Burl reviews Oppenheimer! (2023)

 

Bang boom and blast, it’s Burl, with a report on a big summer movie that I’ve only just gotten around to seeing, as opposed to the big summer movies I managed to see but haven’t yet reviewed! (I hope to review them for you soon, but who knows!) This is one of the biggest of the summer pictures, or at least one of the longest, and I’m sure by now you’ve figured out that I mean Oppenheimer!

Ha ha, as a casual WWII buff, I already knew the broad strokes of the story, and was aware that, after spearheading the logistics of the bomb-building and after the war was won and his utility exhausted, Oppenheimer was subsumed by the Red Scare business of the 50s, mostly, it seems, just to get him to shut up, and also for revenge! All of this is told fairly plainly in the film – we jump around a bit in time, as is the norm in a Christopher Nolan picture, but it seemed pretty straightforward biopic material to me!

Oppenheimer is played by the veteran zombiefighter and Irish-man Cillian Murphy from 28 Days Later, looking rather gaunt and zombielike himself! Ha ha, with his suit and hat and skeletal physique, he seems a pretty good candidate if they ever want to make the William S. Burroughs story! (Unless Peter Weller wants to do it, ha ha - maybe they could share the role!) We meet the titular atom-juggler as he’s testifying before some kind of panel we don’t yet understand, but we will many times return to this small, unprepossessing room to see more of what we soon understand to be a kangaroo court!

We flash back to Oppenheimer’s time at Cambridge, where he nearly kills first his tutor and then, accidentally, Niels Bohr (played with appeal and a fine Danish accent by Kenneth Branagh from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) by means of a poisoned apple! Then we get into some science madness and relationship wackiness, including a few nude-lady scenes which elicited a gasp from the woman sitting next to me! (Ha ha, is a perfectly tasteful sex scene really so shocking? Have we really sunk so far back into puritanism?) We also get into Oppenheimer’s politics a little bit, which were refreshingly similar to my own! And of course then mustachioed army man Leslie Groves, played sternly by Matt Damon from The Martian, shows up to enlist Oppenheimer into the Manhattan Project, and the race to build the biggest bomb in all the world is on! (Ha ha, but they prefer to call it a "gadget!")

Of course once the Trinity test is successful and the bomb carted off by the army, and Oppenheimer has qualms about the morality of it all, there’s still the third hour left in the picture, which is mainly back to the kangaroo court I mentioned before! We learn that an administrator and would-be Cabinet member called Strauss, played very well by Robert Downey Jr. from Weird Science and Due Date, has orchestrated Oppenheimer’s downfall because one time Oppenheimer was a wisenheimer and Strauss has never forgiven him for it!

We meet many, many characters in the course of all this, most of them played by familiar faces! Oppenheimer’s tart-tongued wife Kitty is played by Emily Blunt from Edge of Tomorrow; his emotionally disturbed girlfriend Jean Tatlock is Florence Pugh from Midsommar; Roger Robb, the bulldog prosecutor in the disciplinary panel scenes is played by gimlet-eyed Jason Clarke from Twilight (the Paul Newman one, not the vampire one); silver fox inventor Vannevar Bush is Matthew Modine from Full Metal Jacket; Strauss’s aide is Alden Ehrenreich from Stoker; a fellow called Borden, whom Strauss uses as ponyboy in his pursuit of Oppenheimer, is David Dastmalchian from the more recent Dune; a miraculous defender of Oppenheimer is played by Rami Malek from No Time to Die; and a presidential aide called Gordon Gray is Tony Goldwyn from Plane!

It’s a long picture, but made up mostly of short, often punchy scenes – ha ha, you can tell there was a very concerted effort to keep things moving to offset the inevitable criticisms that this really is mostly a movie about white guys endlessly talking in rooms! It can be difficult to keep track of who’s who and what their motivations are, but a general understanding is really all that’s required to discern the larger themes and narrative drive at work! And some the major concerns here include power and responsibility, and it seems to me the picture is proposing an inverse to Uncle Ben’s great maxim “With great power comes great responsibility!” Oppenheimer – and Oppenheimer, for that matter – asks whether that responsibility still applies when it turns out one doesn’t have much power after all! The conundrum torments our science bug, and is addressed directly in late-picture scenes featuring a no-nonsense Harry Truman, played by Gary Oldman of Track 29 fame, and, separately, an avuncular Professor Albert Einstein, impersonated here by Tom Conti from Reuben, Reuben!

