As I mentioned, they obvious did a digital intermediary for visual effects shots. For Oppenheimer I don't think they was much CGI, but at the bare minimum I sure they did some digital compositing, so they must have matched their photochemical color grading with digital color grading for some scenes. Also, they had a digital colorist to produce the grade for the DCP anyway, to match the look of the film master.
But it seems to me that reputable sources have clearly stated that they did a fully analog film path all the way to release prints.
There's this interview with the DP: https://fotokem.com/oppenheimer-hoytema-fotokem/
> And once production began, FotoKem printed literally everything Nolan shot. Then after the edit was complete, FotoKem brought in Negative Cutter Simone Appleby from the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image Animée in France to cut each section and glue it together, which starts with a list that comes out of the Avid that provides every single one of the over 3,000 shots. That list, coupled with a work print (a film version of the list of shots), was then rolled against the negative, using also a QuickTime reference with key numbers—all of which allowed Appleby to cut the physical negative together into the final assembly, from which final prints were made. And from there, Van Hoytema and Color Timer Kristen Zimmerman painstakingly perfected the color of each and every shot by hand.
> Theodosiou’s focus was matching the color of the digital master to that of the analog film master because Nolan and FotoKem knew that not everybody in the world would be able to view Oppenheimer on analog film. “We were able to manipulate the images and make them look exactly how Christopher intended for them to look on film,” says Theodosiou. “For the final tweaks, we had to split screen the image between a digital and a film on the screen and match the film identically throughout, from reel one all the way to the end.”
Not every film. It was widely reported that Oppenheimer was color graded photochemically, and the 65mm film physically spliced (the editor of course worked in Avid with digital film scans). This means that 70 mm screenings were projecting a fully analog end-to-end pipeline. The exception, of course, is the visual effects shots, which went through a digital intermediary.
The same seems to be true of The Odyssey, although the reporting is less clear as of now, and I suspect there are many more visual effects shots than Oppenheimer.
Reminds me of when Oppenheimer released, a bunch of people criticized it for not actually featuring any Japanese characters, instead being relegated to mere dream-shadows that Oppenheimer sees once.
It's almost as if a work entitled "Oppenheimer" is not supposed to be a character study of this American scientist during the war named Oppenheimer.
Juuusttt maaayyybeee, an adaptation of The Odyssey is mostly gonna be about Odysseus and his side of the war, and that's when Troy gets narratively involved. TFA justifies this criticism with a polemic about what a "serious depiction of violence" is supposed to include but doesn't pause to consider that maybe that is not the film's point. Even the source material isn't about the Trojan War---there's another epic prequel for that! Not to mention Virgil's sequel.
She also says, in the same paragraph, that the "Homeric poems easily clear the bar". Sure! The other Homeric poem---the one not the subject of this adaptation---did that.
I'm not saying these are not themes worth exploring just that maybe it is not a mistake that it wasn't included here. Not an oversight, but intentional. Maybe a work of fiction is supposed to have biases (gasp!) and that is just fine.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Had Nolan involved the Trojans beyond Zendaya's character we'd be hearing criticism along the lines of the film being "thematically incoherent", "could've had a more focused treatment, easily shaving off twenty minutes to its already unforgiving runtime".
> We have a couple new nuclear weapon designs, but not really going for bigger or stronger. Just packaging.
There's many other considerations. Like the type and amount of fissile material. To name one that became well known: any plutonium needs to be refreshed (re-breeded I believe is the term) every few years.
Also, look at first designs: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-35242069 The weight is secret, but I think you can easily see it's going to be deep into "extremely impractical" territory.
Surely you can see why someone (especially aircraft designers) might ask for better versions. Ideally you'd like a version that fits on the hypersonic missiles and those things ... are just not going to work. The size. The shape. The weight. None of them will work.
Then a quick theoretical exploration will tell you that the minimum theoretical size of such a device is tiny. The scare was about "suitcase sized", but if you actually do the calculation looking for the minimum ... to do it however you need to create an explosion of the correct shape to get anywhere near those minimum sizes. And explosion simulations are a problem that utterly sucks ... Oh and these are secret military projects, these simulations, not very optimal. The people doing them are best described as loyal, and not as great physicists. Not saying they're terrible, but in the movie Oppenheimer you can clearly see why the best and brightest are not available for these things.
'Movies' at Blockbuster level pivoted to ersatz carnival rides post-'Pirates of the Caribbean', focusing on safe IPs and simple plots designed to aid comprehension of the major story beats in the SEA markets without the need to resort to subtitles or dubbing.
'True' Cinema has been going from strength to strength the last decade, with even Netflix putting out Fincher spectacles like 'Mank' on streaming, and A24 bringing introducing a new audience to phenomenal Korean Cinema like 'Parasite' and 'Minari'.
Even in the traditional studio system we have been spoilt in recent years by a succession of Palm D'Or and Oscar winners like Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness, Zone of Interest, The Brutalist, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.
That book is fiction with a factual veneer. I liked it a lot until I started realizing that many of the details were made up. Then I couldn't read any more. It was like when TwoSetViolin described what it was like to watch movies with musician characters played, unrealistically, by non-musician actors. You'd be watching the perfectly fine movie until you noticed that the bananas were blue instead of yellow, with nobody mentioning it. After that the movie made no sense any more.
I hated the movie Oppenheimer for the same reason.
> Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world
"The “near zero” chances Oppenheimer unnerves Groves with in-movie probably come from Manhattan Project physicist Arthur Compton, who told author Pearl S. Buck in a 1959 interview that they’d calculated the odds at “slightly less than one-in-three-million.” In 1975, Bethe denied that there had ever been a less-than-one-in-three-million chance of setting the atmosphere on fire, but the idea had already lodged itself in the public imagination."
The first batman movie was a paint by numbers reimplementation of The Shadow (1997). You can find comparisons online, nearly shot by shot and most of the same plot beats. The second and third went sort of back towards a very mechanical batman representation that reminded me of the planned low budget Iron Man movie where he wouldn't have had the ability to fly. Just stomping around punching badguys like a Power Rangers extra. The new Bat Mobile seems to inspire some of this reputation
>Inception
Inceptions pretty flat for a film about dreams.
>Interstellar
Neuro-Diverse level of detail until the bits with space magic at the end.
>Tenet
I couldnt sit through 10 minutes of it. Its like the antifilm. It didnt want me to observe it otherwise it wouldnt have emitted such a piercing screeching noise.
>Dunkirk
He has an old period watch, and he recorded the ticking. He overlays the ticking constantly. Also he tells the story out of sequence for some reason. But theres lots of practical effects if you include the stupid watch.
>Oppenheimer
Between tenet hating me on a physical level, and the perfectly servicable fat man and little boy film from the 70s I just havent seen it to comment.
One of my big gripes with the film Oppenheimer was the blast itself, obviously a climactic moment in the film.
It looked like someone set off a bunch of chemical explosives. That’s not how it looked in real life. Totally bizarre decision. I don’t know if they were trying to avoid effects on purpose of go gritty and retro or something but the “unearthly cosmic horror” feel of the first a-bomb blast is important. It’s what led Oppenheimer to recite “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
>I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.
I'm not a huge Nolan-discourse-insider, but that seems like a pretty bizarre reputation to have for someone who's famous for directing three Batman movies, Inception, Interstellar and Tenet?
Is this reputation just because of Oppenheimer?
I haven't seen Dunkirk (and I'm not a WWII buff so couldn't tell if they used right planes/boats/guns/uniforms/whatever even if I tried), but even a short blurb on Wikipedia talks about a "balance historical accuracy with aesthetics that would favour the film stock".
> I think we’re looking at a wonderful machine that can potentially make meaningful contributions to the sciences and maybe even humanity as a whole.
That's true. But. Maybe you've seen the Oppenheimer movie, there is a moment where Oppenheimer shakes Teller's hand, basically after the guy ruins Oppenheimer's life in a completely immature betrayal. That's what people are angry about, the academy community is Oppenheimer's wife asking, why the fuck did you shake his hand?
At least regarding leadership and funding, I don't know if it's a matter of likely or unlikely outcomes. It's just facts: these guys are collaborators. The commenter might very well have zero graduate students starting next year. What pisses me off is the utter obliviousness that STEM people have about how deeply political their work is.
And perhaps this is the real reckoning for the mathematics community. Not the possibility that AI is going to replace their jobs, it's not going to do that. But that having these intensely myopic and disagreeable personalities mean that basically zero leadership skills have been nurtured in the mathematics community. You cannot name a single politician who is a mathematician. You have to be elected to have power in this country, it's that simple, there are way more billionaires than there are presidents! Leadership is far more scarce. So that's why these disputes matter, and while it's great that people engage on Hacker News about it, it's intensely disappointing that "reduced science funding is really bad" gets downvoted.
That is a result of Hacker News's emphasis on this very 2010s view that it wants to be a place where the math nerds gather (in @dang's words) - he doesn't get that the quality of the discourse was caused by great leadership at many political and academic levels. Nobody credits how much better leaders were during Y Combinator's biggest success stories, or how much we overvalue the intellectual powers of math because it makes money as opposed to enlightening our view of the world.
they completely glossed over Graves in Oppenheimer, one of the many reasons I hated that movie. There's a great "scene" in "the making of the atomic bomb" that also appears in the movie that they botched. Something along the way of oppenheimer stressing over "how do we pick the right way to make the bomb" and graves saying "simple, we do all of them". There's so much interesting material there and they instead focused on bed sheets.
It does not detail those facts. I gloss over them in my reading of the article because I think the topic is been well covered elsewhere. For example, the Oppenheimer movie did a fair job of depicting the communist party activities among intellectuals in the late 1930s.
The fact that those activities led to a thing called McCarthism in the early 1950s is pretty well documented.
Imprisoning Qian for 5 years for a meeting in the late 1930s after his contributions to the war effort was very Red Scare consistent.
> That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring.
Still issue (seriously).
He might be an expert at building organizations in real life, but there is no rule that a movie about him has to focus on that part. Movies are not documentaries.
Examples: Oppenheimer, A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game, Jobs, Social Media, and literally every movie that sells tbh.
Isn't the recent Oppenheimer about building organizations, politics, and courts? There are bombs scenes but majority of the movie is the supposed boring stuff
I agree PHM was great (and I loved the book before the movie). But as a VFX person, please be careful not to buy into the currently popular studio PR line: "it's all real, almost no CGI". Media and influencers love this line and often unknowingly muddle the studio's very carefully crafted press release wording into outright lies by paraphrasing and making assumptions. The problem is these aren't just white lies, they deprive some very talented VFX artists from getting credit for amazing work.
PHM did use real sets (like most movies) and they were able to avoid using green screen for some of the ship exteriors but the backgrounds were still digitally replaced with CGI rendered elements, they just didn't use green screen to pull the matte. Instead they used a black backdrop with careful lighting and some hand rotoscoping to extract the digital mattes. Doing it this way had the advantage of not needing to digitally remove green spill on reflective surfaces by hand and it saved money over doing a StageCraft volume at that size. Done well, green screen would have produced the exact same shot but it would have cost more and taken longer.
About the puppet: A real Rocky puppet was indeed used on set and some of the puppet is sometimes seen on camera. But most of the puppet was digitally replaced or enhanced in most of the scenes. However, using a much more realistic puppet on set was a notable technique but not because the character wasn't CGI. The puppet IS worth talking about because it directly enabled the final mostly CGI character be really good CGI. It's so good because it gives the VFX character animators an ideal reference that's "grounded" in the physical reality of the set. The subtle interplay of light, shadow, texture and specularity are all physically grounded. It also gives actors something closer to reality to interact with. It's a wonderful technique and should be celebrated instead of obfuscated to promote a falsehood that trends well on social media.
But influencers and media are unintentionally perpetuating "No CGI" myths instead of focusing on the actually interesting, more nuanced reality. The same movies you hear these "No/little CGI" claims about actually have tons of digital VFX, they're just good VFX. And they're usually good because what these films are doing is providing extended environments and plates which help the CGI be "grounded" in reality.
Similar "careful wording" grew into outright lies around Top Gun. Tom Cruise truthfully said in interviews that he was flown in a jet right alongside other REAL jets doing simulated dog-fighting. The lost nuance is that all the other jets Cruise flew with those dog fight scenes were Soviet trainer jets that are pretty small and look quite different than real MIGs. So exactly zero pixels of those jets are ever seen in the final film. They were entirely replaced by CGI jets. And you couldn't tell because the weird-looking trainer jets provided grounded reference for the CGI pixel that replaced them. Just about the only recent mainstream release that can reasonably claim "no CGI" is Nolan's Oppenheimer (it's not quite fully true but it depends on technical definitions). But every film I've seen social media "No CGI" hype around is chock full of hundreds of CGI shots. So let's just celebrate using grounded on-set and in-camera references to assist rendering outstanding, realistic CGI because it's great work by talented people.
Recent good movies, just going in release order off my letterboxd, although I have to be careful to include only "Hollywood" here:
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - beautifully shot and a beautiful theme about what humanity is
- One Battle After Another - it's PTA, all his movies are good
- Bugonia - incredible dark comedy
- Weapons - fun little horror comedy movie
- Sinners - just won an oscar for the soundtrack, not a perfect movie but a fun watch with some incredible scenes
- Companion
- Nosferatu - incredibly atmospheric
- The Surfer - total trip with good old Nicholas Cage
- Love Lies Bleeding - just a fun, a bit crazy movie
- Dream Scenario - another trippy Cage movie
- Poor Things
- Oppenheimer ...
- Renfield
- The Menu
- The Banshees of Insherin
- Barbarian (same director as Weapons)
- Prey
- Bullet Train - fun action movie
- The Northman
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- The Invisible Man - most effective horror movie I've ever seen
- The Gentlemen
- Joker -how close can you get to looking like Taxi Driver without being Taxi Driver ...
- The Vast of Night - some scenes that really draw you in and pretty nostalgic
in 2019 now, so I won't continue, but there are plenty of good movies made nowadays, and I won't say I've seen even a close amount of them from the past few years. Of course I'm watching these at home, not in theatres, so that's certainly an argument.
I'm talking about the best of the best though, the top of the form at the time. Yes those are classics and for good reason. But there were also lots more. Lucas, Kubrick, Spielberg, Lynch...feels like they just don't make 'em like that anymore. It's crazy that in some ways nothing has really eclipsed a movie from 1977 and we're still awash in its glow.
I tried to provide specific examples and contrast with something in the current zeitgest. I'm open to counter-arguments. I liked Barbie and Oppenheimer, both were well-done, but I don't think they'll stand up with the greats. I admit that I don't watch as many movies now but what stands out in the past 10 years?
Where I go it's about $33 for two tickets bought online and probably $20 for those snacks, though we usually share a drink and a popcorn. The theater is still usually empty.
The market-clearing price is nearly zero except for some new releases. Oppenheimer was sold out in its first weekend, for example.
Anyone who went to movies before about 1999 remembers them being a lot more popular.
Remember when the Oppenheimer movie taught us how we got The Bomb even though the nazis had a significant head start because ze germans got rid of the smart people studying "jew physics" and what was left of their science took them to dead ends?
Replace "jew physics" with "woke physics" and you see the idiocy of this.
I don't know as of when. But I have no problem listing one movie after another for the 70's, 80's, 70's, 200x but since then it's been longer and longer between movies that stand out.
Oppenheimer and 'Don't look up' are the exceptions. Everything everywhere all at once was mentioned here but I found it pretty thin and predictable.
Stubborn old directors like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorcese... https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/page/shot-on-film/
Films are mostly post processed digitally - but some, like Oppenheimer, are color graded the old optical way. While Dune was shot digitally, printed on film, then scanned back in again!
Mentioned this elsewhere but The Dark Knight Rises is one of the worst dark movie offenders. When someone says dark movie scenes it’s what comes to my mind. That one confusing backwards movie has terrible audio he did on purpose.
Oppenheimer didnt suffer from either of those issues but I’ve only watched it once on a good TV.
Not OP, but one example could perhaps be American Prometheus and the Oppenheimer film. I would consider them "dominant Western narratives" about the origin of the nuclear bomb.
And like the person said, there is nothing inherently wrong with such a narrative. Like them I'm also curious about non-western narratives.
If most groups, cultures, religions, countries were more curious about "non-native" stories, maybe we'd all be a bit more open-minded and understanding.
> Despite his moral quandaries, von Braun participates in the Nazi's V-2 rocket program during World War II to further his ambitions in rocket engineering. The film carefully depicts his efforts to reconcile his love for scientific exploration with the knowledge that his work is being used for destructive purposes.
I have a similar short story idea where a person of the calibre of Elon Musk who works so hard is made to feel and see his successful moonshot projects being used for destroying and subjugating nations. This would be similar to Oppenheimer. Another twist I can take with the story is Hero "Elon" knows about this outcome but still in the hope of change in institutional ideology over decades hopes for better use for his technology. In the movie Watchmen, Ozymandias feels the pain of millions he is going to kill to save future billions.
Where's the demographic data in this piece? Moviegoing isn't the 'same' but it seems like there's a segment of the 'younger generation' that gravitates towards the 'event' aspect of some bigger draws. Taylor Swift movie? Barbie? Minecraft? etc
And what is 'older generations'? Maybe that's not the elder millenial-Gen X portion of the market, but maybe 65+ have a lot of time on their hands to go see Oppenheimer etc. Top Gun? Just some off the top of my head that seemed to have an impact culturally and box office-wise.
There's something to be said about the quality of films and/or the role of the blockbuster level ones. Maybe the result is only the mega films are what the cinema is for in the end.
Meanwhile just last month Zootopia 2 set single-day record for a Hollywood open in China.
Sure. I had a lot of help from Claude Opus 4.5, but it was roughly:
- Using pyscenedetect to split each video on a per scene level
- Using the decord library https://github.com/dmlc/decord to pull frames from each scene at a particular sample rate (specific rate I don't have handy right now, but it was 1-2 per scene)
- Aggregating frames in batches of around 256 frames to be normalized for CLIP embedding on GPU (had to re-write the normalization process for this because the default library does it on CPU)
- Uploading the frames along with metadata (timestamp, etc) into a vector DB, in my case Qdrant running locally along with a screenclip of the frame itself for debugging.
I'm bottlenecked by GPU compute so I also started experimenting with using Modal for the embedding work too, but then vacation ended :) Might pick it up again in a few weeks. I'd like to be able to have a temporal-aware and potentially enriched search so that I can say "Seek to the scene in Oppenheimer where Rami Malek testifies" and be able to get a timestamped clip from the movie.
It's the 21st century. Schools, media, politicians, commentators remind us about multiple world wars, millions of "sacrifices" for "freedom". We have technology that was unimaginable to our parents and grandparents.
So what is going on in the world? Who is putting the brakes on human progress?
The UN is an empty shell. Prominent countries which historically created the conditions for endless conflict - let's call them out: the US, Russia, UK, France, China (coincidentally, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council) - are sitting back, diplomatically allowing atrocities and injustices to unfold.
Why is this being allowed to happen?
This isn't even a time to point fingers, assign blame. We need to hold ourselves to the highest ideals.
We already have tens, hundreds, thousands, of talented individuals - graduates from the top universities of the world, who know how to make the world a better place. They understand history, morality, and ethics to an excruciating degree. Where are they? Why are they not in top decision-making positions in governments?
Why are our political structures still struggling with basic competencies? A House of Dynamite was a perfect movie to follow on from Oppenheimer. Scientists created a superweapon; politicians ran with it, and blackmailed the world. It's pathetic and deplorable.
I'll note that I have a physics degree. My undergrad advisor and several people I've worked for had worked directly under those scientists, though post project. Including my time at the two labs not in New Mexico. I'm saying this to help convince you that I know what I'm talking about here:
That story is wildly overblown. No one really thought this would happen. But given the consequences of being wrong no one wanted to trust themselves. So what they did is keep asking each other to try to do the calculations independently and see if they would get the same results. The idea came from Teller who was researching stars, which do have a runaway reaction. In the movie Oppenheimer says "nonzero chance" and that's accurate. He really did mean "we aren't confident that this would get impossible" but they were very confident the likelihood was almost zero.
The reason this it's important is because it flips the story on its head. Had they thought there was a meaningful chance and moved forward then the story represents how brash they were and careless. But instead it is a story of where they were considering and taking seriously something they thought was a near impossibility and yet they took great effort to ensure that it was actually impossible. That's now a story of how careful they were. It's the exact opposite of being brash.
Mind you, this doesn't contradict what I said before. They did know the bomb would be powerful, but I doubt many knew how powerful until near or at Trinity. And I'll tell you, unless you can do the calculations then you really don't understand what those things actually do. It is so much more than an explosion. It is more than the radiation. There's a reason so many could no longer be blind to the consequences. To this day the skeletons are out of the physicists' closet because we all know we are capable of unknowingly following the same path. When you learn what that bomb does you hope you're at the center of it
>You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known.
But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. Consider the history of CGI. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to complain about how the move away from practical sets in favor of CGI was making movies worse. And it was! You had backgrounds and monsters that looked like they escaped from a video game. But that complaint has pretty much died out these days as the tech got better (although Nolan's Oppenheimer did weirdly hype the fact that its simulated Trinity blast was done by practical effects).
i CERTAINLY agree that theres tons of new literalism in Oppenheimer. i was mentioning that Oppenheimer is not catering to the lowest common denominator in order to get an Oscar. Oscars trade on belabored basic character drama and many of the things you listed. mostly depends on directors who the academy think are "deserving" at the moment
Oppy did incredibly well because of it's memed Barbenheimer marketing wave. i dont think the 3 hour great man movie was lowest common denominator movie. sure, you and i might think it was basic and laughed when Einstein showed up, but my bar for lowest common denominator is a Happy Madison production
Would a "common denominator" person really watch that movie and afterwards be confused about anything that happened? What aspect would they remotely be confused about? What aspect would be "deep" to them?
From what I saw, it was nothing but the most basic character drama combined with some "suspenseful" races against time thrown in here and there. For the second half it turns into just one of those movies where the political/social message is effectively just beaten into your face, there's no subtlety at all.
They took no risk that the viewer wouldn't get their message, they make it plainly obvious. In my mind it's a perfect example of "the new literalism". It's almost up there with stuff like Don't Look Up, Snowpiercer, The Big Short, Parasite, etc. These movies mostly solely exist as a conduit through which a political/social message can be force fed to you, in the form of a movie, rather than existing as an actual movie.
Went to see the F1 movie a couple weeks ago in suburban Northern California on a local theater's "LieMax" screen (ie not one of the ~30 real IMAX 15-perf film theaters in the world but just a slightly larger mall theater screen that (probably) has a newer bulb and more recently calibrated speakers). It cost just over $75 for two adults + a large popcorn, soda and bottle of water.
I was a bit surprised at the price too. Seems maybe 15-20% more than my last theater outing last Summer. We don't go often because we have a dedicated home theater room that's fully sound proof with total light control and 9 custom theater loungers on two levels facing a 150-inch screen with 4K HDR10+ calibrated digital laser projector and built-in 7.4.2 surround THX-rated speakers. While there was nothing wrong with the "LieMax" theater, the picture, sound, seating and overall experience at home are meaningfully better - even when everything works at the cinema and no one is annoying. And I say that as someone with fairly significant professional video engineering experience. Of course, one of the ~30 real IMAX screens is objectively better (when showing 15-perf 70mm film, which they don't always do) but the nearest one is nearly an hour drive, costs even more and has $15 in parking on top. The last time I went was for Oppenheimer two years ago. But short of going there, it's hard to see much reason to go to a local cinema if you have a high-end home theater rig (other than just having a night out).
There's not even an advantage to the claimed "big screen" at the LieMax. While I prefer a slightly larger theatrical field of view than most people (around 45 degrees), my FOV at home is 46 degrees sitting 12.5 feet from the floor-to-ceiling screen (https://acousticfrontiers.com/blogs/Articles/Home-theater-viewing-angles-distances-and-sightlines).
Anora, Oppenheimer, and Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies. the academy has many issues but i dont think its catering to mass appeal and dumbing down
Serpell's interpretation of Anora is dismissive and shallow. the point is Disney infects the American mind and Baker's made that point across half his movies and in some cases incredibly blatantly. its implied and Serpell categorizing it under New Literalism goes to show they're probably right in many cases, but also use it as a convenient excuse to avoid analysis
> movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator
That's not the kind of films that tend to win the major Oscar awards. Those tend to be either a bit artsy (e.g. Anora this year) or "serious" biopics/history movies (e.g. Oppenheimer last year).
Bit of a tight line to walk. Longer movies mean fewer showings per day. When I saw that Oppenheimer was three hours long -I want to watch that at home so I can take a bathroom break/snacks so a personal pause button is an improvement on the theater.
Let's take video streaming. I have a pretty compressed version of Arrival that's at 2GB and is a 4k movie ~2hrs long (the original file was ~2x the size). To stream that we need to do 2000Mb / (3600s * 2) = 277.8Mb/s. This also doesn't account for any buffering. This is one of my smaller 4k videos and more typical is going to be 3Gb-5Gb (e.g. Oppenheimer vs Children of Men). Arrival is pretty dark and a slow movie so great for compression.
Now, there's probably some trickery going on that can get better savings and you'll see used with things like degrading the quality. You could probably drop this down to 1.5Gb and have no major visual hits or you can do a variable streaming and drop this even more. On many screens you might not notice a huge difference between 1440 and 4k, and depending on the video, maybe even 1080p and 4k[0].
For comparison, I loaded up a 4k YouTube video (which uses vp9 encoding) and monitored the bandwidth. It is very spiky, but frequently jumped between 150kbps and 200Mbps. You could probably do 2 people on this. I think it'd get bogged down with 4 people. And remember, this is all highly variable. Games, downloads, and many other things can greatly impact all this. It also highly depends on the stability of your network connection. You're paying for *UP TO* 300Mbps, not a fixed rate of 300Mbps. Most people want a bit of headroom.
[0] Any person will 100% be able to differentiate 1080p and 4k when head to head, but in the wild? We're just too used to spotty connections and variable resolutions. It also depends on the screen you're viewing from, most importantly the screen size (e.g. phone).
>16mm/35mm is already fading, with a finite population of prints that dwindles every year as film deteriorates or reels are lost/destroyed.
They are still publishing films in 35mm and at least in popular US cities the format has a following. For example in 2021, Last Night In Soho was printed in 35mm. To be fair the 35mm print was only exhibited in some select locations and only for special screenings. But then we also have 70mm IMAX that despite only has X number of screens left, still manages to attracts sold out screenings for weeks whenever a film (Like Oppenheimer) appears. I also spoke to the people running the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ (They screen 16mm, 35mm and 70mm and they promote Fort Lee as the birthplace of the American Motion Picture Industry). They told me that you can order up thousands of different 35mm films from studio's storage centers (I think there are only two left in the country) and the main issue is delivery costs make it usually not worth it to screen most films.
I am closer to middle age but I have met a lot of youngins who are die hard film people.
Perhaps you can share some examples of the films you are referring as "mindless banter in between sex and explosions". I'm not sure that description really fits most of the films coming out recently. If you said, "Dumb comic book films", I would maybe agree with you, but there isn't typically any sex in those so I assume you are not referring to them.
Covid halted the production of a lot of movies, and changed how others were made. It also shut down theaters. So, "since covid", is really talking about before and after an era. Kind of like saying, "since 9/11", in terms of the impact on culture. A lot of creativity has moved from the movie theaters to streaming services and from films to more episodic content.
However, here is a short list of films worth seeing (imo) since covid (2019).
Zone of Interest (2023) The Holdovers (2023) Parasite (2019) Dune (2021) Dune Part Two (2024) Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) 1917 (2019) The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) The Substance (2024) Palm Springs (2020) Oppenheimer (2023) The Lighthouse (2019) Hundreds of Beavers (2022) Barbarian (2022) Flow (2024)
I liked that in Oppenheimer, even though the plot of the movie was a similar sort of high stakes mystery heist movie, instead of the macguffin being a random piece of metal like it was in tenet, its the literal atom bomb. For that reason I enjoyed it more than some of his other movies.
I would enjoy a Wes Anderson movie that just moved the whole aesthetic over to something new. It can still be a Wes Anderson movie but just different in one important new dimension.
> These are markedly distinct career paths from the ones taken by homegrown Jews,
Actually "Oppenheimer" the movie also supplies examples of two very different New York Jewish backgrounds:
J Robert Oppenheimer, from an affluent, non-religious family - with an Upper West side apartment and a summer vacation home on Long Island. His father came to the USA as a teenager, and prospered in business.
Isidor Isaac Rabi, from an orthodox, Yiddish-speaking family living in a two-room apartment on the Lower East Side. He was born shortly before the family came to the USA.
Parent comment says "the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists" , which is not the same as "Nazi scientists".
Did you see the "Oppenheimer" movie? Check the real physicists depicted working on the Manhattan project. A large number of them were European Jews who left before or during the war. Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Hornig.
Even some others left Europe because of this: Niels Bohr (Jewish Mother) and Enrico Fermi (Jewish Wife).
To be sure there was Wernher von Braun and co as well.
In fact, it would be quicker to list the Manhattan project physicists depicted in that movie who were not Jewish at all:
I love catching these little translation flubs. Japanese movie and TV subtitles seem to have quite a few, probably because of the aforementioned time pressure. For example, I saw Oppenheimer in the theater and "crown" had been mistranslated as "clown".
Perhaps my favorite subtitle mistake of all time is in the subtitles of Brooklyn 99. One of the characters talks about getting someone a "boogie board" (a small surfboard) as a present. This is translated as "electronic memo pad". I couldn't work out how that had happened until I googled "boogie board" and half of the results are for an electronic writing pad with that name.
I recall debating a historical point with a person who would send me cites in the form of TikTok clips. Coincidentally, I have two entire books on the subject, by two accomplished historians. Both books demolished all of his points.
Just for fun, compare a transcript of the movie "Oppenheimer" with the book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". You're looking at a transcript of the movie of a few pages vs a 750 page small print tome. There's no way "Oppenheimer" makes one well informed about the Manhattan Project.
American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Marin J. Sherwin
It is based on ~20 years of research about Robert Oppenheimer, and is the inspiration for the movie Oppenheimer. Robert Oppenheimer is the scientist who lead the development of the first atomic bomb.
> Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.
In this case, the "people and character studies" are very critical to understanding "the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like". The early part of the book goes in depth to Oppenheimer's social ties to communist groups, which is critical to understanding the reason why he was forbidden from continuing research in the latter part of his life.
(To make a long story short, the American Communists, and their sympathizers, in the 1930s were blissfully unaware that the Soviet Union was an authoritarian hellhole. Many of the people involved in the Manhattan project had ties to those American Communists, and thus scientists in the Soviet Union. Because, for them, the Manhattan project was an academic endeavor, they wanted to share their results with their Soviet collogues. And that's how the nuclear race started... Information was leaked to the Soviets in the name of science. Oppenheimer was a victim of the resulting witch hunt; which requires understanding the "people and character studies" part of the book.)
On the face of it, it sounds like an altruistic, benign operation: to safeguard Kazakhstan and prevent nuclear proliferation.
However, keep in mind the nature of the 'Big Five' permanent members of the UN Security Council: 'The permanent members were all Allies in World War II (and the victors of that war), and are the five states with the first and most nuclear weapons. All have the power of veto which enables any one of them to prevent the adoption of any "substantive" draft Council resolution, regardless of its level of international support.' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_members_of_the_United_Nations_Security_Council)
Highly enriched uranium = nuclear weapons = POWER
Remember the ending of the movie Oppenheimer? Oppie, a scientist at the peak of his field, willingly handed over the most powerful weapon known to humanity to... a person with a less-than-stellar moral code: President Truman ("Don't let that crybaby back in here.")
That handover changed geopolitics forever, which was a major theme of the movie - and in real life too.
Remember also that Ukraine was comprehensively disarmed, by the Budapest Memorandum, and as part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction). And now look what a mess resulted from that: a world war has already quietly started in Europe...
(There is not enough made of the fact that Russia has involved Iran, North Korea, China, and a number of other countries in its effort to invade Ukraine. Russia has violated several articles of the UN Charter, even while it maintains an contentious seat on the Security Council, thus shredding the credibility and founding principles of the United Nations.)
I'm writing this to add a better perspective of this operation. It was a lot more than simply "truck[ing] [the uranium] to the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee to be blended down."
Thanks for mentioning this documentary. I didn't know about it, after all the noise created by the Oppenheimer movie (which I hated with a passion). I'll be sure to watch it. People just don't realize the magnitude of what Oppenheimer achieve, and they fail to realize it by a few orders of magnitude. And the Oscar-studded movie, instead of trying to convey that, decided to focus on the fairly mundane point Oppenheimer losing his security clearance because of some political machinations.
Does anyone actually want to go to the movie theater anymore? I don't. Not since covid anyway. Oppenheimer was the first and only movie I've seen on the big screen since covid. And still it was almost like sitting in coach class on an airplane for two hours.
I can make tastier popcorn at home than what I get at the theatre, the sodas are cheaper, and I don't have to share an armrest with some stranger sitting next to me.
I would really like a 90-100" 8k screen for my living room, but I'm not gonna pay $10k for that.
Oh MMT is a new wrapper around the very basic old ideas. There is research on some pre-revolutionary US states that print their own money and raise the tax to be paid in the printed money at the same time. Inunderstand Dr Johnson commented on it.
Anyway. Yes I guess the order is reversed - print the money first, give it to people to get them to do whatever the government wants (build walls, roads etc), then find whomever the money has gone to and tax them.
