Tag: Movie Review

ExNotes Movie Review:  Oppenheimer

By  Joe Gresh

I don’t go to the movies very often because it seems like superhero stuff is all that plays at our local cineplex, so it’s unusual that I’ve gone to the talkies twice in the last couple weeks. After seeing the big movie of the summer, Barbie, CT and I decided to go to the second big movie of the summer: Oppenheimer. I’ll be dropping a few spoilers so click out of this blog if you plan on going to Oppenheimer.

I became interested in the United States atomic program about 15 years ago. It may seem gruesome to some, but the mechanics of the Manhattan Project intrigued me. Those old-timey scientists did some amazing stuff way back in the 1940s. Everything they were attempting to do was based on theory and done for the first time.

I went to New Mexico’s Los Alamos to tour that once forbidden city and visited Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was exploded. For an insider’s perspective of the super-secret project the book, Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman by Richard Feynman has a lot of Manhattan Project stuff along with other excitement from the anything-is-possible era. I liked the landforms in New Mexico so much we ended up moving here.

As it turns out I really didn’t know all that much about the dawn of the atomic age.  Oppenheimer the movie is mostly about the adversarial relationship between Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss, a man that I never saw name-checked in the information I had read. This kind of smoke-filled-room stuff doesn’t interest me although Strauss caused a lot of trouble for Oppenheimer after the war.

From my limited research I thought Oppenheimer was sort of a figurehead for the Manhattan Project but the movie portrays him as critical to the project’s success. Luckily for New Mexico (or unluckily if you were downwind of the blast) he loved the state and picked a site west of Santa Fe for the new atomic age.

CT and I drove down to El Paso, Texas, to see the movie in large format Imax. An old-style mall, set 25 feet lower in elevation than El Paso’s Montana Avenue, was the closest place we could find. The mall was interesting in that the entire commons area was filled with a flea market. You could find hand-made crucifixes or plastic crucifixes made in China. There were places to get your car key battery replaced and a bar of colorful, homemade soap. We had an hour or so before our show started so we went into a madhouse called Dave and Buster’s. Dave and Buster’s is a huge, chain gaming center with a restaurant attached. The place looked mostly like a Las Vegas casino except it’s ok for kids to go because you can only lose.

The restaurant was not too bad. CT and I split a turkey club sandwich. The racket was so loud I needed a gin and soda to calm my nerves. I can see a parent at the end of their rope taking the kids to Dave and Buster’s and turning them loose while mom or dad get plastered at the bar. Really a great business model if you think about it.

I don’t know if it’s due to the lack of employees or matinees are so sparsely populated that there is no need for employees, but we waltzed past the unmanned snack bar into the Imax theater unmolested. The Imax had very steep steps leading to steep seats with plenty of space for mid-aisle stragglers to wander in front of the punctual people. No need to worry about a lady with a fruit basket on her head sitting in front; you’ll be able to see the screen.

My ears were still smarting from Dave and Buster’s when the movie started with an ear-splitting explosion followed by thousands of random lights racing towards a center point roughly 3 feet in front of my head.  The room thundered and shook. I thought the place was coming down but this was just the Imax theater showing us what it was capable of doing and had nothing to do with the Oppenheimer movie. I began to see the reason there were no ticket takers. The usual series of advertisements you see in a theater were not shown, maybe because there are so few Imax theaters it’s not worth shooting the ads in their large format.

Oppenheimer’s story is told out of sequence with scenes jumping forward and backward in time.  Maybe this is a nod to quantum physics and the impossibility of knowing the true state of matter at any particular time?  The jump scenes are mixed in with fantasy sequences that represent Oppenheimer daydreaming. The film switches between color and black and white. All this jumping to and fro, along with the deafening audio levels and rattling chairs, kept me disoriented. I’m mostly deaf in my left ear and still it was actually painful at times. CT wanted to stick wadded up tissue paper in my ears. I should have done it.

Actors playing famous physicists make cameo appearances throughout the movie. You never know who will pop up at a dinner party. Matt Damon plays a loud General Leslie Groves with a comical Jackie Gleason style. Robert Downey is Oppenheimer’s antagonist. He does a good job for most of the film even if he did fall into a paranoid Captain Queeg riff near the end.

