For
@BWDR
I went long on OPPENHEIMER, Nolan's staggering modernist jigsaw of guilt and Armageddon, turning biography into a Great American Myth on how our most noble aspirations will lead us to our doom.
It's a masterpiece:
the biggest lie my generation was told was how we "can do anything we want" when we grow up, when in reality most degrees aren't marketable, universities hide that from you, and now anything outside finance, tech or healthcare is almost impossible to get into. it's dystopian
Today this girl is out handing out her resume in NY. She has two degrees in communications and acting.
She’s applying for minimum wage jobs and is having a hard time getting one. Says she honestly just wants to live off tik tok.
I'm sure Nolan's choosing his words carefully so OPPENHEIMER doesn't get attacked on Fox News, but everything about the movie itself implies the creation of the atomic bomb will be shown as one of the most dangerous and evil actions in human history. I can't wait for this thing.
Christopher Nolan says “like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived.”
“He made the world we live in, for better or for worse. His story has to be seen to be believed.”
#CinemaCon
My hot take of the day is that Jon Bernthal is one of the most under-utilized actors of his generation, and while he’s doing terrific work popping up in small character-actor roles he hasn’t yet gotten a lead role worthy of his amazing talents.
this is old news but it's kind of staggering how Pedro Pascal managed to be one of the best parts of four of the biggest franchises of the world, giving a great but very different performance in each
the Bill Hader "guest spot SNL funny guy" into one of the most compelling working directors of both action and tragicomic American Surrealism is still one of the most incredible and insane transformations of a talent I've ever seen
paste magazine hiding the identity of the author of a negative Taylor Swift review like they're in witness protection is a good summary of where we're at with obsessive fandom
#TaylorSwift
is the most famous musician—and, arguably, person—on Earth, but on ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ she can’t help but infantilize the very people who buy into her music and drive her successes upwards in the first place. Read our review ↓
People try to knock Nolan's (perceived) politics, but he spoke as pro-union in 2017, he was one of the few major writer-directors to join the WGA picket, and just used an OPPENHEIMER premiere to support the SAG strike. More filmmakers should be leveraging their platform like this
Official: Christopher Nolan just confirmed the cast of
#Oppenheimer
have LEFT the U.K. premiere due to the
#SAGAFTRA
strike
The first time in 60 years that writers and actors are striking together.
#SAGStrike
I've been replaying GTAV and I completely forgot there's a whole Hollywood studio subplot that ends with corrupt producers trying to destroy their own movie to collect insurance money, and we've gotten to the point this is just what studios and streamers do now
Netflix is scrapping ‘THE MOTHERSHIP’, a sci-fi thriller starring Halle Berry, which had completed filming but the studio now plans to never release the film.
(Source: )
People are rightly pointing out how terrific Blunt is in *that* scene, but “You don't get to commit sin, and then ask all of us to feel sorry for you when there are consequences" is the moral center of OPPENHEIMER and she delivers the line with the fire of heartbreak and gospel.
I learned more about how movies are made and why certain creative choices are made from the LORD OF THE RINGS: EXTENDED EDITION appendixes special features than I did from many years of film classes. The fact these kinds of features are rare now is a cultural loss.
Christopher Nolan: ‘‘I’m creating a version of Oppenheimer that you can buy & own at home & put it on your shelf so that no evil streaming service can come & steal it from you’
Nolan goes on to say how dvd extras were so important in his film education.
Watched ANDOR and still in disbelief Disney allowed a series so fiercely anti-cop, anti-prison industrial complex and so skeptical of government to actually get made. Gilroy made a series depicting how close space fascism is to our reality and I can't believe he got away with it.
Rewatching TRUE DETECTIVE season 1 and pretty undeniable how near-perfectly constructed it is; each episode a deeper plunge into the spiral, real policing giving way to a perfect drip of plot, menace, and character. A dozen copy-cats later, nothing looks or feels quite like it.
this episode of SUCCESSION is going to go down in history as one of the best episodes in modern TV history, the kind that defines what the series has always been about while capturing the raw humanity of the deeply flawed, broken people that are the Roy Family. I’m still reeling.
Rewatched RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and still in awe by how fucking fast this thing is. Spielberg directs every scene like a set piece, giving dialogue and exposition nearly as much visual energy as chases and getaways. The pace is almost hypnotic, unlike any movie before or since.
