**Double Feature** Barbenheimer!

Movie: Barbie and Oppenheimer

Running Times: 1:54 (yay!) and 3:00 (ugh!)

Nominated for:   Oppie - Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Costumes, Hair and Makeup, Sound, Production Design, Original Score

                            Barbie - Best Picture, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Costume Design, Production Design, 2 Original Songs

How I watched: AMC, Oppenheimer on 70mm!

When it had me: The hype was strong

When it lost me: I waned at the end of Oppenheimer

What systems does it challenge: Patriarchy, Toxic Masculinity, Nuclear War

I'm going to try to review these together because we Barbenheimered. Both films came out on my child's 18th birthday and this is how they wanted to spend the day. Imagine that! I knocked out 20 nominations on one day back in July!

Barbie. I didn't want to see this movie because of my complicated internal relationship with misogyny. Barbie is stupid and reductive of women and pink is pretty much an insult and no way you'll catch me dead near that. VERY Gen X of me. But of course, this movie is not what anyone expected and what everyone needed and an absolute delight.

Greta Gerwig treats us to sunny comedy that looks with clear eyes at the perils of being a real woman when everyone expects you to be a beautiful object. She gives us kindness for men who are not encouraged to have their own identities and complex feelings. She used all of the world's pink paint! She literally made me laugh and cry and care like Nicole Kidman said I would. I want it to win so many things!

Now Ken is nominated but not Barbie and not the director and people are being so funny about how wrong that is and I love it. And yet, I also think I prefer Ryan Gosling's performance to Margot Robbie's. And maybe because to someone from my generation it is more impressive to see a man participate in a feminist work than it is a woman which is still my programmed inner patriarchy setting women up for higher standards. Greta Gerwig! Come save me from myself!

The director category always feels like a let down because we have 10 great films but only five great directors. Greta's vision and commitment to the world of this film is so hard core and detailed; it's every bit as masterful as Yorgos Lanthimos. Personally, I'd probably replace Yorgos with Greta in that category because Poor Things never fully formed as a complete thesis for me whereas Barbie did. But I know I'd rightfully get lots of arguments on that.

When Christopher Nolan took over, he wowed us with sound. The sound design is absolute fire and needs all the awards. The score, too is part of that soundscape that really took charge of the world. There is a scene where Oppenheimer faces the gravity of what he has done and the sound from this scene is foreshadowed in earlier elements of the film. It is a big, powerful, poignant moment that I continue to think about with frequency. It left a mark.

This movie projected on 70mm was so incredibly beautiful! Soft and delicious and deep and intense! Cillian Murphy's face was haunted and vulnerable and moving.

I've heard arguments that there should have been more time given to the victims of Oppenheimer's bomb but I don't see how that fit into this film. Let's have another movie about that. I've also heard that it is wrong to devote 3 hours to the white guy that invented new methods of genocide but maybe we should see how these decisions get made and how best intentions get away from you. Maybe it can help us make difficult decisions in our own lives, though most of us won't be contemplating world-ending technologies.

This movie was powerful AND it was too long. And it ended, like Killers of the Flower Moon, with a court scene. In this case the trial felt so drawn out. I felt as if I had already gotten the big moments out of the film and now I was sitting through tedium. If only Thelma Schoonmaker could have come over and tightened this up by about 22 minutes! If not for this slightly belabored ending, I would call Oppenheimer the inarguable BEST FILM of the year. Editing is important, Nolan! At least to me.

What an absurdly great day at the movies! Such different films but both powerful and cinematic and entertaining. And to be out with a bunch of weirdos dressed in pink and black and all excited for a cinematic event was more fun than I've had at the movies in a very long time.