evidence to suggest that Blanco and her children did drugs.

Last, (but most certainly not least), let’s talk about June.

June Hawkins, played by Juliana Aiden Martinez, is an analyst for the Miami PD whose work was crucial in catching Blanco. Unlike some other characters in the show, June was very real and even worked with the producers to ensure the show stayed accurate.

Despite being a brilliant analyst, Hawkins struggles daily for respect and acceptance from her deeply chauvinistic colleagues while balancing life as a newly single mother. Sound familiar? That’s because the show makes a big, (and in my, again, esteemed opinion), smart point of driving home the similarities between Blanco and Hawkins.

Martinez, (who portrays June Hawkins), does an excellent job bringing vulnerability to the generally glacial atmosphere of the show. Unlike Blanco, no matter how gruesome, grueling, or how impactful the case, Hawkins refuses to sacrifice her humanity for her gain.

Reveling in her victory, Hawkins exchanges sharp words and even sharper glares with Blanco as she placidly lays out the details of her case. But when Blanco is overcome by car sickness, Hawkins has the convoy stopped to give her time to recover. Even after finally catching Blanco in the sixth and final episode, Hawkins’ rare spark of humanity is one of many cherries to top this show. Although, there is one last thing I’d like to note.

For all her Machiavellian maneuvering and designer dresses, Blanco was still a drug dealer and a vicious murderer and I am pleased to say this show makes a point of highlighting that. That everyone in her inner circle; her first bodyguard, her husband, her henchmen, her children, all lived in fear of her wrath. The series concludes with Blanco on a beach after having served her time in prison. Like dominoes, everyone she loved fell; Dario by her hand, Uber while making a deal, Ozzy at a club and Dixon while simply walking to his car. Taking one last puff of her cigarette, she traces out the shape of her son one last time, and we get a sense, a feeling that we suspect she feels too, that she has gotten what she deserved.

From WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13_(film)

 

Apollo 13 (1995)

On July 20, 1969, astronaut Jim Lovell hosts a party where guests watch Neil Armstrong's televised first steps on the Moon from Apollo 11. Lovell, who orbited the Moon on Apollo 8, tells his wife Marilyn that he will return to the Moon to walk on its surface.

Three months later, as Lovell is conducting a VIP tour of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building, his boss Deke Slayton informs him that his crew will fly Apollo 13 instead of 14, swapping flights with Alan Shepard's crew. Lovell, Ken Mattingly, and Fred Haise train for their mission. Days before launch in April 1970, Mattingly is exposed to German measles, and the flight surgeon demands his replacement with Mattingly's backup, Jack Swigert. Lovell resists breaking up his team, but relents when Slayton threatens to bump his crew to a later mission. As the launch date approaches, Marilyn has a nightmare about her husband dying in space, and tells Lovell she will not go to Kennedy Space Center to see him off for an unprecedented fourth launch. She later changes her mind and surprises him.

On launch day, Flight Director Gene Kranz in Houston's Mission Control Center gives the go for launch. As the Saturn V rocket climbs through the atmosphere, a second stage engine cuts off prematurely, but the craft reaches its Earth parking orbit. After the third stage fires again to send Apollo 13 to the Moon, Swigert performs the maneuver to turn the Command Module Odyssey around to dock with the Lunar Module Aquarius and pull it away from the spent rocket.

Three days into the mission, by order of Mission Control, Swigert turns on the liquid oxygen stirring fans. An electrical short causes a tank to explode, emptying its contents into space and sending the craft tumbling. The other tank is soon found to be leaking. Consumables manager Sy Liebergot convinces Kranz that shutting off two of Odyssey's three fuel cells offers the best chance to stop the leak, but this does not work. With only one fuel cell, mission rules dictate the Moon landing be aborted. Lovell and Haise power up Aquarius to use as a "lifeboat", while Swigert shuts down Odyssey to save its battery power for the return to Earth. Kranz charges his team with bringing the astronauts home, declaring "failure is not an option". Consumables manager John Aaron recruits Mattingly to help him improvise a procedure to restart Odyssey for the landing on Earth.