Lily Gladstone is incredible and obviously should've won, but I think it's weird to act like it was a crime against art they gave the award to an actor whose performance had to shift and evolve every three scene in a feat of powerful athleticism and artistry.
two movies that play with the ephemeral nature of time and memory through structure and using non-linearity to different degrees while being shot on 35mm film? of course Nolan loves them lol lol
still unbelievable to me how the AVATAR sequels have fully replaced Star Wars as the definitive space opera, where each future film feels like the rarest and most special of big-scale cinematic events
every time i see fellowship, i always mark out for this complicated shot tracking the uruk-hai through the woods. i get so worked up over it. always make sure to soak it in properly each time. just, goddamn. the good stuff.
it's notable that everything Simu Liu outlines here as Robbie's achievement for BARBIE was executed in her capacity as producer, for which she is each nominated
Simu Liu shares his disappointment over Margot Robbie & Greta Gerwig not getting
#Oscar
nominations in Best Actress & Director.
“Being involved in a small way gave me a window into just how hard Greta and Margot had to fight to get ‘Barbie’ made, and how flawlessly they…
real quick: i don't care how bad you think BABYLON is, if you're celebrating the flop of one of the priciest big-swing studio movies this decade, you're celebrating another nail in the coffin of original film programming made by actual filmmakers at the studio level
people don't talk enough about Nolan casting David Bowie to play a sci-fi sorcerer version of Nikola Tesla who creates loony electricity machines for deranged magicians. easily one of the casting coups of the century.
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
Act I: rough but good
Act II: messy but stunning
Act III: one of the most spellbinding, amazing hours of blockbuster cinema in the last thirteen years
This week taught me loads of people think the Jedi in the prequels were Good Guys who did everything right, instead of inhuman militarized priests whose hypocritical arrogance directly contributed to the fall of The Republic.
thinking about how THE DARK KNIGHT ends with a psychological thought experiment on the moral soul of an entire city and not a single superhero movie has been able to do something as smart or original since.
you can tell Villeneuve realized the energy shield dueling never quite looked right for Part One so he simply abandoned it almost completely for Part Two lol
a fun thing about all this Hays Code anti-sex talk is that noir got around the guidelines by making the "unseen" lurid subtext as arousing and suggestive as possible. everybody wanted to fuck everybody and probably did and looked at eachother like this.
This is a cliche, but seeing THE DARK KNIGHT in 1.43 IMAX on a six story screen and Nolan opening his superhero crime epic with a sprawling cityscape shot in insane resolution, zooming into an exploding pane of glass, is one of the greatest first images of a movie I've ever seen.
One of my favorite niche sub-genres is when a filmmaker finds a real-life subject who's real life story so fully speaks to the filmmakers voice, interests and themes it's as though it were original work, and turns it into a fictionalized, nearly operatic epic.
are tensions so high on this site that they're shaming this guy for Not Watching Enough Movies when they obviously mean it's rare for a war-type action movie to star a 40-year-old woman, which yeah, is pretty rare!
Rewatching ANDOR and struck again by the genius in creating four multi-episode arcs, forming a uniquely cinematic rhythm constantly cycling through phases of build, anticipation, and climax. Every episode, every scene, part of a linear, satisfying whole. More shows should do this
Hollywood would rather risk hundreds of millions of dollars, cripple big releases with weaker release dates, and reconfigure their entire schedules than pay their workers a fair wage. Delaying DUNE Part II (and others) is a negotiating tactic. It won't work.
having the best time with SHŌGUN, a series with real discipline and interest in light, framing and lenses, and every Japanese actor gives beautifully nuanced performances while the European guys are doing impressions of what Tom Hardy would sound like as a pirate. it's gorgeous
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON showing Ernest's conscience is not absolution. It's the fatal flaw of his humanity laid bare: he still acts out evil, regardless of that guilt. This is what evil looks like in the casual scope of the everyday, and that's why it's so frightening.
Before l stop tweeting about DEAD RECKONING, I have to flex how incredible Pom Klementieff is here. She sculpts an entire character almost entirely through forceful body language, musical-like movement and facial expression. It's almost a silent movie performance. She's amazing.
Ethan Hawke is one of those rare artists who's able to speak profoundly about how art fits into the human experience while sounding like a salt-of-the-earth regular and humble guy and I really love that.
thinking about how 7 months ago we got a stone cold American masterpiece, a genuine visual marvel and the best movie musical in decades and people (audiences and the academy) just did not care
70 years ago today, a Sands Hotel dancer named Sally McCloskey climbed to the top of Mount Charleston in Nevada and performed an interpretive dance while an atomic bomb exploded behind her, just 40 miles away.