I found this an interesting way of looking at money, when I Was thinking about the Oppenheimer movie
Take a hundred dollar bill, and think of that not as money, but as an instruction to the person you give it to, say a builder To do a job for you, maybe build a hut for a nuclear scientist to live in.
Now write on a plain piece of paper “We are your government, we are at war and we need a hut built. You are going to build it”
What’s the difference between the two pieces of paper?
Asset ownership is a legal system. My ownership of my house is a legal situation. My mortgage is a (tradeable) obligation between me and my bank manager
Other points: you cannot tax first - imagine a starting situation. No dollar bills have been printed so how do you get tax paid in dollars?
And the government prints more than it taxes so there is “liquidity” - there has to be be extra dollar bills floating around so we can pay hairdressers etc (I mean you could in theory tax the lot but that would mean perfect understanding of the velocity of money through the economy - maybe with fiat crypto?)
But in the main asset ownership is decoupled from money - you own your house and car and stocks but you don’t own money - you owe the bank or the bank owes you but money is zero sum, even if wealth is not
Yes, it’s an even larger format than traditional 70mm. The cells are physically larger. Anecdote: Nolan worked with Kodak to invent black & white IMAX film for Oppenheimer.
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford is a historical fiction story about the mathematicians and engineers who tried to optimize the Soviet economy.
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende is much deeper and more interesting than any of the theatrical versions. Reminiscent of the Matrix sequels, the Childlike Empress threatens to crash Fantastica with a stack overflow (via infinite recursion) to force Bastian to give her a name.
American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin goes into much more detail than the film (Oppenheimer).
> Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications
We don't have to accept this though, everyone in the modern world makes a choice to accept the implied requirements of being part of the system. We accept the assumption that we are all online, that we all have a mobile phone, and that we all keep up with news and pop culture to an extent that we all seem to zero in on the same transient topic like a solar eclipse or an interest in atching movies about both Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Anyone can choose to avoid any one of these parts of the modern world. We're parts of that world, we aren't victims of it.
The ACM has got a copy of Bush's Memex paper available, it's certainly worth a read for anyone who has not:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/227181.227186
It was interesting to see that Christopher Nolan featured Vannevar Bush prominently in the recent Oppenheimer film. Stripe press published some of his writings recently as well. (I haven't read this one yet)
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the pinnacle event that solidified the US being a nuclear super power. Its willful use of nuclear weapons on civilians is one of the main ways the US projected power in the last century. The movie not showing how the sausage was made, is because Hollywood has a tendency to show propaganda movies. US good, world bad.
This movie had a huge reach.
"Economist / YouGov Poll, which found that 32% of U.S. adult citizens say they had seen "Barbie" and 24% had seen "Oppenheimer."
A nuclear conflict with Russia, is what is on the table.
Perhaps, if US citizens were exposed to graphic brutality of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it might sway political opinion. And for example influence the next election.
>So the Tokyo firebombing alone is sufficient then?
Is it sufficient for you? It might not be for some people.
However, all plausible deniability is lost, that you're not targeting civilians when you nuclear bomb their city.
If Putin deployed nuclear weapons on Kiev tomorrow, with the goal of ending the war faster, it would be a war crime. I hope we agree.
I can understand the artistic choice to portray everything from Oppenheimer's mind / point of view and to not actually show the devastation, but like you I was bothered by how it was done with the bomb drop and also the complete lack of portraying the Nazi threat. Oppenheimer lived the entire war at home and never actually saw the bomb dropped. But it seemed disingenuous to me to show the power of his imagination when contemplating the universe so powerfully at the beginning of the film, then never portray his comprehension of the Nazi threat or the devastation his weapon would have caused. The closest they got was him imagining it in the room with the crowd, but that hardly did it justice in my opinion. That was critical context in many of the scientists' decisions: 27,000 people were dying PER DAY during World War 2 (on average). How you can portray the story of the atomic bomb without that setting (not to mention emphasizing the fear that the Axis would get the bomb first) is kind of beyond me.
I for one was not bothered — the film up to that point had exclusively portrayed Oppenheimer‘s subjective experience in life. To showcase the footage you’re talking about would have meant showing events Oppenheimer did not see, but was certainly able to imagine enough that they affected him deeply — which is what WAS depicted in place of the footage.
While I understand wanting that outside perspective included within Oppenheimer to more fully reflect the actual historic events, I recognize that Oppenheimer was a film telling the story of one man’s internal perspective on events, and so including scenes like you suggest would have diluted and weakened that central premise and through line.
That being said: I am biased in that I do not expect artistic works to reflect a complete reality, but just the reality they choose to explore — I can certainly understand different points of view, especially with regard to such a monumental and tragic real life event.
Was anyone else bothered by how Oppenheimer declined to show even a single scene of the devastation that was caused by dropping nuclear weapons on Japan?
I otherwise liked the film, but I thought it was wrong to hide it from viewers. The bombing was the central plot point of the whole film. It would have been different if it was a new director, or surprise hit or something, but Nolan knew it would be seen by many millions of people.
It could have been shown without losing any narration context at all, in the scene where the protagonist is shown slides of the destruction scenes, and the camera only shows him looking away. The director didn't need to force the audience to look away too.
Why does Ursula Le Guin keep coming up in these posts?
Does she really have that big of a tech following?
When I see articles like this, I assume it's part of a publicity campaign for an upcoming movie.
Like how we saw so many articles about Oppenheimer before the movie. Even some legit news was likely part of the PR campaign - such as the DOE "pardoning" Oppenheimer.
None of the explanations in this topic are relevant if they don't address that "Barbie", "Oppenheimer" and "Super Mario Bros" were all hits last year.
Ticket prices, concession prices, streaming, attention spans, originality (or lack of), home theater setups, length of films... all of these factors were in place last year.
It's probably worth looking at specifically why the marketing for the hits from last year was effective (Barbie marketing particularly was both ubiquitous and highly inventive) versus "Furiosa" and "Fall Guy". Also note that Fall Guy's box office was relatively okay compared to something like "The Lost City" but it's budget was much higher, making it a much tougher financial proposition.
This just feels like poor marketing. I am not an avid movie goer. I saw Dune 2 this year and did Barbie/Oppenheimer last year.
In both scenarios I attended due to viral, word-of-mouth marketing. I didn't see specific trailers that compelled me nor was I anxiously awaiting the releases.
In contrast, I heard nothing about Furiosa prior to its release, but have read tons of content about its post-release failure.
Or stream it once for $4.99 or less if you're patient and are willing to wait a couple months after Blu-ray/streaming release.
It seems like after Endgame, there have only been a few 'event' movies like Oppenheimer, Top Gun Maverick, and Dune 2 that would be worth experiencing in a movie theater.
And even then, those movies are pushing 95-100 dB during some scenes, making me not really want to do the 'IMAX' experience again, it's just too loud and too big. A 40-60" OLED from 5-10' away and near my fridge and bathroom—with a pause button so I can get up halfway through a nearly 3 hour movie—is too tempting.
It'd be nice if there were 1.5 hour movies that cost $10 a ticket in a nice, normal theater.
There is a scene I like in an OppenHeimer movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0pCclxx5nI (Edit: It's not a deleted scene from Nolan's OppenHeimer) .
Their is also an other scene in Nolan's OppenHeimer (who made the cut around timestamp 27:45) where physicists get all excited when a paper is published where Hahn and Strassmann split uranium with neutrons. Alvarez the experimentalist replicate it happily, while being oblivious to the fact that seems obvious to every theoretical physicist : It can be used to create a chain reaction and therefore a bomb.
So here is my question : how do you contain the sparks of employees ? Let's say Alvarez comes all excited in your open-space, and speak a few words "new algorithm", "1000X", what do you do ?
Milley actually didn't even say the quote that we're discussing. An unidentified man did.
The meaning of the quote in the context of the exchange where it was made is not entirely clear, I agree with you on that. The headline exploits this uncertainty. The reader's (i.e., me) biases fill in the blanks.
For all we know, the guy was just trying to impress a woman. He could be nothing more than a researcher manning a both, making a bizarre claim at a bizarre conference. His reference to "Oppenheimer" could even be about the film and not the actual man.
Pardon me for your time. I can see why this story is getting so much criticism.
The video you linked to says that in the movie it's explained that Oppenheimer spoke German, and learned Dutch in a short amount of time. If so, him speaking Dutch with a German accent seems appropriate, if slightly exaggerated.
However a novice in a foreign language will speak more slowly than natives, not more quickly, even if reading a prepared speech (as was likely the case in that setting, and especially given the advanced language used that no beginner would have mastered), so not sure what the thinking was there.
>It’s accepted that the US movies and television industry can’t get contemporary Germany right
The US movies and television industry can rarely get any language right. This reminds me of the Dutch-speaking scene in Oppenheimer which no Dutch speaker can understand [1]. It's like a sped-up pronunciation of a nonsense Dutch sentence by an English-speaker trying to speak a horrible German accent.
One thing I'd add: If we enter a world where the ability to build some product, movie, song, novel, whatever is so widespread and cheap that anyone can do it (and I do emphasize the word "if", because I think its debatable that this will ever happen at a level that is cost-accessible):
The strongest way businesses will be able to differentiate is Taste. Human-ness; novelty, Design, things that AI isn't actually all that good at. AI may generate an episode of Law and Order, but it probably couldn't generate, say, Oppenheimer; because nothing in the world knew that it wanted what Oppenheimer delivered. If everything else goes to zero, then that's all that remains.
The issue is: AI is tremendously bad at working with Humans who actually have taste. You generate an AI image with the subject on the left; you ask for a revision, same image, but move the subject to the right side of the image; it changes too much, or generates new images entirely rather than iterating. Its not-obvious that this will get better because it is somewhat antithetical to the way the AI works.
Put another way, english lacks precision. Its not the right language for this. And what seems inevitable to me is that we'll need something other than english to get the last 20% finished with anything AI is being used to deliver. That thing is, guess what, a human knowing python, knowing After Effects, knowing Photoshop, etc. An image generating AI will be popular; a .psd generating AI, with extremely precise layers left in-tact, would be worth billions.
In that sense, I think the current phase of AI is absolutely "people with no taste now being able to lean on the trained taste of everyone else", but you're right that they're totally blind to one IMO non-zero probability endgame: Taste + Skill + AI becomes a hyperweapon. Creation (AI), in the right direction (Taste), with the technical acumen to take the 80% output AI generates up to 100% delivery (Skill).
The unsolved problem is: How do we integrate AI into that workflow in a way that puts the Human, that puts Taste, first? Such that it isn't "AI does 80%, then passes it off to a human", but rather that the AI becomes more like Photoshop, or After Effects, or VSCode, involved in the process from Day 0, integral to it, back and forth. No one has solved this. No one is even remotely close.
You can't say I'm using the word learn as a metaphor for some purely mechanistic and deterministic process and not like when people say learn as in middle school kids learning algebra and then switch to using the second definition to absolve OpenAI from following the license.
That'd be like saying my computer learned the film Oppenheimer when bittorrent copied it to my computer's storage system, transcoding it to a lower bitrate, and claim I'm free of copyright law because my computer just learned some facts.
All of OpenAI's products are databases with highly lossy compression applied. Using language that implies a mind is pure scam.
These details were covered in depth in The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. The Oppenheimer movie glosses over a lot of the technical details. It’s worth a read.
Just use justwatch in the UK. It shows Oppenheimer as available on Now TV via subscription. Main difference is they directly work with service providers unlike this amateur hour. https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/oppenheimer
Getting accurate info and do the research so you know local streaming landscape should be the first step. Creating simple UI and web app is the last step in projects like this.
The first film that pops up for me, “Oppenheimer,” is shown as available on Netflix in the United States. I believe it is exclusive to the Peacock streaming service in the U.S.
How did this happen? Do you have a mixture of manually maintained data and data pulled from APIs like The Movie Database (TMDB) or IMDB?
That only stops them dividing the prize further, it doesn't stop them awarding for work which in fact took a great many people - only some must be highlighted. I'd guess almost all the modern Physics and Chemistry has a long trail of people who were crucial but didn't get the prize, some of whom the actual winners would cite if asked, and for others they'd probably say "Look it's a cast of thousands, if I forgot to mention you I apologise" or similar.
When a movie wins the Best Picture Oscar, only a few people actually get the physical object, but of course almost all modern movies (especially those likely to get Best Picture) have huge numbers of people involved and even the Producers are too numerous to all get up on stage for some movies. To fix this, a movie that's a plausible Best Picture contender will ensure that it deliberately highlights some of its Producers in the credits as the people to whom such a prize would be awarded. Take "Barbie". Margot Robbie is on that short list of Producers who'd have got the actual statuette if they win Best Picture, in the end Oppenheimer won.
The difference is that wind, solar, and batteries have a history of getting 10x cheaper, and they are continuing on that trend. And the way that these tech curves work is that we will see a slowing of the decrease in prices before it stops, and we haven't seen that yet. A 10x fall in solar and at least a 5x fall in the cost of batteries is baked in at this point, even if the tech curves started to slow today.
Nuclear never had that trend of getting cheaper. And the only person that said anything about it being too cheap to meter was probably talking about fusion instead of fission, and would have been even more wrong than about fission. (It was said by Lewis Strauss, who was recently depicted/demonized in the movie Oppenheimer).
People continually underestimate solar/wind/batteries, as in the actual industry analysts that make predictions always underpredict, every year, year after year after year. If you want to know the future of solar, find the most optimistic prediction you can, and go bigger, and you'll be a better forecaster than the rest of the industry.
I don't know if electricity will ever be too cheap to meter, that sort of overpromising is what the nuclear industry does, not what the renewable industry does. (And I'm not in the renewables industry, just an interested observer.)
Organisations shield moles and infiltrators very effectively. They are rarely alone. It may be harder to get in as an outsider, but once in they've protections a lone wolf does not enjoy.
You can save a lot of time reading John LeCarre novels and take a short summary like this one of Adam Curtis [0].
If you watched the recent Oppenheimer film you'll know the name Klaus Fuchs. But what about Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt? If MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are. almost by tradition stacked to the rafters with defectors and spies, enclaves of enemies within, and enemies within enclaves of enemies... how does anyone expect a commercial company motivated by money and with such a weak perimeter as a "job market", to do better?
For me, any one of the issues would be a problem in isolation but the combination of issues makes it so going to the movies isn't something I really consider.
Oppenheimer was the first movie I considered going to in a long time but still did not. I am going to finally watch it Sunday. Even if I love it, I know I won't think about how much better it could have been at the movies. I will actually just be grateful it wasn't ruined for me by some negative aspect of going to the movies.
> a visually unexciting primarily conversational drama
Which may be why he framed it like a serial drama?
The 70mm imax that Oppenheimer was filmed on is 4:3.
An old standard aspect ratio for television serials.
If you watch Oppenheimer any other way, to remove what are usually large black bars on the sides for contemporary tvs, you are watching a cropped version of the film maker’s vision.
But also, there are plenty stunning vistas in that film.
Incidentally, why was Oppenheimer promoted as an IMAX movie? It was a letdown and a waste for me to have watched it on IMAX, as it was essentially a visually unexciting primarily conversational drama. Barbie would have been a better IMAX movie.
Would have been more entertaining if the "Oppenheimer" movie had been made about Frank Oppenheimer [1] -- a younger brother of J. Robert and the founder of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco [2], where Pi Day comes from [3]
Chess was a major topic of AI research for decades because playing a good game of chess was seen as a sign of intelligence. Until computers started playing better than people and we decided it didn't count for some reason. It reminds me of the (real) quote by I.I. Rabi that got used in Nolan's movie when Rabi was frustrated with how the committee was minimizing the accomplishments of Oppenheimer: "We have an A-bomb! What more do you want, mermaids?"
Googles gemini has no knowledge cutoff, it knows events from the past few days, I asked it about Oppenheimer the movie and it knew it won 7 oscars at the academy awards. Also asked about some famous people that died recently and it knew about those as well.
So no, that is only a limitation of some chatbots, not gemini, it could absolutely be used to ask about election events.
The Barbie being an easier to watch movie than Oppenheimer is a take I didn't expect to see on HN. I'm pretty sure a lot of people on here were a lot more uncomfortable watching the Barbie movie than they were watching Oppenheimer.
I suspect a lot of people even plain didn't see the Barbie movie because they were more comfortable watching a movie that skirts over criticising American fascism/authoritarianism of the 40's and 50's, than watching a movie that treats modern American culture without kid gloves.
They did pretty good given that Barbie got the higher number of views/sales as well as the videos floating around of people who did the whole "Barbieheimer" tour who just surfed TikTok on their phones during the film (because of how bored they were I presume).
If this is how the general public reacted to a movie like Oppenheimer, its impressive how well they actually did viewer wise.
>The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.
And I have the exact opposite view! hah
The Barbie movie felt like a series of clips to me. Not a coherent movie. I also dislike musicals, so maybe personal.
Also despite Oppenheimer being about The Manhattan Project, The Barbie movie felt "too american" for me with weird Twitter references to "The Znyder cut?". (How will that reference age in 2 years?)
Oppenheimer just feels like expertly crafted cinema. I truly got lost in it and the story. The first 20mins felt like 1h in a good way. Truly masterful.
To me this movie showed how Oppenheimer's protests against nuclear proliferation was hushed by the powers of the time, leaving him to be remembered in history as the architect of the most fearsome weapon imaginable, not a brilliant scientist full of regret, becoming anti-proliferation but blackmailed into silence due to earlier communist ties.
I was also fascinated to learn that the fear of Germany getting the bomb first was what drove him and so many others to create the worst thing humans have ever created and used.
As a non-american, none of this was common knowledge and I welcomed the history lesson, I always wondered why such a brilliant physicist and intelligent person would want to destroy the world but never thought to find a book on the topic (I've since added American Prometheus to my read list). It is shameful he was not allowed a public platform to denounce nuclear arms as strongly as he felt.
I think Oppenheimer was kept an enigma on purpose. I didn't exactly like the movie but I was somehow very impressed nevertheless. I don't regret seeing it but I might never watch it again.
Having read "Now it can be told" by Groves, I can testify to other commenters on how much the Manhattan Project was an enormous logistical problem - Elon's manufacturing prowess pales in comparison to what Groves had to grapple with.
On a different note, I liked how the movie portrayed the world of quantum mechanics and somehow didn't try to make Oppenheimer a hero or something more than what he was.
I did not like this movie. That must be an unpopular opinion, given all the movie’s success. And specifically what I didn’t like was that the film makers could have gone in many directions in telling a story about Oppenheimer, but chose to make the RDJ villain central to the plot. The conflict in the film felt forced and unnecessary for telling a good story.
There’s a lot of bits in the Oppenheimer film that seem simplified. For example that Los Alamos appears to be a fairly small operation, a bunch of shacks in the prairie, a kind of physics camp for a team of nerds.
In reality the Manhattan project at Los Alamos was a huge operation, like 8000 people living there in 1945, a kind of university/research campus and town, but the movie doesn’t really show the scale. Also, the Trinity test was actually done 4h away from the Los Alamos site, and just the test was also a huge operation.
The way Groves and Oppenheimer decide important matters, while standing in the prairie or sitting on a train or on the way out of some meeting makes it seem they‘re planning an Oceans Elevens style heist, not one of the biggest techno-scientific projects of the 20th century.
The variety of products is enormous, and is deliberately made complicated by the vendors - is SHP65CM5N different from SHP78CM5N? Do reviews of one apply to another? When a new model code pops up every year - does it invalidate the old reviews? If you watch "Oppenheimer", and your pal watches it - you can be sure you watched the same movie, and can compare the notes, and tell your other pal who didn't watch it yet whether you liked it or not, and it'd be useful. But with every store having their own model code set and those rotating all the time and having a thousand options, your experience may not be comparable to somebody else's. There are review sites and recommendation sites, like Consumer Reports, which kinda approach it, but there's no way to make it as systematic as for movies or video games, because there's too much variety.
Atomic Cafe is a very funny take on origins of the bomb and the birth of the Cold War's nuclear standoff - with lots of grim material though, such as the original films of the effects of nuclear weapons on Japanese people, i.e. the material that was left out of "Oppenheimer". Atomic Cafe is available online in full:
Oh interesting, thanks. I missed Oppenheimer in IMAX the first time around but saw it finally a month or two ago when it was re-released.
I had originally been reading Rhodes's "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" leading up to the release - I timed it to where I stopped reading right at the part Trinity went off at, saw the movie, and just recently finished. So thanks for the rec.
The movie was based in large part on the book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer"
Which is a life of the man, as you say.
The main difference from the movie is that, aside from being much more lengthy, as book vs. movie always is, it dwells more on pre-WW2 California leftist politics. Whereas the downfall of Lewis Strauss gets only a brief mention.
And of course it covers the life of J R Oppenheimer from birth to death in detail, in parts exhaustive detail.
I can't read the article but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Groves book "Now It Can Be Told: The Story Of The Manhattan Project" documents it well
The Oppenheimer movie was a much more personal biopic, rather than about the project itself, unlike some other older movies.
I didn't find it to be incoherent at all, but I had read the book over a decade ago and had seen the previous adaptations. In some sense, maybe I was the ideal audience, because I knew the outline of the story going in but either didn't notice or didn't care when things were left out. Given the success of the film both financially and critically though, I have to imagine that a lot of people who hadn't read the book still understood and enjoyed it.
The reaction to Dune is similar to the reaction to Oppenheimer. I'm a huge fan of Christopher Nolan. A common criticism I see of him, which echoes what you are saying here, is that his characters lack motivation and are one-dimensional. I actually don't disagree. For me, film isn't primarily about character or plot like literature is. It's about creating a mood using pictures and sound. The best parts of Oppenheimer weren't the details of characters' personal lives or the Manhattan project or the senate hearings, they were the sweeping montages of beautiful images, music, and snippets of dialogue that came together to create a feeling of fear and awe appropriate for the subject matter. I feel the same way about Villeneuve's Dune. It might not be faithful to the intricate story of the book, but I think it nails the dark, vast, mystical quality that inhabiting the Dune universe ought to feel like.
You mention Blade Runner 2049. For my money, Villeneuve's true masterpiece is Arrival. It's not only great science fiction but also has a surprising amount of emotional depth, which sci-fi usually lacks.
Asteroid City. Beau is Afraid. Dream Scenario. Medusa Deluxe. Poor Things. Saltburn. Skinamarink. Smoking Causes Coughing.
Barbie. Oppenheimer.
Soon, The People's Joker, which has been stuck in purgatory since last year given its unconventional telling of a mythos that (on the surface) seems similar to Batman's.
You don't have to like any of these movies, and they're all challenging, but all of them were unconventional and innovative and released to theaters in 2023. This has been a wildly unconventional year, and a fairly exciting one in mainstream cinema.
Oh, wait, what am I arguing against? I read the study, and it says that cinema remains innovative despite discourse arguing otherwise! Indeed.
I mean going by the highest grossing movies of the year you got plenty to choose from. Other than barbie (which I would argue is not super deep in terms of politics anyway) the rest are all escapism: Super Mario Bros, Fast and furios 10, guardians of the galaxy 3, spiderverse 2, mission impossible, quantumania, little mermaid and elemental are all extremely light in terms of politics.
The three movies with "heaviest" political message are oppenheimer, barbie and even then in case of oppie the message is "mcarthyanism was paranoid and political engagement was stiffled as well as weaponised for personal and selfish goals" certainly not a super crazy political opinion that america's red scare went too far. And in terms of Barbie its mostly surface level "its not easy to be a woman" and capitalism takes advantage of people. But saying "self actualisation is hard with economic forces pushing against you, and some parts of the patriarchy have a compounding effect on women in terms of how difficult it is" is incredibly milktoast feminism even if its pushing the boundries in a movie that is essentially a toy ad that lasts 2 hours.
I don't know what kind of media you think does not allow Escapism and its so absolutely drenched in political content that is impossible to enjoy.
Most emmy noms went to Succession, a shakespearean tale of rich brats picking on each other for father approval and Last of Us, a zombie show about a father daughter found family that shows humans are the worst threat and not the zombies. Neither seems incredibly political.
Videogames this year, top of the crop were Baldur's gate 3, Zelda and Spiderman 2. One is a DnD campaign about power, world domination and brain washing aliens. Another is Ganon is back, you are the hero go make a car and kill him and the last one is Spiderman saves new york from the same guys he has fought since the 1960s.
What is this escapism that existed in the 90s that no longer exist and where is the political undercurrent in all mainstream media that makes it so hard to escape into?
On the competition aspect, I think it's also important to look at the consumer side. For me it was wild knowing Mission Impossible struggled at the box office because of Barbie/Oppenheimer, especially because it was such a big budget film and it was actually my favorite of the three. The reality is that most people would maybe go once a month to the cinema, so they have to prioritize what to watch.
To make matters worse, you are also competing with all of history. If you want to read 12 books this year, when are you going to get to the small creators with years-worth of classics to go through?
Yes. One of my favorites and regularly shows up on lists of the best non-fiction of the 20th century. Great combo of history and science, compelling, and a great background for the movie Oppenheimer. I couldn’t take the Labatut book seriously after reading “Making of the Atomic Bomb”. The true story is a lot more interesting than his fantasies.
Barbie was a shallow representation of the multiple generations of various feminist ideals and discussion points. Only 2nd wave feminism gets any actual discussion, though there's a mild discussion to point out that today's kids are on the 4th wave and have different ideas.
The thing is that most people just agree with 2nd wave Feminism, as its the type that was well regarded and well pushed from the 1950s onwards. So Barbie plays it safe, pushes the older, well-agreed messaging and doesn't stray too far from the guard-rails.
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Like, after watching Barbie, is anyone actually ready to discuss if sex-work / prostitution is pro-Feminisim or anti-Feminism? Erm... no. It avoided any sketchy issue or anything remotely controversial.
Is sex-work pro-Feminism because women can decide how to act for themselves and use their innate femininity to gain power over males?
Or is sex-work anti-Feminism because males who enjoy sexual material can turn into malicious actors who play into bad stereotypes and harmful myths? (And thus the females who partake in it are subject to male-gaze or something, its been a while since I've read feminist writing)
Nothing wrong with that mind you. Barbie was designed to just be enjoyable, but it is a watered down discussion. But the minute real-world issues show up, you're hopelessly unprepared if you've only reached the surface-level that Barbie-movie brought you to.
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Hell, even just the 4th wave feminist child vs 2nd wave feminist mother dynamic in Barbie is so... short and shallow. The movie just leaves off without much debate, or exploration of the contradictory viewpoints. The only conclusion at the end is the younger generation might find Barbie fun if we play with them together, which is... absolutely avoiding the deeper issues and debates brought up in the movie.
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Oppenheimer on the other hand... gives you far more capability to discuss the pros-and-cons of the 1940s / 1950s politics of nuclear weapons. Its very deep on the subject.
Funny, my take on Oppenheimer is the opposite -- and I loved both movies.
Nolan is making the explicit argument that Oppenheimer is the most important person of the 20th century, it's literally a biopic that adheres (shockingly) faithfully to history, is explaining everything to you from the history of Los Alamos to justifications to drop the bomb to arguments for and against the H-bomb, and you come out of the theater absolutely ready to debate the issues.
Oppenheimer is the literal opposite of art for art's sake. It's a straight-up history lesson that presents different sides of one of the biggest moral questions of the 20th century.
Now other films of his, whether Tenet or Inception or Interstellar -- those are much more art-for-art's-sake. You can discuss them aesthetically all you want, but aside from questions of taste and clarity and plot, there isn't much of substance to debate.
(On the other hand -- while Barbie was hyped as providing a lot to discuss, it was actually mostly just a very clever super funny comedy. It didn't really lead to all that much debate, aside from whether the idea of playing guitar "at" someone was merely a really funny joke, or one of top five funniest jokes in the movie...)
The Barbie movie is highly didactic. It’s like a series of college essays strung together on a thin string of story. You come out of the the theater ready to debate the issues in the movie.
Oppenheimer on the other hand is ‘art for art’s sake’. It’s not trying to ‘splain anything to you. You come out of the theater speechless, just carrying the weight of it all.
$4.6M a month in revenue is not that much honestly. I'm disappointed. The average Hollywoord blockbuster could pay for that about 2 years. And the views/$ are most likely staggeringly lower.
If I do the napkin math: $600 million dollar revenue for Oppenheimer. A movie ticket costs about $10. That means Oppenheimer was viewed 60 million times. Mr. Beast JUST on his main channel has 1.6 BILLION views. And that only for the meager price of $4.6M. Oppenheimer cost $100M to make and it doesn't even touch Mr. Beast.
I think I can apply your last two paragraphs to pretty much any movie unintentionally celebrating the United States security apparatus, politics, public policy, or exploitative crony capitalism that that people lust over for whatever reason.
"That said, there are clear problems with the political narrative in the film Oppenheimer, given that it's supposed to be artwork. Making a film about a nuclear weapon without in any way extensively showcasing the result of it's use on a civilian population i.e. the consequences of the development of that weapon is extremely American and morally dubious at best...downright propaganda at worst. Were the American public and military rank and file the real victims of WW2 ()? Is it ok to pronounce the moral ambiguity of the top brass without commenting on the Holocaust-level crimes committed?
These things were glaring in the theater. And I know I'm going to get the standard 'MAGA move to a Commie country' for having an honest appraisal of the conceptual idea. But it's bad in that way. ..."
War is a complex issue and making a film about Japan's war crimes (the first installment of the Ip Man series was good with this) is something which has to be met with approval from its government who have their hands in film finance as well. Japan is not exactly a capitalist economy-- it is culturally a command economy and everyone listens to the government (this is actually one of the critiques of Shin Godzilla and even if this Godzilla movie).
There are not that many governments that are going to be thrilled about you making a movie shitting on their armed forces or speaking on their war crimes. In the United States, our first amendment protects give us tremendous leeway to do this, but there is a lot of other pressures which can be extorted to kill a film prior to release.
Scorcese recently released Killers of the Flower Moon, which is not about a Holocaust, but about a limited genocide, and people are already bitching about the length, and it is as long as a "rah rah America" Avengers movie. This kind of movie was hard to make in the United States. It would be impossible to make in Japan. People there have to use metaphors to talk about getting nuked (aside from Grave of the Fireflies showing the Tokyo Firebombing, which was worse). How are you supposed to use a metaphor for an Asian Holocaust? If they did it would it come off as insensitive to a Western viewer?
This is a political Godzilla movie. It's a movie about Japan dealing with post war recovery. Maybe next time, there will be a Godzilla who comes and frees all the slave labor in the Imphal India campaign (maybe involve the Indian film industry to reduce cost). Maybe you should pitch it to be developed here with US political assistance and pressure so that Japanese war crimes are addressed. It's certainly a good idea.
But I would hesitate from:
-- being a hypocrite.
-- critiquing simplistically without seeing the larger work of this director.
I think you are misrepresenting the situation and misreading what I said.
What I say is, if you don't like how Oppenheimer was funded, produced and then how they tried to collect money from you when you wanted to see it then you should fund and produce your own movie and distribute it the way you see fit. Upload it to YouTube, share a magnet link - whatever. Nothing stops you from not participating in the DRM stuff.
I like interpolation too, but it must be high quality, not the low quality that's built into TVs. For example, I use SVP 4 which does interpolation with your GPU, works great.
Movied are even worse, I can absolutely see the judder especially when panning. It is one reason I prefer to wait for home releases and will go to movies that are specifically phenomena irreplaceable at home, such as Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX.
> What's the point of having superpower yet battling like a peasant in medieval times?
This is a small part of the overall topic, but I've been saying for a while that real life is much more interesting and scary than Hollywood movies of late.
Modern warfare is far faster and more terrifying than anything in a Marvel movie; look up HIMARS rocket bombardments. Or there's a video of a Russian helicopter accidentally firing rockets on a group of journalists (not gory)—the speed that the scene goes from boring to "everything is exploding" is shocking to the Hollywood-trained eye.
Man I'd love/hate to see a realistic modern nuclear bomb reproduced with 2023 VFX and a director who gave a shit. Oppenheimer doesn't count: the bomb was a tiny fraction of a modern yield. Nolan bragged about how he used practical effects, but you're never going to depict this properly without computer simulation. Maybe Alex Garland could pull it off?
Even tropes like meteors from space are snoozefests compared to real life. In movies they always show up minutes in advance and float down at jumbo jet speeds with ominous music and earthquakes. A true "dinosaur killer" would enter the atmosphere at 30 km/s or more. It would streak down from nothing like lightning from Zeus. It would be so hot so quickly that you might burn to death just by being in line of sight. Absolutely metal.
Lots of people still shoot with film. But distribution will always be digital unless your screening is specifically advertising a film showing. That's usually just big Imax movies like Oppenheimer in select cities, or indie theaters showing old movies who can get access to the film.
I’d rather my films be graded for home theater use than phone use. HDR TVs these days are basically all TVs. Why should we all take a step back in quality when the hardware to view it decently is more affordable than it’s ever been? I don’t care how Oppenheimer looks on your phone I know Nolan would care even less.
Isn't this because the mid range is going straight into the streaming services, rather than through (an I assume expensive) distribution process into theaters?
Theater going is expensive (I think it's expensive), the alternatives are "pretty good", so that impacts overall theater presence.
Having a "block buster" that can justify the expense of marketing and distributing to the now weaker theater market seems like a prudent thing for the studios and it's just part of the current reality of entertainment.
I know I don't see many movies in the theater. I don't know if I've seen anything since Top Gun. I was hoping to see Dune 2, but it's delayed. I will be seeing the Ferrari bio-pic, simply because I'm a Mann nut. Otherwise, we rented Barbie. We rented GoG3, we'll be renting Oppenheimer.
And whatever other random stuff I sleep through from Netflix.