As the crew watches the Moon pass beneath them, Lovell laments his lost dream of walking on its surface, then turns his crew's attention to the business of getting home. With Aquarius running on minimal electrical power and rationed water supply, the crew suffers from freezing conditions, and Haise develops a urinary tract infection. Swigert suspects Mission Control is concealing the fact they are doomed; Haise angrily blames Swigert's inexperience for the accident; but Lovell quashes the argument. As Aquarius's carbon dioxide filters run out, concentration of the gas approaches a dangerous level. Ground control improvises a "Rube Goldberg" device to make the Command Module's incompatible filter cartridges work in the Lunar Module. With Aquarius's navigation systems shut down, the crew makes a vital course correction manually by steering the Lunar Module and controlling its engine.

Mattingly and Aaron struggle to find a way to power up the Command Module systems without drawing too much power, and finally read the procedure to Swigert, who restarts Odyssey by drawing the extra power from Aquarius. When the crew jettisons the Service Module, they are surprised by the extent of the damage, raising the possibility that the ablative heat shield was compromised. As they release Aquarius and re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, no one is sure that Odyssey's heat shield is intact.

The tense period of radio silence due to ionization blackout is longer than normal, but the astronauts report all is well, and the world watches Odyssey splash down and celebrates their return. As helicopters bring the crew aboard the USS Iwo Jima for a hero's welcome, Lovell's voice-over describes the cause of the explosion, and the subsequent careers of Haise, Swigert, Mattingly, and Kranz. He wonders if and when mankind will return to the Moon.

Maestro (2023)

from Roger Ebert.com: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/maestro-movie-review-2023

Maestro

Christy Lemire
November 22, 2023


With “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper tells the story of a generation-defining artistic innovator in the most traditional way possible: through the familiar tropes and linear narrative of a standard biopic.

Directing and starring as the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, Cooper has crafted a film that’s technically dazzling but emotionally frustrating. The script he co-wrote with Josh Singer (“Spotlight”) follows a well-trod, episodic path: This happened, then this happened, then this happened. Ultimately, it falls into the same trap as so many biopics, especially prestige pictures with major award aspirations: In covering a huge swath of an extremely famous person’s life, it ends up feeling superficial.

And yet, you should see it. Yes, this sounds contradictory, but “Maestro” is so consistently spectacular from an aesthetic perspective that it’s worth watching. The cinematography, costumes, and production design are all evocative and precise as they evolve with the times over 40 some-odd years of Bernstein’s life. Behind the camera, Cooper takes a big swing in making you feel as if you’re watching a movie that was made in the ’40s and continues to do so with each era. Shooting in high-contrast black and white and Academy ratio, Matthew Libatique—an Oscar nominee as director of photography on Cooper’s debut feature, “A Star Is Born”—works wonders with a single light bulb on a barren stage, for example. There’s a shot where Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre, who will become Bernstein’s wife, steps off a bus at night and walks up the street to the party where she’ll meet him for the first time, and it’s breathtaking in its cinematic authenticity. The lush Technicolor of scenes set in the ‘60s and ’70 offers its own vibrant allure. And inspired transitions from editor Michelle Tesoro carry the story across time and place in thrilling fashion.

Cooper has clearly taken great care in getting the details right, big and small. That includes spending six years learning how to conduct to perfect a particularly essential scene: a six-plus minute recreation of Bernstein leading the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony No. 2 at Ely Cathedral in 1973. (Yannick Nézet-Séguin was Cooper’s crucial conducting consultant.) The camera roams fluidly across the orchestra, choir, and soloists, the music overtaking his entire body and booming throughout this majestic edifice. Bernstein is passionate and rapturous with perspiration; this is the apex of his joy. The whole film is worth seeing in a theater before it begins streaming on Netflix on Dec. 20, but this lengthy, cathartic moment is one you’ll want to experience with the best possible picture and sound.

