You still don't know what Barbenheimer is? 😦

Come sweet child, let me wash away your ignorance.

“Seriously?!

It’s like you’re photoshopped!”

If it wasn’t bringing in an already released third movie, “The Atomic Blonde” might’ve been a solid candidate to name the event that has come to be known as Barbenheimer - itself a bit of a Frankensteinien nom de guerre due to its amalgamation of things that should not be…

And lest you think I’m exaggerating to call it an “event” when it’s really just two movies opening so like, whatevs, but fuckin’ a man, it has its own Wikipedia entry! I don’t even have a Wikipedia entry (editor’s note: not a good comparison guy). And to think, it almost didn’t happen.

See, Christopher Nolan used to be a staunch Warner Bros (WB) director, all the way back to 2002’s Insomnia and up until 2020’s Tenet, when he decided to make Oppenheimer at Universal due to his frustrations with WB releasing all their movies “day and date” (in theaters and digital on the same day) during “the bullshit.” And wouldn’t you know it, Barbie, lucky for them, is a WB movie. So if both projects had been WB movies, there’s no flippin’ way we’d have had them released on the same weekend, because as I wrote about two weeks ago, studios think about competition in a bit of an obtuse way. And if things had gone that way, we wouldn’t have had this beautiful piece of… art? Sure, let’s call it art.

But we are where we are and the internet did what it does. Whether it’s inventiveness, genuine interest in both films, pure boredom or a nihilistic culture so desperate for meaning that it’ll grasp onto anything, people are double-featuring a movie where the central character is deeply considering the meaning of mortality and… Oppenheimer.

I do love it. It’s of course silly, but that’s partly what makes it fun. And it really is good for the box office, which is good for movies. I mean, Barbie may go on to have the biggest opening weekend by a female director ever (currently held by Captain Marvel), which is fucking crazy, and crazy fucking awesome.

Because whether you see one, neither or both, this is a weekend where the movies coming out are trying something. Not just trying to make money (that too, always), but creating legit fresh cinematic experiences that hopefully people will enjoy, remember and talk about for a long time.

So yeah, Barbenheimer is silly, but it may also may be… important?

Who’da thunk it!

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NEWSY BITS 👾

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EXTRA CREDIT MOVIE(S) 📝

Cobweb - bound to be overlooked this weekend, this horror story about creepy parents (instead of creepy kids for once) may finds its audience on streaming, because reviews are good enough it seems to be worth a watch if you’re a hardcore fan of the scary stuff. Playing in Limited Theaters This Friday

Barbie

I really don’t need to tell you that the Barbie movie is coming out, do I? Because it is fucking everywhere. Almost quite literally. Google. Airbnb. Architectural Digest. uh… Burger King? One could say the Warner Bros. marketing department have done their jobs. Which is true! But the people who most importantly seem to have done their jobs are the filmmakers, namely co-writer / director Greta Gerwig and star / producer Margot Robbie. Because without a great, marketable movie, there is no great marketing¹.

But as noted, you’ve seen the marketing, you’ve probably caught snippets of the actors talking about the movie too, but what is the damn thing actually about. Barbie, duh. 🙄

……..

Right, I understand how that could be confusing. When I say Barbie, you think of the doll. But when I say Barbie, I mean “Barbie,” as in all of it. The doll, the image, the little girls, the little boys, the love, the hate, the marketing, the consumerism, the controversy, the conflicted feelings, the stories, the nostalgia. I mean, honestly, the marketing is kinda spot on, Barbie is everything. Because a toy as ubiquitous as she is inevitably takes on the qualities of the crowd, for better and worse.

But why Barbie? Why aren’t we here talking about same kind of “X is everything” quality for I dunno, some bullshit “boy toy” like G.I. Joe? Well to be quite frank, Barbie is a woman. And the complex feelings you, I, “we” have about women are represented in this toy made of plastic.

And luckily, Gerwig seems to have insightfully identified this and made a delightful movie that not only embraces the bright levity of what Mattel likes to think Barbie is, but also brings forth the more difficult aspects Mattel probably wishes Barbie wasn’t. You could say it’s a set of messages masked within a melange of comedic mayhem.

And I bet if you ask someone who intends to see Barbie why they want to see it, you’ll be met with a mixture of responses too. All of them valid of course, but probably quite individual as well.

Because I’m not sure most people even know that the plot revolves around Barbie and Ken (Ryan Gosling - being called a scene stealer in nearly review) transitioning from perfect Barbieland, populated with a plethora of perfect Barbies (played by the likes of Issa Rae, Dua Lipa, Alexandra Shipp and Ritu Arya) and sure, a few Kens too (Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir) to the real world after Stereotypical Barbie (Robbie) starts to consider death and like ugh, flat feet, where they figure out everything is nooooot quite like it is at home. Which is terrible for Barbie and kind of, shall we say, invigorating for Ken.

But a large reason why the marketing has worked as well as it has, is because even if people don’t quite grasp the story, they don’t need to, because in reality, they just want to “play” with Barbie. All of it.