Nolan provides some poetic visuals that are meant to spring from Oppenheimer’s imagination: here we have raindrops depicting the sort of atomic chain reactions he’s looking for in a bomb, or rather gadget; there, a trick effect dramatizing what might happen if the chain reaction simply didn’t stop! But these sometimes seem shoehorned in as sops to the audience, and, as with the deliberate punchiness of the scenes, the non-stop music attempting to wallpaper over the seams, and the declamatory quality of some of the dialogue, one can here and there see the popular-cinema pulleys, cogs, and wheels hard at work, more so than the director intends!

Still, it’s a real achievement, almost as much as it assumes itself to be, and the sheer volume of craft on display is nearly overwhelming! I’m glad this long, talky, science-minded picture was made and that it’s doing well, and I for one was consistently engaged! (My twelve year-old got pretty antsy after the Trinity test, however, ha ha!) There’s something marvellously old-fashioned about it even beyond its mid-century setting, and I’m going to give Oppenheimer three slatherings of a topical jelly!

Burl reviews Call Northside 777! (1948)

 

Ring ring, it’s Burl, here with newspaper drama! Yes, ol’ Burl is a big fan of the newspaper genre – I really like All the President’s Men of course, and His Girl Friday, and Ace in the Hole, and I even found lots to like about The Paper – not least, ha ha, that it was a newspaper movie! And I’ve just watched one I’d never seen before, a little joint called Call Northside 777!

The title refers to a wee classified ad discovered in the paper by newshound P.J. McNeal! McNeal is played by James Stewart, well known from Thunder Bay and Rear Window, and, following up the ad, he discovers an old floor scrubber named Tillie Wiecek in despair because her son Frank has been in jail these last eleven years for killing a cop! Of course she claims he didn’t do it, and hopes her ad, and the $5000 in reward money she’s spent the past decade on her hands and knees earning, will help bring forth a witness who can clear Frank’s name!

McNeal is initially dismissive, not willing to give a cop killer the time of day! But as he digs into the case, and once he goes to the jail to meet Frank, who’s played very well by Richard Conte from Ocean’s Eleven and is an incredibly sympathetic character, he starts to think, hey, maybe this fella Frank is innocent after all! The great Lee J. Cobb from Gorilla At Large is McNeal’s editor, and, as the story starts to catch the public attention, he encourages his reporter to follow it up!

McNeal does so, occasionally going home to visit his wife, played by Helen Walker from Nightmare Alley and The Big Combo, where they sleep in separate beds as per bizarre Code rules and she makes him sandwiches when he has insomnia worrying about the Wiecek case! I guess he couldn’t make his own sandwich for some reason! McNeal gets on the trail of a witness called Wanda Skutnik, who proves to be just as unpleasant as her name, and he often returns to the Statesville prison, where an unbelievably accommodating warden accedes to his every request! Wiecek is at first justifiably angry about the negative attention the publicity is giving his wife and son, and demands that McNeal lay off! But this reporter is too dogged for that!

E.G. Marshall from Creepshow appears as the kindly (or as kindly as Marshall can manage) man whom Wiecek’s wife marries while he’s in prison so that their son can live a more normal life; and here’s where the movie really shines: in laying out the terrible difficulty of having a husband and father supposed by everyone to be a cop killer! You really feel for these Wieceks, and want Frank to get out of gaol and that post-haste, ha ha! But this movie is an occasionally long 112 minutes, so before that happens there’s plenty of time to watch all the details of how a polygraph test is administered, for example!

Because that’s the other thing: the movie is a gallery of all-new police techniques, like polygraph machines and forgery detection and photo enlargement processes, and a fantastic sort of proto-fax machine that whirls around like a lathe and sends pictures across the wire – but, ha ha, you have to develop them on the receiving end before you can see them! But they really wanted to keep it real for this movie, so when it comes to the lie detector scene, they got the guy who invented the gosh darn machine to play the fellow administering the test, and they take care to depict every intricacy! And McNeal, the newsman, is all the while asking the sort of questions any layman would, and getting detailed explanations of the technologies!