The paradox is that this technology only comes into being by deliberate effort from those claiming it is dangerous. These companies wouldn’t exist if they weren’t funded by SV billionaires and corps.
I thought the recent Oppenheimer film dramatized this sort of scenario quite well. People rushing to build a weapon, claiming it’s dangerous and must not be used, and then feigning innocence and surprise when it was used.
> Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried
I'm always amazed to see claims like this, given it's not how my world works at all. Picking some random popular favorites: searches for (verbatim) "Loki", "Hunger Games", "Oppenheimer", and "House of Usher" all return a wikipedia entry in at worst the second spot (generally behind IMDB, though Oppenheimer and Usher showed the real man and the short story ahead of the films, not unsurprisingly).
I mean, sure, there are glitches with all products and nothing is beyond criticism. But "Google buries Wikipedia results" is just beyond weird. It really seems like HN is starting to develop an "alternative facts" syndrome, where the echo chamber starts driving collective memory.
The faculty got him out because he riled them, e.g. by insisting they ought to actually put effort into teaching undergrads. They looked for a pretext, and they found it.
Just like in that Oppenheimer movie. A sanctimonious witch hunt serving as pretext for a personal vendetta.
(Note that Summers is, I'm told, on a personal level, a dick. The popular depiction is not that wrong on that point. But he's the right pick for this job -- see my other comments in this thread.)
4:3 is the correct aspect ratio for IMAX but it sounds like everything else about the presentation at the theater was wrong so who knows if there were any other issues at your particular theater. The movie was released in a number of different formats so there's already a cropped version that will go onto the disc https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Foppenheimer-film-format-aspect-ratio-guide-v0-90tzv7rx9n2b1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D5c1102fe33b7a89dc973e55cc419b7c22b401302
Unfortunately they emptied out the proverbial bench to get enough staff worldwide to play Oppenheimer in film formats wherever possible and that led to some pretty spotty results.
I love Christopher Nolans movies, but there is something seriously wrong with the audio mix on Oppenheimer that makes the dialogue inaudible. I cannot see how that was a deliberate artistic choice.
I own quite a few blu-rays, mostly movies where compression artifacts on streaming versions are very noticeable. I'd get them for more movies, but I don't have infinite shelf space, nor do I want to transform my living room walls into disc storage like some of my movie buff friends did in the DVD era. Filing cabinets could work, I suppose. But the point is, streaming a purchased or pirated copy is just simpler and better, and for 90% of movies the compression doesn't impact the experience. With all due respect to Nolan's work on the home release, I'm pretty sure Oppenheimer will be in the 90%. For the remaining 10% I'd love if iTunes and the other digital movie storefronts offered a "hifi" quality download with bitrate on par with blu-ray. I know Sony has something like that for their TVs, but I mean something really available cross platform through Movies Anywhere or similar. The difficulty studios have making money on digital movies really seems self-inflicted in some ways, plenty of people out there would be converted from buying blu-rays if the price and quality of downloads improved just a bit.
I read a great user review on a film ranking site for guy Ritchie’s film the covenant that said something approximating “he liberated himself from his own genre” and I sometimes feel that Nolan’s work could use some of that.
I have issue both outright with the material of Oppenheimer, and his handling of it, but on release I waited an extra 3 weeks to get a reasonably positioned seat in one of the imax 70mm showings.
And it made me realize something.
Even if people like Nolan or pta or Tarantino swear by film, and even if they’re right!, what matters is if the theater owners care about film, because the presentation was terrible.
There were flies on the lens obstructing the image with little furry dust balls crawling all over the picture.
There was roughly 5 minutes worth of a red line down the picture, just to the left of center, in various 20 second chunks throughout the film.
Also just culture shocked by imax 70mm because it frames the film in essentially 4:3.
Growing up in the states in the 90s has me associating 4:3 with sitcom tv.
So is the 4:3 framing the “intended” framing?
Are home media viewers encouraged to drop the majority of their screen real estate when watching this?
Does the home release have a 16:9 cut? Did Nolan reframe it? (These questions likely have answers for anyone who really wants to know but this article was light on actionable details other than “it is cause he said it is”)
At a similar special showing I thought hateful 8 used theatrical 70mm to great effect.
I liked the first fifth of Oppenheimer. Mostly the imaginative practical effect asides of seeing into the mind of someone laboring over matter at this scale.
It lost me right around the time Nolan cruelly mangled this absolutely chilling moment into a “get it up” punchline.
The political aspect is obviously not true relative to the past.
The post WW, Cold War era was marked by the federal government, senators and intelligence agencies literally maintaining lists of “communists” that were blackballed almost entirely.
Oppenheimer was released only recently, a movie which is all about how a tenuous communist connection led to the demise of the career of among the most famous scientists in WW2.
Students were famously killed for protests in Berkeley just a few decades ago.
And it’s only been a few decades that anyone but a white man was even allowed on campus.
The idea that speech on campus is anyways more restricted than it has been in the past is ridiculous on its face.
The idea that speech on campus is censored any more than in the past is very clearly not true. What might have changed is either the groups of people whose speech is curtailed has changed slightly, but more likely, you tend to hear a lot more about it because of social media.
The bible - am not a religious person, don't want to become one, and I mean no shade to religious people. However, as I now read it, I'm surprised by how much western culture references it. People use examples, names and scenes from the bible much more often than I realised and it helps to recognize that.
American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Oppenheimer was an ok movie, the book it's based on is better paced.
A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. This is the first book I encountered on disaster sociology. That field of study sounds amazing! It's about how people become altruistic and how communities form right after a natural disaster.
Obviously it is digital and Omnimax (not IMAX) is analog but how does the Sphere compare to Omnimax? Is it an even bigger field of view?
The most recent time I went to an Omnimax was to see Oppenheimer, but it actually wasn't that great since Oppenheimer was filmed in IMAX versus Omnimax.. the end result was a gigantic wrap around movie that had spherical distortion and made your neck hurt from turning it to see everything.
I am kind of sad such smart people on here are missing the forest for the trees.
Moving institutions, historically, is about cross pollination of ideas. In physics this has been important because different institutions provide variations of how to 'think like a physicist'. On top of that, it allows for a mixing pot of lab culture and best practices.
They even did a good job of pointing at this in the movie Oppenheimer, where he visits Germany and has a formative experience which changes the trajectory of his focus.
It's very easy to 'do it by the numbers' and be repetitive in your work when you stay in the same institution. This is also the reason why 'sabbaticals' are still a thing, so professors will visit for a 0.5-1yr another institution or research hub for their field, which in theory happens every 7-10 years if the professor takes advantage of it.
I have seen one movie in a theater in the last decade. I made the error of agreeing to take my son to see Oppenheimer. Then we both got to feel very uncomfortable at all those communist mammories.
I will probably never see another movie in a theater.
The problem with a UCLA-sponsored survey of teens is always going to be response bias.
For example:
>Very few adolescents prefer aspirational content. The majority favor original content over IP-based content. Also, the majority prefer binge releases over weekly releases.
A quick search of the top Youtubers shows that Gen Z in fact loves aspirational content, they just don't like the image that comes into their head when they hear the term.
A quick scan of the box office shows that they also love IP-based content, unless all the viewers of Spiderman, Barbie, Mario, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fast X, and The Little Mermaid were over 25 (Hell, even Oppenheimer was technically IP-based).
After Oppenheimer I realized that Christopher Nolan is only able to make one movie. That movie is a movie about a damaged man who must find the solution to something and he is special in some way which either will allow him to find it or demonstrate that no one can. Which made me think about who does Christopher Nolan see himself to be in all these films? The protagonist? Maybe this is all critical nonsense.
For those who like to tie together different contexts, this incident is briefly mentioned in the recent film Oppenheimer. (Which, much to my surprise and delight, is pretty good history for a Hollywood movie.)
Oh I don't argue about art. Most of these decisions are driven by financial constraints, not the artistic vision. And this is not going to change.
Christopher Nolan can afford extreme artistic choices like not showing ads or previews before Oppenheimer. That's such a rarity that I wouldn't make any extrapolations even in today's world. Betting that gen AI will result in an alternative type of art and not just replace multiple roles and production techniques in existing industries is not something I can see happening considering that professional art is business.
E.g. we didn't see CGI creating an alternative movie industry that exists in parallel to non-CGI movies. CGI is used by everyone, including artsy independent creators.
I will forever love Studio Ghibli animation. But if in the future the same level of expression can be achieved with CGI/gen AI - I just fail to see them not switching their tools (possibly in the post-Miyazaki world).
> What's hilarious is that the execs still don't fucking see it
Why would they? Very few people can notice and appreciate the level of detail you are describing. And I am not even sure we will never be able to replicate it computationally. In 10-20... 50 years? Don't see why not.
> Why would anyone hire 20K people for a movie today?
To make better art. I've seen most of the films in that list are they're incredible films that stick with me and give me a sense of awe today. Watching 1000s of real life people in a scene just creates a sense of spectacle that is just not achievable with current CGI - the brain is just not fooled or impressed like it is when you watch those old films and see the amount of work and effort that must have gone into them. Sergio Morricone hired the Spanish army to build the cemetery at the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and it took them several days to make. Nowadays it just takes someone a few clicks of a mouse but it fucking shows as well. Maybe with AI we'll actually get to a point where the brain can be tricked because it gets the lighting right, but at the minute it just doesn't and the films are worse because of it.
Just look at how incredible this location is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpVaoA8RfIk
It's even more awesome when you watch the film in it's totality because it builds up slowly, with bigger and bigger scenarios until it culminates with this.
And even in potato cam resolution, how impressive is this scene from Cleopatra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_rLwuVP9Zw
They just hit different when they're actually real.
What's hilarious is that the execs still don't fucking see it. Christopher Nolan is one of the only ones out there still pushing for practical effects and he rakes in the money at the box office more consistently than just about any other director other than Cameron or Spielberg. It's because the films are actually worth watching. Before Oppenheimer, what was the last big film? Top Gun, which also used a ton of real life flight footage.
If I want to watch an animation, I'll watch an actual, awesome animation that takes full advantage of the medium like Into The Spiderverse or something from Studio Ghibli. If I want to watch a movie, I want to watch a real flesh and guts movie. Yet 99% of the stuff Hollywood puts out is some weird hybrid shit that is the worst of all worlds.
If Hollywood starts making better art, people will start going back to the movies. But they've got greedy. In any other industry, if you made a product, and you got 100% more for it than what it cost to produce you'd consider that a success. But these arseholes don't. They want 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x and they want to milk it for all it's worth and turn it into a fucking "universe" until it just collapses into a heap of shit and no-one even remembers why they liked the original.
Hedy's Folly, by Richard Rhodes. It's a very good book about Hedy Lamar's life and her fame, and work on that patent.
It's interesting that the book is not mentioned.
The author is the same one that wrote the Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I believe the movie Oppenheimer, was based on. All of his books are very interesting, revealing many of the intricacies, that took place in recent history, making the world we live in today.
It would be nice to have statistics. People say VFX heavy blockbuster film has few thousand people working out of which 2/3 can be VFX artists.
Even Oppenheimer had over hundred artists and it’s famous for not having any VFX. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/christopher-nolan-forgot-to-credit-more-than-80-of-vfx-artists-on-oppenheimer-230775.html
"Finally, you're right that Kobe Bryant is admired more than the average hard worker in school, and that's because he was among the best in the world."
All over the world, sportsmen and entertainment personalities are celebrated more than other workers who, in theory and intuitively, should be celebrated more. For example, among the celebrities, in theory and intuitively, we should find the best scientists, surgeons, and administrators that a country can offer. But do we? No, we don't.
To use a recent example, if you think about it, it is curious that the hype about Oppenheimer has been about the film itself, Nolan the director, and Murphy the performer, and not Oppenheimer the scientist and the Manhattan Project as a formidable government-sponsored science and technology initiative. Yes, there has been some minor residual interest in the real people, science and technology associated with Los Alamos on the part of viewers, but nothing particularly relevant.
Today, Mr. Oppenheimer, academic and/or govt employee, would have to work for 30+ years (probably more...) to earn the same money that Murphy earned pretending to be Oppenheimer in a movie. If that's not funny and ridiculous, I don't know what is.
Definitely felt this with IMDB and now also RT. Sometimes it’s political, but more often it seems like new mediocre movies get amazing ratings, which just didn’t add up. For a while, I thought it was just enthusiast bias but it makes more sense that there’s gaming going on. “Foreign” movies very often get shit ratings, especially when they don’t copy-paste the Anglo-Hollywood style and tropes.
In either case, my best advice for reviews in general is: take it with a big grain of salt. Ie don’t compare 7.5 with 7.8. Barbie vs Oppenheimer ratings is not gonna tell you anything useful, even if there’s no gaming going on. Never obsess over subjective measurements.
Instead, use a 5.2 rating as an indicator that it’s very likely to be bad. But if it’s say a documentary about something you have nerded out on, then it may have you glued to the screen.
Let's use a less contentious topic: FOSS vs proprietary software. There is a common sentiment I've seen on HN that FOSS is superior to proprietary software, and all else being equal, I agree with that sentiment. However, in reality, not all else is equal. Some proprietary software is just better at solving certain problems than FOSS equivalents – maybe the proprietary software is more reliable or has a better UX or is more regularly maintained or has more features a user wants or differs along a host of other dimensions. Thus, if someone makes a categorical claim that all FOSS software is superior to similar proprietary software, we would regard that comment as propaganda. This doesn't mean that FOSS software is bad or that good FOSS software can't be created or that no one should try to create excellent FOSS software.
This is an analogy or what I mean by "political correctness" (or related concepts like "wokeness" and "social justice warrior"). Great art communicates truth about the human condition in a beautiful way. This is, of course, open to interpretation, yet somehow many people agree that, for example, The Godfather is a great film. Why? I believe the film shows us some truth about the human condition (particularly our ability to descend into evil) through a gripping story with excellent characters, visuals, dialogue, plotting, etc.
When we substitute an arbitrary checklist of criteria a film must meet that have nothing to do with communicating truth about the human condition in a beautiful way, we are engaging in "political correctness," and we have ceased to value art but instead propaganda. For instance, if we were to use the new Academy standards for Oscar-nominated movies, the Godfather would fail – the cast is almost all white, has no LGBT and IIRC includes the n-word. Amadeus, another excellent film (one of the most praised in Oscar history) would certainly fail, since the cast is all white and almost entirely male, as we would expect from a film set in 18th century Vienna. This does not mean great art cannot have diverse casts, LGBT characters or a lack of "problematic" content. For a recent example, the excellent show Andor ticks almost all of the DEI checkboxes – LGBT character(s), diverse cast –, but it also has smart writing, interesting characters, sensible plots, beautiful visuals and a compelling story. As long as the former are subordinated to the latter, a work remains art and not "politically correct" propaganda. At the same time, Oppenheimer ticks almost none of the DEI checkboxes and yet is arguably one of the best films of this century.
> So instead of using a meaningless euphemism, OP should articulate what exact themes, stories, or characters they think lead to a good critic score?
I think this comment betrays exactly what I'm critiquing. Great art can't be shoved in a box like this. Mediocre art has identifiable flaws - maybe it's visually bland or maybe the dialogue is poor or the characters act in inexplicable ways. These all detract from the beauty and truth of the work.
I'm not sure I agree, but it would be worth studying empirically. The film Strange World, for instance, bombed, but has a 72% on RT and is certainly politically correct. It was quite poorly marketed.[0] While studios aren't in the habit of sharing marketing budgets, we can safely say the marketing expenditure was low.
This is a single datapoint, but my hypothesis is that political correctness does indeed account for a measurable (beyond noise) portion of a RT score. Marketing spend probably matters more, and genuinely excellent non-PC films (say, Oppenheimer) can succeed without PC, but PC does contribute.
Gödel also had a short appearance in the Oppenheimer movie, in the scene where Einstein talks about Kurt still being afraid even though they are in the states now.
Why do you say so? We casually call it "connecting the dots". It's like during the Oppenheimer movie when after the first demonstration of Uranium splitting people thought "oh, we can do a bomb with that".
Some of the arguments aren't actually Olympian, although if you have a pre-existing bias against commerce or capitalism it may feel that way.
Most obvious example query of where PageRank totally fails: [flowers]. The correct top result here for 99.9% of searchers is a local flower shop or possibly a big flower delivery chain, but it's not the Wikipedia page for flowers. Likewise for [hotel near me] which an algorithm like PageRank will yield garbage for, [oppenheimer showtimes] and many other very popular query types.
Link based ranking just doesn't work for this sort of result. You need data that isn't on the web which means you then need a way to rank it. And how exactly do you plan to rank flower shops or movie theatres? You've got no data on which to do that. Even if they have a website at all (big if) people don't organically link to them. Attempts to gain ranking data via things like user reviews will fail, almost nobody real reviews local stores or cinemas so if you rely on that then either you'll be flooded with fake reviews, or companies will aggressively push people to write them, or both, and users hate both outcomes.
Ad auctions work much better. Users don't have to do anything directly, they just buy things from the best businesses as they see it, revenue flows to those businesses enabling them to bid higher for ads, so users see the most successful businesses as determined by the market as a whole, which is much harder to game than user reviews or PageRank.
When the original Google was built, it was built by students. Their first ever test query was the name of the guy who ran the university. Their edge was ranking publicly available web pages using link graphs, so they just weren't thinking about commercial queries at all and if that's the scope of your ambition then yeah it will look like ads are always a conflict of interest because the only model you can imagine is re-ranking organic informational results surreptitiously. Once they turned on their first search backend deal and got experience running a search engine with serious non-nerd user traffic for the first time, they realized there were tons of popular queries that their whole approach just sucked at and would always suck at. That's when they realized that in some cases "ads are information", as they put it.
That wasn't some sort of paycheque-induced intellectual blindness, if it was then Google would have gone bankrupt a long time ago. It was an actual fundamental realization about the nature of what people use search engines for.
It's uncanny how much nuance and craftsmanship there is to Oppenheimer you need to just... discard in order to make it into an example of a property that would benefit from AI.
If ever there was a movie that could only have been made by one person. If ever there was a movie that if it had been made by anyone else would have fallen along so much more standard and predictable lines.
Ask an AI to create a talky 3 hour biopic with as few explosions as Oppenheimer, and people would flock to it at blockbuster levels. Go ahead. Keep clicking the generate button. Use the Nolan preset.
There are so many movies you could argue wouldn't lose anything for being AI. I wouldn't even trade those for AI, but I acknowledge they exist. Marvel has about 30 alone.
And if ever there was a technology more analogous to the bomb in terms of the need for their creators to have been more humble and prepared and less naive about their effect on the world before rather than after the invention, it's generative AI.
Even if Murphy was a nepo baby, you're right there's unfairness in Hollywood, still we can't overlook how much we still need people and we can't be so naive as to think the same unfairness in human nature would just go away rather than simply start to benefit a different set of privileged people.
> "I've been looking forward to watching this film, but it's frustratingly not been available in the UK ... this regional specific delay feels really quite outdated."
Now days, most big budget/big studio films are released simultaneously in major markets around the world. For example, Barbie and Oppenheimer were released on the same day in most of the major markets.
But smaller independent releases like this typically aren't, because different companies often bid on the distribution rights separately for different markets. In this case, it was released in Canada by Elevation Pictures, in the USA by IFC Films, and internationally by Paramount.
In the UK & Ireland it will be released (exclusively in cinemas) on October 6th, and looks like it will get fairly wide distribution.
It's a misunderstanding of Russian mentality, national ethos and the mechanics of their internal propaganda to think that a "message" disseminated by a Hollywood movie poses some kind of threat to it.
Using the example of Oppenheimer, a Russian citizen might see the movie and take away the following conclusions:
1. American leadership makes decisions based on an irrational fear of communism.
2. We are justified in expanding our nuclear arsenal. This is the only way they won't bomb our people in an event of conflict.
3. The Nazis sure were a threat to everyone. I'm glad we defeated them, but they weren't mentioning that in the movie. So ungrateful, typical Americans.
4. The political system of the US is quite unstable. I'm glad we have Putin. That Yeltsin sure was an embarrassment.
5. Whoah, the h-bomb sure is a powerful thing, we should drop that on Ukraine to win the war.
6. History is written by the winners, and whoever is the strongest wins. Thank goodness we're so strong.
7. I'm glad to live in a country where I could torrent this and I don't have to be worried about a 100 million dollar lawsuit.
8. The respect everyone gives us makes me feel so proud to live in Russia, one of the world leaders. We have a great future ahead of us.
For Putin's government the key here is censorship of Western content.
Many Western blockbuster movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer included, disseminate ideas that are antagonistic to Putin's fascist narrative. Barbie is, among other things, a play on feminism and on democratic values - think Ken's voting a new Constitution! It's only logical that Putin does not want "foreign agents" distorting the regime's narrative massively distributed to its 83 federal subjects ("federal states").
China has been doing this for ages now by picking a handful of foreign films / year and demanding the Statue of Liberty be removed from film. However, the Chinese market is so yummy that Western blockbuster productions will often self-censor to make sure they make the cut [1]. Putin is getting the opposite in fact, the West is high on anti-Russian sentiments for the last decade or so, and that has trickled down into content. Remember when under Boris Yeltsin that Western productions got plenty of "good Russians" after the Iron Curtain melted down?
>They came out on the same day, they have the same budget for production, gorgeous well-known actors, but there is one big difference. Directors spent $150 million on the marketing of Barbie, while $145 million was spent on the creation. Oppenheimer did not allocate such a budget for marketing.
Interesting, because I've heard about the Oppenheimer movie but not about the Barbie movie. The only time I've heard about the movie is after the fact, via the comparison with the Oppenheimer movie. I might not be the target audience, but it completely was stealth.
I have watched none of them yet.
>Marketing is an amazing tool, especially when it is handled by a team of professionals, so if the product is great, then it is strange to neglect it. But is it possible to make a cool product without focusing on marketing?
What's no marketing? It is developing a product in secret, in a bunker somewhere, and never telling someone about it. How will people who have the problem your product solves, i.e: the market, know about it? If the market doesn't know about it, where will sales come from? That's akin to someone who never gets out of the house and complains about being an "Incel". Not putting your product out there leads to "InSale" (just came up with this).
Not only that, but how will you know that your product actually solves the problem you think it's solving if you don't expose it to the market and target audience? You have to reduce that risk by exposing your product to the market and reality as early as possible. Maybe your target audience just doesn't really care about spending money on solving that problem and only complain about it? How will you improve the product/discover bugs if there isn't an influx of people using it, and how will they use it if they have never heard of it.
Saying marketing is a tool is like saying sales is a tool.
Assuming that the "barbenheimer" effect is what made people shy away seems to miss the occam's razor possibility: It's really not a great movie.
Okay, maybe that was just my opinion. Let's back that up.
The Barbie movie is incredibly dependent on cultural tropes, and targets both the nostalgia bone with its Barbie references and the cultural feelings of American women of a certain age.
Yes, the movie was very popular here. Because it targeted a very specific, yet very large, audience. It seems incredibly likely to me that the simple explanation for it's low acceptance in Japan is simply that the very specific audience it appeals to is quite small in Japan.
An n=1 sample of "stayed away due to oppenheimer marketing" makes this an entirely useless article.
Barbie is a light and fun movie, and a shorter movie than Oppenheimer. I have a PhD in physics, I have been to the Trinity site, I've been exposed to the story of the atom bomb over and over again, there is nothing new about it for me. So I went to see Barbie and didn't see Oppenheimer.
That said, the "overnight success" without marketing is a matter of being lucky, you really do want to make your own luck with marketing.
Folks, this article isn’t a criticism of the movie. It’s literally a “Oppenheimer, and…” not “Oppenheimer, but…” type of article. If you appreciate history, you will appreciate this article.
Articles keep appearing criticizing the film for a myriad of reasons, but most of those reasons turn out to be a) staying on its narrative focus of Oppenheimer, the man b) Not being enough of a commentary on the dangers and horrors of nuclear weapons. As someone who appreciates film, writing and Nolan’s first grounded, character-driven work in quite some time these criticisms are not only frustrating, but seem geared toward being nothing more than rage inducing click bait.
The movie shows Oppenheimer averting his eyes from footage of the horrors, which is a meta nod to the film taking the same approach.
The movie is not so much about the morality of dropping the bomb as it is about the subtler question of what it means to live the sanitized experience of being half a world away from it.
If you don't have to face it, what then? Do you still find it troubling, or does it become easy to latch onto projections of how many people might die if you don't use it? Or how much influence you'll lose decades off if you don't intimidate a future superpower now?
If you don't see civilians dying do you still approach it with humility, or attend pep rallies where we lament missing the chance to have used it on the Germans?
Yes, not talking about the Japanese who got bombed or the miners who suffered from uranium mining is understandable from the point of a movie focused on Oppenheimer and Los Alamos. The one thing that I think is relevant is when people criticize the line in the movie that "nobody lives here [site of Los Alamos] -- there is just a boarding school and some Indians who come here for ceremonies". This wasn't true. There were farmers (mostly Hispanic) who were forced to leave their lands.
I think the topic of the article is very relevant and connected to the subject of the movie.
Yes, the movie is subjective and a biography.
It also seems to be interested in the necessities for the development of the bomb. What humans needed to contribute and how they saw the moral implications of the weapon, as well as what efforts were needed to realize the bomb.
The article opens with a very memorable and important scene in the movie.
Then it connects this to the realities of uranium mining.
Which are relevant until today.
Why is this not an omission? Is the movie not a document of zeitgeist itself, does it not meam to evoke any thoughts or questions?
It does not need to be a documentary to be omitting something, especially because Oppenheimer's biography has moral and political aspects that the movie seems interested in.
I don't read the headline of the article as some kind of accusation against the movie.
The headline is supposed to spike interest in facts that many people don't seem to know or care about, despite having opinions on them.
Indeed. There's countless movies that could be made around other aspects of this period in history. Personally I found this movie kind of a disappointment as Oppenheimer's story is one of the less emotionally engaging aspects to me. It did look good though.
You have Oppenheimer and you have Barbie. They are both "movies" technically but are completely different type of products that happen to use the same media for dissemination. Her books are no different; I like your start-up analogy because she's focused on making money through this particular media and not "writing books" in the same way, let's say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote books.
> I think the conditional Kolmogorov complexity of Oppenheimer given all real world data we could collect [K(Oppenheimer|earth)] would be massively shorter than its gzip length.
To predict Oppenheimer perfectly, pixel for pixel, we would need at least Laplace's Demon with knowledge of both the laws and the complete initial state of the universe. And we need to assume the evolution of the universe is even deterministic and computable, otherwise this wouldn't work in the first place.
And even if we have the laws and the complete initial state of the universe, and its evolution is computable: if we live in some form of multiverse (or extremely large repeating universe, which is not unlikely, since many physicists assume the universe is infinitely large), it would still not work. There may be countless copies of Earth which are indistinguishable given (i.e. underdetermined by[1]) the data we can collect on Earth, but where each version of Oppenheimer has a completely different pixel noise pattern, and consequently different Kolmogorov complexity. So the "compressed" UTM input string would have to hardcode basically our entire Earth Oppenheimer in order to perfectly and uniquely determine the movie, resulting in a terrible compression ratio.
And even if the universe is in fact small and not a multiverse, our data available to us on Earth is probably not enough to uniquely retrodict the initial state (and laws) of our universe, since there are countless possible but non-actual universes which are consistent with our Earth data, but which all differ in initial state and laws in a way such that they again predict different versions of Oppenheimer, and so again the "compression" has to hardcode basically everything. Underdetermination strikes again, be it uncertainty about location in a multiverse or uncertainty about which merely possible universe the the actual one.
> Roughly speaking (glossing over some details), you can’t do better at predicting the future than this probability distribution assuming the physical Church-Turing thesis.
That only holds if you restrict yourself to perfect predictions, not prediction in general. (And of course ignore that Solomonoff induction is uncomputable even if the universe itself is computable.) The issue is that we don't care about just maximizing the probability of perfectly accurate predictions, because, given underdetermination, the best perfect prediction would still be highly unlikely to be true, because it would be dominated by overfitting on tons of hardcoded noise and not by real high level patterns in the data. What we really want for an "optimal" prediction is the prediction with the best "expected accuracy", the best expected "goodness of fit", expected "closeness to the truth" etc. The best such prediction may be perfectly accurate with probability 0% (most good predictions make unrealistic simplifying assumptions where we already know they are strictly speaking false), but that doesn't matter when the prediction is likely very accurate, very close to the truth.
An ideal prediction algorithm would probably minimize something like the quantity (complexity of hypothesis + inverse of goodness of fit to the given data). And it would be computable, since uncomputability is a rather non-ideal property of an algorithm.
on the other hand: few movie goers are seeing multiple movies a day, and movies make their money on concessions, not ticket sales. They don't necessarily care about many movies a day, as opposed to 2-3 big hits that can get people in. if Nolan can get 100 people in for the 180 minute oppenheimer as opposed to 20 people for the Haunted mansion, the goal is clear.
The difference is 1) the power law distribution of revenue and 2) the finality of a moview.
1: A few movies (e.g. Barbie, Spiderman, Oppenheimer this year) make the majority of the money. Most movies make little. So if you pay based on expected return you probably don't pay your actors at all, or pay them peanuts. That's inequitable. But you can't pay them lots because you don't know how much money the movie is going to make. The solution is profit sharing. Most software business have much more stable income.
2: A movie, when finished, is done. There may be a director's cut in a decade or two if it's a super popular movie. There are occasionally different edits for different markets (alternate endings etc.) But basically it's done. The movie that is shown on release is the movie you watch 20 years later. So you can easily apportion credit to the actors, writers, etc. This isn't the case for software. It continually evolves. You made the initial design, but 64 other developers have worked on it since. Who gets credit?
I am currently going through the book about Oppenheimer, the one they based the movie on (https://www.amazon.in/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-Oppenheimer/dp/B01N6T1M1C/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2RR969YD7D8JT&keywords=american+prometheus&qid=1690382654&sprefix=american+prometheus+%2Caps%2C251&sr=8-1). I am listening to via Audible and it really gives some fascinating insight into the troubled man's life, much more than the movie did.
The software indeed has to do what I do, which is understanding my environment and mentating solutions that are somehow appropriate for either fixing or alleviating any one of the uncountable challenges said environment faces. I cannot even describe what I am doing, only that relatively small parts of the end-result are encoded into symbols called code.
This reminds me of what Bohr said to Oppenheimer - in the movie - when some doubt arose around his mathematical ability: "Algebra is like sheet music. The important thing isn't 'can you read music', it's 'can you hear it'. Can you hear the music, Robert?"
I'm very much wondering if GPT can hear the music, but time will tell if and to what degree this even matters.
Judith Curry is interesting case-in-point; most science should not be conducted in such a manner as to associate it with a particular science; the cult of personality should by virtue of a preference for rationale treatment of evidence be avoided in favour of the facts. This includes a systematic treatment and discussion around uncertainty, something that she is criticised for abusing. It should be noted that she is a
> prominent climatologist
precisely because she is a contrarian, i.e. it is not the case that she represents dissent from a prominent researcher. It is to be expected that she is prominent given that it is hard to find many scientists who agree with her thinking. Politically, she is one of the few people available to provide credibility to climate-denialism (even if "credible" does not apply within her own field).
I really want to engage with you on this, because there is an alarming trend in the alt-media to try and depict scientific communities as a cabal of politically minded sell-outs. But the reality is pretty far from this. It's not perfect; peer review needs to be more accessible, journals should be open-accessm, etc., but to depict it as a cult is deeply misrepresentative.
The source you referred to (https://reason.com/2023/08/09/this-scientist-used-to-spread-climate-change-alarmism-now-shes-trying-to-debunk-it) has all the hallmarks of this. It writes as though "establishment science" (which I would be interested in having the authors define) is a person you can speak to, and receive a single opinion. I've seen a number of these kind of "free speech" publications pop up recently, but from what I can see, they are really just contrarian outlets; they seem more interested in being "other" than actually pursuing a particular theme with any kind of rigour.
Part of the problem is of course science communication. The media is problematic in the UK (at least) because of its poor treatment of complex issues like Brexit, climate change, economics, etc). In general, the media tend to fail in communicating how science is conducted, what risk looks like, and how uncertainty is described. You can see this in cinema; science is portrayed as esoteric experts who defy the establishment in some good-wins-out triumph (see Oppenheimer). But, that's really, that's just good entertainment.
We know that computer models aren't perfect. No-one would take you seriously if you gave a modelling result without a description of the uncertainty and how it was derived. But they're also the best thing that we have besides "wait and see", where we walk without agency into whatever future awaits us.
Observational data can disagree with models without invalidating their conclusions; it depends upon the questions that you ask. A specific example; the nucleus is often modelled as a bunch of protons and neutrons moving around independently. We can answer some really interesting questions about why some atoms have very long half-lives using this model. But, if you want to know why a particular nucleus shows vibrational behaviour, the shell model can't help you. Despite this, the shell model is considered one of the most successful theories in physics.
"Truth is the First Casualty of War" - Quote Investigator
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It's interesting to me that many of the same people who do not trust the vaccine, also do not want the FDA to complete their review process of medications. Those are opposites! The 'Expert' is well and truly dead.
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We do NOT need scientific dissidents, we need everyone in a position of responsibility to be clear about the line between knowledge and belief. We need scientists to say "We don't know that". We need journalists who accept that answer and ask "How can we find out", instead of just finding a scientist who will answer an impossible question.
We need a better informed and more skeptical public. We should not accept something as a final answer just because it's interesting or satisfying. We need to be prepared to be unsatisfied.
