An excellent rebuttal, to which I can’t say much. But I’ll try.
Surely there’s some form of art that’s wildly popular among your social circle, but yet in your opinion is so flawed you can’t seem to understand how people can look past said flaws.
Jumping back in here. I haven’t followed all of this thread, but, two things:
To see it in 70/15 IMAX here in Northern California, I booked the wife and me at Sacramento on Sunday night, 7pm. It’ll be a 10 hour affair: 2h there (from San Francisco), dinner, a 3h movie, then 2h back. This allows plenty of time for driving, parking, and dinner. 10 hours! We’re due back home at 11:30pm. Way past our bedtime.
And for those who lament only the many killed with the bomb drops, you’re categorically dismissing the many thousands of Marines and soldiers who would have died otherwise. The responsibility for those Japanese deaths lies not with Truman and Oppenheimer, but with Japanese leadership who refused to surrender a war they were guaranteed to lose. And it’s very easy for you to think so here today, 80 years later, when it’s not your brothers being shipped off to fight that war. Or yourselves.
If it had to be decided again under the same conditions, I’d drop those bombs in a heartbeat. It’s sad that they died, but it’s good that others did not need to die.
Wow. Driving two hours each way to see the movie in IMAX is a major commitment.
Is watching it (or any movie, I suppose) on IMAX worth the upgrade? The closest IMAX theater to me is about an hour away and while I plan on seeing this movie I’m not convinced that driving an hour each way vs. driving 10 minutes each way is worth it.
I honestly don’t think so. The film is visually interesting but I didn’t see anything that warrants going out of your way. If anything, I’d expected more bang for my buck (pun intended). I do understand that the effects are practical (as opposed to CGI) and they work very well, but I didn’t find them spectacular.
If it’s one of the 19 theaters in the US showing it in 70mm IMAX, I’d definitely say it’d worth it. It’s such a rare format and is the highest quality image you can possibly have. I know of people who flew to New York to see it at Lincoln Square! (The biggest screen in the country.)
Assuming the movie gets only one Oscar nomination for a supporting role, who should it go to? I say David Krumholtz as Izzy Rabi. He added so much to the movie and to me was what is meant as Best Supporting Actor. I suspect though that if there is only one Supporting nomination it’ll go to RDJ.
I’ll look for David Krumholtz’s performance.
I should’ve explained about the 2h drive, that my wife has a favorite restaurant there, so we’ll make it a long date.
Happy wife…, and all that.
That’s a better explanation. I find it impossible to believe that the nearest 70MM/IMAX screen to San Francisco is in Sacramento, so there has to be a secondary agenda.
The closest 70mm IMAX to San Francisco is… in San Francisco:
Did my ears deceive me or did someone at the inquiry board refer to Gen. Leslie Groves as “Jim” as he was leaving?
I read a lot of reviews–NYT, Ebert, and others–and was impressed by how much critics raved over Oppenheimer. It really was superb, one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long, long time. Anyone anticipating a biopic or a docudrama is in for a surprise, as it’s neither. In fact, while it’s about Oppenheimer, it isn’t just about Oppenheimer.
One mark of a powerful movie is that you don’t feel like discussing it when you walk out of the theater. That was the case with my friend and me, and my daughter told me she read reviews that said that’s a common experience.
I’d like to see it again, but I have to let the first viewing sit for awhile before I do that.
When that happens to me, I generally try to learn what I’m missing instead of assuming that I’m the only savvy one and everyone else in my social circle is a poseur and easily duped. In the case of Oppenheimer, I’d also have to assume that the NYT and Ebert critics were pretentious fools.
I genuinely think it was the best movie I’ve seen in a very long time and highly recommend it.
I didn’t catch that, but I read that he didn’t like the name Leslie and instead went by “Dick” (his middle name being Richard). Is it possible that’s what was said?
As for me, I was underwhelmed by the film. Not that it was bad at all, but I think I’m much more interested in the story of the technology than I am in Oppenheimer personally. I was hoping for some slow motion, sub-atomic effects demonstrating the sequence of events when a nuclear weapon is detonated.
And there’s also Dublin, but seats sucked at that location. I also did not want to park my Jeep at night in SF. So Sacto it is.
Ah OK - “Dick” makes more sense. I didn’t realize until today his middle name was Richard.
Just got back from the theater. Some moderately coherent thoughts:
GREAT movie. I’d forgotten how powerful film can be.
I see 5 Oscar nods, minimum: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (several choices here), Sound, Sound Editing and a possible slew of Technical awards.
Could have been a touch tighter. 20 minutes could have been edited out without diluting the impact a whit.
Some great turns by other supporting actors. Nolan got peak performances out of everybody.
It doesn’t need IMAX. It worked perfectly well in the average theater. Having beer delivered to our seats helped.
Nolan is fanatical about the 15-perf 70mm film IMAX format and not a big fan of digital IMAX. But this article helps in understanding why film IMAX theaters are becoming scarce. That absolutely gigantic reel in the middle of the picture is the film print of Oppenheimer, containing 11.3 miles of laterally imaged 70mm film. They must need a special heavy-duty forklift just to move the thing in and out of the building. Whereas with digital, all you have is a hard drive and some decoding electronics.
I guess there are two issues at play. The first is film vs. digital. Nolan clearly prefers analog techniques, and in the context of filmmaking I think that’s fine. To some extent, art thrives on the limits of the medium. So to shoot on film, and prefer practical over digital effects, results in a different movie. That’s entirely reasonable.
But as a watcher, I don’t care. The movie is the same either way, assuming equal projection quality. But that leads into the second thing: digital IMAX still doesn’t match 70mm IMAX in quality. The best digital IMAX theaters have a kind of doubled 4k system, which is better than normal 4x but not quite 8k. 70mm film, OTOH, is more like 12k (though with some extra film grain).
I’m not sure why IMAX has kinda dropped the ball here; it should be possible to build a true 12k projector. Maybe that would still rub Nolan the wrong way, being digital, but movie watchers shouldn’t notice the difference.
Both the original 2K digital IMAX projection systems and the new laser-based 4K systems use dual projectors. I would guess from this that there are limitations to what can be achieved with current technology, in terms of some combination of brightness, resolution, contrast, or other practical factors. If they could just build a projector with arbitrarily high resolution and brightness they wouldn’t be going to the complexity of dual projectors.
Right, but the question is why? Dual projectors makes it sound like they’re using semi off-the-shelf hardware that they hacked up to work a little better. They obviously have a great deal of in-house optical expertise, but maybe much less on the digital side. So they picked a solution that fits in their wheelhouse, while being unable to develop a true digital replacement.
There’s no serious technological reason they can’t develop a 12k system. It’s all well within the bounds of fairly conventional components. But it may be too much of a stretch for them to develop on their own and within a reasonable budget.