So there’s occasionally the feeling of watching an educational film or a sponsored documentary, but the olde-tyme tech aspect is really interesting, to me anyway! And, as I say, you get really caught up in the family’s situation, so by the time the boy is running toward his freed father, shouting “Daddy! That’s my daddy!” you may shed a happy tear! I don’t think I’m giving anything away to reveal that Wiecek is in fact proved innocent, but another thing about the conclusion, foregone as it may be, is that it doesn’t really follow up the hints of conspiracy and cover-up that are teased in the first half! I suppose we’re meant to take the railroad job done on Wiecek as just one of those things, and the subsequent cover-up as just what any sensible authority figure would do after committing a horrible blunder! Ha ha, some of the sensibilities are a little out of date, I guess, and this fealty toward authority is among them! But the movie has lots to recommend it, and Stewart is always good, so I give Call Northside 777 three linotype slugs!

Burl reviews Sully! (2016)

 

Heading for runway two-niner, it’s Burl, reporting birdstrike from the sky! Ha ha, it’s a real-life disaster movie – or is it? Those of us who remember watching the news in early 2009 remember that it wasn’t a disaster at all, but a heartening story of competence! Yes, it’s a picture from the man who reinvented himself as a chronicler of ripped-from-recent-headline stories, and this, as far as I can tell, is the best-regarded of them: by garr, it’s the fabulous story of Sully!

Yes, it’s Sully Sullenberger, Airport Pilot, and who better to essay him than Tom Hanks, the fellow we recall from Dragnet and Big and pictures like that! Why, Hanks already had the real-life-pilot-wrings-triumph-from-disaster angle covered in his portrayal of Jim Lovell of Apollo 13! Like Lovell, Sully keeps a calm head and is helped by his even-keeled co-workers, and from the oncoming rush of too-certain tragedy comes the joy of unexpected survival – a water landing from which the aviatrons emerge smiling!

You recall the story: in January of 2009, a flight takes off from La Guardia airport in New York, and instead of its intended destination, Charlotte, a capitol of one of the Carolinas I believe, the airplane is struck by passing birds and, bereft of thrust, is forced into the icy waters of the Hudson River! Injuries are minor and fatalities nil, and pilot Sully Sullenberger is hailed as a hero! But wait – the Red Cross blankets draped across the shoulders of the survivors are not the only wet ones in this story, because various authorities, especially those concerned about insurance costs and so forth with regards to the plane, ask whether Sully and his co-pilot could not have returned to the aerodrome even in their bird-crippled state! By the end of the picture it is revealed that the pilots did all the right things, and their reputations and hero status remain intact!

Aaron Eckhart from Olympus Has Fallen is the co-pilot of Mustache Air flight 1549, and he provides a stolid backup to Sully, a faithful wingman, someone for him to talk to! Laura Linney from Congo is the worried Mrs. Sully, whose scenes are all on the telephone and who doesn’t get to do anything but fret from a distance! Ha ha, it’s a bit of a nothing part, but Linney is a good actor and does what she can! And of course the picture is directed by Clint himself, who as a filmmaker has brought us many pictures: some of them very good, others more like Blood Work! And yes, as mentioned above, of his ripped-from-the-headlines pictures, which include one about the terrorists on the train to Paris and another about the security guard who was thought to have planted a bomb, Sully is the one people thought was pretty good!

Maybe that’s because Sully himself was such a readymade white middle-aged man hero, and therefore perfect to be played by Hanks! Hanks is good in the role, but there’s not all that much to the man aside from being a good and dedicated pilot who’s certain of the rightness of his actions aside from one or two moments of doubt! The picture is assembled in such a way as to break the actual crash and rescue into sections, one of them from the perspective of the La Guardia tower; and occasionally we are privy to the explosive visions with which Sully is occasionally assailed – snapshots of how the disaster might have unfolded if everything hadn’t gone exactly right in the aftermath of the birdstrike!

Like most Eastwood pictures, it’s a competent but unspectacular work! It certainly doesn’t wear out its welcome – at 93 minutes, including credits and explanatory titles, it qualifies as a miniature in the Eastwood oeuvre! It’s a fine piece of reportage, very basic in its themes and emotions, and carries nearly to a fault an abhorrence of nuance or complication! It’s no Unforgiven, ha ha, and it's no Sully Sullenberger: Airport Pilot either, but then what is! Still, I’m going to give Sully two and a half cries of “Heads down, stay down, brace, brace, brace!”