WAR OF THE WORLDS centers the storytelling and camerawork around the trauma, fear and anxiety of the often (intentionally) unlikable family, with Spielberg evoking 9/11 iconography, trains on fire and crowd violence. It’s an upsetting film, and not what audiences wanted in 2005.
the funniest part of Tarantino's ten movie limit is that it's based on some Classic Hollywood guys who got worse in age, meanwhile many of our modern masters (Spielberg, Scorsese, Lynch, Miller, Cameron, Miyazaki, etc) continue doing incredible work without breaking a sweat
it's wild how Daisy Ridley showed up with a powerhouse performance in THE FORCE AWAKENS, a sensitive and nuanced turn in THE LAST JEDI and then gave a great performance THE RISE OF SKYWALKER despite it being shit, and Hollywood has not given her one great thing to do since
The way SUCCESSION repeatedly breaks my heart over this wretched, fucked up morally bankrupt family is astonishing. One week my stomach churns with disgust, the next I’m crying over the depths of their grief. They are not okay. It’s one of the best episodes the show’s ever done.
what amazes me about the "THE WAY OF WATER has a predictable plot" people is how it climaxes with two parents threatening eachother's kids, one a divinely birthed fairy child and the other the son of a reborn villain, where the villain find his humanity and hero loses hers.
Indiana Jones has always been a pure distillation of Lucas' deeply weird sensibilities with Spielberg's penchant for genuine horror. Villains melt, or their heads explode like watermelon. They've never been simple, easy adventure films, so of course Disney treated them like one.
says a lot about collective franchise fatigue that in the span of a couple weeks we’ll have HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, RINGS OF POWER, SHE-HULK and ANDOR releasing basically at the same time and the general vibe is “eh, hope they will be ok”
whenever people bring up whether Tom Cruise is a good actor, I think of this simple scene in FALLOUT that hinges entirely on Cruise's face, body language and chemistry with Alix Bénézech who plays the cop. for such a small moment, they're both incredible.
the way George Miller is coming back to remind everyone he's one of the greatest directors alive with a teaser trailer that has a more brilliant blend of physical and digital effects than nearly any other movie in years, this looks unbelievably gorgeous
this David Lynch interview about making music in his mud-cave music studio while shirtless and covered in mud is one of the greatest things i've ever seen
this tweet is going to self-destruct shortly but a lot of BARBIE doesn't look much better –– the opening musical number is all simple setups of wides and mediums with a couple push-ins, IE how music videos are shot. I adore Gerwig, but it's her least impressively directed movie.
What the best directors of digital action understand, IE Lucas and Cameron, is how the virtual camera has to feel like a physical, weighted object reacting to the action. It can't be "floaty," or have impossible camera moves. This is one reason the prequels are aging like wine.
important reminder digital cameras can create almost any look the filmmakers want––including emulating film––if they take the right steps to find that look. If a digitally shot movie looks too flat, sterile, murky, drab, it's not the camera. incredible times we're living in.
fascinated by the way Villeneuve and Fraser are using drastically different color palettes––shades of beige, 2049s Vegas-Orange, cooly naturalistic, and B&W monochrome––to show a spectrum of worlds in the DUNE universe
with THE FABELMANS flopping can't think of a better metaphor for how the culture of moviegoing has shifted than the fact in 2004 THE TERMINAL, a mixed-reviewed movie about Tom Hanks hanging out at an airport eating packets of ketchup, made 220 million dollars worldwide
Not everyone feels this way, but I loved how ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE balances setting up a sequel while being its own movie–Miles and Gwen have tidy and concluding arcs with genuine growth, as it still ends on a true cliffhanger. It's among the best part ones I've ever seen.
This is the obvious response, but it's very funny for Tarantino to talk about his ten movie limit for 15 years only for it to psyche himself out to the point he over-stresses making a perfect final film and winds up fumbling the ball in paralysis lol
NOPE uses directional sound in a more sophisticated (and terrifying) way than almost any movie this year. The clatter of hooves, the wind of digested screams, the bellow of the alien beast. Of course the Academy, ever biased against horror, snubbed it.
didn't occur to me until tonight one of the biggest upsides of OPPENHEIMER winning best picture is people finally realizing just how instrumental and irreplaceable Emma Thomas is as one of the great (and thrifty!) producers in Hollywood right now
i know this is a boring and obvious thing to say and we’re all sick of saying it, but OPPENHEIMER winning best picture is truly one of the best wins in the history of the Academy Awards
why did nobody tell me SUGAR, the new Colin Farrell detective show, is nuts. even before the alleged twist, it plays as a noir fever dream-gumshoe fantasy thing with constant stylistic swings –– like splicing in THE BIG HEAT into casual conversations. having the time of my life
speaks volumes about how streamers keep treating its "content" that Soderbergh has a new mini-series out that's a really fun modern twist on a Kurosawa classic with Timothy Olyphant and Claire Danes and Zazie Beetz, but because "MAX" buried it essentially no-one knows it exists
Guillermo del Toro recently summarized the problem of blockbusters relying on previz as "we get motion but not emotion, we don't get scope, we get effects," and that really speaks to how weightless, flat and low-stakes most action has come to feel this decade
watching SHOGUN and I'm still in awe an opulent series can simply spend a fortune on gorgeous locations, beautiful sets, and thoughtful camera setups while still focusing almost entirely on drama, writing and performance to drive the storytelling like it's mid-2000s HBO
I really love how Chad Stahelski finally got a huge budget more than double of the previous JOHN WICK movies, and instead of using it to go wild with visual effects or cartoonishly big set-pieces, he built an entire club with walls made of waterfalls
after years of drab and dark fantasy-themed movies and tv, seeing Yorgos make an expressionistic Mary Shelley dreamland with maximalist tendencies and gloriously rich color feels a little like getting electrocuted in the best possible way
Epic widescreen imagery, the promise of old-west action, a gripping story of cultural wipeout, and a possibly goofy menacing DiCaprio accent. I couldn't be happier Apple gave Scorsese blockbuster-level cash to make KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. This thing looks incredible.
