Friday reviews for 21 July 2023

Oppenheimer (Nolan, 2023) and Barbie (Gerwig, 2023) in theatres

Slight change of plans this week as my reviews of the new cinema releases Oppenheimer and Barbie were also wanted by RNZ for their web­site and they would prefer that I extract some high­lights here and send you all to them for the full experience.

I’m not sure when it will be pos­ted but I’ll send an update through when I have a link.

Oppenheimer is a biop­ic about the revolu­tion­ary phys­i­cist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) but because this is a Christopher Nolan film it does not fol­low a straight line from birth to death, there are two stor­ies run­ning in par­al­lel. The first is Oppenheimer’s jour­ney from awk­ward stu­dent to the “fath­er of the atom­ic bomb” fol­lowed by dis­grace as post war anti-communist politi­cians set out to des­troy his repu­ta­tion, all shot in vivid IMAX colour.

And, Nolan being Nolan, there is also a bit of a puzzle to be solved as a key piece of inform­a­tion is with­held from us until the end, a piece of inform­a­tion that unlocks all of the giant themes the film has been wrest­ling with and provides an unset­tling but dra­mat­ic­ally sat­is­fy­ing con­clu­sion. Satisfying but manip­u­lat­ive all the same.

…

Gerwig – and co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach – have big­ger fish to fry. Like many stor­ies about inan­im­ate objects brought to life – as far back as Pinocchio and even fur­ther – Barbie is about being human. Is it a desir­able state when so much of life is about dis­ap­point­ment, loss, anxi­ety and pain. Barbie goes a step fur­ther, though, and asks wheth­er the ‘real world’ even thinks of women as human at all?

Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) is liv­ing her per­fect life in Barbieland – with all her dif­fer­ent Barbie friends, plus the Kens, a Midge and an Allan – when she starts hav­ing uncom­fort­ably human thoughts about things like death. Turns out there is a psych­ic bond between the Barbie in Barbieland and the child in the ‘real world’ who plays with her.

Advice from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) is to travel through a portal to the real world, find her child and repair the psy­cho­lo­gic­al dam­age and restore the equi­lib­ri­um. Barbie’s lovelorn Ken (Ryan Gosling) stows away only to dis­cov­er that in the real world men like him are not second-class cit­izens and that he should bring his dim-witted ver­sion of the pat­ri­archy back to Barbieland.

There’s also no new stream­ing or VOD con­tent fea­tured this week as I spent most of the time watch­ing New Zealand International Film Festival films for RNZ Widescreen. My pre­view is in three parts: one, two and three.

If you are won­der­ing why there is no pre­view for any New Zealand con­tent, that’s because of the three I got to look at in advance, two we couldn’t fin­ish and one turned out to be a trail­er not the full fea­ture. So, rather than bag the obvi­ously hard work of loc­al film­makers this year I’ll let sleep­ing dogs lie. It looks like there are heaps of excel­lent loc­al titles avail­able, I just drew the short straw before deadline.

I have already bought tick­ets for the restored ver­sion of Gaylene Preston’s Bread & Roses. That’s going to be fam­ily day out as my moth­er has a role in that pic­ture and none of us have seen it since it was first screened back in 1993.