But while Bernstein’s music is woven throughout—including an amusing use of his “West Side Story” prologue during a period of marital discord—we never truly understand him deeply as a musician or a man. He’s a legend, a larger-than-life cultural force in mid-century America whose persona extends far beyond the rarefied circles of the classical music world. But the necessarily performative nature of Bernstein’s existence, as a closeted gay man, keeps us at a distance as viewers, too. Fully aware of his brilliance and increasing celebrity, he was always “on.” We spy a few glimmers of his intimate happiness with various men, including Matt Bomer as a clarinetist ex-boyfriend, with whom he shares a heartbreaking, tearful farewell on a Manhattan sidewalk. But a tantalizing, unfulfilled quality to the characterization lingers throughout.

Lenny’s relationship with Felicia was complicated, yet “Maestro” rarely digs far beyond the surface. The two share a bubbly, infectious chemistry as they meet and fall in love—and Cooper the director wisely lets these scenes, and later the couple’s arguments, play out in long, single takes. The affection between them feels genuine, and Mulligan is frequently magnificent, finding avenues in her portrayal of Felicia that elevate it beyond the mere woman-behind-the-man notion. And yet, the Costa Rican-Chilean actress is often literally in Bernstein’s shadow; one image finds her standing in the wings as her husband conducts, with the exaggerated shape of him swallowing her up as if he were a monster. (Mulligan is also the beneficiary of costume designer Mark Bridges’ most exquisite fashions throughout the film.) But how does Felicia truly feel about sharing her husband with a series of men, most younger and fawning? She catches him kissing a party guest in the hallway of their apartment in the historic Dakota building and icily scolds him: “Fix your hair. You’re getting sloppy.” That comes close to the real, raw emotion that would have given “Maestro” more heft.

Speaking of the skin-deep nature of the movie, much has been made about Cooper’s decision to wear elaborate prosthetics to make his transformation into Bernstein more complete. The prominent nose, in particular, has been a source of consternation, as Cooper is not Jewish. (Bernstein’s children have defended the choice.) Makeup guru Kazu Hiro, who won Academy Awards for turning Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill for “The Darkest Hour” and Charlize Theron into Megyn Kelly for “Bombshell,” does thoroughly convincing work here, especially when Bernstein appears as a 70-year-old man at the very beginning and end of the film.

Something does happen toward the film’s conclusion, though, that deserves criticism. It’s the late 1980s, and the frame has expanded to widescreen. Bernstein drives his Jaguar convertible, blaring R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” Just as he zooms into the center of the shot, lead singer Michael Stipe yells the lyric “Leonard Bernstein!” Maybe this is something Bernstein did in real life; he clearly thought quite highly of himself, so maybe he was so tickled to be mentioned in this capacity. But in a movie, this choice was eye-rollingly on the nose. I groaned audibly.

Bernstein took chances with his work; that’s what made him great. “Maestro” would have been stronger if it had done the same.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

from Roger Ebert: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-2001

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Roger Ebert
December 19, 2001

We invest Hobbits with qualities that cannot be visualized. In my mind, they are good-hearted, bustling, chatty little creatures who live in twee houses or burrows, and dress like the merry men of Robin Hood--in smaller sizes, of course. They eat seven or eight times a day, like to take naps, have never been far from home and have eyes that grow wide at the sounds of the night. They are like children grown up or grown old, and when they rise to an occasion, it takes true heroism, for they are timid by nature and would rather avoid a fight.

Such notions about Hobbits can be found in "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," but the Hobbits themselves have been pushed off center stage. If the books are about brave little creatures who enlist powerful men and wizards to help them in a dangerous crusade, the movie is about powerful men and wizards who embark on a dangerous crusade, and take along the Hobbits. That is not true of every scene or episode, but by the end "Fellowship" adds up to more of a sword and sorcery epic than a realization of the more naive and guileless vision of J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Ring Trilogy embodies the kind of innocence that belongs to an earlier, gentler time. The Hollywood that made "The Wizard of Oz" might have been equal to it. But "Fellowship" is a film that comes after "Gladiator" and "Matrix," and it instinctively ramps up to the genre of the overwrought special-effects action picture. That it transcends this genre--that it is a well-crafted and sometimes stirring adventure--is to its credit. But a true visualization of Tolkien's Middle-earth it is not.