Burl reviews The End of the Tour! (2015)

 

With a bookish hello it’s Burl, here to review a literary two-hander that came out a while back, and I’ve just now caught up with! It’s a tale of fellers who write books, and shows what can happen when two of them spend a few days in close company with one another! Yes, the movie is The End of the Tour, the tale of the meeting between a Rolling Stone reporter named David Lipsky and the bandanna-clad wordsmith David Foster Wallace!

Jason Segel from SLC Punk dons the doo-rag in order to play the celebrated author, and I’ll say right up front that I though his performance was terrific! I’m not familiar enough with the real DFW’s voice, look, and mannerisms to do a detailed comparison, but, ha ha, in any case impersonation is beside the point! Segel does an excellent job of creating the character of a shy, friendly, humble, prideful, whip-smart, uncertain, spiky, obliging, bewildered and ambitious man, no matter what his initials are!

Jesse Eisenberg from Adventureland and Zombieland enters Wallaceland in the character of Lipsky, assigned by Rolling Stone to accompany Wallace on the last stop of his Infinite Jest book tour! This last stop turns out to be Minneapolis, which is a city I’m pretty familiar with, so that was nice! The requisite Fargo-ness comes in the person of Joan Cusack from Grandville U.S.A., their perky tour guide and driver, but the city is otherwise portrayed as the bastion of NPR-level mainstream sophistication that it is, for the white, college-educated set anyway!

The bulk of the picture involves these two Davids getting to know one another, mostly in a mellow way but interrupted on occasion by neuroses and jealousies! It’s a pretty male movie, but there are ladies: Anna Chlumsky from Uncle Buck appears in a nothing, mostly phoned-in part as Lipsky’s girlfriend; while in Minneapolis Mickey Sumner from Frances Ha and Mamie Gummer from The Ward show up as Betsy and Julie, two DFW pals with whom the Davids hang out and, in a delightful sequence, go to Mall of America and catch a screening of John Woo’s Broken Arrow!

At several points in the picture, when Lipsky gets upset, Eisenberg pulls out one of his acting staples: a hurt, about-to-cry face that makes me want to jump up and run away whenever I see it! I didn’t care for that, nor for his amateur-hour smoking (it looks practiced, but fake), but on balance I think Eisenberg did a good job in his role! It’s a real pleasure sometimes to watch a movie about intelligent people having intelligent conversations, and this one hit me at just such a moment; and on top of that it’s solidly directed and features unexpected treats on the soundtrack! Ha ha, there are some 80s tunes and some Alanis to shore up Wallace’s contention that he has the musical tastes of a thirteen year-old girl, but R.E.M., Pavement, and Brian Eno all get a look in too, plus there are a couple of Tindersticks tunes, and most unexpectedly, a Tindersticks cover of a Pavement song! Ha ha, weird!

It’s necessarily limited in what it can do, but the movie is smart enough to know that, and so it just cruises along in its pleasant and competent way through appealingly familiar territory! I enjoyed it, though of course the ultimate fate of DFW made me sad! Still, this was a supposedly fun thing that I might very well do again, and I give The End of the Tour three pop tarts!

Burl reviews The Right Stuff! (1983)

Ad astra, friends, it’s Burl! No, I’m not reviewing the recent Brad Pitt movie by that title, not yet anyway, but instead a picture suffused with the spirit of this inspiring phrase! Ha ha, yes, I’m talking about The Right Stuff!

This movie was a pretty big deal back in the early 1980s, as I recall, though not in terms of box office! I guess it’s a pretty long picture, and people were worried they might have to go to the bathroom in their spacesuits, ha ha! I wish I’d seen it in the theatre, you bet, and why my family didn't go is a mystery to me, because we usually took in all the epics! It’s a beautifully shot picture - take a bow, Caleb Deschanel! - and would have played magnificently on the big screen, I am sure!

Of course it’s the story of the beginnings of the American space program, before they even had a thing called NASA, and plays a little like a prequel to Apollo 13! It starts with Chuck Yeager, played by Sam Shepard from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and his ladywife Glennis, personified by Barbara Hershey from Hoosiers! They ride horses, banter a bit, and then old Chuck goes and breaks the sound barrier! After that we get into the recruitment and training of the Mercury 7 astronauts, and as the space flights start, we get all sorts of ups and downs both technical and personal!