For instance, we do not now and will never know how contagious the virus is to a naïve immune system. To know that we have to perform 'challenge trials'. It is unethical to perform a challenge trial without effective treatment, so we did not do any early in the pandemic. Now everyone is vaccinated or exposed, or must be considered to be exposed; so any evidence now would only answer questions about a post-pandemic world.
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Writing a serious article about a "lab leak" without clarifying what exactly you mean is irresponsible to the point of professional negligence. Lab Leak means many things: 'It walked out of the lab on someone's shoe', 'Secret Research', 'Illegal Research', 'Malicious Research', 'Modified Virus', 'Man-Made Virus', etc...
So a scientist says "I think it's likely that the virus came from the lab" - which do they mean? The audience is free to assume that the scientist supports their pet theory.
If a lab in China was doing anything nefarious, what would you actually do about it?
Consider that the human mind really loves conclusions. Consider that we look for motivations at a less-than-conscious level.
When people say "conspiracy theory", I hear "motivation theory", as in, I think this group has a motivation to cause this disaster.
So here's my motivation theory: Chinese officials are VERY sensitive to embarrassment. I think they are highly motivated to destroy any evidence that might embarrass them.
That includes the 'liquidation' of the wet market where viral traces of Sars-Cov-2 have been found. It might also include any research related to Sars-Cov-2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It's most likely that the virus was not modified by humans, but I do hold a place in my reasoning for the idea that it might have been.
I'm reminded of the Oppenheimer movie - people don't like it when you have a complex view of a moral question, and the question of the lab leak is heavily moralized by many people.
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It is clear to me that individual people can make masks work to prevent the spread of contagious disease; in much the same way as individual people can live off-grid. In both cases it's more work than most are willing to do, or it's in some way beyond our capabilities.
I saw a woman wearing a mask, but with it pulled below her nose - the 2020 Karen/Ken classic look. But I saw this in 2022, WELL after masking orders were over. Entirely of her own volition, she was wearing a mask, but without any care for actual function. Was it misunderstanding? Was it moral signaling? Was it habit? People are hard to understand.
Absolutely, and I think the recent Oppenheimer movie was an excellent take on this exact subject. At some point, you don't get to throw up your hands and say, "technology is just neutral” and absolve yourself of any responsibility for what you’ve put into the world.
This essay really hits me wrong. Perhaps its because I am a human and not simply a "unit of production". Also the "personal playing to win strategy" immediately reminds me of the parody program "refuse to lose" from the film "Little Miss Sunshine".
I am a 58 year-old man with a family. Today I'm giving the eulogy at my Uncle's memorial. In the last weeks of his life I was one of his principal care givers in home hospice. I've been helping my daughter through one of the most challenging times of her life. My wife just broke her wrist and severely injured her back and had trauma surgery two days ago. The FBI keeps showing up at my door looking for an interview (my brother is a fugitive on the most wanted list). In my view, part of being a man is supporting those around you with strength and love. I haven't seen Barbie or Oppenheimer, I've had to temporarily set aside my FAA training for work. I've been too busy supporting my family during a challenging time. I'm at full capacity.
One thing I've refused to stop doing is working out - so I get up at 5:30 to make sure I can have the time to do so. This is part of my personal care routine that means the most for my mental health as well as my physical health.
Its entirely possible my personal strategy sucks. However I think this essay sucks.
Glad Oppenheimer didn't shy away from those aspects of his life. Help really humanize him, in both good and bad ways even if the relationship(s) weren't necessarily a vital part of history outside of "oh his wife was a communist before he met".
It's just interesting because even 2000's superhero movies did this. Society changes quickly when a trillion dollar corporation azures a studio I guess.
Like I said, the Nazi scientists were very capable. They just didn’t have any power or control. The movie Oppenheimer correctly points out that the Nazi politicians saw a lot of important ideas as “Jewish science” and didn’t take critical scientific innovations seriously, underfunding them in favor of more conventional innovations like “big powerful rocket.”
Remote work and async comms means that latency tends to be high. Latency issues can be overcome by not stopping to wait at each decision point.
For example, low latency this is ok: “do you want to go to dinner or a movie?” Movie. ”Do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer?” Oppenheimer. “Do you want to go at 6:00, 7:00, or 8:00?” 8:00.
Instead for high latency, this will cut down on a lot of dead time in back and forth: “Do you want to dinner or see a movie? If you want dinner do you prefer to go to Il Capricio (Italian) or Sushi Go 55? I can make reservations at 6, 6:30, or 7. If you’d rather see a movie, do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer? Barbie is at 6:15, 7:20, and 8:15. Oppenheimer is at 6:00, 7:00, and 8:00.” Let’s do Oppenheimer at 8
It’s more work up front and any unchosen paths are “wasted effort”, but for work there’s usually value in fully exploring the alternate paths anyway.
Depends on the movie, and it is not always smooth. Also, it leads to higher piracy in countries where cuts are made because people do want the raunchier scenes. Like Oppenheimer had a bunch of cuts in India but it is still doing well, but it is by no means guaranteed.
I took a PTO day to see Oppenheimer mid-week. Another colleague did the same. We both have young kids, so getting to the movies is a heavy lift. We live pretty close to each other and there is a theater about a mile from my house. We decided that we'd definitely do it again for the right movies.
I saw Oppenheimer at Alamo with movie-talkers and cell-users next to me, and they still put the entirety of the onus on the customer to report the bad actors. I don't know how I thought they'd do it, but I was sufficiently put off by the prospect of considering myself a Karen that I didn't (also the latent fear that the server would take my ticket, read it, and immediately turn to the people next to me and tell them I reported them)
Interesting enough, I think Oppenheimer needed slightly more sex. There's a part of the movie where he's called a womanizer, yet the movie shows him having two relations (both of them serious) plus an implied flirt with a third woman.
According to the biography the movie is based on [1] Oppenheimer "once had half a dozen lovers on the go". That is definitely not the impression I got from the movie.
This is why I specifically wrote about "spoiling the EXPERIENCE OF WATCHING Oppenheimer", not "spoiling the story".
A movie is so much more than just the story or story outline (which I do know as I've read the excellent "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb").
I really love to experience movies with as little before-hand information as possible — I don't want to read about that great moment where actor X enters the scene, I don't want to read about how they did that awesome camera work in that one scene, I don't want to read about that dialogue in that one scene where the whole audience in the cinema broke into spontaneous applause etc.
I want to experience these kinds of things myself, as uninformed as possible.
It’s 90% interpersonal/political drama (Including a bunch of unnecessary nudity thrown in for dramatic effect), a few token scenes with Albert Einstein, a 10 minute detonation with decent SFX, and a small fraction of real physics and engineering. If you’re actually interested in the Manhattan Project you’ll be way more inspired by a history channel documentary than anything in that movie.
> We thought Oppenheimer was the way to instill a love of physics to young people
The only person so far that I've seen publicly saying that is Sam Altman. Never crossed my mind that this could inspire people (albeit I haven't seen the movie). Same for the Turing movie, or the Hawking movie, none of them really made the work look that cool IMO.
> Except that it isn’t the end. All kinds of worrying things are buried in the story. At one point, in 1942, one of Oppenheimer’s Communist friends, Haakon Chevalier, suggests that Oppenheimer gets in touch with the Soviet Union about the bomb project through a British scientist (and Soviet asset) George Eltenton. Oppenheimer realises immediately that the suggestion is treasonous and refuses it. But he does not report the contact to Groves or anyone else for eight months. When he eventually does, he tries to cover up Chevalier’s role for four months.
They covered that in the movie (though they glossed over it).
I spent a fair amount of time during the film playing 'Spot Jack Quaid' in anticipation of Feynman being called out at some point. He is spotted early during the montage when Oppenheimer goes recruiting, and then during various scenes in the background, twice playing bongos (!), but only once is he called by name- Teller calls his name right before the Trinity test for not having goggles or a welding glass to look through, and he notes he is in a truck with a thick windshield that blocks the UV. I smiled so much when that little tidbit happens, as it is a story he prominently tells in his book 'Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman...'
He gives an incredible account of his time there in the lecture (and almost stand-up-comedy act) 'Los Alamos from Below' -
Yes, but the American views about specifically Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem different from most other countries, or at least from Japan. Outside the US it is quite common to view the bombings as war crimes, while this is uncommon in the US. This probably influenced how "Oppenheimer" handled the matter.
(A comparison would perhaps be the difference between a Russian and a Polish film about the Sowjet invasion of Poland. The history here is viewed very differently in the Russian/Polish public.)
The movie was about the man, not the bomb, which is why it focused primarily on a man, and not a bomb. The actual testing of the bomb was a small part of the movie and the real deployments of it were but a couple sentences. The movie Oppenheimer was never a movie about Hiroshima and while I think there needs to be more coverage in general about our impact on Japan by dropping those bombs, I think giving the movie Oppenheimer shit about it isn't reasonable just because the man worked on it. It covered everything from the his view point, and what he personally lived. He read about the bombs being used the same as everyone else, and it wouldn't have fit the movie to suddenly jump to Japan to show the impact of his work. It did however try to visualize the impact and eventual realization of what he had played a part in, in the visuals at the compound when he's giving the speech to the fanatical coworkers stomping their feet (which was very Aronofsky like imo)
> During World War II, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. appoints physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer and a team of scientists spend years developing and designing the atomic bomb. Their work comes to fruition on July 16, 1945, as they witness the world's first nuclear explosion, forever changing the course of history.
Literally from the description of the movie.
It promised work of Oppenheimer and team of scientists working on the Manhattan project. Instead it’s a shitty avengers rip off where Oppenheimer assembles team of scientists without any substance and literally no focus on Manhattan project.
I expected to see at least the Imitation Game level movie, not subpar plot focused on sex and politics.
A movie about Oppenheimer should’ve at least shown what haunted him and weight of his decisions, not one minute (!) of Oppenheimer watching some background video showing surprised face like on this video.
The movie called "Oppenheimer" is mainly about Oppenheimer (shocking, right?), it's not about "the bomb", otherwise it would have been called "Trinity" or "Manhattan" or something.
If you want to see a movie about "the bomb" don't watch Oppenheimer.
Yes, although they touched on the impact of the bomb on Japanese civilians a little, they didn't really do it justice, and it's a shame because I think it would have really provided an important insight on why Oppenheimer's views changed over time.
The movie lacked a cohesive story anyway, so that would have added some meaning.
> Andrej Karpathy, another OpenAI employee [...] “My hope going into Oppenheimer was that it would be a kind of true story ‘Avengers of Science,’” he said in a tweet. “It's still a good movie with lots of gems but the focus was elsewhere.”
These are the type of people building and running OpenAI? We're in a fun ride, seems they're more out of touch than I could have imagined.
August 6, but more importantly the last few weeks there has been a flurry of articles about the Manhattan Project and the a-bomb, probably due to the release of the Oppenheimer movie.
I thought this to myself as well after seeing Oppenheimer. As someone else has mentioned, it was shown in Fat Man, Little Boy. Each movie had different things that were or were not shown. FMLB didn't have the football field. There's only so much you can put into a 3 hour film where at least 7/8ths are in focus.
I mean not that many films that I really want to watch come out per year, so if Oppenheimer is 3hs instead of 2hs or whatever then let it be; I'd rather spend one more hour at the theater and watch the movie knowing the director didn't need to cut an hour off the film.
(Although I do have to say Oppenheimer got somewhat tedious in certain parts)
> (Wait a minute, Oppenheimer is three hours long? Sorry, ChrisN, but that's one's getting streamed in my living room, too.)
That's a smart decision. Oppenheimer was a good movie (I give it a B+), though very long, and the director (or editor?) gives the audience very few moments to take a breather. I'd have enjoyed it more if I knew I could pause to take a leak or fast forward through the boring part about the affair.
My regular reminder that 2001: A Space Odyssey was only 2h 23m, and that movie had an intermission at the cinema. Tess of the d'Urbervilles? 18 minutes longer than M:I, and that one had an intermission, too. Ghandi had an intermission, but $DEITY, no human bladder can hold that much so it was kind of required.
Your Marvel movie is approaching 3 hours, and no intermission? Fuck that, I'll watch it at home while your CEO whines that no one goes to the movies anymore.
(Wait a minute, Oppenheimer is three hours long? Sorry, ChrisN, but that's one's getting streamed in my living room, too.)
Movies with a compelling story keep your attention, but with action, your brain can only take so much stimulation. Unless it has a really compelling story, your mind will wander.
Nolan not using CGI is like Tom Cruise doing Mission: Impossible stunts himself. These affirmations are ambiguous and misleading.
In the case of Oppenheimer (and other Nolan movies) they use a lot of practical effects but they are eventually digitally composited, color corrected and edited.
> The director was not attempting to claim that there was no CGI in Oppenheimer at all. He was instead stating that there are no shots in the movie that were entirely created using visual effects.
see https://screenrant.com/how-much-oppenheimer-real-cgi/
>Does the Oppenheimer movie include a lot of CGI?
>No. Director Christopher Nolan told Collider that Oppenheimer has "zero" CGI shots. This includes the bomb tests, which were recreated without CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery). "I think computer graphics, they're very versatile, they can do all kinds of things, but they tend to feel a bit safe," said Nolan. "That's why they're difficult to use in horror movies. Animation tends to feel a little safe for the audience. The Trinity Test, ultimately, but also these early imaginings of Oppenheimer visualizing the Quantum Realm, they had to be threatening in some way. They had to have the bite of real-world imagery. The Trinity Test, for those who were there, was the most beautiful and terrifying thing simultaneously, and that's where we were headed with this film." Last year, Top Gun: Maverick took a similar approach and it paid off (although a limited amount of CGI was used in the Tom Cruise blockbuster).
This can't be. I had read the statement but the final shot where he and Einstein talked near the pond, where we see the visions inside Oppenheimer's mind, had to have been CGI. Also, though I am not sure how they filmed the Trinity test practically, it had to be a smaller explosion made to look bigger, so it had to have required some compositing work. The rest of the movie did not really have all that much in terms of VFX since almost every other was scene was dialogue heavy and was mostly shot inside closed spaces. The scenes where Oppenheimer was giving a speech and was experiencing visions of an explosion also could have been done 100% practically.
This is not a slight on the movie or on Nolan, cause it would have been much easier for him to do the trinity test or the scene of Oppenheimer dreaming about atoms via CG (which I recently read was done by using an aquarium and glass balls). It was just Nolan doing his best to market his movie, considering the fact the cast nor his writers were available to market the movie.
As a side note, I want to add that I felt the scene with the Trinity test was fantastic, especially the fact that the hall went dead silent for a few seconds,but the actual shot of the mushroom cloud paled in comparison to the actual footage.
This I felt that whenever we saw the actors reacting to the explosion, they are being bathed by the light from the explosion, but seeing the actual explosion itself did not live
up to how Oppenheimer himself said that it looked like a thousand suns shining in the sky at once.
But with the excellent music, acting, writing, direction, shot composition etc. it is easy to forgive.
I didn't really get that sense from the film. At one point, Teller even says (paraphrased) to Oppenheimer, "You're not a scientist anymore, you're a politician now." He is portrayed as a manager, not a lone genius.
The kids are just as tired as many of the adults of watching super hero x version y movies with a smattering of Tom Cruise action version z. I am hopeful that Oppenheimer will be interesting …
The feigned move toward AI generated content would likely make things worse, providing bizarre fake Tom Cruise scripts generated from old real Tom Cruise scripts.
> Meanwhile, 70 mm IMAX film releases like Oppenheimer don't come often, and when they do, only 30 theaters in the world can support them, CNBC reported, and not necessarily all of them will (Tenet's 70 mm release, for example, was limited to 11 theaters due to pandemic restrictions, CNBC said). That makes any need for upgrades and overhauls less urgent.
> the public supports of the strike amounts to ... wanting new TV shows and movies
Nobody in my social circle has taken any notice of it, because movies and TV has become so bad that none of us watch them anymore. Dune was the last Hollywood movie I watched, Oppenheimer and the next Dune are the only movies I’m looking forward to watching. There’s nothing on TV that I watch. I’m somewhat looking forward to the 3 Body Problem adaptation, but I’m expecting it will be bad.
As far as I’m concerned they can stay on strike forever. Let somebody who can do a better job replace them.
I think that IMAX has really struggled with branding confusion as the majority of "IMAX" branded screens are slightly larger regular screens and not the true experience that IMAX can be. There's only a few dozen IMAX 15-perf 70mm film theatres in 1.43 aspect ratio worldwide, some more digital 4K IMAX multi-laser in 1.43 which are also quite good, and then the vast majority of other "IMAX" screens are digital IMAX Xenon which is usually just a slightly bigger screen than a traditional theatre (but still not the 1.43 ratio the filmmaker intended).
I think IMAX Xenon as well as general confusion about which systems are in use at which theatres and which movies are filmed in which format has led to a ton of frustration with the brand, even though when everything is just right they can produce some really incredible experiences.
Then even for Oppenheimer there is a lot of technical troubles going on for the film theatres... The top of /r/imax has stories of people who flew cross country to see it in the best format they could and then had the projector bonk out 20 minutes in.
I think that, post-COVID, a lot of people have realized that a good home video theatre is very affordable, lots of movies are going to streaming either direct or very quickly, and that modern 4K HDR OLED TVs can be absolutely gorgeous. I don't have a lot of motivation to go to a standard theatre screening these days, but IMAX is an experience you can't get at home though so I hope it stays around.
>he's an analog snob and believes the only legitimate place to enjoy his analog tech films is in a theater
He is like that in interviews, but it's worth noting that a lot of care is put into making great digital versions of his movies too. I'm not familiar with how involved he is in that process, but I would hazard a guess he's pretty involved.
The Oppenheimer site mentions this:
The Digital Cinema presentation of OPPENHEIMER has been created from 8k scans of the photochemically color-graded film elements, scaled to 4K, fine-tuned in the digital realm to maximize the color and contrast attributes of digital projectors, and dust-busted to achieve the cleanest and most stable image presentation possible. The film was finished in 4k for the highest digital resolution currently available.
That may be the best answer (it was a serious question). The explosion in the film is layered small-scale petrol explosions [1], but more visible detail may help sell it as bigger.
>Only 19 theaters in the United States, and 30 worldwide, are showing the ambitious biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, using a version of the film in its most epic form.
If anyone currently in Hamburg, Germany plans to watch this movie, the movie theater "Savoy" (seems to be independent - no chain) offers the Oppenheimer movie in original English language (no dubs/subs) in the original 70mm version.
I think I'm gonna attend next week.
Edit: I'm seeing the list above which claims there are no German cinemas who have the original 70mm film. However this[0] German cinema in Hamburg clearly claims to have original 70mm version ("OV"). Not sure if I either misunderstand something, the list is incorrect, or if the cinema is lying?
It feels like there is some ongoing sophisticated guerrilla marketing campaign to promote these movies. YouTube mysteriously promotes some video about how Oppenheimer was a great physicist, Columns are written about what the Barbie movie has to do with Feminism, and even on Hacker News there are multiple links per day about these two movies. Something is going on here.
Mostly foreign Jewish scientists who were neither taught nor started their research in the USA and came because of the situation in Europe. Even Oppenheimer had to go do his PhD in Germany.
> Hollywood
Both the camera, the first films and the foundation of filming come from the Lumieres and their company based in France and the films they made around the world.
> internet
Packet switching is from Batman in the UK. HTML was from a British engineer in Switzerland.
Even the rocket you sent to the moon was built by a German.
It's not a biography of Oppenheimer, it's a history of the making of the atomic bomb. Unsurprisingly, the parts of the book that deal with Oppenheimer - only a fraction of the book - are concerned with his involvement in the making of the atomic bomb. It does not mention the apple incident.
By contrast, the biography the movie is based on treats the apple incident at some length.
Both books are superb, in my opinion, and deserve their Pulitzers.
Anecdotally, I've only ever heard the name Fermi in the phrase Fermi Paradox. Oppenheimer I know much more about, and I only know there's a movie about him because it's all over HN this month.
I'm sure that the red scare did tarnish his name for decades, but it looks to me like those decades had ended by 2004 when Google's trends pick up.
Figured this might be interesting in light of the Oppenheimer movie. This book documents Oliphant's role in introducing Oppenheimer to the atomic bomb. Also a cracking story about two great scientists and their foundational work on radar, penicillin and the atomic bomb..
This month, there were Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan and Asteroid City by Wes Anderson.
It does show that HN is a website for techies and not for cinema enthusiasts; there's good stuff out there, but you won't get to it if you only scratch the surface.
To be fair, in most cases only cinema enthusiasts really need to concern themselves with what the director's ideal presentation is. The overwhelming majority of people probably couldn't even recount to you which movies they've seen in which formats.
For someone (like yourself) who is aware of and interested in the differences in presentational formats, it does suck that formats like IMAX 1570 have very few locations around the world (heck, that's even true of IMAX GT). But it wouldn't be any better for you if those formats just didn't exist at all!
Perhaps one could argue that, because the IMAX GT exists, Christopher Nolan is making filmmaking decisions that compromise how the film will end up looking on more traditional (e.g. 2.39:1) presentational formats. Or in other words, one might argue "Oppenheimer would look better on 2.39:1 if Nolan had shot it specifically for 2.39:1." But I tend to think that Nolan probably realizes that the vast majority of people won't see it in IMAX, and I doubt the compromises are significant.
Oppenheimer has had his own movie (and opera and TV series and a ton of books as others here have pointed out).
The earlier Hollywood treatment was "Fat Man and Little Boy" with Paul Newman. It's rentable on Amazon Prime. It's not a great movie despite the talented cast and good photography. I expect Nolan to make a better movie, but FM&LB does a decent job telling the story of the relationship of Groves and Oppenheimer and some of Oppie's back story.
I heard recently (on Lex Fridman's podcast with Marc Andreessen) that Oppenheimer was called a "cry-baby scientist" by President Truman, and that his groveling campaign was considered by many to be self-aggrandizing, albeit in a self-deprecating way.
Apparently, his involvement was less significant than many others in the Manhattan Project, but his name became one of the most well-known due to his public outcries, and of course his iconic quote.
I haven't yet seen the movie and I'm looking forward to it; I wonder how much of this is portrayed.
Funny enough, I'm planning a double feature with Oppenheimer and the Barbie movie. Maintaining a healthy relationship involves tradeoffs.
don't forget to insist on seeing Oppenheimer in a cinema with subtitles, if you plan on seeing it; it's a bit harder to find, but hopefully will send a message
Why does he need to market. I know about this movie because of all of the "not being marketed" news posts. Media is giving them a free marketing coupon it seem. He's playing it well.
That said I rarely see movie marketing anymore. Only movies I know are out are barbie and Oppenheimer due to the meme and my friend insisting we go to both.
I agree. It doesn't make Nolan look good. But he's probably just trying to generate publicity.
I suspect that facebook's contribution to Myanmar was more as a place of organization and evidence of opponents, than the feeds somehow generated most of the zeitgeist to slaughter. It kinda ignores the other causes of zeitgeist/organization and absolves the villains of the affair in doing so. But the idea latched on to some journalist.
The Soviet Union had a semi/automated system for firing if Moscow got blown up before making a decision.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
They're is an air of vanity to the media and researchers who compare AI to nukes. It's sorta like Nolan making a film about Oppenheimer, in the hope to associate with them.
As far as the "meme" of the two movies being together, I think it's the "battle of the sexes" turned on its head. Barbie looks feminine and colorful, full of fantasy, and Oppenheimer looks cold and stark, with the masculine and realist elements of wartime - watching both the movies together would be a blissful whiplash between extremes. It's produced a lot of funny content including that fake trailer that implies Barbie constructed Los Alamos and created the weapon, which made me laugh my head off. People just want to be silly and enjoy something.
The Barbie movie had one of the best marketing campaigns I have ever seen dating back to the initial announcements. But I think they lost the plot with this contrived connection to Oppenheimer. It feels forced and kind of turns me off to both movies. I try to be a good sport and enjoy the whole marketing production for these kind of cultural events (meaning the Barbie movie), but then they come in hot with this absurd upsell and it just rubs me wrong.
I'm not doing a "double feature", but I am seeing both opening weekend, which is something I haven't done in a long time.
My local film society got a 35mm print of Oppenheimer, which I have tickets to see opening night. Barbie on the other hand I'm happy seeing on a digital screen closer to home.
I do this too. I watch everything with subtitles now. It is not your fault. This is some new hollywood mantra. They have become harder to hear and harder to see. Some new Christopher Nolan effect. I forget what it is.
Anyways, I would love to watch the new Oppenheimer movie in a theater but I am not sure, it is hard to see and hear and understand dialogues without subtitles nowadays.
People outside the bubble aren't declaring AI to be literally as dangerous as nuclear weapons and I think anyone that thinks this with any gravity needs to take a very deep time out to step out of the bubble, calm down and think about their thought processes. The "AI is as dangerous as nuclear weapons" petition from the tech scene was ridiculous and frankly kind of embarrassing.
I wrote up my thoughts about it last month https://kyledrake.com/writings/ai
Christopher Nolan just finished a movie profile of J Robert Oppenheimer, has presumably spent a lot of time thinking about nuclear weapons, and has similar lesser-concerns about AI https://www.wired.com/story/christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-ai-apocalypse/
It's standard practice for me to watch films w/ subtitles as the sound (as the article suggests) is all F-up.
I take my films seriously and my Mrs just bought ticket to 'Oppenheimer'. First question out of my mouth was "Is it in IMAX"? No, but it was on sale! Ugh. I re-iterated that Nolan produces movies for IMAX [0] with very good sound systems. Apparently only 30 theaters WORLDWIDE [1] are capable of showing that film in the correct format! Fingers crossed, it will be somewhat acceptable.
Inevitable with all of Nolan's films, I re-watch them at home with subtitles because I need to know wtf is going on. (Tenet was next to impossible without them).
[0] "Christopher Nolan explains best ways to watch a movie, which theater seats to pick" https://www.mywabashvalley.com/news/national-news/christopher-nolan-explains-best-ways-to-watch-a-movie-which-theater-seats-to-pick/
[1] "Oppenheimer: IMAX 70mm Screening at Only 30 Theaters Worldwide" https://ymcinema.com/2023/06/05/oppenheimer-imax-70mm-screening-at-only-30-theaters-worldwide/
I have to wonder about a device that won't allow you to watch a 2-hour movie without running out of battery and having to plug it in. I guess Oppenheimer is a no-go.
How much the better tech matters is something that I find is film dependent.
A big, splashy, large-scale action film? Yeah, it makes a difference to me. OTOH even apparently "thinky" films like the upcoming OPPENHEIMER are likely better in a more immersive situation.
But a smaller film like THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN? Not a factor. (But this also means I don't think you lose much watching it at home if you have a decent screen.)
Yeah, I was surprised the article only mentioned this in a quick breath. Of course it's because of the movie! The DoE doesn't want the movie to come out, painting the AEC as these persecutors and bad guys, and then the public crying to the DoE to clear Oppenheimer's name.
Now the DoE can say... "yeah, we already took care of that, nothing to see here". It seems completely transparent to me.
There's an upcoming movie about Oppenheimer with an A-list cast and Christopher Nolan directing. I wonder if this is to get ahead the incident coming into the public consciousness.
I quite enjoy the type of movie they are referencing and have almost never watched a super hero movie but The Fabelmans looks like a total bore. That is even with wanting to see Julia Butters acting evolve.
We will see with Nolan's Oppenheimer next year.
This is all over dramatized. Butters will probably be the biggest actor in the world in 10 years making "serious" dramas.
Tarantino has even talked about how this goes in cycles and we have been going through a boring time like in the late 50s.
It's a great scene (even though it's highly fictionalized), and it's a shame that the film itself is so mediocre. In particular, Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves were horribly miscast. Sam Waterston in the Oppenheimer (1980) miniseries was much more true to life.
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WW2 and it's consequences will be a big part of this.
Consider the _Oppenheimer_ movie. The majority of physicists depicted there are people who left Europe around that time.
As I mentioned, they obvious did a digital intermediary for visual effects shots. For Oppenheimer I don't think they was much CGI, but at the bare minimum I sure they did some digital compositing, so they must have matched their photochemical color grading with digital color grading for some scenes. Also, they had a digital colorist to produce the grade for the DCP anyway, to match the look of the film master.
But it seems to me that reputable sources have clearly stated that they did a fully analog film path all the way to release prints.
There's this interview with the DP: https://fotokem.com/oppenheimer-hoytema-fotokem/
> And once production began, FotoKem printed literally everything Nolan shot. Then after the edit was complete, FotoKem brought in Negative Cutter Simone Appleby from the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image Animée in France to cut each section and glue it together, which starts with a list that comes out of the Avid that provides every single one of the over 3,000 shots. That list, coupled with a work print (a film version of the list of shots), was then rolled against the negative, using also a QuickTime reference with key numbers—all of which allowed Appleby to cut the physical negative together into the final assembly, from which final prints were made. And from there, Van Hoytema and Color Timer Kristen Zimmerman painstakingly perfected the color of each and every shot by hand.
> Theodosiou’s focus was matching the color of the digital master to that of the analog film master because Nolan and FotoKem knew that not everybody in the world would be able to view Oppenheimer on analog film. “We were able to manipulate the images and make them look exactly how Christopher intended for them to look on film,” says Theodosiou. “For the final tweaks, we had to split screen the image between a digital and a film on the screen and match the film identically throughout, from reel one all the way to the end.”
> It was widely reported that Oppenheimer was color graded photochemically,
So I'm deeply sceptical of this. There was a DI colourist in the colour department and the editorial had a digital conform team and a colourist.
I'm sure there was some photochemcial fiddling. but it was all conformed digitally and lasered out to be finished.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15398776/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cst_sm
Photochemical grading is hard and really sucks compared to DI. especially if you are trying to put in a butt tone of VFX.
Not every film. It was widely reported that Oppenheimer was color graded photochemically, and the 65mm film physically spliced (the editor of course worked in Avid with digital film scans). This means that 70 mm screenings were projecting a fully analog end-to-end pipeline. The exception, of course, is the visual effects shots, which went through a digital intermediary.
The same seems to be true of The Odyssey, although the reporting is less clear as of now, and I suspect there are many more visual effects shots than Oppenheimer.
Reminds me of when Oppenheimer released, a bunch of people criticized it for not actually featuring any Japanese characters, instead being relegated to mere dream-shadows that Oppenheimer sees once.
It's almost as if a work entitled "Oppenheimer" is not supposed to be a character study of this American scientist during the war named Oppenheimer.
Juuusttt maaayyybeee, an adaptation of The Odyssey is mostly gonna be about Odysseus and his side of the war, and that's when Troy gets narratively involved. TFA justifies this criticism with a polemic about what a "serious depiction of violence" is supposed to include but doesn't pause to consider that maybe that is not the film's point. Even the source material isn't about the Trojan War---there's another epic prequel for that! Not to mention Virgil's sequel.
She also says, in the same paragraph, that the "Homeric poems easily clear the bar". Sure! The other Homeric poem---the one not the subject of this adaptation---did that.
I'm not saying these are not themes worth exploring just that maybe it is not a mistake that it wasn't included here. Not an oversight, but intentional. Maybe a work of fiction is supposed to have biases (gasp!) and that is just fine.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Had Nolan involved the Trojans beyond Zendaya's character we'd be hearing criticism along the lines of the film being "thematically incoherent", "could've had a more focused treatment, easily shaving off twenty minutes to its already unforgiving runtime".
> We have a couple new nuclear weapon designs, but not really going for bigger or stronger. Just packaging.
There's many other considerations. Like the type and amount of fissile material. To name one that became well known: any plutonium needs to be refreshed (re-breeded I believe is the term) every few years.
Also, look at first designs: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-35242069 The weight is secret, but I think you can easily see it's going to be deep into "extremely impractical" territory.
Surely you can see why someone (especially aircraft designers) might ask for better versions. Ideally you'd like a version that fits on the hypersonic missiles and those things ... are just not going to work. The size. The shape. The weight. None of them will work.
Then a quick theoretical exploration will tell you that the minimum theoretical size of such a device is tiny. The scare was about "suitcase sized", but if you actually do the calculation looking for the minimum ... to do it however you need to create an explosion of the correct shape to get anywhere near those minimum sizes. And explosion simulations are a problem that utterly sucks ... Oh and these are secret military projects, these simulations, not very optimal. The people doing them are best described as loyal, and not as great physicists. Not saying they're terrible, but in the movie Oppenheimer you can clearly see why the best and brightest are not available for these things.
'Movies' at Blockbuster level pivoted to ersatz carnival rides post-'Pirates of the Caribbean', focusing on safe IPs and simple plots designed to aid comprehension of the major story beats in the SEA markets without the need to resort to subtitles or dubbing.
'True' Cinema has been going from strength to strength the last decade, with even Netflix putting out Fincher spectacles like 'Mank' on streaming, and A24 bringing introducing a new audience to phenomenal Korean Cinema like 'Parasite' and 'Minari'.
Even in the traditional studio system we have been spoilt in recent years by a succession of Palm D'Or and Oscar winners like Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness, Zone of Interest, The Brutalist, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.
That book is fiction with a factual veneer. I liked it a lot until I started realizing that many of the details were made up. Then I couldn't read any more. It was like when TwoSetViolin described what it was like to watch movies with musician characters played, unrealistically, by non-musician actors. You'd be watching the perfectly fine movie until you noticed that the bananas were blue instead of yellow, with nobody mentioning it. After that the movie made no sense any more.
I hated the movie Oppenheimer for the same reason.
I have to remark how moved I was during the explosion scene of the Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer film.
It had no music and actually (if I recall correctly) had no sound at all for what seemed like the longest time.
It really did make the extreme gravity of the event sink in very deeply.