There is something undignified and even grim about how whenever a filmmaker makes a mildly controversial creative choice, award season treats it like a public trial where they’re repeatedly cross-examined to generate cheap clicks. It’s happened with a dozen movies this year.
Following some criticism from Indigenous viewers, Martin Scorsese is breaking down exactly why
#KillersOfTheFlowerMoon
ended up being so focused on the villainous Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, instead of Lily Gladstone's Mollie:
the way SUCCESSION took the most disgustingly wealthy, self-involved and pitch-black evil family of buffoons and turned them into television's most tragic and deeply felt characters is a magic trick that's going to be studied for the next decade
I rewatched MONEYBALL on Netflix and no movie makes me feel like I have a burning passion for something I don't care much about quite as much this movie makes me feel like I fucking love baseball
I know this is an easy jab but it's really something how THE WAY OF WATER completely ruined the way I look at fantastical underwater sequences in other movies. Most might not look great anyway, but now they just seem unacceptably artless.
the biggest surprise for me having now seen DUNE: PART TWO in 15/70 IMAX, 2.39 scope and single laser 1.90 is that the majority of the shots are actually compositionally strongest and most beautiful in scope
Thinking about how THE FABELMANS is one of the only movies to endorse the importance of selfishness, and openly questions our responsibility to others versus our responsibility to our own happiness, whether it’s who you love or chasing reckless dreams. It’s a masterpiece.
listening to Margot Robbie explain to Cillian Murphy how she helped convince Mattel to make BARBIE really illustrates how shrewd a film producer she's become, packaging her thoughts into articulate but gentle bite-size statements for easy comprehension that express actual ideas
imagine how badly Universal wanted to be in the Nolan business to agree to 200 million dollar spend for a non-blockbuster historical drama without action sequences, and then limit the box office even more by having it be rated R. This just doesn't happen anymore by major studios.
can’t think of a better sign of the shifting tides in audience interest than THE BOY AND THE HERON has sold more Friday night tickets in its third weekend than opening night
Dolby for AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM Chicago’s biggest theater
I can't imagine a more brainless strategy than announcing ASTEROID CITY is hitting VOD just as it won Wes Anderson the biggest opening of his career. Studios are so stupidly desperate for a quick buck, they're undercutting their own film and theatrical exhibition as a whole.
rewatching DUNE solidifies one of its key pleasures is how Villenueve grounds classic dweebo-nerd shit — huge laser beams, towering space vessels, ships shaped like bugs, energy shields, big worms, witchy spell-casting voices — into a magnificently credible and textural reality
I watched FIRST BLOOD for the first time in ages only to realize the sequels eclipsed that the original is a fiercely anti-cop, anti-government and deeply sad action epic about a veteran discarded by the exploitative military machine. Stallone is incredible. I loved it.
I finally watched STRANGE DAYS, Kathryn Bigelow's anti-cop glitch-noir cyberpunk actioner, saying more about the ethical trespasses of tech-voyeurism, exploitation, and systemic apathy than most movies the last decade. Amazing how ahead of its time it is. I loved this thing.
seeing DUNE is 100% in full IMAX but remembering there's only eleven "real IMAX" 1.43 dual laser theaters left in the United States and none of them are near me
I'm late but I *loved* Ang Lee's HULK, a bizarro, green-tinged psychodrama about fathers and sons and actually dramatizes Banner's freudian anger and it's origin. It's also a visual marvel, with more stylistic, comic-book invention than most superhero movies combined. Incredible.
I know we keep talking about how crazy the box office is for OPPENHEIMER, but the way -this- movie is about to out-gross Nolan’s sci-fi epic melodrama that’s proven his most popular with younger people, is genuinely another box office feat of this decade. Just staggering.
I don't think there's been another popular director this decade so many guys online call one of the greatest to ever do it also have his first three or four films so casually erased from any and all discussion of his body of work quite like Villeneuve
You are now looking at one of the greatest runs by any director in the history of Cinema. Over the course of the last 11 years & 7 Films, Denis Villeneuve has cemented himself as one of the best directors of his generation & perhaps one of the greatest directors in the history of…