Brandy

I’m really quite curious how anyone is supposed to take in much of the information contained in this film’s dialogue. It’s many years since Nolan fell into the habit of editing out the spaces between one character’s lines and the next character’s responses, the one or two seconds in which one speaker processes what the other has just said and formulates his or her response before replying. No time for those in a project of this size. We hear a line delivered and are jumped forward instantly to its response. On top of which many characters have heavy accents and nothing was done to alleviate the confusion this often caused on individual words. On top of which the writing’s trying to be clever as hell and boil itself down to a snappy shorthand. On top of which most of the dialogue is delivered very, very fast and often slurrily. On top of which most of the actors have adopted low, Batman-like monotones rather than the varying cadences ordinary humans use while speaking which help us distinguish one emotion, one subject or one part of a sentence from another. All the major people involved in making and financing this film had of course read the script and had all the time they needed to absorb the dialogue and its contents. Not so the audience. Most of this film’s exchanges come bearing rather startling amounts of information, whether scientific, character- or plot-related, and we’re seldom allowed any time at all to absorb it, neither between lines nor between conversation scenes themselves, which come at us in a nearly unbroken chain for three hours. What I suspect is that most viewers simply get the general gist of the movie and its conversations and are content with that. Then there’s the Emperor’s New Clothes element in which few viewers want to appear unintelligent and admit they were having considerable trouble following what the hell the characters were talking about most of the time. Nolan frequently illustrates scientific points through lightning-bursts of special effects tossed in during the dialogue. Obviously the purpose of these is to make the science clearer, but the effect instead is the opposite. If something’s being explained well, we start to form a mental picture of it ourselves. This requires us to concentrate closely on what we’re hearing, and I found that these jolting flashes of strange imagery consistently did nothing but break my concentration. The verbal information in these many scenes is (at least relatively) smooth and fluid, and then Nolan interjects visual information that’s jarring and eye-blink brief. I suspect the thinking was that by now a Nolan movie just wouldn’t feel like a Nolan movie without special effects of some kind, and there was pressure to find an occasion for them. Then there’s the man of the hour himself. The real Oppenheimer often seemed quite light-hearted about his work (Isidor Rabi described the ‘air of easy nonchalance’ he tended to affect) and most of those involved in the Manhattan Project reported that they’d never had more fun in their lives. This may have been an interesting angle to explore in a dramatization of the Project. And it’s about as far as one could imagine from what the film depicts. Murphy plays Oppenheimer as a man possessed of a perpetual bug-eyed intensity of alarming magnitude. A man who bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, a depiction more appropriate to an intelligent modern actor with an acute awareness of the enormity of the physicist’s impact on human history than to what we know of the man. Murphy’s Oppenheimer fixes the gaunt, moon-eyed stare of a cocaine addict on seemingly every person he speaks to for every moment he speaks to them, intoning Grave Seriousness in nearly every syllable in a breathy monotone deep and intense and bordering on Batman (so very opposite of the high, thin, Irish-tinted voice of the real J. Robert). There wasn’t an instant where I felt I was watching a plausible human being. Not that I much blame Murphy, of course. It’s the director’s job to avoid bad decisions. Indeed Downey, Safdie and half the other male actors also seem to be doing their best Dark Knight voice for most of the movie, the better to impart the grave, grave gravity of the proceedings. As with many of Nolan’s films, the overseriousness of the characters and of Zimmer’s score strikes me as distinctly comical. I read someone somewhere who said he found that the snippets about Oppenheimer sprinkled throughout Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris gave him a much better and clearer picture of both the man and the Manhattan Project than this entire three-hour movie did, and I’d agree heartily.

Looking over Licorice Pizza a couple of times, even though it's an exquisite movie I began to feel a sense of lost potential. I thought, this guy's got pretty much the best cinematography of any living film-maker and some of the very best writing, and for three films now what he's been using his almost unimaginable talents for are these increasingly easy-going admixtures of comedy and romance. He seemed to've shrunken away from the deeply challenging and complex terrain he'd wrestled upon in his fifth and sixth films. I kept on hoping he'd return to scale those heights again. I've now very clearly gotten my wish. Only it's not like before, with those laser-focused character studies of deranged men in Punch-Drunk, Blood and The Master, but something sprawling and chaotic. Anderson's awakened from his thematic slumber and seems to've begun a new phase of his work. And he’s also now brought with him the quite brilliant, off-the-wall comedy chops he’s been honing in Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza; this is wunna the funnier movies I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if any other film-maker could dream of putting so much hilarity into a story of desperate revolutionaries, white supremacists and the hellscape of today's U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This thing is just so very much not like any other movie I can think of. It was a wonderfully mind-boggling experience to watch for the first time. And it develops into just the most amazing, unpredictable and thrilling adventure movie. See it with a decent-sized crowd if possible. It’s wonderful to hear an audience laughing along at this thing with you.

Good god in heaven. That first fifty minutes is one of the most gorgeous stretches of cinema I've seen in my life. An experiment in underexposing objects and textures that so subtly, so strangely and so strongly brings back the mid and later '90s of my childhood, and is profoundly effective in the existential horror vein it mines. After that it gets jolted over into an utterly different movie made mostly in Lynch's usual Soap Opera 'n' Chaotic Screaming Idiocy mode. 'Parently there's some complex 'dissociative psychogenic fugue' Möbius strip business that makes the movie's two (or three?) parts more cogent than they first look if you have some understanding of it, but aesthetically it crashes and burns at the sixty-minute mark, apart from the basic visual texture which is still quite beautiful. My god those are some terrible music choices. But that first hour is so transcendently good-looking I just bought two different Blu-ray editions that have different color and lighting values. That first hour I was asking where has this movie been all my life.

Overpoweringly brilliant. Will take me years to even begin to get a real grasp on it. One of the great films of all time.

One of the great directors forgets every last thing he ever learned about how to shoot a movie in 'The Last Temptation of Christ', one of the stupidest and worst-looking films you'll ever see (or, to be sure, hear). Religion really does squander the intellect. Scorsese and Schrader also neglect, of course, to include the episodes of the quasihistorical Nazarene's ministry involving his racism, support of slavery or assertion that the world was just about to end. This movie is a mortal sin, but Scorsese more than atoned for it a decade later by making 'Bringing Out the Dead'.

A titanically indulgent mess. Tarantino, normally a writing genius, unloads his every juvenile fantasy, his every cheap cinematic crush, onto 'True Romance'. Apart from one excellent (though disconnected) scene between Walken and Hopper, the writing itself is laughable and defies the brilliance of its author at every turn. Clueless cinematography, a horrific sound-track, hacky acting and unceasingly preposterous story logic do not improve the situation. Not one redeeming feature or endearing scene. This film is like watching Tarantino at confession.

It's like Jackson just took a giant bucket of C.G.I., a giant bucket of terrible editing, a giant bucket of terrible dubbing and a giant bucket of incoherency and dumped them all over an awful movie.