Fully agree with libraryofbabel's comment here of it being "one of the most successful and horrifying experiments in the history of science".
> Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world
"The “near zero” chances Oppenheimer unnerves Groves with in-movie probably come from Manhattan Project physicist Arthur Compton, who told author Pearl S. Buck in a 1959 interview that they’d calculated the odds at “slightly less than one-in-three-million.” In 1975, Bethe denied that there had ever been a less-than-one-in-three-million chance of setting the atmosphere on fire, but the idea had already lodged itself in the public imagination."
https://www.inverse.com/science/did-oppenheimer-really-worry-about-setting-the-atmosphere-on-fire
>three Batman movies
The first batman movie was a paint by numbers reimplementation of The Shadow (1997). You can find comparisons online, nearly shot by shot and most of the same plot beats. The second and third went sort of back towards a very mechanical batman representation that reminded me of the planned low budget Iron Man movie where he wouldn't have had the ability to fly. Just stomping around punching badguys like a Power Rangers extra. The new Bat Mobile seems to inspire some of this reputation
>Inception
Inceptions pretty flat for a film about dreams.
>Interstellar
Neuro-Diverse level of detail until the bits with space magic at the end.
>Tenet
I couldnt sit through 10 minutes of it. Its like the antifilm. It didnt want me to observe it otherwise it wouldnt have emitted such a piercing screeching noise.
>Dunkirk
He has an old period watch, and he recorded the ticking. He overlays the ticking constantly. Also he tells the story out of sequence for some reason. But theres lots of practical effects if you include the stupid watch.
>Oppenheimer
Between tenet hating me on a physical level, and the perfectly servicable fat man and little boy film from the 70s I just havent seen it to comment.
One of my big gripes with the film Oppenheimer was the blast itself, obviously a climactic moment in the film.
It looked like someone set off a bunch of chemical explosives. That’s not how it looked in real life. Totally bizarre decision. I don’t know if they were trying to avoid effects on purpose of go gritty and retro or something but the “unearthly cosmic horror” feel of the first a-bomb blast is important. It’s what led Oppenheimer to recite “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
> Isn't the recent Oppenheimer about building organizations, politics, and courts?
The film tells two interwoven stories: one follows Oppenheimer's career, the other about how Oppenheimer's loyalty was questioned.
It is a character study and a moral reckoning, preoccupied with he guilt and dread of having created a weapon capable of ending humanity.
>I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.
I'm not a huge Nolan-discourse-insider, but that seems like a pretty bizarre reputation to have for someone who's famous for directing three Batman movies, Inception, Interstellar and Tenet?
Is this reputation just because of Oppenheimer?
I haven't seen Dunkirk (and I'm not a WWII buff so couldn't tell if they used right planes/boats/guns/uniforms/whatever even if I tried), but even a short blurb on Wikipedia talks about a "balance historical accuracy with aesthetics that would favour the film stock".
> I think we’re looking at a wonderful machine that can potentially make meaningful contributions to the sciences and maybe even humanity as a whole.
That's true. But. Maybe you've seen the Oppenheimer movie, there is a moment where Oppenheimer shakes Teller's hand, basically after the guy ruins Oppenheimer's life in a completely immature betrayal. That's what people are angry about, the academy community is Oppenheimer's wife asking, why the fuck did you shake his hand?
At least regarding leadership and funding, I don't know if it's a matter of likely or unlikely outcomes. It's just facts: these guys are collaborators. The commenter might very well have zero graduate students starting next year. What pisses me off is the utter obliviousness that STEM people have about how deeply political their work is.
And perhaps this is the real reckoning for the mathematics community. Not the possibility that AI is going to replace their jobs, it's not going to do that. But that having these intensely myopic and disagreeable personalities mean that basically zero leadership skills have been nurtured in the mathematics community. You cannot name a single politician who is a mathematician. You have to be elected to have power in this country, it's that simple, there are way more billionaires than there are presidents! Leadership is far more scarce. So that's why these disputes matter, and while it's great that people engage on Hacker News about it, it's intensely disappointing that "reduced science funding is really bad" gets downvoted.
That is a result of Hacker News's emphasis on this very 2010s view that it wants to be a place where the math nerds gather (in @dang's words) - he doesn't get that the quality of the discourse was caused by great leadership at many political and academic levels. Nobody credits how much better leaders were during Y Combinator's biggest success stories, or how much we overvalue the intellectual powers of math because it makes money as opposed to enlightening our view of the world.
they completely glossed over Graves in Oppenheimer, one of the many reasons I hated that movie. There's a great "scene" in "the making of the atomic bomb" that also appears in the movie that they botched. Something along the way of oppenheimer stressing over "how do we pick the right way to make the bomb" and graves saying "simple, we do all of them". There's so much interesting material there and they instead focused on bed sheets.
It does not detail those facts. I gloss over them in my reading of the article because I think the topic is been well covered elsewhere. For example, the Oppenheimer movie did a fair job of depicting the communist party activities among intellectuals in the late 1930s.
The fact that those activities led to a thing called McCarthism in the early 1950s is pretty well documented.
Imprisoning Qian for 5 years for a meeting in the late 1930s after his contributions to the war effort was very Red Scare consistent.
> That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring.
Still issue (seriously).
He might be an expert at building organizations in real life, but there is no rule that a movie about him has to focus on that part. Movies are not documentaries.
Examples: Oppenheimer, A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game, Jobs, Social Media, and literally every movie that sells tbh.
Isn't the recent Oppenheimer about building organizations, politics, and courts? There are bombs scenes but majority of the movie is the supposed boring stuff
> That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring.
Well, part of the Oppenheimer biopic is about J. Robert being thrust into that kind of role.
> Oppenheimer ... rapidly learned the art of large-scale administration after he took up permanent residence at Los Alamos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#Los_Alamos
I agree PHM was great (and I loved the book before the movie). But as a VFX person, please be careful not to buy into the currently popular studio PR line: "it's all real, almost no CGI". Media and influencers love this line and often unknowingly muddle the studio's very carefully crafted press release wording into outright lies by paraphrasing and making assumptions. The problem is these aren't just white lies, they deprive some very talented VFX artists from getting credit for amazing work.
PHM did use real sets (like most movies) and they were able to avoid using green screen for some of the ship exteriors but the backgrounds were still digitally replaced with CGI rendered elements, they just didn't use green screen to pull the matte. Instead they used a black backdrop with careful lighting and some hand rotoscoping to extract the digital mattes. Doing it this way had the advantage of not needing to digitally remove green spill on reflective surfaces by hand and it saved money over doing a StageCraft volume at that size. Done well, green screen would have produced the exact same shot but it would have cost more and taken longer.
About the puppet: A real Rocky puppet was indeed used on set and some of the puppet is sometimes seen on camera. But most of the puppet was digitally replaced or enhanced in most of the scenes. However, using a much more realistic puppet on set was a notable technique but not because the character wasn't CGI. The puppet IS worth talking about because it directly enabled the final mostly CGI character be really good CGI. It's so good because it gives the VFX character animators an ideal reference that's "grounded" in the physical reality of the set. The subtle interplay of light, shadow, texture and specularity are all physically grounded. It also gives actors something closer to reality to interact with. It's a wonderful technique and should be celebrated instead of obfuscated to promote a falsehood that trends well on social media.
But influencers and media are unintentionally perpetuating "No CGI" myths instead of focusing on the actually interesting, more nuanced reality. The same movies you hear these "No/little CGI" claims about actually have tons of digital VFX, they're just good VFX. And they're usually good because what these films are doing is providing extended environments and plates which help the CGI be "grounded" in reality.
Similar "careful wording" grew into outright lies around Top Gun. Tom Cruise truthfully said in interviews that he was flown in a jet right alongside other REAL jets doing simulated dog-fighting. The lost nuance is that all the other jets Cruise flew with those dog fight scenes were Soviet trainer jets that are pretty small and look quite different than real MIGs. So exactly zero pixels of those jets are ever seen in the final film. They were entirely replaced by CGI jets. And you couldn't tell because the weird-looking trainer jets provided grounded reference for the CGI pixel that replaced them. Just about the only recent mainstream release that can reasonably claim "no CGI" is Nolan's Oppenheimer (it's not quite fully true but it depends on technical definitions). But every film I've seen social media "No CGI" hype around is chock full of hundreds of CGI shots. So let's just celebrate using grounded on-set and in-camera references to assist rendering outstanding, realistic CGI because it's great work by talented people.
This is appealing for some films, but may not matter for others.
I'm glad I was in a full house for Avengers: Endgame, for example. I don't know how much it mattered, OTOH, for Oppenheimer, or Hail Mary.
Recent good movies, just going in release order off my letterboxd, although I have to be careful to include only "Hollywood" here:
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - beautifully shot and a beautiful theme about what humanity is
- One Battle After Another - it's PTA, all his movies are good
- Bugonia - incredible dark comedy
- Weapons - fun little horror comedy movie
- Sinners - just won an oscar for the soundtrack, not a perfect movie but a fun watch with some incredible scenes
- Companion
- Nosferatu - incredibly atmospheric
- The Surfer - total trip with good old Nicholas Cage
- Love Lies Bleeding - just a fun, a bit crazy movie
- Dream Scenario - another trippy Cage movie
- Poor Things
- Oppenheimer ...
- Renfield
- The Menu
- The Banshees of Insherin
- Barbarian (same director as Weapons)
- Prey
- Bullet Train - fun action movie
- The Northman
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- The Invisible Man - most effective horror movie I've ever seen
- The Gentlemen
- Joker -how close can you get to looking like Taxi Driver without being Taxi Driver ...
- The Vast of Night - some scenes that really draw you in and pretty nostalgic
in 2019 now, so I won't continue, but there are plenty of good movies made nowadays, and I won't say I've seen even a close amount of them from the past few years. Of course I'm watching these at home, not in theatres, so that's certainly an argument.
I'm talking about the best of the best though, the top of the form at the time. Yes those are classics and for good reason. But there were also lots more. Lucas, Kubrick, Spielberg, Lynch...feels like they just don't make 'em like that anymore. It's crazy that in some ways nothing has really eclipsed a movie from 1977 and we're still awash in its glow.
I tried to provide specific examples and contrast with something in the current zeitgest. I'm open to counter-arguments. I liked Barbie and Oppenheimer, both were well-done, but I don't think they'll stand up with the greats. I admit that I don't watch as many movies now but what stands out in the past 10 years?
Where I go it's about $33 for two tickets bought online and probably $20 for those snacks, though we usually share a drink and a popcorn. The theater is still usually empty.
The market-clearing price is nearly zero except for some new releases. Oppenheimer was sold out in its first weekend, for example.
Anyone who went to movies before about 1999 remembers them being a lot more popular.
They learned nothing from the recent CNolan movie, Oppenheimer :D.
That was not my takeaway from the Oppenheimer movie.
Or from … history.
The Germans chose to extremely underinvest in their nuclear program to maintain financial and political support for their rocket program.
The rocket program was so fundamentally different from the Manhattan Project it’s hard to see the Germans doing anything like it.
Remember when the Oppenheimer movie taught us how we got The Bomb even though the nazis had a significant head start because ze germans got rid of the smart people studying "jew physics" and what was left of their science took them to dead ends?
Replace "jew physics" with "woke physics" and you see the idiocy of this.
Foot, meet gun.
You can only think of 2 notable films since 2022?
* American Fiction
* The Holdovers
* Oppenheimer
* Perfect Days(!)
* Nosferatu
* Conclave
* Challengers
* The Mastermind
I can rattle off more but those seem pretty hard to argue with. All of them are better than EEAAO.
I don't know as of when. But I have no problem listing one movie after another for the 70's, 80's, 70's, 200x but since then it's been longer and longer between movies that stand out.
Oppenheimer and 'Don't look up' are the exceptions. Everything everywhere all at once was mentioned here but I found it pretty thin and predictable.
Stubborn old directors like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorcese... https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/page/shot-on-film/
Films are mostly post processed digitally - but some, like Oppenheimer, are color graded the old optical way. While Dune was shot digitally, printed on film, then scanned back in again!
Mentioned this elsewhere but The Dark Knight Rises is one of the worst dark movie offenders. When someone says dark movie scenes it’s what comes to my mind. That one confusing backwards movie has terrible audio he did on purpose.
Oppenheimer didnt suffer from either of those issues but I’ve only watched it once on a good TV.
Not OP, but one example could perhaps be American Prometheus and the Oppenheimer film. I would consider them "dominant Western narratives" about the origin of the nuclear bomb.
And like the person said, there is nothing inherently wrong with such a narrative. Like them I'm also curious about non-western narratives.
If most groups, cultures, religions, countries were more curious about "non-native" stories, maybe we'd all be a bit more open-minded and understanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars
> Despite his moral quandaries, von Braun participates in the Nazi's V-2 rocket program during World War II to further his ambitions in rocket engineering. The film carefully depicts his efforts to reconcile his love for scientific exploration with the knowledge that his work is being used for destructive purposes.
I have a similar short story idea where a person of the calibre of Elon Musk who works so hard is made to feel and see his successful moonshot projects being used for destroying and subjugating nations. This would be similar to Oppenheimer. Another twist I can take with the story is Hero "Elon" knows about this outcome but still in the hope of change in institutional ideology over decades hopes for better use for his technology. In the movie Watchmen, Ozymandias feels the pain of millions he is going to kill to save future billions.
Watchmen: Killing millions to save billions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu2DdkOxLNs
Where's the demographic data in this piece? Moviegoing isn't the 'same' but it seems like there's a segment of the 'younger generation' that gravitates towards the 'event' aspect of some bigger draws. Taylor Swift movie? Barbie? Minecraft? etc
And what is 'older generations'? Maybe that's not the elder millenial-Gen X portion of the market, but maybe 65+ have a lot of time on their hands to go see Oppenheimer etc. Top Gun? Just some off the top of my head that seemed to have an impact culturally and box office-wise.
There's something to be said about the quality of films and/or the role of the blockbuster level ones. Maybe the result is only the mega films are what the cinema is for in the end.
Meanwhile just last month Zootopia 2 set single-day record for a Hollywood open in China.
Sure. I had a lot of help from Claude Opus 4.5, but it was roughly:
- Using pyscenedetect to split each video on a per scene level
- Using the decord library https://github.com/dmlc/decord to pull frames from each scene at a particular sample rate (specific rate I don't have handy right now, but it was 1-2 per scene)
- Aggregating frames in batches of around 256 frames to be normalized for CLIP embedding on GPU (had to re-write the normalization process for this because the default library does it on CPU)
- Uploading the frames along with metadata (timestamp, etc) into a vector DB, in my case Qdrant running locally along with a screenclip of the frame itself for debugging.
I'm bottlenecked by GPU compute so I also started experimenting with using Modal for the embedding work too, but then vacation ended :) Might pick it up again in a few weeks. I'd like to be able to have a temporal-aware and potentially enriched search so that I can say "Seek to the scene in Oppenheimer where Rami Malek testifies" and be able to get a timestamped clip from the movie.
Why the hell is this flagged?
It's the 21st century. Schools, media, politicians, commentators remind us about multiple world wars, millions of "sacrifices" for "freedom". We have technology that was unimaginable to our parents and grandparents.
So what is going on in the world? Who is putting the brakes on human progress?
The UN is an empty shell. Prominent countries which historically created the conditions for endless conflict - let's call them out: the US, Russia, UK, France, China (coincidentally, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council) - are sitting back, diplomatically allowing atrocities and injustices to unfold.
Why is this being allowed to happen?
This isn't even a time to point fingers, assign blame. We need to hold ourselves to the highest ideals.
We already have tens, hundreds, thousands, of talented individuals - graduates from the top universities of the world, who know how to make the world a better place. They understand history, morality, and ethics to an excruciating degree. Where are they? Why are they not in top decision-making positions in governments?
Why are our political structures still struggling with basic competencies? A House of Dynamite was a perfect movie to follow on from Oppenheimer. Scientists created a superweapon; politicians ran with it, and blackmailed the world. It's pathetic and deplorable.
WE NEED TO DO BETTER.
A three hour Oppenheimer biopic with a nonlinear narrative structure made a billion dollars. Let's just admit this movie was bad.
That sure seems to be getting close to something usable for movies...kinda.
Sam looks weirdly like Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer in some shots. I wonder whether there was dataset bleedover from that.
I'll note that I have a physics degree. My undergrad advisor and several people I've worked for had worked directly under those scientists, though post project. Including my time at the two labs not in New Mexico. I'm saying this to help convince you that I know what I'm talking about here:
That story is wildly overblown. No one really thought this would happen. But given the consequences of being wrong no one wanted to trust themselves. So what they did is keep asking each other to try to do the calculations independently and see if they would get the same results. The idea came from Teller who was researching stars, which do have a runaway reaction. In the movie Oppenheimer says "nonzero chance" and that's accurate. He really did mean "we aren't confident that this would get impossible" but they were very confident the likelihood was almost zero.
The reason this it's important is because it flips the story on its head. Had they thought there was a meaningful chance and moved forward then the story represents how brash they were and careless. But instead it is a story of where they were considering and taking seriously something they thought was a near impossibility and yet they took great effort to ensure that it was actually impossible. That's now a story of how careful they were. It's the exact opposite of being brash.
Mind you, this doesn't contradict what I said before. They did know the bomb would be powerful, but I doubt many knew how powerful until near or at Trinity. And I'll tell you, unless you can do the calculations then you really don't understand what those things actually do. It is so much more than an explosion. It is more than the radiation. There's a reason so many could no longer be blind to the consequences. To this day the skeletons are out of the physicists' closet because we all know we are capable of unknowingly following the same path. When you learn what that bomb does you hope you're at the center of it
>You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known.
But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. Consider the history of CGI. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to complain about how the move away from practical sets in favor of CGI was making movies worse. And it was! You had backgrounds and monsters that looked like they escaped from a video game. But that complaint has pretty much died out these days as the tech got better (although Nolan's Oppenheimer did weirdly hype the fact that its simulated Trinity blast was done by practical effects).
i CERTAINLY agree that theres tons of new literalism in Oppenheimer. i was mentioning that Oppenheimer is not catering to the lowest common denominator in order to get an Oscar. Oscars trade on belabored basic character drama and many of the things you listed. mostly depends on directors who the academy think are "deserving" at the moment
Oppy did incredibly well because of it's memed Barbenheimer marketing wave. i dont think the 3 hour great man movie was lowest common denominator movie. sure, you and i might think it was basic and laughed when Einstein showed up, but my bar for lowest common denominator is a Happy Madison production
What was complicated at all about Oppenheimer?
Would a "common denominator" person really watch that movie and afterwards be confused about anything that happened? What aspect would they remotely be confused about? What aspect would be "deep" to them?
From what I saw, it was nothing but the most basic character drama combined with some "suspenseful" races against time thrown in here and there. For the second half it turns into just one of those movies where the political/social message is effectively just beaten into your face, there's no subtlety at all.
They took no risk that the viewer wouldn't get their message, they make it plainly obvious. In my mind it's a perfect example of "the new literalism". It's almost up there with stuff like Don't Look Up, Snowpiercer, The Big Short, Parasite, etc. These movies mostly solely exist as a conduit through which a political/social message can be force fed to you, in the form of a movie, rather than existing as an actual movie.
Went to see the F1 movie a couple weeks ago in suburban Northern California on a local theater's "LieMax" screen (ie not one of the ~30 real IMAX 15-perf film theaters in the world but just a slightly larger mall theater screen that (probably) has a newer bulb and more recently calibrated speakers). It cost just over $75 for two adults + a large popcorn, soda and bottle of water.
I was a bit surprised at the price too. Seems maybe 15-20% more than my last theater outing last Summer. We don't go often because we have a dedicated home theater room that's fully sound proof with total light control and 9 custom theater loungers on two levels facing a 150-inch screen with 4K HDR10+ calibrated digital laser projector and built-in 7.4.2 surround THX-rated speakers. While there was nothing wrong with the "LieMax" theater, the picture, sound, seating and overall experience at home are meaningfully better - even when everything works at the cinema and no one is annoying. And I say that as someone with fairly significant professional video engineering experience. Of course, one of the ~30 real IMAX screens is objectively better (when showing 15-perf 70mm film, which they don't always do) but the nearest one is nearly an hour drive, costs even more and has $15 in parking on top. The last time I went was for Oppenheimer two years ago. But short of going there, it's hard to see much reason to go to a local cinema if you have a high-end home theater rig (other than just having a night out).
There's not even an advantage to the claimed "big screen" at the LieMax. While I prefer a slightly larger theatrical field of view than most people (around 45 degrees), my FOV at home is 46 degrees sitting 12.5 feet from the floor-to-ceiling screen (https://acousticfrontiers.com/blogs/Articles/Home-theater-viewing-angles-distances-and-sightlines).
Anora, Oppenheimer, and Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies. the academy has many issues but i dont think its catering to mass appeal and dumbing down
Serpell's interpretation of Anora is dismissive and shallow. the point is Disney infects the American mind and Baker's made that point across half his movies and in some cases incredibly blatantly. its implied and Serpell categorizing it under New Literalism goes to show they're probably right in many cases, but also use it as a convenient excuse to avoid analysis
> movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator
That's not the kind of films that tend to win the major Oscar awards. Those tend to be either a bit artsy (e.g. Anora this year) or "serious" biopics/history movies (e.g. Oppenheimer last year).
Bit of a tight line to walk. Longer movies mean fewer showings per day. When I saw that Oppenheimer was three hours long -I want to watch that at home so I can take a bathroom break/snacks so a personal pause button is an improvement on the theater.
Depends on what you're doing, right?
Let's take video streaming. I have a pretty compressed version of Arrival that's at 2GB and is a 4k movie ~2hrs long (the original file was ~2x the size). To stream that we need to do 2000Mb / (3600s * 2) = 277.8Mb/s. This also doesn't account for any buffering. This is one of my smaller 4k videos and more typical is going to be 3Gb-5Gb (e.g. Oppenheimer vs Children of Men). Arrival is pretty dark and a slow movie so great for compression.
Now, there's probably some trickery going on that can get better savings and you'll see used with things like degrading the quality. You could probably drop this down to 1.5Gb and have no major visual hits or you can do a variable streaming and drop this even more. On many screens you might not notice a huge difference between 1440 and 4k, and depending on the video, maybe even 1080p and 4k[0].
For comparison, I loaded up a 4k YouTube video (which uses vp9 encoding) and monitored the bandwidth. It is very spiky, but frequently jumped between 150kbps and 200Mbps. You could probably do 2 people on this. I think it'd get bogged down with 4 people. And remember, this is all highly variable. Games, downloads, and many other things can greatly impact all this. It also highly depends on the stability of your network connection. You're paying for *UP TO* 300Mbps, not a fixed rate of 300Mbps. Most people want a bit of headroom.
[0] Any person will 100% be able to differentiate 1080p and 4k when head to head, but in the wild? We're just too used to spotty connections and variable resolutions. It also depends on the screen you're viewing from, most importantly the screen size (e.g. phone).
>16mm/35mm is already fading, with a finite population of prints that dwindles every year as film deteriorates or reels are lost/destroyed.
They are still publishing films in 35mm and at least in popular US cities the format has a following. For example in 2021, Last Night In Soho was printed in 35mm. To be fair the 35mm print was only exhibited in some select locations and only for special screenings. But then we also have 70mm IMAX that despite only has X number of screens left, still manages to attracts sold out screenings for weeks whenever a film (Like Oppenheimer) appears. I also spoke to the people running the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ (They screen 16mm, 35mm and 70mm and they promote Fort Lee as the birthplace of the American Motion Picture Industry). They told me that you can order up thousands of different 35mm films from studio's storage centers (I think there are only two left in the country) and the main issue is delivery costs make it usually not worth it to screen most films.
I am closer to middle age but I have met a lot of youngins who are die hard film people.
Perhaps you can share some examples of the films you are referring as "mindless banter in between sex and explosions". I'm not sure that description really fits most of the films coming out recently. If you said, "Dumb comic book films", I would maybe agree with you, but there isn't typically any sex in those so I assume you are not referring to them.
Covid halted the production of a lot of movies, and changed how others were made. It also shut down theaters. So, "since covid", is really talking about before and after an era. Kind of like saying, "since 9/11", in terms of the impact on culture. A lot of creativity has moved from the movie theaters to streaming services and from films to more episodic content.
However, here is a short list of films worth seeing (imo) since covid (2019).
Zone of Interest (2023) The Holdovers (2023) Parasite (2019) Dune (2021) Dune Part Two (2024) Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) 1917 (2019) The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) The Substance (2024) Palm Springs (2020) Oppenheimer (2023) The Lighthouse (2019) Hundreds of Beavers (2022) Barbarian (2022) Flow (2024)
I liked that in Oppenheimer, even though the plot of the movie was a similar sort of high stakes mystery heist movie, instead of the macguffin being a random piece of metal like it was in tenet, its the literal atom bomb. For that reason I enjoyed it more than some of his other movies.
I would enjoy a Wes Anderson movie that just moved the whole aesthetic over to something new. It can still be a Wes Anderson movie but just different in one important new dimension.
> These are markedly distinct career paths from the ones taken by homegrown Jews,
Actually "Oppenheimer" the movie also supplies examples of two very different New York Jewish backgrounds:
J Robert Oppenheimer, from an affluent, non-religious family - with an Upper West side apartment and a summer vacation home on Long Island. His father came to the USA as a teenager, and prospered in business.
Isidor Isaac Rabi, from an orthodox, Yiddish-speaking family living in a two-room apartment on the Lower East Side. He was born shortly before the family came to the USA.
Parent comment says "the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists" , which is not the same as "Nazi scientists".
Did you see the "Oppenheimer" movie? Check the real physicists depicted working on the Manhattan project. A large number of them were European Jews who left before or during the war. Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Hornig.
Even some others left Europe because of this: Niels Bohr (Jewish Mother) and Enrico Fermi (Jewish Wife).
To be sure there was Wernher von Braun and co as well.
In fact, it would be quicker to list the Manhattan project physicists depicted in that movie who were not Jewish at all:
* Ernest Lawrence
* Luis Walter Alvarez
It's not even that, I couldn't hear large parts of Oppenheimer, having paid a hefty premium for a cinema with a good sound system.
There's a scene in the recent movie Oppenheimer about that.
I love catching these little translation flubs. Japanese movie and TV subtitles seem to have quite a few, probably because of the aforementioned time pressure. For example, I saw Oppenheimer in the theater and "crown" had been mistranslated as "clown".
Perhaps my favorite subtitle mistake of all time is in the subtitles of Brooklyn 99. One of the characters talks about getting someone a "boogie board" (a small surfboard) as a present. This is translated as "electronic memo pad". I couldn't work out how that had happened until I googled "boogie board" and half of the results are for an electronic writing pad with that name.
One doesn't become well-informed without reading.
I recall debating a historical point with a person who would send me cites in the form of TikTok clips. Coincidentally, I have two entire books on the subject, by two accomplished historians. Both books demolished all of his points.
Just for fun, compare a transcript of the movie "Oppenheimer" with the book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". You're looking at a transcript of the movie of a few pages vs a 750 page small print tome. There's no way "Oppenheimer" makes one well informed about the Manhattan Project.
I also thought the Oppenheimer movie was stupid
American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Marin J. Sherwin
It is based on ~20 years of research about Robert Oppenheimer, and is the inspiration for the movie Oppenheimer. Robert Oppenheimer is the scientist who lead the development of the first atomic bomb.
> Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.
In this case, the "people and character studies" are very critical to understanding "the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like". The early part of the book goes in depth to Oppenheimer's social ties to communist groups, which is critical to understanding the reason why he was forbidden from continuing research in the latter part of his life.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-Oppenheimer-ebook/dp/B000XUBEYS/ref=sr_1_1?sr=8-1
(To make a long story short, the American Communists, and their sympathizers, in the 1930s were blissfully unaware that the Soviet Union was an authoritarian hellhole. Many of the people involved in the Manhattan project had ties to those American Communists, and thus scientists in the Soviet Union. Because, for them, the Manhattan project was an academic endeavor, they wanted to share their results with their Soviet collogues. And that's how the nuclear race started... Information was leaked to the Soviets in the name of science. Oppenheimer was a victim of the resulting witch hunt; which requires understanding the "people and character studies" part of the book.)
See also: Musk and others' critique of the movie Oppenheimer.
On the face of it, it sounds like an altruistic, benign operation: to safeguard Kazakhstan and prevent nuclear proliferation.
However, keep in mind the nature of the 'Big Five' permanent members of the UN Security Council: 'The permanent members were all Allies in World War II (and the victors of that war), and are the five states with the first and most nuclear weapons. All have the power of veto which enables any one of them to prevent the adoption of any "substantive" draft Council resolution, regardless of its level of international support.' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_members_of_the_United_Nations_Security_Council)
Highly enriched uranium = nuclear weapons = POWER
Remember the ending of the movie Oppenheimer? Oppie, a scientist at the peak of his field, willingly handed over the most powerful weapon known to humanity to... a person with a less-than-stellar moral code: President Truman ("Don't let that crybaby back in here.")
That handover changed geopolitics forever, which was a major theme of the movie - and in real life too.
Remember also that Ukraine was comprehensively disarmed, by the Budapest Memorandum, and as part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction). And now look what a mess resulted from that: a world war has already quietly started in Europe...
(There is not enough made of the fact that Russia has involved Iran, North Korea, China, and a number of other countries in its effort to invade Ukraine. Russia has violated several articles of the UN Charter, even while it maintains an contentious seat on the Security Council, thus shredding the credibility and founding principles of the United Nations.)
I'm writing this to add a better perspective of this operation. It was a lot more than simply "truck[ing] [the uranium] to the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee to be blended down."
Thanks for mentioning this documentary. I didn't know about it, after all the noise created by the Oppenheimer movie (which I hated with a passion). I'll be sure to watch it. People just don't realize the magnitude of what Oppenheimer achieve, and they fail to realize it by a few orders of magnitude. And the Oscar-studded movie, instead of trying to convey that, decided to focus on the fairly mundane point Oppenheimer losing his security clearance because of some political machinations.
Does anyone actually want to go to the movie theater anymore? I don't. Not since covid anyway. Oppenheimer was the first and only movie I've seen on the big screen since covid. And still it was almost like sitting in coach class on an airplane for two hours.
I can make tastier popcorn at home than what I get at the theatre, the sodas are cheaper, and I don't have to share an armrest with some stranger sitting next to me.
I would really like a 90-100" 8k screen for my living room, but I'm not gonna pay $10k for that.
Oh MMT is a new wrapper around the very basic old ideas. There is research on some pre-revolutionary US states that print their own money and raise the tax to be paid in the printed money at the same time. Inunderstand Dr Johnson commented on it.
Anyway. Yes I guess the order is reversed - print the money first, give it to people to get them to do whatever the government wants (build walls, roads etc), then find whomever the money has gone to and tax them.
I found this an interesting way of looking at money, when I Was thinking about the Oppenheimer movie
Take a hundred dollar bill, and think of that not as money, but as an instruction to the person you give it to, say a builder To do a job for you, maybe build a hut for a nuclear scientist to live in.
Now write on a plain piece of paper “We are your government, we are at war and we need a hut built. You are going to build it”
What’s the difference between the two pieces of paper?
Asset ownership is a legal system. My ownership of my house is a legal situation. My mortgage is a (tradeable) obligation between me and my bank manager
Other points: you cannot tax first - imagine a starting situation. No dollar bills have been printed so how do you get tax paid in dollars?
And the government prints more than it taxes so there is “liquidity” - there has to be be extra dollar bills floating around so we can pay hairdressers etc (I mean you could in theory tax the lot but that would mean perfect understanding of the velocity of money through the economy - maybe with fiat crypto?)
But in the main asset ownership is decoupled from money - you own your house and car and stocks but you don’t own money - you owe the bank or the bank owes you but money is zero sum, even if wealth is not
Yes, it’s an even larger format than traditional 70mm. The cells are physically larger. Anecdote: Nolan worked with Kodak to invent black & white IMAX film for Oppenheimer.
https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/blog-post/oppenheimer/
A few that haven’t been mentioned:
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford is a historical fiction story about the mathematicians and engineers who tried to optimize the Soviet economy.
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende is much deeper and more interesting than any of the theatrical versions. Reminiscent of the Matrix sequels, the Childlike Empress threatens to crash Fantastica with a stack overflow (via infinite recursion) to force Bastian to give her a name.
American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin goes into much more detail than the film (Oppenheimer).
> Missing from this is the reality that the modern world increasingly requires using these applications
We don't have to accept this though, everyone in the modern world makes a choice to accept the implied requirements of being part of the system. We accept the assumption that we are all online, that we all have a mobile phone, and that we all keep up with news and pop culture to an extent that we all seem to zero in on the same transient topic like a solar eclipse or an interest in atching movies about both Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Anyone can choose to avoid any one of these parts of the modern world. We're parts of that world, we aren't victims of it.
The ACM has got a copy of Bush's Memex paper available, it's certainly worth a read for anyone who has not:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/227181.227186
It was interesting to see that Christopher Nolan featured Vannevar Bush prominently in the recent Oppenheimer film. Stripe press published some of his writings recently as well. (I haven't read this one yet)
https://press.stripe.com/pieces-of-the-action
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the pinnacle event that solidified the US being a nuclear super power. Its willful use of nuclear weapons on civilians is one of the main ways the US projected power in the last century. The movie not showing how the sausage was made, is because Hollywood has a tendency to show propaganda movies. US good, world bad.
This movie had a huge reach.
"Economist / YouGov Poll, which found that 32% of U.S. adult citizens say they had seen "Barbie" and 24% had seen "Oppenheimer."
A nuclear conflict with Russia, is what is on the table.