The early, red-scare communists were the beautiful people in the movie and their party meetings were more like cocktail socials. Even though it appears he went to the meetings solely to pick up chicks, this dabbling in communism would prove to be a problem for Oppenheimer later in his career.

I like 40-foot tall ta-tas as much as the next guy, but the nude scenes in Oppenheimer seemed to be there to bump the rating and didn’t really contribute to the story in any meaningful way. Which is exactly what you want from gratuitous sex scenes. I feel the director went a little light in this area. There should have been 15 or 20 more. During the kangaroo court to take away Oppenheimer’s security clearance there was a creepy fantasy sequence with Oppenheimer’s dead lover staring at Oppenheimer’s wife while straddling him naked on the witness chair. She wasn’t decomposing with her nose falling off or anything, but it did seem weird.

The director had a tough job making Oppenheimer exciting enough for our 2-second attention span populace. It’s a story that wants to be told slowly and with great detail. I fear that movie will never be made and if it was would not earn much money for the studio. Instead, we get clip after clip that somehow are supposed to make sense at the end. Those Superhero movies have ruined us.

Oppenheimer was sort of a let down. I was expecting a more nuts and bolts experience, like I would be able to build my own small thermonuclear weapon after seeing the movie. Don’t let that deter you from seeing the film; it’s probably just me. I had a hard time following the story and it took 75% of the run time before I began to connect all the disjointed scenes. I think in a regular theater I would have done better. The Imax experience was too overwhelming for me. The constant shaking of seats and booming audio put me in a fight or flight mode. Picture reading a good book, and every few minutes a guy walks up, shakes your shoulders, and shouts “You’re reading a book!” in your ear.  It’s that kind of annoying. Imax never lets you forget that you’re in a movie theater.

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ExNotes Review: Operation Mincemeat

Susie and I were channel surfing on Netflix the other night and a trailer for Operation Mincemeat appeared.  It looked like it might be interesting so we hit the play icon.  Wow, this movie is great.  The story is about the British military intelligence deception operation to convince the Nazis the 1943 Allied invasion of Europe would begin in Greece and not Sicily.  Everyone knew Sicily was the logical choice, including the Germans, but the Brits managed to pull off a miracle and the Germans diverted the bulk of their forces to Greece.  I won’t tell you much more about how MI5 did this (beyond what the trailer below shows) because I don’t want to spoil the movie for you.

Operation Mincemeat is a dark, foreboding movie, as it should be.   Literally tens of thousands of lives and indeed, the future of humanity, hung in the balance.

One of the interesting characters in this true Operation Mincemeat story is a mid-level British Intel officer named Ian Fleming.

Johnny Flynn playing Ian Fleming in Operation Mincemeat.  Here Fleming is intrigued by a Q Branch watch with a bezel that becomes a buzz saw. You have to pay attention or this and other scenes that inspired 007 will zip right by.

Yes, that Ian Fleming…the one who went on to create and write the James Bond stories.  He and several other MI5 officers were working on spy novels while the real Operation Mincemeat was unfolding.  At one point, the man in charge (played to perfection by Colin Firth) exclaimed, “My God, is there anyone here who isn’t writing a spy novel?”  There were other James Bond references, including the senior MI5 person everyone referred to as “M,” Q Branch, and more.

Trust me on this:  If you are a James Bond fan, you will love Operation Mincemeat.

Nah, that’s too restrictive.   Anyone who enjoys a good movie will enjoy Operation Mincemeat.  It’s on Netflix and it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time.  I enjoyed it so much I watched it again from start to finish the next day.  It was that good.  You can thank me later.

More reviews?  You bet!

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Film Review: Lonely Hearts

We watched Lonely Hearts on Netflix a few nights ago, and it was surprisingly good.  It would be hard to go wrong, I think, with any film that had John Travolta and the late James Gandolfini in it, but this one was even better than expected.

Lonely Hearts (made in 2006) is based on the true story of serial spree killers Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck.  Fernandez was a weasely con man who preyed on lonely women (he found them through their lonely hearts ads).  Beck was one of his intended victims, but she saw through his game immediately and, weirdly, they became partners in perpetuating similar crimes, ultimately progressing to several murders to silence their victims, witnesses, and others who crossed their paths (including a police officer).  Both Fernandez and Beck died in the electric chair in 1951.