Wondering if the trilogy could possibly be as action-packed as this film, I searched my memory for sustained action scenes and finally turned to the books themselves, which I had not read since the 1970s. The chapter "The Bridge of Khazad-Dum" provides the basis for perhaps the most sensational action scene in the film, in which Gandalf the wizard stands on an unstable rock bridge over a chasm, and must engage in a deadly swordfight with the monstrous Balrog. This is an exciting scene, done with state-of-the-art special effects and sound that shakes the theater. In the book, I was not surprised to discover, the entire scene requires less than 500 words.

Settling down with my book, the one-volume, 1969 India paper edition, I read or skimmed for an hour or so. It was as I remembered it. The trilogy is mostly about leaving places, going places, being places, and going on to other places, all amid fearful portents and speculations. There are a great many mountains, valleys, streams, villages, caves, residences, grottos, bowers, fields, high roads, low roads, and along them the Hobbits and their larger companions travel while paying great attention to mealtimes. Landscapes are described with the faithful detail of a Victorian travel writer. The travelers meet strange and fascinating characters along the way, some of them friendly, some of them not, some of them of an order far above Hobbits or even men. Sometimes they must fight to defend themselves or to keep possession of the ring, but mostly the trilogy is an unfolding, a quest, a journey, told in an elevated, archaic, romantic prose style that tests our capacity for the declarative voice.

Reading it, I remembered why I liked it in the first place. It was reassuring. You could tell by holding the book in your hands that there were many pages to go, many sights to see, many adventures to share. I cherished the way it paused for songs and poems, which the movie has no time for. Like The Tale of Genji, which some say is the first novel, "The Lord of the Rings" is not about a narrative arc or the growth of the characters, but about a long series of episodes in which the essential nature of the characters is demonstrated again and again (and again). The ring, which provides the purpose for the journey, serves Tolkien as the ideal MacGuffin, motivating an epic quest while mostly staying right there on a chain around Frodo Baggins' neck.

Peter Jackson, the New Zealand director who masterminded this film (and two more to follow, in a $300 million undertaking), has made a work for, and of, our times. It will be embraced, I suspect, by many Tolkien fans and take on aspects of a cult. It is a candidate for many Oscars. It is an awesome production in its daring and breadth, and there are small touches that are just right; the Hobbits may not look like my idea of Hobbits (may, indeed, look like full-sized humans made to seem smaller through visual trickery), but they have the right combination of twinkle and pluck in their gaze--especially Elijah Wood as Frodo and Ian Holm as the worried Bilbo.

Yet the taller characters seem to stand astride the little Hobbit world and steal the story away. Gandalf the good wizard (Ian McKellen) and Saruman the treacherous wizard (Christopher Lee) and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), who is the warrior known as Strider, are so well-seen and acted, so fearsome in battle, that we can't imagine the Hobbits getting anywhere without them. The elf Arwen (Liv Tyler), the Elf Queen Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and Arwen's father, Elrond (Hugo Weaving), are not small like literary elves ("very tall they were," the book tells us), and here they tower like Norse gods and goddesses, accompanied by so much dramatic sound and lighting that it's a wonder they can think to speak, with all the distractions.

Jackson has used modern special effects to great purpose in several shots, especially one where a massive wall of water forms and reforms into the wraiths of charging stallions. I like the way he handles crowds of Orcs in the big battle scenes, wisely knowing that in a film of this kind, realism has to be tempered with a certain fanciful fudging. The film is remarkably well made. But it does go on, and on, and on--more vistas, more forests, more sounds in the night, more fearsome creatures, more prophecies, more visions, more dire warnings, more close calls, until we realize this sort of thing can continue indefinitely. "This tale grew in the telling," Tolkien tells us in the famous first words of his foreword; it's as if Tolkien, and now Jackson, grew so fond of the journey, they dreaded the destination.