Perhaps, if US citizens were exposed to graphic brutality of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it might sway political opinion. And for example influence the next election.
>So the Tokyo firebombing alone is sufficient then?
Is it sufficient for you? It might not be for some people.
However, all plausible deniability is lost, that you're not targeting civilians when you nuclear bomb their city.
If Putin deployed nuclear weapons on Kiev tomorrow, with the goal of ending the war faster, it would be a war crime. I hope we agree.
I can understand the artistic choice to portray everything from Oppenheimer's mind / point of view and to not actually show the devastation, but like you I was bothered by how it was done with the bomb drop and also the complete lack of portraying the Nazi threat. Oppenheimer lived the entire war at home and never actually saw the bomb dropped. But it seemed disingenuous to me to show the power of his imagination when contemplating the universe so powerfully at the beginning of the film, then never portray his comprehension of the Nazi threat or the devastation his weapon would have caused. The closest they got was him imagining it in the room with the crowd, but that hardly did it justice in my opinion. That was critical context in many of the scientists' decisions: 27,000 people were dying PER DAY during World War 2 (on average). How you can portray the story of the atomic bomb without that setting (not to mention emphasizing the fear that the Axis would get the bomb first) is kind of beyond me.
I for one was not bothered — the film up to that point had exclusively portrayed Oppenheimer‘s subjective experience in life. To showcase the footage you’re talking about would have meant showing events Oppenheimer did not see, but was certainly able to imagine enough that they affected him deeply — which is what WAS depicted in place of the footage.
While I understand wanting that outside perspective included within Oppenheimer to more fully reflect the actual historic events, I recognize that Oppenheimer was a film telling the story of one man’s internal perspective on events, and so including scenes like you suggest would have diluted and weakened that central premise and through line.
That being said: I am biased in that I do not expect artistic works to reflect a complete reality, but just the reality they choose to explore — I can certainly understand different points of view, especially with regard to such a monumental and tragic real life event.
Was anyone else bothered by how Oppenheimer declined to show even a single scene of the devastation that was caused by dropping nuclear weapons on Japan?
I otherwise liked the film, but I thought it was wrong to hide it from viewers. The bombing was the central plot point of the whole film. It would have been different if it was a new director, or surprise hit or something, but Nolan knew it would be seen by many millions of people.
It could have been shown without losing any narration context at all, in the scene where the protagonist is shown slides of the destruction scenes, and the camera only shows him looking away. The director didn't need to force the audience to look away too.
> even a 3-hour movie isn't really long enough to give politics a treatment that is interesting; the storytelling is too turgid
I think Oppenheimer did pretty well on that. Better than I would have expected if someone had described it before I had seen it.
Why does Ursula Le Guin keep coming up in these posts?
Does she really have that big of a tech following?
When I see articles like this, I assume it's part of a publicity campaign for an upcoming movie.
Like how we saw so many articles about Oppenheimer before the movie. Even some legit news was likely part of the PR campaign - such as the DOE "pardoning" Oppenheimer.
Am I just cynical and jaded?
None of the explanations in this topic are relevant if they don't address that "Barbie", "Oppenheimer" and "Super Mario Bros" were all hits last year.
Ticket prices, concession prices, streaming, attention spans, originality (or lack of), home theater setups, length of films... all of these factors were in place last year.
It's probably worth looking at specifically why the marketing for the hits from last year was effective (Barbie marketing particularly was both ubiquitous and highly inventive) versus "Furiosa" and "Fall Guy". Also note that Fall Guy's box office was relatively okay compared to something like "The Lost City" but it's budget was much higher, making it a much tougher financial proposition.
This just feels like poor marketing. I am not an avid movie goer. I saw Dune 2 this year and did Barbie/Oppenheimer last year.
In both scenarios I attended due to viral, word-of-mouth marketing. I didn't see specific trailers that compelled me nor was I anxiously awaiting the releases.
In contrast, I heard nothing about Furiosa prior to its release, but have read tons of content about its post-release failure.
Or stream it once for $4.99 or less if you're patient and are willing to wait a couple months after Blu-ray/streaming release.
It seems like after Endgame, there have only been a few 'event' movies like Oppenheimer, Top Gun Maverick, and Dune 2 that would be worth experiencing in a movie theater.
And even then, those movies are pushing 95-100 dB during some scenes, making me not really want to do the 'IMAX' experience again, it's just too loud and too big. A 40-60" OLED from 5-10' away and near my fridge and bathroom—with a pause button so I can get up halfway through a nearly 3 hour movie—is too tempting.
It'd be nice if there were 1.5 hour movies that cost $10 a ticket in a nice, normal theater.
There is a scene I like in an OppenHeimer movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0pCclxx5nI (Edit: It's not a deleted scene from Nolan's OppenHeimer) .
Their is also an other scene in Nolan's OppenHeimer (who made the cut around timestamp 27:45) where physicists get all excited when a paper is published where Hahn and Strassmann split uranium with neutrons. Alvarez the experimentalist replicate it happily, while being oblivious to the fact that seems obvious to every theoretical physicist : It can be used to create a chain reaction and therefore a bomb.
So here is my question : how do you contain the sparks of employees ? Let's say Alvarez comes all excited in your open-space, and speak a few words "new algorithm", "1000X", what do you do ?
What a fool of me.
Milley actually didn't even say the quote that we're discussing. An unidentified man did.
The meaning of the quote in the context of the exchange where it was made is not entirely clear, I agree with you on that. The headline exploits this uncertainty. The reader's (i.e., me) biases fill in the blanks.
For all we know, the guy was just trying to impress a woman. He could be nothing more than a researcher manning a both, making a bizarre claim at a bizarre conference. His reference to "Oppenheimer" could even be about the film and not the actual man.
Pardon me for your time. I can see why this story is getting so much criticism.
The video you linked to says that in the movie it's explained that Oppenheimer spoke German, and learned Dutch in a short amount of time. If so, him speaking Dutch with a German accent seems appropriate, if slightly exaggerated.
However a novice in a foreign language will speak more slowly than natives, not more quickly, even if reading a prepared speech (as was likely the case in that setting, and especially given the advanced language used that no beginner would have mastered), so not sure what the thinking was there.
>It’s accepted that the US movies and television industry can’t get contemporary Germany right
The US movies and television industry can rarely get any language right. This reminds me of the Dutch-speaking scene in Oppenheimer which no Dutch speaker can understand [1]. It's like a sped-up pronunciation of a nonsense Dutch sentence by an English-speaker trying to speak a horrible German accent.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFORgWaYrBU
I think you bring up some good points.
One thing I'd add: If we enter a world where the ability to build some product, movie, song, novel, whatever is so widespread and cheap that anyone can do it (and I do emphasize the word "if", because I think its debatable that this will ever happen at a level that is cost-accessible):
The strongest way businesses will be able to differentiate is Taste. Human-ness; novelty, Design, things that AI isn't actually all that good at. AI may generate an episode of Law and Order, but it probably couldn't generate, say, Oppenheimer; because nothing in the world knew that it wanted what Oppenheimer delivered. If everything else goes to zero, then that's all that remains.
The issue is: AI is tremendously bad at working with Humans who actually have taste. You generate an AI image with the subject on the left; you ask for a revision, same image, but move the subject to the right side of the image; it changes too much, or generates new images entirely rather than iterating. Its not-obvious that this will get better because it is somewhat antithetical to the way the AI works.
Put another way, english lacks precision. Its not the right language for this. And what seems inevitable to me is that we'll need something other than english to get the last 20% finished with anything AI is being used to deliver. That thing is, guess what, a human knowing python, knowing After Effects, knowing Photoshop, etc. An image generating AI will be popular; a .psd generating AI, with extremely precise layers left in-tact, would be worth billions.
In that sense, I think the current phase of AI is absolutely "people with no taste now being able to lean on the trained taste of everyone else", but you're right that they're totally blind to one IMO non-zero probability endgame: Taste + Skill + AI becomes a hyperweapon. Creation (AI), in the right direction (Taste), with the technical acumen to take the 80% output AI generates up to 100% delivery (Skill).
The unsolved problem is: How do we integrate AI into that workflow in a way that puts the Human, that puts Taste, first? Such that it isn't "AI does 80%, then passes it off to a human", but rather that the AI becomes more like Photoshop, or After Effects, or VSCode, involved in the process from Day 0, integral to it, back and forth. No one has solved this. No one is even remotely close.
You can't say I'm using the word learn as a metaphor for some purely mechanistic and deterministic process and not like when people say learn as in middle school kids learning algebra and then switch to using the second definition to absolve OpenAI from following the license.
That'd be like saying my computer learned the film Oppenheimer when bittorrent copied it to my computer's storage system, transcoding it to a lower bitrate, and claim I'm free of copyright law because my computer just learned some facts.
All of OpenAI's products are databases with highly lossy compression applied. Using language that implies a mind is pure scam.
These details were covered in depth in The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. The Oppenheimer movie glosses over a lot of the technical details. It’s worth a read.
Just use justwatch in the UK. It shows Oppenheimer as available on Now TV via subscription. Main difference is they directly work with service providers unlike this amateur hour. https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/oppenheimer
Getting accurate info and do the research so you know local streaming landscape should be the first step. Creating simple UI and web app is the last step in projects like this.
The first film that pops up for me, “Oppenheimer,” is shown as available on Netflix in the United States. I believe it is exclusive to the Peacock streaming service in the U.S.
How did this happen? Do you have a mixture of manually maintained data and data pulled from APIs like The Movie Database (TMDB) or IMDB?
That only stops them dividing the prize further, it doesn't stop them awarding for work which in fact took a great many people - only some must be highlighted. I'd guess almost all the modern Physics and Chemistry has a long trail of people who were crucial but didn't get the prize, some of whom the actual winners would cite if asked, and for others they'd probably say "Look it's a cast of thousands, if I forgot to mention you I apologise" or similar.
When a movie wins the Best Picture Oscar, only a few people actually get the physical object, but of course almost all modern movies (especially those likely to get Best Picture) have huge numbers of people involved and even the Producers are too numerous to all get up on stage for some movies. To fix this, a movie that's a plausible Best Picture contender will ensure that it deliberately highlights some of its Producers in the credits as the people to whom such a prize would be awarded. Take "Barbie". Margot Robbie is on that short list of Producers who'd have got the actual statuette if they win Best Picture, in the end Oppenheimer won.
The difference is that wind, solar, and batteries have a history of getting 10x cheaper, and they are continuing on that trend. And the way that these tech curves work is that we will see a slowing of the decrease in prices before it stops, and we haven't seen that yet. A 10x fall in solar and at least a 5x fall in the cost of batteries is baked in at this point, even if the tech curves started to slow today.
Nuclear never had that trend of getting cheaper. And the only person that said anything about it being too cheap to meter was probably talking about fusion instead of fission, and would have been even more wrong than about fission. (It was said by Lewis Strauss, who was recently depicted/demonized in the movie Oppenheimer).
People continually underestimate solar/wind/batteries, as in the actual industry analysts that make predictions always underpredict, every year, year after year after year. If you want to know the future of solar, find the most optimistic prediction you can, and go bigger, and you'll be a better forecaster than the rest of the industry.
I don't know if electricity will ever be too cheap to meter, that sort of overpromising is what the nuclear industry does, not what the renewable industry does. (And I'm not in the renewables industry, just an interested observer.)
What a wonderful read.
Makes me slightly bothered he didn't get so much as a cameo in the Oppenheimer film.
The book the author referenced, Turing's Cathedral, is a great read for anyone who enjoyed this and wants to know more.
Organisations shield moles and infiltrators very effectively. They are rarely alone. It may be harder to get in as an outsider, but once in they've protections a lone wolf does not enjoy.
You can save a lot of time reading John LeCarre novels and take a short summary like this one of Adam Curtis [0].
If you watched the recent Oppenheimer film you'll know the name Klaus Fuchs. But what about Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt? If MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are. almost by tradition stacked to the rafters with defectors and spies, enclaves of enemies within, and enemies within enclaves of enemies... how does anyone expect a commercial company motivated by money and with such a weak perimeter as a "job market", to do better?
Trust does not have an organisational solution.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460
For me, any one of the issues would be a problem in isolation but the combination of issues makes it so going to the movies isn't something I really consider.
Oppenheimer was the first movie I considered going to in a long time but still did not. I am going to finally watch it Sunday. Even if I love it, I know I won't think about how much better it could have been at the movies. I will actually just be grateful it wasn't ruined for me by some negative aspect of going to the movies.
> a visually unexciting primarily conversational drama
Which may be why he framed it like a serial drama?
The 70mm imax that Oppenheimer was filmed on is 4:3.
An old standard aspect ratio for television serials.
If you watch Oppenheimer any other way, to remove what are usually large black bars on the sides for contemporary tvs, you are watching a cropped version of the film maker’s vision.
But also, there are plenty stunning vistas in that film.
Incidentally, why was Oppenheimer promoted as an IMAX movie? It was a letdown and a waste for me to have watched it on IMAX, as it was essentially a visually unexciting primarily conversational drama. Barbie would have been a better IMAX movie.
Would have been more entertaining if the "Oppenheimer" movie had been made about Frank Oppenheimer [1] -- a younger brother of J. Robert and the founder of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco [2], where Pi Day comes from [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Oppenheimer
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratorium
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_Day
Chess was a major topic of AI research for decades because playing a good game of chess was seen as a sign of intelligence. Until computers started playing better than people and we decided it didn't count for some reason. It reminds me of the (real) quote by I.I. Rabi that got used in Nolan's movie when Rabi was frustrated with how the committee was minimizing the accomplishments of Oppenheimer: "We have an A-bomb! What more do you want, mermaids?"
Googles gemini has no knowledge cutoff, it knows events from the past few days, I asked it about Oppenheimer the movie and it knew it won 7 oscars at the academy awards. Also asked about some famous people that died recently and it knew about those as well.
So no, that is only a limitation of some chatbots, not gemini, it could absolutely be used to ask about election events.
I am aware and it is awful. I do hope intelligent movies like Oppenheimer continue to be made.
People on TikTok will not have the attention span for a film like Oppenheimer.
The Barbie being an easier to watch movie than Oppenheimer is a take I didn't expect to see on HN. I'm pretty sure a lot of people on here were a lot more uncomfortable watching the Barbie movie than they were watching Oppenheimer.
I suspect a lot of people even plain didn't see the Barbie movie because they were more comfortable watching a movie that skirts over criticising American fascism/authoritarianism of the 40's and 50's, than watching a movie that treats modern American culture without kid gloves.
They did pretty good given that Barbie got the higher number of views/sales as well as the videos floating around of people who did the whole "Barbieheimer" tour who just surfed TikTok on their phones during the film (because of how bored they were I presume).
If this is how the general public reacted to a movie like Oppenheimer, its impressive how well they actually did viewer wise.
>The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.
And I have the exact opposite view! hah
The Barbie movie felt like a series of clips to me. Not a coherent movie. I also dislike musicals, so maybe personal.
Also despite Oppenheimer being about The Manhattan Project, The Barbie movie felt "too american" for me with weird Twitter references to "The Znyder cut?". (How will that reference age in 2 years?)
Oppenheimer just feels like expertly crafted cinema. I truly got lost in it and the story. The first 20mins felt like 1h in a good way. Truly masterful.
To me this movie showed how Oppenheimer's protests against nuclear proliferation was hushed by the powers of the time, leaving him to be remembered in history as the architect of the most fearsome weapon imaginable, not a brilliant scientist full of regret, becoming anti-proliferation but blackmailed into silence due to earlier communist ties.
I was also fascinated to learn that the fear of Germany getting the bomb first was what drove him and so many others to create the worst thing humans have ever created and used.
As a non-american, none of this was common knowledge and I welcomed the history lesson, I always wondered why such a brilliant physicist and intelligent person would want to destroy the world but never thought to find a book on the topic (I've since added American Prometheus to my read list). It is shameful he was not allowed a public platform to denounce nuclear arms as strongly as he felt.
I think Oppenheimer was kept an enigma on purpose. I didn't exactly like the movie but I was somehow very impressed nevertheless. I don't regret seeing it but I might never watch it again.
Having read "Now it can be told" by Groves, I can testify to other commenters on how much the Manhattan Project was an enormous logistical problem - Elon's manufacturing prowess pales in comparison to what Groves had to grapple with.
On a different note, I liked how the movie portrayed the world of quantum mechanics and somehow didn't try to make Oppenheimer a hero or something more than what he was.
I did not like this movie. That must be an unpopular opinion, given all the movie’s success. And specifically what I didn’t like was that the film makers could have gone in many directions in telling a story about Oppenheimer, but chose to make the RDJ villain central to the plot. The conflict in the film felt forced and unnecessary for telling a good story.
There’s a lot of bits in the Oppenheimer film that seem simplified. For example that Los Alamos appears to be a fairly small operation, a bunch of shacks in the prairie, a kind of physics camp for a team of nerds.
In reality the Manhattan project at Los Alamos was a huge operation, like 8000 people living there in 1945, a kind of university/research campus and town, but the movie doesn’t really show the scale. Also, the Trinity test was actually done 4h away from the Los Alamos site, and just the test was also a huge operation.
The way Groves and Oppenheimer decide important matters, while standing in the prairie or sitting on a train or on the way out of some meeting makes it seem they‘re planning an Oceans Elevens style heist, not one of the biggest techno-scientific projects of the 20th century.
The variety of products is enormous, and is deliberately made complicated by the vendors - is SHP65CM5N different from SHP78CM5N? Do reviews of one apply to another? When a new model code pops up every year - does it invalidate the old reviews? If you watch "Oppenheimer", and your pal watches it - you can be sure you watched the same movie, and can compare the notes, and tell your other pal who didn't watch it yet whether you liked it or not, and it'd be useful. But with every store having their own model code set and those rotating all the time and having a thousand options, your experience may not be comparable to somebody else's. There are review sites and recommendation sites, like Consumer Reports, which kinda approach it, but there's no way to make it as systematic as for movies or video games, because there's too much variety.
Atomic Cafe is a very funny take on origins of the bomb and the birth of the Cold War's nuclear standoff - with lots of grim material though, such as the original films of the effects of nuclear weapons on Japanese people, i.e. the material that was left out of "Oppenheimer". Atomic Cafe is available online in full:
https://youtu.be/i9xQTJ-kbUk
Oh interesting, thanks. I missed Oppenheimer in IMAX the first time around but saw it finally a month or two ago when it was re-released.
I had originally been reading Rhodes's "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" leading up to the release - I timed it to where I stopped reading right at the part Trinity went off at, saw the movie, and just recently finished. So thanks for the rec.
The movie was based in large part on the book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer"
Which is a life of the man, as you say.
The main difference from the movie is that, aside from being much more lengthy, as book vs. movie always is, it dwells more on pre-WW2 California leftist politics. Whereas the downfall of Lewis Strauss gets only a brief mention.
And of course it covers the life of J R Oppenheimer from birth to death in detail, in parts exhaustive detail.
I can't read the article but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Groves book "Now It Can Be Told: The Story Of The Manhattan Project" documents it well
The Oppenheimer movie was a much more personal biopic, rather than about the project itself, unlike some other older movies.
I didn't find it to be incoherent at all, but I had read the book over a decade ago and had seen the previous adaptations. In some sense, maybe I was the ideal audience, because I knew the outline of the story going in but either didn't notice or didn't care when things were left out. Given the success of the film both financially and critically though, I have to imagine that a lot of people who hadn't read the book still understood and enjoyed it.
The reaction to Dune is similar to the reaction to Oppenheimer. I'm a huge fan of Christopher Nolan. A common criticism I see of him, which echoes what you are saying here, is that his characters lack motivation and are one-dimensional. I actually don't disagree. For me, film isn't primarily about character or plot like literature is. It's about creating a mood using pictures and sound. The best parts of Oppenheimer weren't the details of characters' personal lives or the Manhattan project or the senate hearings, they were the sweeping montages of beautiful images, music, and snippets of dialogue that came together to create a feeling of fear and awe appropriate for the subject matter. I feel the same way about Villeneuve's Dune. It might not be faithful to the intricate story of the book, but I think it nails the dark, vast, mystical quality that inhabiting the Dune universe ought to feel like.
You mention Blade Runner 2049. For my money, Villeneuve's true masterpiece is Arrival. It's not only great science fiction but also has a surprising amount of emotional depth, which sci-fi usually lacks.
Asteroid City. Beau is Afraid. Dream Scenario. Medusa Deluxe. Poor Things. Saltburn. Skinamarink. Smoking Causes Coughing.
Barbie. Oppenheimer.
Soon, The People's Joker, which has been stuck in purgatory since last year given its unconventional telling of a mythos that (on the surface) seems similar to Batman's.
You don't have to like any of these movies, and they're all challenging, but all of them were unconventional and innovative and released to theaters in 2023. This has been a wildly unconventional year, and a fairly exciting one in mainstream cinema.
Oh, wait, what am I arguing against? I read the study, and it says that cinema remains innovative despite discourse arguing otherwise! Indeed.
> I want escapism
I mean going by the highest grossing movies of the year you got plenty to choose from. Other than barbie (which I would argue is not super deep in terms of politics anyway) the rest are all escapism: Super Mario Bros, Fast and furios 10, guardians of the galaxy 3, spiderverse 2, mission impossible, quantumania, little mermaid and elemental are all extremely light in terms of politics.
The three movies with "heaviest" political message are oppenheimer, barbie and even then in case of oppie the message is "mcarthyanism was paranoid and political engagement was stiffled as well as weaponised for personal and selfish goals" certainly not a super crazy political opinion that america's red scare went too far. And in terms of Barbie its mostly surface level "its not easy to be a woman" and capitalism takes advantage of people. But saying "self actualisation is hard with economic forces pushing against you, and some parts of the patriarchy have a compounding effect on women in terms of how difficult it is" is incredibly milktoast feminism even if its pushing the boundries in a movie that is essentially a toy ad that lasts 2 hours.
I don't know what kind of media you think does not allow Escapism and its so absolutely drenched in political content that is impossible to enjoy.
Most emmy noms went to Succession, a shakespearean tale of rich brats picking on each other for father approval and Last of Us, a zombie show about a father daughter found family that shows humans are the worst threat and not the zombies. Neither seems incredibly political.
Videogames this year, top of the crop were Baldur's gate 3, Zelda and Spiderman 2. One is a DnD campaign about power, world domination and brain washing aliens. Another is Ganon is back, you are the hero go make a car and kill him and the last one is Spiderman saves new york from the same guys he has fought since the 1960s.
What is this escapism that existed in the 90s that no longer exist and where is the political undercurrent in all mainstream media that makes it so hard to escape into?
On the competition aspect, I think it's also important to look at the consumer side. For me it was wild knowing Mission Impossible struggled at the box office because of Barbie/Oppenheimer, especially because it was such a big budget film and it was actually my favorite of the three. The reality is that most people would maybe go once a month to the cinema, so they have to prioritize what to watch.
To make matters worse, you are also competing with all of history. If you want to read 12 books this year, when are you going to get to the small creators with years-worth of classics to go through?
Yes. One of my favorites and regularly shows up on lists of the best non-fiction of the 20th century. Great combo of history and science, compelling, and a great background for the movie Oppenheimer. I couldn’t take the Labatut book seriously after reading “Making of the Atomic Bomb”. The true story is a lot more interesting than his fantasies.
Barbie was a shallow representation of the multiple generations of various feminist ideals and discussion points. Only 2nd wave feminism gets any actual discussion, though there's a mild discussion to point out that today's kids are on the 4th wave and have different ideas.
The thing is that most people just agree with 2nd wave Feminism, as its the type that was well regarded and well pushed from the 1950s onwards. So Barbie plays it safe, pushes the older, well-agreed messaging and doesn't stray too far from the guard-rails.
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Like, after watching Barbie, is anyone actually ready to discuss if sex-work / prostitution is pro-Feminisim or anti-Feminism? Erm... no. It avoided any sketchy issue or anything remotely controversial.
Is sex-work pro-Feminism because women can decide how to act for themselves and use their innate femininity to gain power over males?
Or is sex-work anti-Feminism because males who enjoy sexual material can turn into malicious actors who play into bad stereotypes and harmful myths? (And thus the females who partake in it are subject to male-gaze or something, its been a while since I've read feminist writing)
Nothing wrong with that mind you. Barbie was designed to just be enjoyable, but it is a watered down discussion. But the minute real-world issues show up, you're hopelessly unprepared if you've only reached the surface-level that Barbie-movie brought you to.
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Hell, even just the 4th wave feminist child vs 2nd wave feminist mother dynamic in Barbie is so... short and shallow. The movie just leaves off without much debate, or exploration of the contradictory viewpoints. The only conclusion at the end is the younger generation might find Barbie fun if we play with them together, which is... absolutely avoiding the deeper issues and debates brought up in the movie.
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Oppenheimer on the other hand... gives you far more capability to discuss the pros-and-cons of the 1940s / 1950s politics of nuclear weapons. Its very deep on the subject.
Funny, my take on Oppenheimer is the opposite -- and I loved both movies.
Nolan is making the explicit argument that Oppenheimer is the most important person of the 20th century, it's literally a biopic that adheres (shockingly) faithfully to history, is explaining everything to you from the history of Los Alamos to justifications to drop the bomb to arguments for and against the H-bomb, and you come out of the theater absolutely ready to debate the issues.
Oppenheimer is the literal opposite of art for art's sake. It's a straight-up history lesson that presents different sides of one of the biggest moral questions of the 20th century.
Now other films of his, whether Tenet or Inception or Interstellar -- those are much more art-for-art's-sake. You can discuss them aesthetically all you want, but aside from questions of taste and clarity and plot, there isn't much of substance to debate.
(On the other hand -- while Barbie was hyped as providing a lot to discuss, it was actually mostly just a very clever super funny comedy. It didn't really lead to all that much debate, aside from whether the idea of playing guitar "at" someone was merely a really funny joke, or one of top five funniest jokes in the movie...)
See ‘Didacticism’:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didacticism
vs ‘Art for art’s sake’:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_art%27s_sake
The Barbie movie is highly didactic. It’s like a series of college essays strung together on a thin string of story. You come out of the the theater ready to debate the issues in the movie.
Oppenheimer on the other hand is ‘art for art’s sake’. It’s not trying to ‘splain anything to you. You come out of the theater speechless, just carrying the weight of it all.
Edit: Barbenheimer.
$4.6M a month in revenue is not that much honestly. I'm disappointed. The average Hollywoord blockbuster could pay for that about 2 years. And the views/$ are most likely staggeringly lower.
If I do the napkin math: $600 million dollar revenue for Oppenheimer. A movie ticket costs about $10. That means Oppenheimer was viewed 60 million times. Mr. Beast JUST on his main channel has 1.6 BILLION views. And that only for the meager price of $4.6M. Oppenheimer cost $100M to make and it doesn't even touch Mr. Beast.
I think I can apply your last two paragraphs to pretty much any movie unintentionally celebrating the United States security apparatus, politics, public policy, or exploitative crony capitalism that that people lust over for whatever reason.
"That said, there are clear problems with the political narrative in the film Oppenheimer, given that it's supposed to be artwork. Making a film about a nuclear weapon without in any way extensively showcasing the result of it's use on a civilian population i.e. the consequences of the development of that weapon is extremely American and morally dubious at best...downright propaganda at worst. Were the American public and military rank and file the real victims of WW2 ()? Is it ok to pronounce the moral ambiguity of the top brass without commenting on the Holocaust-level crimes committed?
These things were glaring in the theater. And I know I'm going to get the standard 'MAGA move to a Commie country' for having an honest appraisal of the conceptual idea. But it's bad in that way. ..."
War is a complex issue and making a film about Japan's war crimes (the first installment of the Ip Man series was good with this) is something which has to be met with approval from its government who have their hands in film finance as well. Japan is not exactly a capitalist economy-- it is culturally a command economy and everyone listens to the government (this is actually one of the critiques of Shin Godzilla and even if this Godzilla movie).
There are not that many governments that are going to be thrilled about you making a movie shitting on their armed forces or speaking on their war crimes. In the United States, our first amendment protects give us tremendous leeway to do this, but there is a lot of other pressures which can be extorted to kill a film prior to release.
Scorcese recently released Killers of the Flower Moon, which is not about a Holocaust, but about a limited genocide, and people are already bitching about the length, and it is as long as a "rah rah America" Avengers movie. This kind of movie was hard to make in the United States. It would be impossible to make in Japan. People there have to use metaphors to talk about getting nuked (aside from Grave of the Fireflies showing the Tokyo Firebombing, which was worse). How are you supposed to use a metaphor for an Asian Holocaust? If they did it would it come off as insensitive to a Western viewer?
This is a political Godzilla movie. It's a movie about Japan dealing with post war recovery. Maybe next time, there will be a Godzilla who comes and frees all the slave labor in the Imphal India campaign (maybe involve the Indian film industry to reduce cost). Maybe you should pitch it to be developed here with US political assistance and pressure so that Japanese war crimes are addressed. It's certainly a good idea.
But I would hesitate from: -- being a hypocrite. -- critiquing simplistically without seeing the larger work of this director.
I think you are misrepresenting the situation and misreading what I said.
What I say is, if you don't like how Oppenheimer was funded, produced and then how they tried to collect money from you when you wanted to see it then you should fund and produce your own movie and distribute it the way you see fit. Upload it to YouTube, share a magnet link - whatever. Nothing stops you from not participating in the DRM stuff.
I like interpolation too, but it must be high quality, not the low quality that's built into TVs. For example, I use SVP 4 which does interpolation with your GPU, works great.
Movied are even worse, I can absolutely see the judder especially when panning. It is one reason I prefer to wait for home releases and will go to movies that are specifically phenomena irreplaceable at home, such as Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX.
> What's the point of having superpower yet battling like a peasant in medieval times?
This is a small part of the overall topic, but I've been saying for a while that real life is much more interesting and scary than Hollywood movies of late.
Modern warfare is far faster and more terrifying than anything in a Marvel movie; look up HIMARS rocket bombardments. Or there's a video of a Russian helicopter accidentally firing rockets on a group of journalists (not gory)—the speed that the scene goes from boring to "everything is exploding" is shocking to the Hollywood-trained eye.
Man I'd love/hate to see a realistic modern nuclear bomb reproduced with 2023 VFX and a director who gave a shit. Oppenheimer doesn't count: the bomb was a tiny fraction of a modern yield. Nolan bragged about how he used practical effects, but you're never going to depict this properly without computer simulation. Maybe Alex Garland could pull it off?
Even tropes like meteors from space are snoozefests compared to real life. In movies they always show up minutes in advance and float down at jumbo jet speeds with ominous music and earthquakes. A true "dinosaur killer" would enter the atmosphere at 30 km/s or more. It would streak down from nothing like lightning from Zeus. It would be so hot so quickly that you might burn to death just by being in line of sight. Absolutely metal.
Lots of people still shoot with film. But distribution will always be digital unless your screening is specifically advertising a film showing. That's usually just big Imax movies like Oppenheimer in select cities, or indie theaters showing old movies who can get access to the film.
I’d rather my films be graded for home theater use than phone use. HDR TVs these days are basically all TVs. Why should we all take a step back in quality when the hardware to view it decently is more affordable than it’s ever been? I don’t care how Oppenheimer looks on your phone I know Nolan would care even less.
Isn't this because the mid range is going straight into the streaming services, rather than through (an I assume expensive) distribution process into theaters?
Theater going is expensive (I think it's expensive), the alternatives are "pretty good", so that impacts overall theater presence.
Having a "block buster" that can justify the expense of marketing and distributing to the now weaker theater market seems like a prudent thing for the studios and it's just part of the current reality of entertainment.
I know I don't see many movies in the theater. I don't know if I've seen anything since Top Gun. I was hoping to see Dune 2, but it's delayed. I will be seeing the Ferrari bio-pic, simply because I'm a Mann nut. Otherwise, we rented Barbie. We rented GoG3, we'll be renting Oppenheimer.
And whatever other random stuff I sleep through from Netflix.
The paradox is that this technology only comes into being by deliberate effort from those claiming it is dangerous. These companies wouldn’t exist if they weren’t funded by SV billionaires and corps.
I thought the recent Oppenheimer film dramatized this sort of scenario quite well. People rushing to build a weapon, claiming it’s dangerous and must not be used, and then feigning innocence and surprise when it was used.
> Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried
I'm always amazed to see claims like this, given it's not how my world works at all. Picking some random popular favorites: searches for (verbatim) "Loki", "Hunger Games", "Oppenheimer", and "House of Usher" all return a wikipedia entry in at worst the second spot (generally behind IMDB, though Oppenheimer and Usher showed the real man and the short story ahead of the films, not unsurprisingly).
I mean, sure, there are glitches with all products and nothing is beyond criticism. But "Google buries Wikipedia results" is just beyond weird. It really seems like HN is starting to develop an "alternative facts" syndrome, where the echo chamber starts driving collective memory.
The faculty got him out because he riled them, e.g. by insisting they ought to actually put effort into teaching undergrads. They looked for a pretext, and they found it.
Just like in that Oppenheimer movie. A sanctimonious witch hunt serving as pretext for a personal vendetta.
(Note that Summers is, I'm told, on a personal level, a dick. The popular depiction is not that wrong on that point. But he's the right pick for this job -- see my other comments in this thread.)
4:3 is the correct aspect ratio for IMAX but it sounds like everything else about the presentation at the theater was wrong so who knows if there were any other issues at your particular theater. The movie was released in a number of different formats so there's already a cropped version that will go onto the disc https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Foppenheimer-film-format-aspect-ratio-guide-v0-90tzv7rx9n2b1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D5c1102fe33b7a89dc973e55cc419b7c22b401302
Unfortunately they emptied out the proverbial bench to get enough staff worldwide to play Oppenheimer in film formats wherever possible and that led to some pretty spotty results.
