The Barbenheimer Apocalypse

Posted on September 14, 2023 by reelentropy

August may have been the best time to go to the movies in my life.

For the past months, movie news has been dominated by anticipation for and tracking of “Barbenheimer,” the release of both Barbie and Oppenheimer on July 21, and their results. Barbie stayed at no. 1 at the box office for four weeks, and Oppenheimer dropped to no. 5 only over Labor Day weekend, though this is partially due to the traditionally weak August release schedule.

Well, “dominated” is a strong term – this double-feature has shared the news cycles with the double strike, as both the Writers’ Guild of America and the Screen Actors’ Guild had begun striking by the time of release. The two news items collided dramatically when the actors walked off of Barbie and Oppenheimer’s star-studded press junkets a week before the twin premier, canceling what would have been an unconscionably fashionable red carpet premiere for Barbie.

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Learning to love Dallas again at the Oak Cliff Film Festival

Posted on August 24, 2023 by reelentropy

Tony Ruggio

Keep Dallas Pretentious. That shirt exists out there, in the glimmer and glamorous ether of the second largest city in Texas, worn by Dallas denizens swathed in club wear and creating noise across downtown via all manner of loud engines and dirty exhaust pipes. So it’s much to my surprise and pleasure to find an oasis among the jet-setters and white collars. That oasis was the 2023 Oak Cliff Film Festival, my first networking foray into Dallas’ cinema landscape in eight years. Surrounded by fellow cinephiles and art world locals, it was a reprieve from a city that often prioritizes business over burgeoning culture, commerce over curation of the arts. There were low-riders strolling down Jefferson Boulevard and high-flyers from the coasts hobnobbing inside the Texas Theatre. 

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‘Barbie’ is all about queerness and domestic violence and it took my dumb ass a week to fully realize it

Posted on July 29, 2023 by reelentropy
We’re going to use all the same media for this. Just, get of my back, OK? Images courtesy Warner Bros.

My Barbie review last week ended with several paragraphs on the romantic relationship played out in stereo between the Barbies and the Kens in the final leg of the film, the main argument being it seems like writer/director Greta Gerwig needs to get her love life in order – Gerwig has, quite famously, been with her romantic and creative partner Noah Baumbach since 2011, they have two children, and neither of them can seem to stop making movies about nasty breakups.

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‘Oppenheimer:’ how I learned to love the bomb and start worrying

Posted on July 24, 2023 by reelentropy
This face, 45 feet tall. Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

10/10 Los Almos, New Mexico, 1940s- The human instinct toward self-destruction has metastasized and now threatens to consume our entire species. Thirty years after a war to end all wars, many of the people who were hurt the worst by it have started a second, and there can be no victory, as it will certainly be followed by a third, a fourth and a fifth.

As this second world war draws toward its close, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is recruited by Col. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to lead a team of scientists in the creation of a bomb to end all bombs, harnessing the power of the sun to annihilate an entire civilization in a single flash of light.

Oppenheimer tells this story in three hours’ worth of detail through the lens of controversial hearings around Oppenheimer’s security clearance renewal in April 1954, followed by Rear Adm. Lewis Strauss’ (Robert Downey Jr.) confirmation hearings as Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce in June 1959, both events that were ruled by innuendo about Oppenheimer’s communist associations before joining the Manhattan Project.

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Come on ‘Barbie,’ let’s go party with gender theory

Posted on July 23, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

9/10 Barbie is an irrepressible explosion of high fashion, joyous and extraordinary set design and deliberately off-kilter dialogue and body language all delivered with a stone-cold straight face from writer/director/executive producer Greta Gerwig. It may be categorically a satire, but none of it is a joke.  

Barbie (Margot Robbie, who also produces), an anthropomorphization of the iconic doll, lives an idyllic life in Barbieland, which appears to be a pocket dimension in Venice Beach in Los Angeles, where she relaxes and parties and sings and dances every day and night with all the other Barbies. She imagines herself and the other Barbies as uncontroversial icons of female empowerment, beauty and opportunity.

Suddenly, Barbie appears to start aging, unable to recover from the previous night like she once did, and the plastic, imagination-powered plumbing and kitchen wares of her Dreamhouse begin to malfunction as she is plagued with thoughts of her own mortality. She makes a pilgrimage to Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who tells her that she must go to the real world and solve the existential crisis of her owner, or she will continue to age. She is followed by her faithful but hopeless suitor, Ken (Ryan Gosling).

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