That "Fellowship of the Ring" doesn't match my imaginary vision of Middle-earth is my problem, not yours. Perhaps it will look exactly as you think it should. But some may regret that the Hobbits have been pushed out of the foreground and reduced to supporting characters. And the movie depends on action scenes much more than Tolkien did. In a statement last week, Tolkien's son Christopher, who is the "literary protector" of his father's works, said, "My own position is that 'The Lord of the Rings' is peculiarly unsuitable to transformation into visual dramatic form." That is probably true, and Jackson, instead of transforming it, has transmuted it, into a sword-and-sorcery epic in the modern style, containing many of the same characters and incidents.

Oppenheimer (2023)

from Roger Ebert: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oppenheimer-film-review-2023

Oppenheimer (2023)

Matt Zoller Seitz
July 19, 2023

For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film's most spectacular attraction turns out to be something else: the human face.

This three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is a film about faces. They talk, a lot. They listen. They react to good and bad news. And sometimes they get lost in their own heads—none more so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan's primary source, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman). Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico's desert panoramas but contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy it. Close-up after close-up shows star Cillian Murphy's face staring into the middle distance, off-screen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, and waking nightmares. "Oppenheimer" rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others.

Sometimes the close-ups of people's faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of events that haven't happened, or already happened. There are recurring images of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. (There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.) But these don't just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer's team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer's life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. The "fissile" cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. This principle is also visualized by repeated images of ripples in water, starting with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off expanding circles on the surface that foreshadow both the ending of Oppenheimer's career as a government advisor and public figure and the explosion of the first nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then finally feel, in all its awful impact).

The weight of the film's interests and meanings are carried by faces—not just Oppenheimer's, but those of other significant characters, including General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Los Alamos' military supervisor; Robert's suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt), whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened; and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer's post-Los Alamos career. The latter constitutes its own adjacent full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. Strauss is Salieri to Oppenheimer's Mozart, regularly and often pathetically reminding others that he studied physics, too, back in the day, and that he's a good person, unlike Oppenheimer the adulterer and communist sympathizer. (This film asserts that Strauss leaked the FBI file on his progressive and communist associations to a third party who then wrote to the bureau's director, J. Edgar Hoover.)

The film speaks quite often of one of the principles of quantum physics, which holds that observing quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the results of this experiment. The editing illustrates it by constantly re-framing our perception of an event to change its meaning, and the script does it by adding new information that undermines, contradicts, or expands our sense of why a character did something, or whether they even knew why they did it.

That, I believe, is really what "Oppenheimer" is about, much more so than the atom bomb itself, or even its impact on the war and the Japanese civilian population, which is talked about but never shown. The film does show what the atom bomb does to human flesh, but it's not recreations of the actual attacks on Japan: the agonized Oppenheimer imagines Americans going through it. This filmmaking decision is likely to antagonize both viewers who wanted a more direct reckoning with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those who have bought into the arguments advanced by Strauss and others that the bombs had to be dropped because Japan never would have surrendered otherwise. The movie doesn't indicate whether it thinks that interpretation is true or if it sides more with Oppenheimer and others who insisted that Japan was on its knees by that point in World War II and would have eventually given up without atomic attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. No, this is a film that permits itself the freedoms and indulgences of novelists, poets, and opera composers. It does what we expect it to do: Dramatize the life of Oppenheimer and other historically significant people in his orbit in an aesthetically daring way while also letting all of the characters and all of the events be used metaphorically and symbolically as well, so that they become pointillistic elements in a much larger canvas that's about the mysteries of the human personality and the unforeseen impact of decisions made by individuals and societies.