It's a criticism basically all recent Nolan movies share, not just Oppenheimer.
I love Christopher Nolans movies, but there is something seriously wrong with the audio mix on Oppenheimer that makes the dialogue inaudible. I cannot see how that was a deliberate artistic choice.
I own quite a few blu-rays, mostly movies where compression artifacts on streaming versions are very noticeable. I'd get them for more movies, but I don't have infinite shelf space, nor do I want to transform my living room walls into disc storage like some of my movie buff friends did in the DVD era. Filing cabinets could work, I suppose. But the point is, streaming a purchased or pirated copy is just simpler and better, and for 90% of movies the compression doesn't impact the experience. With all due respect to Nolan's work on the home release, I'm pretty sure Oppenheimer will be in the 90%. For the remaining 10% I'd love if iTunes and the other digital movie storefronts offered a "hifi" quality download with bitrate on par with blu-ray. I know Sony has something like that for their TVs, but I mean something really available cross platform through Movies Anywhere or similar. The difficulty studios have making money on digital movies really seems self-inflicted in some ways, plenty of people out there would be converted from buying blu-rays if the price and quality of downloads improved just a bit.
I read a great user review on a film ranking site for guy Ritchie’s film the covenant that said something approximating “he liberated himself from his own genre” and I sometimes feel that Nolan’s work could use some of that.
I have issue both outright with the material of Oppenheimer, and his handling of it, but on release I waited an extra 3 weeks to get a reasonably positioned seat in one of the imax 70mm showings.
And it made me realize something.
Even if people like Nolan or pta or Tarantino swear by film, and even if they’re right!, what matters is if the theater owners care about film, because the presentation was terrible.
There were flies on the lens obstructing the image with little furry dust balls crawling all over the picture.
There was roughly 5 minutes worth of a red line down the picture, just to the left of center, in various 20 second chunks throughout the film.
Also just culture shocked by imax 70mm because it frames the film in essentially 4:3.
Growing up in the states in the 90s has me associating 4:3 with sitcom tv.
So is the 4:3 framing the “intended” framing?
Are home media viewers encouraged to drop the majority of their screen real estate when watching this?
Does the home release have a 16:9 cut? Did Nolan reframe it? (These questions likely have answers for anyone who really wants to know but this article was light on actionable details other than “it is cause he said it is”)
At a similar special showing I thought hateful 8 used theatrical 70mm to great effect.
I liked the first fifth of Oppenheimer. Mostly the imaginative practical effect asides of seeing into the mind of someone laboring over matter at this scale.
It lost me right around the time Nolan cruelly mangled this absolutely chilling moment into a “get it up” punchline.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac
The political aspect is obviously not true relative to the past.
The post WW, Cold War era was marked by the federal government, senators and intelligence agencies literally maintaining lists of “communists” that were blackballed almost entirely.
Oppenheimer was released only recently, a movie which is all about how a tenuous communist connection led to the demise of the career of among the most famous scientists in WW2.
Students were famously killed for protests in Berkeley just a few decades ago.
And it’s only been a few decades that anyone but a white man was even allowed on campus.
The idea that speech on campus is anyways more restricted than it has been in the past is ridiculous on its face.
The idea that speech on campus is censored any more than in the past is very clearly not true. What might have changed is either the groups of people whose speech is curtailed has changed slightly, but more likely, you tend to hear a lot more about it because of social media.
Except Oppenheimer movie, who got it right.
Seek to 4m46s https://youtu.be/kqYenzBwlkU?si=y87R0XvuWL8_7t6Q&t=286
If my memory is right, the actual scene, and delay, is longer than it is in this clip.
The bible - am not a religious person, don't want to become one, and I mean no shade to religious people. However, as I now read it, I'm surprised by how much western culture references it. People use examples, names and scenes from the bible much more often than I realised and it helps to recognize that.
American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Oppenheimer was an ok movie, the book it's based on is better paced.
A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. This is the first book I encountered on disaster sociology. That field of study sounds amazing! It's about how people become altruistic and how communities form right after a natural disaster.
Obviously it is digital and Omnimax (not IMAX) is analog but how does the Sphere compare to Omnimax? Is it an even bigger field of view?
The most recent time I went to an Omnimax was to see Oppenheimer, but it actually wasn't that great since Oppenheimer was filmed in IMAX versus Omnimax.. the end result was a gigantic wrap around movie that had spherical distortion and made your neck hurt from turning it to see everything.
I am kind of sad such smart people on here are missing the forest for the trees.
Moving institutions, historically, is about cross pollination of ideas. In physics this has been important because different institutions provide variations of how to 'think like a physicist'. On top of that, it allows for a mixing pot of lab culture and best practices.
They even did a good job of pointing at this in the movie Oppenheimer, where he visits Germany and has a formative experience which changes the trajectory of his focus.
It's very easy to 'do it by the numbers' and be repetitive in your work when you stay in the same institution. This is also the reason why 'sabbaticals' are still a thing, so professors will visit for a 0.5-1yr another institution or research hub for their field, which in theory happens every 7-10 years if the professor takes advantage of it.
I have seen one movie in a theater in the last decade. I made the error of agreeing to take my son to see Oppenheimer. Then we both got to feel very uncomfortable at all those communist mammories.
I will probably never see another movie in a theater.
The problem with a UCLA-sponsored survey of teens is always going to be response bias.
For example:
>Very few adolescents prefer aspirational content. The majority favor original content over IP-based content. Also, the majority prefer binge releases over weekly releases.
A quick search of the top Youtubers shows that Gen Z in fact loves aspirational content, they just don't like the image that comes into their head when they hear the term.
A quick scan of the box office shows that they also love IP-based content, unless all the viewers of Spiderman, Barbie, Mario, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fast X, and The Little Mermaid were over 25 (Hell, even Oppenheimer was technically IP-based).
I believe the binge watching thing though.
After Oppenheimer I realized that Christopher Nolan is only able to make one movie. That movie is a movie about a damaged man who must find the solution to something and he is special in some way which either will allow him to find it or demonstrate that no one can. Which made me think about who does Christopher Nolan see himself to be in all these films? The protagonist? Maybe this is all critical nonsense.
For those who like to tie together different contexts, this incident is briefly mentioned in the recent film Oppenheimer. (Which, much to my surprise and delight, is pretty good history for a Hollywood movie.)
Oh I don't argue about art. Most of these decisions are driven by financial constraints, not the artistic vision. And this is not going to change.
Christopher Nolan can afford extreme artistic choices like not showing ads or previews before Oppenheimer. That's such a rarity that I wouldn't make any extrapolations even in today's world. Betting that gen AI will result in an alternative type of art and not just replace multiple roles and production techniques in existing industries is not something I can see happening considering that professional art is business.
E.g. we didn't see CGI creating an alternative movie industry that exists in parallel to non-CGI movies. CGI is used by everyone, including artsy independent creators.
I will forever love Studio Ghibli animation. But if in the future the same level of expression can be achieved with CGI/gen AI - I just fail to see them not switching their tools (possibly in the post-Miyazaki world).
> What's hilarious is that the execs still don't fucking see it
Why would they? Very few people can notice and appreciate the level of detail you are describing. And I am not even sure we will never be able to replicate it computationally. In 10-20... 50 years? Don't see why not.
> Why would anyone hire 20K people for a movie today?
To make better art. I've seen most of the films in that list are they're incredible films that stick with me and give me a sense of awe today. Watching 1000s of real life people in a scene just creates a sense of spectacle that is just not achievable with current CGI - the brain is just not fooled or impressed like it is when you watch those old films and see the amount of work and effort that must have gone into them. Sergio Morricone hired the Spanish army to build the cemetery at the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and it took them several days to make. Nowadays it just takes someone a few clicks of a mouse but it fucking shows as well. Maybe with AI we'll actually get to a point where the brain can be tricked because it gets the lighting right, but at the minute it just doesn't and the films are worse because of it.
Just look at how incredible this location is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpVaoA8RfIk
It's even more awesome when you watch the film in it's totality because it builds up slowly, with bigger and bigger scenarios until it culminates with this.
And even in potato cam resolution, how impressive is this scene from Cleopatra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_rLwuVP9Zw
They just hit different when they're actually real.
What's hilarious is that the execs still don't fucking see it. Christopher Nolan is one of the only ones out there still pushing for practical effects and he rakes in the money at the box office more consistently than just about any other director other than Cameron or Spielberg. It's because the films are actually worth watching. Before Oppenheimer, what was the last big film? Top Gun, which also used a ton of real life flight footage.
If I want to watch an animation, I'll watch an actual, awesome animation that takes full advantage of the medium like Into The Spiderverse or something from Studio Ghibli. If I want to watch a movie, I want to watch a real flesh and guts movie. Yet 99% of the stuff Hollywood puts out is some weird hybrid shit that is the worst of all worlds.
If Hollywood starts making better art, people will start going back to the movies. But they've got greedy. In any other industry, if you made a product, and you got 100% more for it than what it cost to produce you'd consider that a success. But these arseholes don't. They want 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x and they want to milk it for all it's worth and turn it into a fucking "universe" until it just collapses into a heap of shit and no-one even remembers why they liked the original.
Hedy's Folly, by Richard Rhodes. It's a very good book about Hedy Lamar's life and her fame, and work on that patent. It's interesting that the book is not mentioned. The author is the same one that wrote the Making of the Atomic Bomb, which I believe the movie Oppenheimer, was based on. All of his books are very interesting, revealing many of the intricacies, that took place in recent history, making the world we live in today.
It would be nice to have statistics. People say VFX heavy blockbuster film has few thousand people working out of which 2/3 can be VFX artists.
Even Oppenheimer had over hundred artists and it’s famous for not having any VFX. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/christopher-nolan-forgot-to-credit-more-than-80-of-vfx-artists-on-oppenheimer-230775.html
"Finally, you're right that Kobe Bryant is admired more than the average hard worker in school, and that's because he was among the best in the world."
All over the world, sportsmen and entertainment personalities are celebrated more than other workers who, in theory and intuitively, should be celebrated more. For example, among the celebrities, in theory and intuitively, we should find the best scientists, surgeons, and administrators that a country can offer. But do we? No, we don't.
To use a recent example, if you think about it, it is curious that the hype about Oppenheimer has been about the film itself, Nolan the director, and Murphy the performer, and not Oppenheimer the scientist and the Manhattan Project as a formidable government-sponsored science and technology initiative. Yes, there has been some minor residual interest in the real people, science and technology associated with Los Alamos on the part of viewers, but nothing particularly relevant.
Today, Mr. Oppenheimer, academic and/or govt employee, would have to work for 30+ years (probably more...) to earn the same money that Murphy earned pretending to be Oppenheimer in a movie. If that's not funny and ridiculous, I don't know what is.
Definitely felt this with IMDB and now also RT. Sometimes it’s political, but more often it seems like new mediocre movies get amazing ratings, which just didn’t add up. For a while, I thought it was just enthusiast bias but it makes more sense that there’s gaming going on. “Foreign” movies very often get shit ratings, especially when they don’t copy-paste the Anglo-Hollywood style and tropes.
In either case, my best advice for reviews in general is: take it with a big grain of salt. Ie don’t compare 7.5 with 7.8. Barbie vs Oppenheimer ratings is not gonna tell you anything useful, even if there’s no gaming going on. Never obsess over subjective measurements.
Instead, use a 5.2 rating as an indicator that it’s very likely to be bad. But if it’s say a documentary about something you have nerded out on, then it may have you glued to the screen.
Let's use a less contentious topic: FOSS vs proprietary software. There is a common sentiment I've seen on HN that FOSS is superior to proprietary software, and all else being equal, I agree with that sentiment. However, in reality, not all else is equal. Some proprietary software is just better at solving certain problems than FOSS equivalents – maybe the proprietary software is more reliable or has a better UX or is more regularly maintained or has more features a user wants or differs along a host of other dimensions. Thus, if someone makes a categorical claim that all FOSS software is superior to similar proprietary software, we would regard that comment as propaganda. This doesn't mean that FOSS software is bad or that good FOSS software can't be created or that no one should try to create excellent FOSS software.
This is an analogy or what I mean by "political correctness" (or related concepts like "wokeness" and "social justice warrior"). Great art communicates truth about the human condition in a beautiful way. This is, of course, open to interpretation, yet somehow many people agree that, for example, The Godfather is a great film. Why? I believe the film shows us some truth about the human condition (particularly our ability to descend into evil) through a gripping story with excellent characters, visuals, dialogue, plotting, etc.
When we substitute an arbitrary checklist of criteria a film must meet that have nothing to do with communicating truth about the human condition in a beautiful way, we are engaging in "political correctness," and we have ceased to value art but instead propaganda. For instance, if we were to use the new Academy standards for Oscar-nominated movies, the Godfather would fail – the cast is almost all white, has no LGBT and IIRC includes the n-word. Amadeus, another excellent film (one of the most praised in Oscar history) would certainly fail, since the cast is all white and almost entirely male, as we would expect from a film set in 18th century Vienna. This does not mean great art cannot have diverse casts, LGBT characters or a lack of "problematic" content. For a recent example, the excellent show Andor ticks almost all of the DEI checkboxes – LGBT character(s), diverse cast –, but it also has smart writing, interesting characters, sensible plots, beautiful visuals and a compelling story. As long as the former are subordinated to the latter, a work remains art and not "politically correct" propaganda. At the same time, Oppenheimer ticks almost none of the DEI checkboxes and yet is arguably one of the best films of this century.
> So instead of using a meaningless euphemism, OP should articulate what exact themes, stories, or characters they think lead to a good critic score?
I think this comment betrays exactly what I'm critiquing. Great art can't be shoved in a box like this. Mediocre art has identifiable flaws - maybe it's visually bland or maybe the dialogue is poor or the characters act in inexplicable ways. These all detract from the beauty and truth of the work.
I'm not sure I agree, but it would be worth studying empirically. The film Strange World, for instance, bombed, but has a 72% on RT and is certainly politically correct. It was quite poorly marketed.[0] While studios aren't in the habit of sharing marketing budgets, we can safely say the marketing expenditure was low.
This is a single datapoint, but my hypothesis is that political correctness does indeed account for a measurable (beyond noise) portion of a RT score. Marketing spend probably matters more, and genuinely excellent non-PC films (say, Oppenheimer) can succeed without PC, but PC does contribute.
[0]https://fandomwire.com/theyve-been-barely-advertising-it-until-last-week-disney-faces-backlash-for-negligible-marketing-for-strange-world-first-disney-animated-movie-with-lgbtq-lead/
Gödel also had a short appearance in the Oppenheimer movie, in the scene where Einstein talks about Kurt still being afraid even though they are in the states now.
> Humans aren’t capable of that.
Why do you say so? We casually call it "connecting the dots". It's like during the Oppenheimer movie when after the first demonstration of Uranium splitting people thought "oh, we can do a bomb with that".
Some of the arguments aren't actually Olympian, although if you have a pre-existing bias against commerce or capitalism it may feel that way.
Most obvious example query of where PageRank totally fails: [flowers]. The correct top result here for 99.9% of searchers is a local flower shop or possibly a big flower delivery chain, but it's not the Wikipedia page for flowers. Likewise for [hotel near me] which an algorithm like PageRank will yield garbage for, [oppenheimer showtimes] and many other very popular query types.
Link based ranking just doesn't work for this sort of result. You need data that isn't on the web which means you then need a way to rank it. And how exactly do you plan to rank flower shops or movie theatres? You've got no data on which to do that. Even if they have a website at all (big if) people don't organically link to them. Attempts to gain ranking data via things like user reviews will fail, almost nobody real reviews local stores or cinemas so if you rely on that then either you'll be flooded with fake reviews, or companies will aggressively push people to write them, or both, and users hate both outcomes.
Ad auctions work much better. Users don't have to do anything directly, they just buy things from the best businesses as they see it, revenue flows to those businesses enabling them to bid higher for ads, so users see the most successful businesses as determined by the market as a whole, which is much harder to game than user reviews or PageRank.
When the original Google was built, it was built by students. Their first ever test query was the name of the guy who ran the university. Their edge was ranking publicly available web pages using link graphs, so they just weren't thinking about commercial queries at all and if that's the scope of your ambition then yeah it will look like ads are always a conflict of interest because the only model you can imagine is re-ranking organic informational results surreptitiously. Once they turned on their first search backend deal and got experience running a search engine with serious non-nerd user traffic for the first time, they realized there were tons of popular queries that their whole approach just sucked at and would always suck at. That's when they realized that in some cases "ads are information", as they put it.
That wasn't some sort of paycheque-induced intellectual blindness, if it was then Google would have gone bankrupt a long time ago. It was an actual fundamental realization about the nature of what people use search engines for.
It's uncanny how much nuance and craftsmanship there is to Oppenheimer you need to just... discard in order to make it into an example of a property that would benefit from AI.
If ever there was a movie that could only have been made by one person. If ever there was a movie that if it had been made by anyone else would have fallen along so much more standard and predictable lines.
Ask an AI to create a talky 3 hour biopic with as few explosions as Oppenheimer, and people would flock to it at blockbuster levels. Go ahead. Keep clicking the generate button. Use the Nolan preset.
There are so many movies you could argue wouldn't lose anything for being AI. I wouldn't even trade those for AI, but I acknowledge they exist. Marvel has about 30 alone.
And if ever there was a technology more analogous to the bomb in terms of the need for their creators to have been more humble and prepared and less naive about their effect on the world before rather than after the invention, it's generative AI.
Even if Murphy was a nepo baby, you're right there's unfairness in Hollywood, still we can't overlook how much we still need people and we can't be so naive as to think the same unfairness in human nature would just go away rather than simply start to benefit a different set of privileged people.
> "I've been looking forward to watching this film, but it's frustratingly not been available in the UK ... this regional specific delay feels really quite outdated."
Now days, most big budget/big studio films are released simultaneously in major markets around the world. For example, Barbie and Oppenheimer were released on the same day in most of the major markets.
But smaller independent releases like this typically aren't, because different companies often bid on the distribution rights separately for different markets. In this case, it was released in Canada by Elevation Pictures, in the USA by IFC Films, and internationally by Paramount.
In the UK & Ireland it will be released (exclusively in cinemas) on October 6th, and looks like it will get fairly wide distribution.
It's a misunderstanding of Russian mentality, national ethos and the mechanics of their internal propaganda to think that a "message" disseminated by a Hollywood movie poses some kind of threat to it.
Using the example of Oppenheimer, a Russian citizen might see the movie and take away the following conclusions:
1. American leadership makes decisions based on an irrational fear of communism.
2. We are justified in expanding our nuclear arsenal. This is the only way they won't bomb our people in an event of conflict.
3. The Nazis sure were a threat to everyone. I'm glad we defeated them, but they weren't mentioning that in the movie. So ungrateful, typical Americans.
4. The political system of the US is quite unstable. I'm glad we have Putin. That Yeltsin sure was an embarrassment.
5. Whoah, the h-bomb sure is a powerful thing, we should drop that on Ukraine to win the war.
6. History is written by the winners, and whoever is the strongest wins. Thank goodness we're so strong.
7. I'm glad to live in a country where I could torrent this and I don't have to be worried about a 100 million dollar lawsuit.
8. The respect everyone gives us makes me feel so proud to live in Russia, one of the world leaders. We have a great future ahead of us.
> Many Western blockbuster movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer included, disseminate ideas that are antagonistic to Putin's fascist narrative.
This is so wonderfully, innocently naïve. Thank you for writing it. God bless America.
For Putin's government the key here is censorship of Western content.
Many Western blockbuster movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer included, disseminate ideas that are antagonistic to Putin's fascist narrative. Barbie is, among other things, a play on feminism and on democratic values - think Ken's voting a new Constitution! It's only logical that Putin does not want "foreign agents" distorting the regime's narrative massively distributed to its 83 federal subjects ("federal states").
China has been doing this for ages now by picking a handful of foreign films / year and demanding the Statue of Liberty be removed from film. However, the Chinese market is so yummy that Western blockbuster productions will often self-censor to make sure they make the cut [1]. Putin is getting the opposite in fact, the West is high on anti-Russian sentiments for the last decade or so, and that has trickled down into content. Remember when under Boris Yeltsin that Western productions got plenty of "good Russians" after the Iron Curtain melted down?
[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/censorship-of-hollywood-blockbuster-films-intensifies-in-china-/6557850.html
>They came out on the same day, they have the same budget for production, gorgeous well-known actors, but there is one big difference. Directors spent $150 million on the marketing of Barbie, while $145 million was spent on the creation. Oppenheimer did not allocate such a budget for marketing.
Interesting, because I've heard about the Oppenheimer movie but not about the Barbie movie. The only time I've heard about the movie is after the fact, via the comparison with the Oppenheimer movie. I might not be the target audience, but it completely was stealth.
I have watched none of them yet.
>Marketing is an amazing tool, especially when it is handled by a team of professionals, so if the product is great, then it is strange to neglect it. But is it possible to make a cool product without focusing on marketing?
What's no marketing? It is developing a product in secret, in a bunker somewhere, and never telling someone about it. How will people who have the problem your product solves, i.e: the market, know about it? If the market doesn't know about it, where will sales come from? That's akin to someone who never gets out of the house and complains about being an "Incel". Not putting your product out there leads to "InSale" (just came up with this).
Not only that, but how will you know that your product actually solves the problem you think it's solving if you don't expose it to the market and target audience? You have to reduce that risk by exposing your product to the market and reality as early as possible. Maybe your target audience just doesn't really care about spending money on solving that problem and only complain about it? How will you improve the product/discover bugs if there isn't an influx of people using it, and how will they use it if they have never heard of it.
Saying marketing is a tool is like saying sales is a tool.
Assuming that the "barbenheimer" effect is what made people shy away seems to miss the occam's razor possibility: It's really not a great movie.
Okay, maybe that was just my opinion. Let's back that up.
The Barbie movie is incredibly dependent on cultural tropes, and targets both the nostalgia bone with its Barbie references and the cultural feelings of American women of a certain age.
Yes, the movie was very popular here. Because it targeted a very specific, yet very large, audience. It seems incredibly likely to me that the simple explanation for it's low acceptance in Japan is simply that the very specific audience it appeals to is quite small in Japan.
An n=1 sample of "stayed away due to oppenheimer marketing" makes this an entirely useless article.
Author posits the Barbie movie was heavily promoted alongside Oppenheimer.
I think it is about "it".
Barbie is a light and fun movie, and a shorter movie than Oppenheimer. I have a PhD in physics, I have been to the Trinity site, I've been exposed to the story of the atom bomb over and over again, there is nothing new about it for me. So I went to see Barbie and didn't see Oppenheimer.
That said, the "overnight success" without marketing is a matter of being lucky, you really do want to make your own luck with marketing.
Folks, this article isn’t a criticism of the movie. It’s literally a “Oppenheimer, and…” not “Oppenheimer, but…” type of article. If you appreciate history, you will appreciate this article.
Relevant, recent article: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-08-26/oppenheimer-movie-los-alamos-plateau-evictions-reparations
Articles keep appearing criticizing the film for a myriad of reasons, but most of those reasons turn out to be a) staying on its narrative focus of Oppenheimer, the man b) Not being enough of a commentary on the dangers and horrors of nuclear weapons. As someone who appreciates film, writing and Nolan’s first grounded, character-driven work in quite some time these criticisms are not only frustrating, but seem geared toward being nothing more than rage inducing click bait.
The movie shows Oppenheimer averting his eyes from footage of the horrors, which is a meta nod to the film taking the same approach.
The movie is not so much about the morality of dropping the bomb as it is about the subtler question of what it means to live the sanitized experience of being half a world away from it.
If you don't have to face it, what then? Do you still find it troubling, or does it become easy to latch onto projections of how many people might die if you don't use it? Or how much influence you'll lose decades off if you don't intimidate a future superpower now?
If you don't see civilians dying do you still approach it with humility, or attend pep rallies where we lament missing the chance to have used it on the Germans?
Yes, not talking about the Japanese who got bombed or the miners who suffered from uranium mining is understandable from the point of a movie focused on Oppenheimer and Los Alamos. The one thing that I think is relevant is when people criticize the line in the movie that "nobody lives here [site of Los Alamos] -- there is just a boarding school and some Indians who come here for ceremonies". This wasn't true. There were farmers (mostly Hispanic) who were forced to leave their lands.
I think the topic of the article is very relevant and connected to the subject of the movie.
Yes, the movie is subjective and a biography. It also seems to be interested in the necessities for the development of the bomb. What humans needed to contribute and how they saw the moral implications of the weapon, as well as what efforts were needed to realize the bomb.
The article opens with a very memorable and important scene in the movie.
Then it connects this to the realities of uranium mining.
Which are relevant until today.
Why is this not an omission? Is the movie not a document of zeitgeist itself, does it not meam to evoke any thoughts or questions?
It does not need to be a documentary to be omitting something, especially because Oppenheimer's biography has moral and political aspects that the movie seems interested in.
I don't read the headline of the article as some kind of accusation against the movie. The headline is supposed to spike interest in facts that many people don't seem to know or care about, despite having opinions on them.
Indeed. There's countless movies that could be made around other aspects of this period in history. Personally I found this movie kind of a disappointment as Oppenheimer's story is one of the less emotionally engaging aspects to me. It did look good though.
In a movie specifically about the person Oppenheimer, why would it be considered weird that it focuses mostly on him?
You have Oppenheimer and you have Barbie. They are both "movies" technically but are completely different type of products that happen to use the same media for dissemination. Her books are no different; I like your start-up analogy because she's focused on making money through this particular media and not "writing books" in the same way, let's say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote books.
> I think the conditional Kolmogorov complexity of Oppenheimer given all real world data we could collect [K(Oppenheimer|earth)] would be massively shorter than its gzip length.
To predict Oppenheimer perfectly, pixel for pixel, we would need at least Laplace's Demon with knowledge of both the laws and the complete initial state of the universe. And we need to assume the evolution of the universe is even deterministic and computable, otherwise this wouldn't work in the first place.
And even if we have the laws and the complete initial state of the universe, and its evolution is computable: if we live in some form of multiverse (or extremely large repeating universe, which is not unlikely, since many physicists assume the universe is infinitely large), it would still not work. There may be countless copies of Earth which are indistinguishable given (i.e. underdetermined by[1]) the data we can collect on Earth, but where each version of Oppenheimer has a completely different pixel noise pattern, and consequently different Kolmogorov complexity. So the "compressed" UTM input string would have to hardcode basically our entire Earth Oppenheimer in order to perfectly and uniquely determine the movie, resulting in a terrible compression ratio.
And even if the universe is in fact small and not a multiverse, our data available to us on Earth is probably not enough to uniquely retrodict the initial state (and laws) of our universe, since there are countless possible but non-actual universes which are consistent with our Earth data, but which all differ in initial state and laws in a way such that they again predict different versions of Oppenheimer, and so again the "compression" has to hardcode basically everything. Underdetermination strikes again, be it uncertainty about location in a multiverse or uncertainty about which merely possible universe the the actual one.
> Roughly speaking (glossing over some details), you can’t do better at predicting the future than this probability distribution assuming the physical Church-Turing thesis.
That only holds if you restrict yourself to perfect predictions, not prediction in general. (And of course ignore that Solomonoff induction is uncomputable even if the universe itself is computable.) The issue is that we don't care about just maximizing the probability of perfectly accurate predictions, because, given underdetermination, the best perfect prediction would still be highly unlikely to be true, because it would be dominated by overfitting on tons of hardcoded noise and not by real high level patterns in the data. What we really want for an "optimal" prediction is the prediction with the best "expected accuracy", the best expected "goodness of fit", expected "closeness to the truth" etc. The best such prediction may be perfectly accurate with probability 0% (most good predictions make unrealistic simplifying assumptions where we already know they are strictly speaking false), but that doesn't matter when the prediction is likely very accurate, very close to the truth.
An ideal prediction algorithm would probably minimize something like the quantity (complexity of hypothesis + inverse of goodness of fit to the given data). And it would be computable, since uncomputability is a rather non-ideal property of an algorithm.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underdetermination
on the other hand: few movie goers are seeing multiple movies a day, and movies make their money on concessions, not ticket sales. They don't necessarily care about many movies a day, as opposed to 2-3 big hits that can get people in. if Nolan can get 100 people in for the 180 minute oppenheimer as opposed to 20 people for the Haunted mansion, the goal is clear.
The difference is 1) the power law distribution of revenue and 2) the finality of a moview.
1: A few movies (e.g. Barbie, Spiderman, Oppenheimer this year) make the majority of the money. Most movies make little. So if you pay based on expected return you probably don't pay your actors at all, or pay them peanuts. That's inequitable. But you can't pay them lots because you don't know how much money the movie is going to make. The solution is profit sharing. Most software business have much more stable income.
2: A movie, when finished, is done. There may be a director's cut in a decade or two if it's a super popular movie. There are occasionally different edits for different markets (alternate endings etc.) But basically it's done. The movie that is shown on release is the movie you watch 20 years later. So you can easily apportion credit to the actors, writers, etc. This isn't the case for software. It continually evolves. You made the initial design, but 64 other developers have worked on it since. Who gets credit?
Maybe she hasn't watched the Oppenheimer movie yet :D
I am currently going through the book about Oppenheimer, the one they based the movie on (https://www.amazon.in/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-Oppenheimer/dp/B01N6T1M1C/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2RR969YD7D8JT&keywords=american+prometheus&qid=1690382654&sprefix=american+prometheus+%2Caps%2C251&sr=8-1). I am listening to via Audible and it really gives some fascinating insight into the troubled man's life, much more than the movie did.
Doesn't celluloid still have more resolution? See eg. the recent Oppenheimer release on 70mm film.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool"
- Some guy who showed up as an extra in the Oppenheimer movie, playing the bongo drums
The software indeed has to do what I do, which is understanding my environment and mentating solutions that are somehow appropriate for either fixing or alleviating any one of the uncountable challenges said environment faces. I cannot even describe what I am doing, only that relatively small parts of the end-result are encoded into symbols called code.
This reminds me of what Bohr said to Oppenheimer - in the movie - when some doubt arose around his mathematical ability: "Algebra is like sheet music. The important thing isn't 'can you read music', it's 'can you hear it'. Can you hear the music, Robert?"
I'm very much wondering if GPT can hear the music, but time will tell if and to what degree this even matters.
Judith Curry is interesting case-in-point; most science should not be conducted in such a manner as to associate it with a particular science; the cult of personality should by virtue of a preference for rationale treatment of evidence be avoided in favour of the facts. This includes a systematic treatment and discussion around uncertainty, something that she is criticised for abusing. It should be noted that she is a > prominent climatologist
precisely because she is a contrarian, i.e. it is not the case that she represents dissent from a prominent researcher. It is to be expected that she is prominent given that it is hard to find many scientists who agree with her thinking. Politically, she is one of the few people available to provide credibility to climate-denialism (even if "credible" does not apply within her own field).
I really want to engage with you on this, because there is an alarming trend in the alt-media to try and depict scientific communities as a cabal of politically minded sell-outs. But the reality is pretty far from this. It's not perfect; peer review needs to be more accessible, journals should be open-accessm, etc., but to depict it as a cult is deeply misrepresentative.
The source you referred to (https://reason.com/2023/08/09/this-scientist-used-to-spread-climate-change-alarmism-now-shes-trying-to-debunk-it) has all the hallmarks of this. It writes as though "establishment science" (which I would be interested in having the authors define) is a person you can speak to, and receive a single opinion. I've seen a number of these kind of "free speech" publications pop up recently, but from what I can see, they are really just contrarian outlets; they seem more interested in being "other" than actually pursuing a particular theme with any kind of rigour.
Part of the problem is of course science communication. The media is problematic in the UK (at least) because of its poor treatment of complex issues like Brexit, climate change, economics, etc). In general, the media tend to fail in communicating how science is conducted, what risk looks like, and how uncertainty is described. You can see this in cinema; science is portrayed as esoteric experts who defy the establishment in some good-wins-out triumph (see Oppenheimer). But, that's really, that's just good entertainment.
We know that computer models aren't perfect. No-one would take you seriously if you gave a modelling result without a description of the uncertainty and how it was derived. But they're also the best thing that we have besides "wait and see", where we walk without agency into whatever future awaits us.
Observational data can disagree with models without invalidating their conclusions; it depends upon the questions that you ask. A specific example; the nucleus is often modelled as a bunch of protons and neutrons moving around independently. We can answer some really interesting questions about why some atoms have very long half-lives using this model. But, if you want to know why a particular nucleus shows vibrational behaviour, the shell model can't help you. Despite this, the shell model is considered one of the most successful theories in physics.
"Truth is the First Casualty of War" - Quote Investigator
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It's interesting to me that many of the same people who do not trust the vaccine, also do not want the FDA to complete their review process of medications. Those are opposites! The 'Expert' is well and truly dead.
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We do NOT need scientific dissidents, we need everyone in a position of responsibility to be clear about the line between knowledge and belief. We need scientists to say "We don't know that". We need journalists who accept that answer and ask "How can we find out", instead of just finding a scientist who will answer an impossible question.
We need a better informed and more skeptical public. We should not accept something as a final answer just because it's interesting or satisfying. We need to be prepared to be unsatisfied.
For instance, we do not now and will never know how contagious the virus is to a naïve immune system. To know that we have to perform 'challenge trials'. It is unethical to perform a challenge trial without effective treatment, so we did not do any early in the pandemic. Now everyone is vaccinated or exposed, or must be considered to be exposed; so any evidence now would only answer questions about a post-pandemic world.