The story was dark and moody, but the movie was well done.  It’s worth a watch.

More reviews?  You bet.  They’re right here.

Lonesome Dove

The greatest story ever told:  That’s Larry McMurtry’s blockbuster work, Lonesome Dove.  We’ve touched on it before with our book review on Revolver – Sam Colt and the Six Shooter that Changed America.  This is another book review, and a movie review, too, as Lonesome Dove was also made into a four-part TV special three decades ago.

McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove in 1985.  It was loosely based on the true story of Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, and their third cattle drive north.  I have a copy of Lonesome Dove that I bought when it first came out, and I’ve probably read it a half dozen times.  Sometimes a few years will go by before I see it tucked away in the bookshelf, and I’ll pull it down and take a few days to read it again   Even though I know what’s coming next (I almost have it memorized), I still enjoy reading it.  It’s that good.

Motown Productions did the Lonesome Dove four-part television mini-series in 1989.  Most of the time a movie based on a book gives up a lot, but this one did not.  When it pops up as a re-run, I’m in.  I’ve probably watched it no fewer than five times.

The scenes in both the book and the TV series (which stayed faithful to the novel) are well crafted and memorable.  Several stood out, including the river crossing water moccasin attack, McCrae’s taking out a group of renegades while rescuing Lorena, Call’s horse-collision-takedown of an arrogant and abusive cavalry officer, and the bar room scene in which McCrae puts his Colt Walker to good use teaching a surly bartender western etiquette (that one is my favorite).

If you’ve read the book or seen the TV series, you know what I’m talking about.  If you haven’t, you need to. Trust me on this one one, folks.  The next time Lonesome Dove is on TV you’ll want to see it, and if you have a chance to grab a copy of Lonesome Dove, you should do so.

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Movie Review: The Forgotten Tragedy

Last year we wrote a blog about The Warning, a statue honoing two motor officers who came to be known as the Paul Reveres of Santa Paula.   The statue was an unanticipated discovery on a motorcycle ride through Santa Paula, and it had my attention because it’s not the kind of monument you see every day.

The other night Sue and I were flipping through the movies on Amazon Prime, and to my great surprise one I had not seen before popped up:  The Forgotten Tragedy:  The Story of the St. Francis Dam. 

You know, I’m embarrassed to admit that when I first saw that statue in Santa Paula 10 years ago, I had never heard of the St. Francis Dam and its collapse.  I grew up on the east coast, and there’s a lot we never heard about back there.  It took a little digging for me to learn about California’s second largest disaster ever (the only event involving greater loss of life in the Golden State was the San Francisco earthquake), so the idea of a movie on the St. Francis Dam and its collapse had my immediate attention.   The Forgotten Tragedy is a documentary and it’s very well done.  It even included a bit about the motorcycle officers in the above statue (although it only mentioned one).

Trust me on this, my friends.  The Forgotten Tragedy:  The Story of the St. Francis Dam is worth viewing.

Movie Review: A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

Okay, we’re not becoming a movie review site.  Gresh did that one on Ford vs. Ferrari, I offered The 24 Hour War, then I watched The Irishman and reviewed it, and good buddy Gonzo recommended the new Mr. Rogers movie with Tom Hanks, A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood.  We hit a lot of rain and snow on a recent trip, Susie suggested seeing the Tom Hanks flick, and off to the movies we went.  And this is a review of that movie.  But, like I said, we’re not a movie review site.

A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood was not what I was expecting, and it was way more than a movie about Fred Rogers’ life.  Hanks was superb in the role (that guy has never let me down in any movie, ever…he’s one of the best actors who ever lived, in my opinion).   A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood was intense and it was emotional.  But it was good.  Really good.  There’s a masterfully executed subway scene that I particularly enjoyed, and I’m pretty sure you will, too.

The downsides?  I thought a lot of the movie was out of focus (literally; the images were a bit on the blurry side).  Some of that was intentional for artistic effects, but the producers went too far with it.  Better to get things focused, I think.  I found the Esquire article that inspired the movie and, to be blunt, I didn’t think the article that started the ball rolling was very good.  That’s not intended to be a slam on the movie, though.  The movie was great.

See this one, folks.  You won’t be disappointed.