This is another striking thing about "Oppenheimer." It's not entirely about Oppenheimer even though Murphy's baleful face and haunting yet opaque eyes dominate the movie. It's also about the effect of Oppenheimer's personality and decisions on other people, from the other strong-willed members of his atom bomb development team (including Benny Safdie's Edwin Teller, who wanted to skip ahead to create the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, and eventually did) to the beleaguered Kitty; Oppenheimer's mistress Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, who has some of Gloria Grahame's self-immolating smolder); General Groves, who likes Oppenheimer in spite of his arrogance but isn't going to side with him over the United States government; and even Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (played in a marvelous cameo by Gary Oldman) and who derides Oppenheimer as a naive and narcissistic "crybaby" who sees history mainly in terms of his own feelings.

Jennifer Lame's editing is prismatic and relentless, often in a faintly Terrence Malick-y way, skipping between three or more time periods within seconds. It's wedded to virtually nonstop music by Ludwig Göransson that fuses with the equally relentless dialogue and monologues to create an odd but distinctive sort of scientifically expository aria that's probably what it would feel like to read American Prometheus while listening to a playlist of Philip Glass film scores. Non-linear movies like this one do a better job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear movies do, and they also capture what it's like to read a third-person omniscient book (or a biography that permits itself to imagine what its subjects might have been thinking or feeling). It also paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually. The mind stays anchored to the text. But it also jumps outside of it, connecting the text to other texts, to external knowledge, and to one's own experience and imaginings.

This review hasn't delved into the plot of the film or the real-world history that inspired it, not because it isn't important (of course it is) but because—as is always the case with Nolan—the main attraction is not the tale but the telling. Nolan has been derided as less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated blockbusters that are as much puzzles as stories. But whether that characterization was true (and I'm increasingly convinced it never entirely was) it seems beside the point when you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it's been applied to a biography of a real person. "Oppenheimer" could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director's filmography, when he takes all of the stylistic and technical practices that he'd been honing for the previous twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward.

The movie is an academic-psychedelic biography in the vein of those 1990s Oliver Stone films that were edited within an inch of their lives (at times it's as if the park bench scene in "JFK" had been expanded to three hours). There's also a strain of pitch-black humor, in a Stanley Kubrick mode, as when top government officials meet to go over a list of possible Japanese cities to bomb, and the man reading the list says that he just made an executive decision to delete Kyoto from it because he and his wife honeymooned there. (The Kubrick connection is cemented further by the presence of "Full Metal Jacket" star Matthew Modine, who co-stars as American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush.) It’s an example of top-of-the-line, studio-produced popular art with a dash of swagger, variously evoking Michael Mann's "The Insider," late-period Terrence Malick, nonlinearly-edited art cinema touchstones like "Hiroshima Mon Amour," "The Pawnbroker," "All That Jazz" and "Picnic at Hanging Rock"; and, inevitably, "Citizen Kane" (there's even a Rosebud-like mystery surrounding what Oppenheimer and his hero Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti, talked about on the banks of a Princeton pond).


Most of the performances have a bit of an "old movie" feeling, with the actors snapping off their lines and not moving their faces as much as they would in a more modern story. A lot of the dialogue is delivered quickly, producing a screwball comedy energy. This comes through most strongly in the arguments between Robert and Kitty about his sexual indiscretions and refusal to listen to her mostly superb advice; the more abstract debates about power and responsibility between Robert and General Groves, and the scenes between Strauss and a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) who is advising him as he testifies before a committee that he hopes will approve him to serve in President Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet.

But as a physical experience, "Oppenheimer" is something else entirely—it's hard to say exactly what, and that's what's so fascinating about it. I've already heard complaints that the movie is "too long," that it could've ended with the first bomb detonating, and could've done without the bits about Oppenheimer's sex life and the enmity of Strauss, and that it's perversely self-defeating to devote so much of the running time, including the most of the third hour, to a pair of governmental hearings: the one where Oppenheimer tries to get his security clearance renewed, and Strauss trying to get approved for Eisenhower's cabinet. But the film's furiously entropic tendencies complement the theoretical discussions of the how's and why's of the individual and collective personality. To greater and lesser degrees, all of the characters are appearing before a tribunal and bring called to account for their contradictions, hypocrisies, and sins. The tribunal is out there in the dark. We've been given the information but not told what to decide, which is as it should be.