And ok, Ken too.

Out: Thursday

Where: Theaters

1 hr 54 mins | PG-13 | 🍅: 89%

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This is, in the most practical of terms, a biopic. But there has never been a biopic quite like this before. Because there’s never been a biopic about the man who is credited with creating an object that can destroy the world as we know it before.

If this sounds like I’m about to go into “serious and important movie” territory, you are correct. But just because a movie is serious, doesn’t mean it can’t be entertaining. Hell, Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy is nothing if not serious, straddling the line between earnest and hammy and it is insanely watchable.

But if Oppenheimer is beset with a somber mood, that’s only because its subject is a man who, after watching a nuclear explosion for the first time, recalled reciting these lines from a Hindu poem to himself, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Are you understanding the fun people are having contrasting this movie with Barbie yet? 😀

And sure, Universal may have missed an amazing marketing opportunity by not having star Cillian Murphy rap in character as Robert J. OPPenheimer, changing the lyrics of Naughty By Nature’s 1991 classic hip-hop hit O.P.P. to a dissertation on quantum physics, but sure, be cautious. This movie honestly doesn’t need a ton of marketing. It’s the movie equivalent of the stoic partygoer who you’re initially cautious of engaging in conversation with, but after a few minutes of back and forth you’re peppering them with questions, eager to suck out every piece of knowledge in their gigantic brain. That is to say, it’ll find its audience.

Which is a credit to Nolan, whose somewhat cold style may turn off some, but he’s one of a few filmmakers who can take an objectively important, but still kinda nerdy historical topic and turn it into a massive cinematic blockbuster.

But Oppenheimer’s story did have drama to it apparently, and not just the kablooie kind either. There’s romance, sex, intense moral conflict, political subterfuge and even Einstein. It’s a lot. Which may be why the run time is a bit of a behemoth at three hours. Or, it could be because Nolan is trying to fit in all the famous actors he cast. See, yet another benefit of having Christopher Nolan direct a movie is that he can basically snap and a litany of great actors fall into roles he created. Murphy, a long time Nolan collaborator, is apparently almost obnoxiously good at portraying the famed scientist. But there’s also Emily Blunt as his take no bullshit wife, Matt Damon as the mustachioed Army dad of the Manhattan Project and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s… nemesis? Or maybe that’s unfair to the man. Not Strauss, Oppenheimer. Because when you’re battling the laws of physics, humans are a mere trifle, no?

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.“ - from the New York Times review of Oppenheimer

Out: Thursday

Where: Theaters

3 hrs 0 mins | R | 🍅: 92%

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They Cloned Tyrone

I know what you’re thinking. And I can assure you, Jamie Foxx’s hair is indeed real. Just kidding, how the fuck should I know?? Right, I should be investigating these types of things. But sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s real and not in this life. Something the trio of They Cloned Tyrone are set to figure out.

While this Netflix flick is sure to get less of the conversation this weekend, that might be a bit of a shame, because of all three “notable” releases this weekend, it actually has the highest Rotten Tomatoes score. 😮

Tyrone is a modern day set, but 70’s styled sci-fi satire (say that shit three times fast) where a pimp (Foxx), sex-worker (Teyonah Parris) and a drug dealer (John Boyega) investigate a government conspiracy to clone Black people. It all sounds ridiculous², and that’s probably intentional - the director did describe the movie as “If The Truman Show drank a bottle of vodka“ - but reviews say the cast and their extremely potent chemistry is what makes the movie really work.

So either while the rest of the world watches Barbenheimer, or maybe after you’ve partaken, you are free to escape to your couch and enjoy the bounty that is the modern moviegoing experience.

“It’s not often that a film can be accurately described as a sci-fi, mystery, action-comedy, thriller and Blaxploitation. It’s a credit to Juel Taylor — here making his directorial debut — that They Cloned Tyrone’s mishmash of genres doesn’t result in a tonal mess. Rather, it’s a consistently hilarious ride, where the laughs never dull the poignant, sharply observed messages at its centre.“ - from the Empire review of The Cloned Tyrone

Out: Friday

Where: Netflix

2 hrs 2 mins | R | 🍅: 97%

Do you like trailers?

1. The Haunting in Venice - I’m honestly impressed by Kenneth Branagh’s commitment and the fact he’s been “allowed” to make three Agatha Christie mysteries into movies. They don’t look bad, quite solid in fact, but these types of movie, at this budget, are just not made very often.

2. The Holdovers - Alexander Payne (The Descendants, Sideways) loves his combination of awkward and heartfelt, and his next looks no different.

3. The Creator - this one hasn’t been getting a ton of attention, which I guess makes sense considering it’s not based on a super well known intellectual property, but it is also an original big budget sci-fi movie not based on well known IP (rare). Maybe that turns it into a sleeper hit? Or just something people sleep on. 🤷‍♂️

4. Migration - the Illumination people (Despicable Me / The Super Marios Bros. Movie) do a bird movie.

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1. I know, there are no absolutes, but by and large this is true

2. but is it that ridiculous?