Movie Review: The Irishman

A swing and a miss is the way I’d describe it. Formulaic. I know what the Italian quattro (Scorcese, Pacino, DeNiro, and Pesci) were thinking: Hey, it worked before; maybe it will work again.  The mob. The Kennedys and Castro. DeNiro as an Irish hit man. Hoffa. Music from the 1950s. Voiced-in explanations from the main characters giving the lowdown on each mob dude. Over-restored ‘50s and ‘60s cars. Let’s throw it all against the silver screen for 3½ hours and maybe something will stick (yeah, you read that right: 3½ hours). I know what they were thinking:  Goodfellas, The Godfather (and all of its Roman-numeraled follow-ons), and Casino.  Yeah, it worked before, so maybe it will work again. Except it doesn’t.  Those earlier mob flicks were great. The Irishman is not.

Guys, at some point you have to realize there’s not any milk left in the cow. Even with your digital filtering to make old guys look young, all you gave us were weird, slitty-eyed visions of a younger DeNiro with the body and gait of a senior citizen (where’s Fredo when you need him?).  And Pacino playing Hoffa? Another swing and a miss (you should have let the ump call a strike). Jack Nicholson will forever be Jimmy Hoffa; Pacino just wasn’t believable in this role.  If you can see it, then hey, I’m the Pope.  Al, go back to threatening Mr. Trump. You’re not believable in that role, either, but you apparently know what they say about bad publicity.

Save your money, folks, and hang on to that 3½ hours of your life I’ll never get back.  The Irishman is one that should sleep with the fish.

ExNotes Review: Ford vs Ferrari

Caution: Spoilers ahead!

When did two sodas and a bag of popcorn top 15 dollars? I mean, come on dude!  I’m not a big movie-goer because it seems like everything is either superhero stuff or some depressing Nazi thing.  Anyway, us gasoline burner types are starved for content when it comes to full-length movies. We get nothing on the big screen but engine sounds mismatched to the motorcycles and grease monkey stereotypes. When something like Ford vs Ferrari comes along we tend to fall all over ourselves praising the damn thing.  And it’s not a bad movie.  People are clamoring for Oscar nominations.  I don’t know, man, it makes us look kinda thirsty.

Matt Damon does a good job playing Carroll Shelby, although my wife says you never forget it’s Matt Damon as Jason Bourne playing Carroll Shelby. I didn’t recognize any of the other actors so I could accept that they were who they were. There were a few unpleasant characters planted by Hollywood to give the story a villain.

One Ford executive was made out to be petty and vindictive. I have no idea if he was that way in real life. Lee Iacocca was an eager sort, the company man trying to make stuff happen between the stuffy corporate world and Shelby’s hot rod culture. Henry Ford II was shown as cold and authoritarian, much like you would expect him to be. The Ferrari driver had a Simon Legree, comic-villain look that brought me back to the movie theater every time he glared at the hero Ken Miles.

Ferrari was a foil for Ford in this movie. We really don’t get to see much of them. After the Le Mans race begins Ford II flies off to dinner in a helicopter while Mr. Ferrari stays in his seat to watch. I guess that was to show the different level of commitment to the sport. It seems like old man Ferrari never slept the entire 24 hours of Le mans.

One of the movie’s main story arcs was how Ken Miles was forced off the team for Ford’s first attempt at Le Mans. That bad-guy Ford executive is to blame. Of course real life is less complex and Ken Miles ran that 1965 event breaking down after 45 laps due to a bad transmission. Little things like that make you suspect the rest of the story.

Ken Miles’ character was a sort of rebel against the car sellers. The Suits irritated him to no end. I know we are supposed to cheer for him but he seemed like a pain in the ass to me. I’ve known guys like that: Bitching about the company while drawing a check. I figure that if Ford is paying you stacks of money to represent them, suck it up, you know? At least fake it, man.

Some of the Le Mans race scenes were pretty hokey looking, like something out of the old CHIPs television show. “Ponch, we got a freeze up!” Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed Ford vs Ferrari. I think you’ll probably enjoy it also. You shouldn’t watch a Hollywood movie expecting to get the facts (see Cinderella Man’s portrayal of Max Baer) and us gasoline burners don’t get many chances to hear the audio match the engines.