Barbie (2023)

from wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie_(film)

Barbie ("Stereotypical Barbie") and fellow dolls reside in Barbieland, a matriarchal society populated by different versions of Barbies, Kens, and a group of discontinued models who are treated like outcasts due to their unconventional traits. While the Kens spend their days playing at the beach, considering it their profession, the Barbies hold prestigious jobs in law, science, politics, and so on. Ken ("Beach Ken") is only happy when he is with Barbie, and seeks a closer relationship with her, but she rebuffs him in favor of other activities and female friendships.

One evening at a dance party, Barbie is suddenly stricken with worries about mortality. Overnight, she develops bad breath, cellulite, and flat feet, disrupting her usual routines and the classic perfection of the Barbies. Weird Barbie, a disfigured doll, tells Barbie to find the child playing with her in the real world to cure her afflictions. Barbie decides to follow the advice and travel to the real world, with Ken joining Barbie by stowing away in her convertible.

After arriving in Venice Beach, Barbie punches a man after he gropes her. Barbie and Ken are briefly arrested. Alarmed by the dolls' presence in the real world, the CEO of Mattel orders their recapture. Barbie tracks down her owner, a teenage girl named Sasha, who criticizes Barbie for encouraging unrealistic beauty standards. Distraught, Barbie discovers that Gloria, a Mattel employee and Sasha's mother, inadvertently caused Barbie's existential crisis after Gloria began playing with Sasha's old Barbies. Mattel attempts to put Barbie in a toy box for remanufacturing, but she escapes with Gloria and Sasha's help, and the three travel to Barbieland with Mattel executives in pursuit.

Meanwhile, Ken learns about patriarchy and feels respected for the first time. He returns to Barbieland before Barbie does and persuades the other Kens to take over. The Kens indoctrinate the Barbies into submissive roles, such as agreeable girlfriends, housewives, and maids. Barbie arrives and attempts to convince the Barbies to be independent again. When her attempts fail, she becomes depressed. Gloria expresses her frustration with the conflicting standards women are forced to follow in the real world. Gloria's speech restores Barbie's confidence.

With the assistance of Sasha, Weird Barbie, Allan, and the discontinued dolls, Gloria uses her knowledge from the real world to deprogram the Barbies from their indoctrination. The Barbies then manipulate the Kens into fighting among themselves, which distracts them from enshrining male superiority into Barbieland's constitution, allowing the Barbies to regain power. Having now experienced systemic oppression for themselves, the Barbies resolve to rectify the faults of their previous society, emphasizing better treatment of the Kens and all outcasts.

Barbie and Ken apologize to each other, acknowledging their past mistakes. When Ken bemoans his lack of purpose without Barbie, she encourages him to find an autonomous identity. Barbie, who remains unsure of her own identity, meets with the spirit of Ruth Handler, Mattel co-founder and creator of the Barbie doll, who explains that Barbie's story has no set ending and her ever-evolving history surpasses her roots.

After sharing goodbyes with the Barbies, Kens, and Mattel executives, Barbie decides to become human and return to the real world. Sometime later, Gloria, her husband, and Sasha take Barbie, now going by the name "Barbara Handler", to her first gynecologist appointment.

 

Leave The World Behind (2023)

from NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/movies/leave-the-world-behind-review.html





From left, Mahershala Ali, Myha’la, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in “Leave the World Behind.”Credit...JoJo Whilden/Netflix


By Alissa Wilkinson
Dec. 7, 2023

The haunting cleverness of Rumaan Alam’s novel “Leave the World Behind” — published in 2020, when every novel about the apocalypse felt uncannily prophetic — comes in what it doesn’t say. For the whole book, you’re expecting to find out what’s caused the catastrophe that is just beginning to reach the main characters, New Yorkers who just happen to be vacationing out in the sticks when things start going wrong. And then, tensions stretched to the breaking point, the book thwarts all expectations, leaving behind a feeling of lingering unease.