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Writing a serious article about a "lab leak" without clarifying what exactly you mean is irresponsible to the point of professional negligence. Lab Leak means many things: 'It walked out of the lab on someone's shoe', 'Secret Research', 'Illegal Research', 'Malicious Research', 'Modified Virus', 'Man-Made Virus', etc...
So a scientist says "I think it's likely that the virus came from the lab" - which do they mean? The audience is free to assume that the scientist supports their pet theory.
If a lab in China was doing anything nefarious, what would you actually do about it?
Consider that the human mind really loves conclusions. Consider that we look for motivations at a less-than-conscious level.
When people say "conspiracy theory", I hear "motivation theory", as in, I think this group has a motivation to cause this disaster.
So here's my motivation theory: Chinese officials are VERY sensitive to embarrassment. I think they are highly motivated to destroy any evidence that might embarrass them.
That includes the 'liquidation' of the wet market where viral traces of Sars-Cov-2 have been found. It might also include any research related to Sars-Cov-2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It's most likely that the virus was not modified by humans, but I do hold a place in my reasoning for the idea that it might have been.
I'm reminded of the Oppenheimer movie - people don't like it when you have a complex view of a moral question, and the question of the lab leak is heavily moralized by many people.
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It is clear to me that individual people can make masks work to prevent the spread of contagious disease; in much the same way as individual people can live off-grid. In both cases it's more work than most are willing to do, or it's in some way beyond our capabilities.
I saw a woman wearing a mask, but with it pulled below her nose - the 2020 Karen/Ken classic look. But I saw this in 2022, WELL after masking orders were over. Entirely of her own volition, she was wearing a mask, but without any care for actual function. Was it misunderstanding? Was it moral signaling? Was it habit? People are hard to understand.
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Absolutely, and I think the recent Oppenheimer movie was an excellent take on this exact subject. At some point, you don't get to throw up your hands and say, "technology is just neutral” and absolve yourself of any responsibility for what you’ve put into the world.
This essay really hits me wrong. Perhaps its because I am a human and not simply a "unit of production". Also the "personal playing to win strategy" immediately reminds me of the parody program "refuse to lose" from the film "Little Miss Sunshine".
I am a 58 year-old man with a family. Today I'm giving the eulogy at my Uncle's memorial. In the last weeks of his life I was one of his principal care givers in home hospice. I've been helping my daughter through one of the most challenging times of her life. My wife just broke her wrist and severely injured her back and had trauma surgery two days ago. The FBI keeps showing up at my door looking for an interview (my brother is a fugitive on the most wanted list). In my view, part of being a man is supporting those around you with strength and love. I haven't seen Barbie or Oppenheimer, I've had to temporarily set aside my FAA training for work. I've been too busy supporting my family during a challenging time. I'm at full capacity.
One thing I've refused to stop doing is working out - so I get up at 5:30 to make sure I can have the time to do so. This is part of my personal care routine that means the most for my mental health as well as my physical health.
Its entirely possible my personal strategy sucks. However I think this essay sucks.
Glad Oppenheimer didn't shy away from those aspects of his life. Help really humanize him, in both good and bad ways even if the relationship(s) weren't necessarily a vital part of history outside of "oh his wife was a communist before he met".
It's just interesting because even 2000's superhero movies did this. Society changes quickly when a trillion dollar corporation azures a studio I guess.
Like I said, the Nazi scientists were very capable. They just didn’t have any power or control. The movie Oppenheimer correctly points out that the Nazi politicians saw a lot of important ideas as “Jewish science” and didn’t take critical scientific innovations seriously, underfunding them in favor of more conventional innovations like “big powerful rocket.”
The Oppenheimer movie equivalent of 2123, but it's about someone in Gen Z, so their name is Brayden or something.
Remote work and async comms means that latency tends to be high. Latency issues can be overcome by not stopping to wait at each decision point.
For example, low latency this is ok: “do you want to go to dinner or a movie?” Movie. ”Do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer?” Oppenheimer. “Do you want to go at 6:00, 7:00, or 8:00?” 8:00.
Instead for high latency, this will cut down on a lot of dead time in back and forth: “Do you want to dinner or see a movie? If you want dinner do you prefer to go to Il Capricio (Italian) or Sushi Go 55? I can make reservations at 6, 6:30, or 7. If you’d rather see a movie, do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer? Barbie is at 6:15, 7:20, and 8:15. Oppenheimer is at 6:00, 7:00, and 8:00.” Let’s do Oppenheimer at 8
It’s more work up front and any unchosen paths are “wasted effort”, but for work there’s usually value in fully exploring the alternate paths anyway.
Depends on the movie, and it is not always smooth. Also, it leads to higher piracy in countries where cuts are made because people do want the raunchier scenes. Like Oppenheimer had a bunch of cuts in India but it is still doing well, but it is by no means guaranteed.
I took a PTO day to see Oppenheimer mid-week. Another colleague did the same. We both have young kids, so getting to the movies is a heavy lift. We live pretty close to each other and there is a theater about a mile from my house. We decided that we'd definitely do it again for the right movies.
I saw Oppenheimer at Alamo with movie-talkers and cell-users next to me, and they still put the entirety of the onus on the customer to report the bad actors. I don't know how I thought they'd do it, but I was sufficiently put off by the prospect of considering myself a Karen that I didn't (also the latent fear that the server would take my ticket, read it, and immediately turn to the people next to me and tell them I reported them)
Interesting enough, I think Oppenheimer needed slightly more sex. There's a part of the movie where he's called a womanizer, yet the movie shows him having two relations (both of them serious) plus an implied flirt with a third woman.
According to the biography the movie is based on [1] Oppenheimer "once had half a dozen lovers on the go". That is definitely not the impression I got from the movie.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/truth-oppenheimer-cillian-murphy-christopher-nolan/
This is why I specifically wrote about "spoiling the EXPERIENCE OF WATCHING Oppenheimer", not "spoiling the story".
A movie is so much more than just the story or story outline (which I do know as I've read the excellent "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb").
I really love to experience movies with as little before-hand information as possible — I don't want to read about that great moment where actor X enters the scene, I don't want to read about how they did that awesome camera work in that one scene, I don't want to read about that dialogue in that one scene where the whole audience in the cinema broke into spontaneous applause etc.
I want to experience these kinds of things myself, as uninformed as possible.
I was massively let down by Oppenheimer.
It’s 90% interpersonal/political drama (Including a bunch of unnecessary nudity thrown in for dramatic effect), a few token scenes with Albert Einstein, a 10 minute detonation with decent SFX, and a small fraction of real physics and engineering. If you’re actually interested in the Manhattan Project you’ll be way more inspired by a history channel documentary than anything in that movie.
> We thought Oppenheimer was the way to instill a love of physics to young people
The only person so far that I've seen publicly saying that is Sam Altman. Never crossed my mind that this could inspire people (albeit I haven't seen the movie). Same for the Turing movie, or the Hawking movie, none of them really made the work look that cool IMO.
> Except that it isn’t the end. All kinds of worrying things are buried in the story. At one point, in 1942, one of Oppenheimer’s Communist friends, Haakon Chevalier, suggests that Oppenheimer gets in touch with the Soviet Union about the bomb project through a British scientist (and Soviet asset) George Eltenton. Oppenheimer realises immediately that the suggestion is treasonous and refuses it. But he does not report the contact to Groves or anyone else for eight months. When he eventually does, he tries to cover up Chevalier’s role for four months.
They covered that in the movie (though they glossed over it).
I spent a fair amount of time during the film playing 'Spot Jack Quaid' in anticipation of Feynman being called out at some point. He is spotted early during the montage when Oppenheimer goes recruiting, and then during various scenes in the background, twice playing bongos (!), but only once is he called by name- Teller calls his name right before the Trinity test for not having goggles or a welding glass to look through, and he notes he is in a truck with a thick windshield that blocks the UV. I smiled so much when that little tidbit happens, as it is a story he prominently tells in his book 'Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman...'
He gives an incredible account of his time there in the lecture (and almost stand-up-comedy act) 'Los Alamos from Below' -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY-u1qyRM5w
So highly entertaining.
Yes, but the American views about specifically Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem different from most other countries, or at least from Japan. Outside the US it is quite common to view the bombings as war crimes, while this is uncommon in the US. This probably influenced how "Oppenheimer" handled the matter.
(A comparison would perhaps be the difference between a Russian and a Polish film about the Sowjet invasion of Poland. The history here is viewed very differently in the Russian/Polish public.)
The movie was about the man, not the bomb, which is why it focused primarily on a man, and not a bomb. The actual testing of the bomb was a small part of the movie and the real deployments of it were but a couple sentences. The movie Oppenheimer was never a movie about Hiroshima and while I think there needs to be more coverage in general about our impact on Japan by dropping those bombs, I think giving the movie Oppenheimer shit about it isn't reasonable just because the man worked on it. It covered everything from the his view point, and what he personally lived. He read about the bombs being used the same as everyone else, and it wouldn't have fit the movie to suddenly jump to Japan to show the impact of his work. It did however try to visualize the impact and eventual realization of what he had played a part in, in the visuals at the compound when he's giving the speech to the fanatical coworkers stomping their feet (which was very Aronofsky like imo)
> During World War II, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. appoints physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer and a team of scientists spend years developing and designing the atomic bomb. Their work comes to fruition on July 16, 1945, as they witness the world's first nuclear explosion, forever changing the course of history.
Literally from the description of the movie.
It promised work of Oppenheimer and team of scientists working on the Manhattan project. Instead it’s a shitty avengers rip off where Oppenheimer assembles team of scientists without any substance and literally no focus on Manhattan project.
I expected to see at least the Imitation Game level movie, not subpar plot focused on sex and politics.
A movie about Oppenheimer should’ve at least shown what haunted him and weight of his decisions, not one minute (!) of Oppenheimer watching some background video showing surprised face like on this video.
https://youtu.be/6pc0u-iqIDw
>This is what Oppenheimer should’ve been about
The movie called "Oppenheimer" is mainly about Oppenheimer (shocking, right?), it's not about "the bomb", otherwise it would have been called "Trinity" or "Manhattan" or something.
If you want to see a movie about "the bomb" don't watch Oppenheimer.
Yes, although they touched on the impact of the bomb on Japanese civilians a little, they didn't really do it justice, and it's a shame because I think it would have really provided an important insight on why Oppenheimer's views changed over time.
The movie lacked a cohesive story anyway, so that would have added some meaning.
A movie about Oppenheimer's life should be about... the immediate fallout of the bomb on the Japanese population?
The movie was based off a book, which was about Oppenheimer hence the title.
I thought it was amazing, sure some parts were a bit long.
Makes sense if the movie Hiroshima is more focused on Hiroshima than Oppenheimer.
> Andrej Karpathy, another OpenAI employee [...] “My hope going into Oppenheimer was that it would be a kind of true story ‘Avengers of Science,’” he said in a tweet. “It's still a good movie with lots of gems but the focus was elsewhere.”
These are the type of people building and running OpenAI? We're in a fun ride, seems they're more out of touch than I could have imagined.
August 6, but more importantly the last few weeks there has been a flurry of articles about the Manhattan Project and the a-bomb, probably due to the release of the Oppenheimer movie.
I thought this to myself as well after seeing Oppenheimer. As someone else has mentioned, it was shown in Fat Man, Little Boy. Each movie had different things that were or were not shown. FMLB didn't have the football field. There's only so much you can put into a 3 hour film where at least 7/8ths are in focus.
I mean not that many films that I really want to watch come out per year, so if Oppenheimer is 3hs instead of 2hs or whatever then let it be; I'd rather spend one more hour at the theater and watch the movie knowing the director didn't need to cut an hour off the film.
(Although I do have to say Oppenheimer got somewhat tedious in certain parts)
> (Wait a minute, Oppenheimer is three hours long? Sorry, ChrisN, but that's one's getting streamed in my living room, too.)
That's a smart decision. Oppenheimer was a good movie (I give it a B+), though very long, and the director (or editor?) gives the audience very few moments to take a breather. I'd have enjoyed it more if I knew I could pause to take a leak or fast forward through the boring part about the affair.
My regular reminder that 2001: A Space Odyssey was only 2h 23m, and that movie had an intermission at the cinema. Tess of the d'Urbervilles? 18 minutes longer than M:I, and that one had an intermission, too. Ghandi had an intermission, but $DEITY, no human bladder can hold that much so it was kind of required.
Your Marvel movie is approaching 3 hours, and no intermission? Fuck that, I'll watch it at home while your CEO whines that no one goes to the movies anymore.
(Wait a minute, Oppenheimer is three hours long? Sorry, ChrisN, but that's one's getting streamed in my living room, too.)
Oppenheimer is not an action flick. :)
Movies with a compelling story keep your attention, but with action, your brain can only take so much stimulation. Unless it has a really compelling story, your mind will wander.
> I think that has to do with excessively long movies
Anecdotal experience but we (n=2) didn't have the urge to pull out our phones on Oppenheimer (180 minutes).
It also missed that Oppenheimer quoted the Gita but the Hollywood film did not depict it factually.
What Oppenheimer actually said about the Gita in an interview
https://twitter.com/pun_fact/status/1680803902524989440
How Hollywood depicted it:
https://twitter.com/Nikhilsingh21_/status/1682685435687075840
Its not that its offensive. But more so its not factual because he didn't do it over a mating conversation. But in a serious video.
Nolan not using CGI is like Tom Cruise doing Mission: Impossible stunts himself. These affirmations are ambiguous and misleading.
In the case of Oppenheimer (and other Nolan movies) they use a lot of practical effects but they are eventually digitally composited, color corrected and edited.
> The director was not attempting to claim that there was no CGI in Oppenheimer at all. He was instead stating that there are no shots in the movie that were entirely created using visual effects.
see https://screenrant.com/how-much-oppenheimer-real-cgi/
>Does the Oppenheimer movie include a lot of CGI? >No. Director Christopher Nolan told Collider that Oppenheimer has "zero" CGI shots. This includes the bomb tests, which were recreated without CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery). "I think computer graphics, they're very versatile, they can do all kinds of things, but they tend to feel a bit safe," said Nolan. "That's why they're difficult to use in horror movies. Animation tends to feel a little safe for the audience. The Trinity Test, ultimately, but also these early imaginings of Oppenheimer visualizing the Quantum Realm, they had to be threatening in some way. They had to have the bite of real-world imagery. The Trinity Test, for those who were there, was the most beautiful and terrifying thing simultaneously, and that's where we were headed with this film." Last year, Top Gun: Maverick took a similar approach and it paid off (although a limited amount of CGI was used in the Tom Cruise blockbuster).
This can't be. I had read the statement but the final shot where he and Einstein talked near the pond, where we see the visions inside Oppenheimer's mind, had to have been CGI. Also, though I am not sure how they filmed the Trinity test practically, it had to be a smaller explosion made to look bigger, so it had to have required some compositing work. The rest of the movie did not really have all that much in terms of VFX since almost every other was scene was dialogue heavy and was mostly shot inside closed spaces. The scenes where Oppenheimer was giving a speech and was experiencing visions of an explosion also could have been done 100% practically.
This is not a slight on the movie or on Nolan, cause it would have been much easier for him to do the trinity test or the scene of Oppenheimer dreaming about atoms via CG (which I recently read was done by using an aquarium and glass balls). It was just Nolan doing his best to market his movie, considering the fact the cast nor his writers were available to market the movie.
As a side note, I want to add that I felt the scene with the Trinity test was fantastic, especially the fact that the hall went dead silent for a few seconds,but the actual shot of the mushroom cloud paled in comparison to the actual footage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dfK9G7UDok&ab_channel=atomcentral
https://youtu.be/hyiXpECM7eg?t=224
This I felt that whenever we saw the actors reacting to the explosion, they are being bathed by the light from the explosion, but seeing the actual explosion itself did not live up to how Oppenheimer himself said that it looked like a thousand suns shining in the sky at once. But with the excellent music, acting, writing, direction, shot composition etc. it is easy to forgive.
I didn't really get that sense from the film. At one point, Teller even says (paraphrased) to Oppenheimer, "You're not a scientist anymore, you're a politician now." He is portrayed as a manager, not a lone genius.
> Right now the film that is out in the multiplex that people are going crazy for is literally a toy commercial.
They're making toys for Oppenheimer?
It is pretty amazing to see the smart ideas they came up with in quick succession.
Although setting fire to a forest by mistake, and having to escape in their protection tank is a bit of an oversight.
I’m late to book tickets to see Oppenheimer in IMAX 70mm film, although hopefully they’ll had more shows.
We had a version (not in USA) of an Oppenheimer movie.
They really, really played up the angle: The entire atmosphere might ignite.
The last scene was at the test site, and the last few seconds were just all white in the frame.
I suppose in part this saved on production cost.
For years I was left wondering: "Did the entire atmosphere burned up?"
30 theaters showing "Oppenheimer" in Imax-70mm film
UNITED STATES
Tempe, Ariz. Harkins Arizona Mills 25 & IMAX
San Francisco AMC Metreon 16 & IMAX
Universal City, Calif. Universal Cinema AMC at CityWalk Hollywood & IMAX
Hollywood TCL Chinese Theater IMAX
Ontario, Calif. Regal Edwards Ontario Palace & IMAX
Irvine, Calif. Regal Irvine Spectrum 21 + IMAX
Sacramento Esquire IMAX
Dublin, Calif. Regal Hacienda Crossings & IMAX
Fort Lauderdale, Fla. AutoNation IMAX, Museum of Discovery & Science
Buford, Ga. Regal Mall of Georgia & IMAX
Indianapolis IMAX Theatre at Indiana State Museum
Detroit Chrysler IMAX Dome Theatre, Michigan Science Center
Grand Rapids, Mich. Celebration! Cinema Grand Rapids North & IMAX
New York AMC Lincoln Square 13 & IMAX
King of Prussia, Pa. Regal UA King of Prussia & IMAX
Providence, R.I. Providence Place Cinemas 16 and IMAX
San Antonio AMC Rivercenter 11 & IMAX
Dallas Cinemark 17 & IMAX
Nashville Regal Opry Mills & IMAX
CANADA
Calgary, Alberta Scotiabank Chinook & IMAX
Edmonton, Alberta Scotiabank Edmonton & IMAX
Langley, British Columbia Cineplex Cinemas Langley & IMAX
Mississauga, Ontario Cineplex Cinemas Mississauga & IMAX
Woodbridge, Ontario Cineplex Cinemas Vaughan & IMAX
Regina, Saskatchewan Kramer IMAX, Saskatchewan Science Centre
UNITED KINGDOM
London BFI IMAX, British Film Institute
London The Ronson Theatre at the Science Museum
Manchester, U.K. Vue Manchester IMAX & The Printworks
AUSTRALIA
Melbourne IMAX, Melbourne Museum
CZECH REPUBLIC
Prague IMAX Theatre, Palac Flora
The kids are just as tired as many of the adults of watching super hero x version y movies with a smattering of Tom Cruise action version z. I am hopeful that Oppenheimer will be interesting …
The feigned move toward AI generated content would likely make things worse, providing bizarre fake Tom Cruise scripts generated from old real Tom Cruise scripts.
Noteworthy point:
> Meanwhile, 70 mm IMAX film releases like Oppenheimer don't come often, and when they do, only 30 theaters in the world can support them, CNBC reported, and not necessarily all of them will (Tenet's 70 mm release, for example, was limited to 11 theaters due to pandemic restrictions, CNBC said). That makes any need for upgrades and overhauls less urgent.
> the public supports of the strike amounts to ... wanting new TV shows and movies
Nobody in my social circle has taken any notice of it, because movies and TV has become so bad that none of us watch them anymore. Dune was the last Hollywood movie I watched, Oppenheimer and the next Dune are the only movies I’m looking forward to watching. There’s nothing on TV that I watch. I’m somewhat looking forward to the 3 Body Problem adaptation, but I’m expecting it will be bad.
As far as I’m concerned they can stay on strike forever. Let somebody who can do a better job replace them.
I think that IMAX has really struggled with branding confusion as the majority of "IMAX" branded screens are slightly larger regular screens and not the true experience that IMAX can be. There's only a few dozen IMAX 15-perf 70mm film theatres in 1.43 aspect ratio worldwide, some more digital 4K IMAX multi-laser in 1.43 which are also quite good, and then the vast majority of other "IMAX" screens are digital IMAX Xenon which is usually just a slightly bigger screen than a traditional theatre (but still not the 1.43 ratio the filmmaker intended).
I think IMAX Xenon as well as general confusion about which systems are in use at which theatres and which movies are filmed in which format has led to a ton of frustration with the brand, even though when everything is just right they can produce some really incredible experiences.
Then even for Oppenheimer there is a lot of technical troubles going on for the film theatres... The top of /r/imax has stories of people who flew cross country to see it in the best format they could and then had the projector bonk out 20 minutes in.
I think that, post-COVID, a lot of people have realized that a good home video theatre is very affordable, lots of movies are going to streaming either direct or very quickly, and that modern 4K HDR OLED TVs can be absolutely gorgeous. I don't have a lot of motivation to go to a standard theatre screening these days, but IMAX is an experience you can't get at home though so I hope it stays around.
>he's an analog snob and believes the only legitimate place to enjoy his analog tech films is in a theater
He is like that in interviews, but it's worth noting that a lot of care is put into making great digital versions of his movies too. I'm not familiar with how involved he is in that process, but I would hazard a guess he's pretty involved.
The Oppenheimer site mentions this:
The Digital Cinema presentation of OPPENHEIMER has been created from 8k scans of the photochemically color-graded film elements, scaled to 4K, fine-tuned in the digital realm to maximize the color and contrast attributes of digital projectors, and dust-busted to achieve the cleanest and most stable image presentation possible. The film was finished in 4k for the highest digital resolution currently available.
https://www.oppenheimermovie.com/tickets/formats/
That may be the best answer (it was a serious question). The explosion in the film is layered small-scale petrol explosions [1], but more visible detail may help sell it as bigger.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-trinity-test-no-cgi-2023-7?op=1
https://archive.ph/EzQsC
>Only 19 theaters in the United States, and 30 worldwide, are showing the ambitious biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, using a version of the film in its most epic form.
If anyone currently in Hamburg, Germany plans to watch this movie, the movie theater "Savoy" (seems to be independent - no chain) offers the Oppenheimer movie in original English language (no dubs/subs) in the original 70mm version.
I think I'm gonna attend next week.
Edit: I'm seeing the list above which claims there are no German cinemas who have the original 70mm film. However this[0] German cinema in Hamburg clearly claims to have original 70mm version ("OV"). Not sure if I either misunderstand something, the list is incorrect, or if the cinema is lying?
[0] https://savoy.premiumkino.de/vorstellung/oppenheimer/20230724/1315/H5M_zyWdj8CzYXtKC9yerjuGy8doKk8ntW8bmupFnJg~
It feels like there is some ongoing sophisticated guerrilla marketing campaign to promote these movies. YouTube mysteriously promotes some video about how Oppenheimer was a great physicist, Columns are written about what the Barbie movie has to do with Feminism, and even on Hacker News there are multiple links per day about these two movies. Something is going on here.
> Atomic bomb
Mostly foreign Jewish scientists who were neither taught nor started their research in the USA and came because of the situation in Europe. Even Oppenheimer had to go do his PhD in Germany.
> Hollywood
Both the camera, the first films and the foundation of filming come from the Lumieres and their company based in France and the films they made around the world.
> internet
Packet switching is from Batman in the UK. HTML was from a British engineer in Switzerland.
Even the rocket you sent to the moon was built by a German.
Yep. That's why in the movie, Bohr (if I'm not mistaken) saw Oppenheimer going to teach quantum physics in US to be... funny.
It's not a biography of Oppenheimer, it's a history of the making of the atomic bomb. Unsurprisingly, the parts of the book that deal with Oppenheimer - only a fraction of the book - are concerned with his involvement in the making of the atomic bomb. It does not mention the apple incident.
By contrast, the biography the movie is based on treats the apple incident at some length.
Both books are superb, in my opinion, and deserve their Pulitzers.
Google trends would disagree with you there [0].
Anecdotally, I've only ever heard the name Fermi in the phrase Fermi Paradox. Oppenheimer I know much more about, and I only know there's a movie about him because it's all over HN this month.
I'm sure that the red scare did tarnish his name for decades, but it looks to me like those decades had ended by 2004 when Google's trends pick up.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F09qxy,%2Fm%2F02sdx&hl=en
The Times review says this attempted murder is Oppenheimer's first significant act in the film.
Figured this might be interesting in light of the Oppenheimer movie. This book documents Oliphant's role in introducing Oppenheimer to the atomic bomb. Also a cracking story about two great scientists and their foundational work on radar, penicillin and the atomic bomb..
This month, there were Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan and Asteroid City by Wes Anderson.
It does show that HN is a website for techies and not for cinema enthusiasts; there's good stuff out there, but you won't get to it if you only scratch the surface.
To be fair, in most cases only cinema enthusiasts really need to concern themselves with what the director's ideal presentation is. The overwhelming majority of people probably couldn't even recount to you which movies they've seen in which formats.
For someone (like yourself) who is aware of and interested in the differences in presentational formats, it does suck that formats like IMAX 1570 have very few locations around the world (heck, that's even true of IMAX GT). But it wouldn't be any better for you if those formats just didn't exist at all!
Perhaps one could argue that, because the IMAX GT exists, Christopher Nolan is making filmmaking decisions that compromise how the film will end up looking on more traditional (e.g. 2.39:1) presentational formats. Or in other words, one might argue "Oppenheimer would look better on 2.39:1 if Nolan had shot it specifically for 2.39:1." But I tend to think that Nolan probably realizes that the vast majority of people won't see it in IMAX, and I doubt the compromises are significant.
Doesn’t matter.
Nolan’s vision specifically accounts for film. He’s been very vocal that the most accurate way to view the movie as he envisioned it is via 70mm IMAX.
“For Nolan, the “best possible experience” to view “Oppenheimer” in theaters is the IMAX 70mm film presentations.” [0]
I think I’ll watch it as the director intended it to be watched.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/oppenheimer-christopher-nolan-0f8c1fdc4a358decee6105cac91a90ae
Oppenheimer has had his own movie (and opera and TV series and a ton of books as others here have pointed out).
The earlier Hollywood treatment was "Fat Man and Little Boy" with Paul Newman. It's rentable on Amazon Prime. It's not a great movie despite the talented cast and good photography. I expect Nolan to make a better movie, but FM&LB does a decent job telling the story of the relationship of Groves and Oppenheimer and some of Oppie's back story.
I heard recently (on Lex Fridman's podcast with Marc Andreessen) that Oppenheimer was called a "cry-baby scientist" by President Truman, and that his groveling campaign was considered by many to be self-aggrandizing, albeit in a self-deprecating way.
Apparently, his involvement was less significant than many others in the Manhattan Project, but his name became one of the most well-known due to his public outcries, and of course his iconic quote.
I haven't yet seen the movie and I'm looking forward to it; I wonder how much of this is portrayed.
Funny enough, I'm planning a double feature with Oppenheimer and the Barbie movie. Maintaining a healthy relationship involves tradeoffs.
don't forget to insist on seeing Oppenheimer in a cinema with subtitles, if you plan on seeing it; it's a bit harder to find, but hopefully will send a message
Why does he need to market. I know about this movie because of all of the "not being marketed" news posts. Media is giving them a free marketing coupon it seem. He's playing it well.
That said I rarely see movie marketing anymore. Only movies I know are out are barbie and Oppenheimer due to the meme and my friend insisting we go to both.
I just don't see ads much anymore.
I agree. It doesn't make Nolan look good. But he's probably just trying to generate publicity.
I suspect that facebook's contribution to Myanmar was more as a place of organization and evidence of opponents, than the feeds somehow generated most of the zeitgeist to slaughter. It kinda ignores the other causes of zeitgeist/organization and absolves the villains of the affair in doing so. But the idea latched on to some journalist.
The Soviet Union had a semi/automated system for firing if Moscow got blown up before making a decision.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
They're is an air of vanity to the media and researchers who compare AI to nukes. It's sorta like Nolan making a film about Oppenheimer, in the hope to associate with them.
As far as the "meme" of the two movies being together, I think it's the "battle of the sexes" turned on its head. Barbie looks feminine and colorful, full of fantasy, and Oppenheimer looks cold and stark, with the masculine and realist elements of wartime - watching both the movies together would be a blissful whiplash between extremes. It's produced a lot of funny content including that fake trailer that implies Barbie constructed Los Alamos and created the weapon, which made me laugh my head off. People just want to be silly and enjoy something.
The Barbie movie had one of the best marketing campaigns I have ever seen dating back to the initial announcements. But I think they lost the plot with this contrived connection to Oppenheimer. It feels forced and kind of turns me off to both movies. I try to be a good sport and enjoy the whole marketing production for these kind of cultural events (meaning the Barbie movie), but then they come in hot with this absurd upsell and it just rubs me wrong.
I'm not doing a "double feature", but I am seeing both opening weekend, which is something I haven't done in a long time.
My local film society got a 35mm print of Oppenheimer, which I have tickets to see opening night. Barbie on the other hand I'm happy seeing on a digital screen closer to home.
As a concept I don’t think it’s any sillier than a “LEGO movie,” which was a huge hit with multiple sequels.
It’s all about execution, and the Barbie movie has a promising set of creative people involved.
By the same token, would as many people be excited about an Oppenheimer bio if it wasn’t Chris Nolan in the directors chair? Doubtful.
I do this too. I watch everything with subtitles now. It is not your fault. This is some new hollywood mantra. They have become harder to hear and harder to see. Some new Christopher Nolan effect. I forget what it is. Anyways, I would love to watch the new Oppenheimer movie in a theater but I am not sure, it is hard to see and hear and understand dialogues without subtitles nowadays.
People outside the bubble aren't declaring AI to be literally as dangerous as nuclear weapons and I think anyone that thinks this with any gravity needs to take a very deep time out to step out of the bubble, calm down and think about their thought processes. The "AI is as dangerous as nuclear weapons" petition from the tech scene was ridiculous and frankly kind of embarrassing.
I wrote up my thoughts about it last month https://kyledrake.com/writings/ai
Christopher Nolan just finished a movie profile of J Robert Oppenheimer, has presumably spent a lot of time thinking about nuclear weapons, and has similar lesser-concerns about AI https://www.wired.com/story/christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-ai-apocalypse/
It's standard practice for me to watch films w/ subtitles as the sound (as the article suggests) is all F-up.
I take my films seriously and my Mrs just bought ticket to 'Oppenheimer'. First question out of my mouth was "Is it in IMAX"? No, but it was on sale! Ugh. I re-iterated that Nolan produces movies for IMAX [0] with very good sound systems. Apparently only 30 theaters WORLDWIDE [1] are capable of showing that film in the correct format! Fingers crossed, it will be somewhat acceptable.
Inevitable with all of Nolan's films, I re-watch them at home with subtitles because I need to know wtf is going on. (Tenet was next to impossible without them).
[0] "Christopher Nolan explains best ways to watch a movie, which theater seats to pick" https://www.mywabashvalley.com/news/national-news/christopher-nolan-explains-best-ways-to-watch-a-movie-which-theater-seats-to-pick/
[1] "Oppenheimer: IMAX 70mm Screening at Only 30 Theaters Worldwide" https://ymcinema.com/2023/06/05/oppenheimer-imax-70mm-screening-at-only-30-theaters-worldwide/
I have to wonder about a device that won't allow you to watch a 2-hour movie without running out of battery and having to plug it in. I guess Oppenheimer is a no-go.
> As two major movies about the atomic era hit screens
These 2 movies would be "Oppenheimer" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15398776/ and "Asteroid City" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14230388/
AFAIK, only the first is directly about the Atomic Bomb.
Slightly off-topic, but the upcoming Oppenheimer movie from Christopher Nolan is looking to be a masterpiece. Can’t wait for it.
How much the better tech matters is something that I find is film dependent.
A big, splashy, large-scale action film? Yeah, it makes a difference to me. OTOH even apparently "thinky" films like the upcoming OPPENHEIMER are likely better in a more immersive situation.
But a smaller film like THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN? Not a factor. (But this also means I don't think you lose much watching it at home if you have a decent screen.)
Is this an attempt at viral marketing for the new Oppenheimer movie?
This and Oppenheimer are the only two movies I'm excited for this year.
Yeah, I was surprised the article only mentioned this in a quick breath. Of course it's because of the movie! The DoE doesn't want the movie to come out, painting the AEC as these persecutors and bad guys, and then the public crying to the DoE to clear Oppenheimer's name.
Now the DoE can say... "yeah, we already took care of that, nothing to see here". It seems completely transparent to me.
There's an upcoming movie about Oppenheimer with an A-list cast and Christopher Nolan directing. I wonder if this is to get ahead the incident coming into the public consciousness.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheimer_(film)
I quite enjoy the type of movie they are referencing and have almost never watched a super hero movie but The Fabelmans looks like a total bore. That is even with wanting to see Julia Butters acting evolve.
We will see with Nolan's Oppenheimer next year.
This is all over dramatized. Butters will probably be the biggest actor in the world in 10 years making "serious" dramas.
Tarantino has even talked about how this goes in cycles and we have been going through a boring time like in the late 50s.
'The Act of Killing' is arguably the most forward-thinking documentary of the last 20 years. Heavy going, but unflinching.
That both Erol Morris and Werner Herzog executive produced after Oppenheimer made it should tell you how formally important it is.
It's a great scene (even though it's highly fictionalized), and it's a shame that the film itself is so mediocre. In particular, Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves were horribly miscast. Sam Waterston in the Oppenheimer (1980) miniseries was much more true to life.