Today’s film criticism just isn’t what it used to be. The number of people who can call themselves “critics” has watered down the field to sheer nothingness.
That’s why I absolutely love this movement of filmmakers chiming in with their own reviews on current cinema. It’s been happening more and more lately. Case in point, Oliver Stone raving about “Oppenheimer.”
Saturday, I sat through 3 hours of “Oppenheimer”, gripped by Chris Nolan’s narrative. His screenplay is layered & fascinating. Familiar with the book by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin, I once turned the project down because I couldn’t find my way to its essence. Nolan has found it.
His direction is mind-boggling & eye-popping as he takes reams of incident and cycles it into an exciting torrent of action inside all the talk. Each actor is a surprise to me, especially Cillian Murphy, whose exaggerated eyes here feel normal playing a genius like
“Oppenheimer” is a classic, which I never believed could be made in this climate. Bravo. […] Aside from the points mentioned in my previous post, the movie packs in the essence of the tragedy of , a man historically in the middle of an impossible situation, though one, as Nolan shows, partly of his own making.”
This “Oppenheimer” is quite something. It’s even converted Nolan haters into full-blown fans of his latest picture. It’s also an astounding achievement when you take into consideration how formally bold and un-mainstream the whole thing is.
As a reader succinctly pointed out, Stone praising “Oppenheimer” makes sense in the context that Nolan’s film does owe a lot to Stone’s own “Nixon” and, especially, “JFK” in the way a historical event is told, via black and white, editing trickery and multiple storylines.
While James L. Brooks teased last year that "we'll soon be seeing" Jack Nicholson, 89, act again, and that he was "reading scripts," that idea has now been shut down by his close friend Michael Douglas, 82.