The film adaptation of the novel, written and directed by the “Mr. Robot” creator Sam Esmail, also leaves behind lingering unease, but for entirely different reasons. In this rendition of the story, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke star as Amanda and Clay Sandford, an advertising executive and her English and media studies professor husband, who live a comfortable but not extravagant life in their Brooklyn home. (He says it’s in Sunset Park; she says it’s in Park Slope; that’s a clarifying character detail, if you know the geography.)

Prompted by her annoyance with humanity, Amanda, a prickly misanthrope, rents a house to which she, Clay and their teenagers decamp. They wish, as the listing promised, to “leave the world behind.” (As a New Yorker, I have to pause on this house for a second, because somehow it’s in the woods, only reachable by a multi-hour drive and remote enough that cellular service is extremely spotty, but the Manhattan skyline seems closer from the yard than it does when you’re in, like, Brooklyn Heights. I don’t know.)

Anyhow, the house is beautiful and they’re happy for a few hours until they go to the beach, where something so bizarre happens that I, who am not made of such strong stuff as them apparently, would have headed back to my Sunset Park (Slope) home immediately. Instead they go back to the house and seem to shake it off, for a while — until a man (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter (Myha’la) show up on the doorstep, claiming that this is their house, and they’re so sorry, but there’s a blackout in the city and can they please stay here tonight?



It soon becomes clear there’s more than a blackout, but this is where the movie really goes awry. Here is the thing about stories about the apocalypse: What they reveal, most of all, is what we think will actually end the world. What works in the novel is this question is left open, a blank space for the reader to fill with their own conjecture. Thus the reader discovers something about themselves, maybe indulges in a little self-examination, without getting caught up in the plausibility of this particular catastrophe.


You can do that in a movie — Jeff Nichols’s stellar 2011 thriller, “Take Shelter,” comes to mind — but it is a bit trickier to exercise restraint in a visual medium, and requires deft storytelling. Instead of leaving room for imagination, Esmail elects to throw everything at the screen. What will bring the apocalypse? White liberal racism (present in the novel, but underlined in some thuddingly obvious ways here, like when Clay keeps turning the car radio dial and landing on 1619 AM). Class divisions. Also conspiracy theorists and survivalists ranting about microwave weapons. Also our phones, our market fluctuations, our enemies foreign and domestic, self-driving cars, radiation — in essence, a “dysfunctional nation,” populated by people who, like Amanda, don’t really like one another.

So basically, a divided country, one easily manipulated by bad actors. After a while, the movie plays like a bulleted list of everything wrong with America — fair enough — but hurled so relentlessly at the audience that you can only assume the goal is for anyone watching the movie to find something they agree with. In the onslaught, the narrative tension dulls into passivity, both for us and for the characters. Really, no one is in control, as one person says. No one is pulling the strings. And “the best even the most powerful people can hope for is a heads up.”

A more skillfully crafted movie might have been able to turn that sentiment into something more horror adjacent, or at least a little more discomfiting. But there’s a lot of over-signaling dialogue here: Early on, Clay tells Amanda about a former student who wrote a book about how “media is both an escape and a reflection,” and comments, apropos of nothing, that it’s “a contradiction that she manages to reconcile.” Camerawork choices seem to suggest a third party is watching them — lots of showy overhead spiraling shots, repeated punch-outs to the earth floating in space — but have no narrative payoff. And though the main cast are accomplished, beautiful and intermittently interesting, they feel out of place in a movie that ought to have been a lot more scary, or a lot more subdued. Here, they feel stranded.



The film’s ending seems like a punchline. It’s strongly implied that what will survive the apocalypse is not humanity or beauty or neighborliness or even civilization, but physical media, the DVDs that will still work when the internet and the streamers go down. “Leave the World Behind” is a Netflix movie, so there’s irony in that. But I guess it’s one irony I can get on board with. This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but a theme song.







Netflix film. Julia Robert’s and Ethan Hawke. Meh.