The cast, of course, is extraordinary! The Mercury 7 include Scott Glenn from The Hunt for Red October as Alan Shepherd; Ed Harris, well known from Creepshow, as John Glenn, no doubt drawing on this experience when he played control room chief Gene Kranz in Apollo 13; Dennis Quaid, playing Gordon Cooper the same way he later played Tuck Pendleton in Innerspace; Fred Ward from UFOria playing Gus Grissom with great wounded dignity; Scott Paulin from Forbidden World as Deke Slayton; Charles Frank from Russkies as Scott Carpenter; and Lance Henriksen from Aliens, The Visitor, The Horror Show, and many, many others, as Wally Schirra, who later sold ointments on TV as I recall!

The wives are just as strong a group: Veronica Cartwright from Nightmares; Pamela Reed from Junior; Kathy Baker from Edward Scissorhands; and Mary Jo Deschanel from 2010, in which she played a different astronaut’s wife! Plus we get Donald Moffat from The Thing as a cranky LBJ; a pair of comedy-relief recruiters seeking out the spacemen for the program, who are played with an Artoo and Threepio dynamic by Harry Shearer of Godzilla and Jeff Goldblum of Into the Night; a proto-NASA official played by John P. Ryan of Avenging Force; another official type played by David Clennon of Matinee; the always-welcome Levon Helm from Staying Together, playing mechanic-designer-gum supplier Jack Ridley; and the great Royal Dano, playing another in his long line of cadaverously allegorical memento moris!

The picture is in many ways a remarkable thing: at once mythmaking and myth-deflating; a resolutely personal telling of a defiantly epic story; traditional and grounded while reveling in outrageous eccentricities and gross-out gaggery! Ha ha! It celebrates individual achievement while insisting the same is not possible without communal effort, wastes no time on flag-waving, and its stand-up-and-cheer moments come as much from small moments, like John Glenn backing up his shy, stammering wife when she doesn’t want to meet Johnson, as from aeronautical triumphs!

Ha ha, I wonder if there’s a Russian version of this story! If there is, I’d like to see it! In the meantime, this excellent telling of the tale from the American side will have to do! I give The Right Stuff three and a half nurses peeking through portholes!

Burl reviews Apollo 13! (1995)

Blast off it’s me, Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a movie of rocketmen, and I have to say that it’s a picture I’ve always held in fond regard! I’m not much for the rah-rah Americana - ha ha, I’m not even American! - so that this picture avoids all the obvious touchstones, like the snapping flags that, say, Peter Berg or Michael Bay would have added had they told this story, makes me like it all the more! Oh, I just shuddered at the thought of Berg, Bay or some like-minded simp making this instead of Opie “The Paper” Cunningham!

And if Opie Cunningham were here, I would clap him on the back and tell him he did a fine job with this tale of accidents in space! In fact it’s my second-favourite of his pictures, right after Grand Theft Auto! He’s always been one of those craftsmanlike directors, but he’s got his high points and low points like anyone else! Rush, for example, was pretty good, and Cocoon and Backdraft both have their moments! Gung Ho, on the other hand, is an unfunny anti-union jackanapes, and those DaVinci Code pictures are crazy nonsense! Yes, the more I think about it, the more I realize Apollo 13 is streets ahead of most of Opie’s work, and that’s even before I recall that Roger Corman has a cameo in it, playing a senator, ha ha!

Of course we all know the true-life story! Three astronauts bound for the moon have their plans changed when an electrical blauchup plays havoc with their spaceship! The commander of the mission, Jim Lovell is played by the imperturbable Tom Hanks, whom we all know best from Dragnet; pilot Jack Swigert is portrayed by Kevin Bacon, famed from his appearance in Friday the 13^th; and third guy Fred Haise is brought to life by the sadly late, but always great, Bill Paxton, beloved for his appearances in movies as diverse as Mortuary and Streets of Fire! All of these actors acquit themselves marvelously from the opening bar-b-que scenes (there has to be a bar-b-que scene in these astronaut movies, ha ha!) through the space crisis and right up to splashdown!

The scenes in Mission Control are excellent too - some of the best moments involve these gentlemen (and they were all men back then) solving problems and doing math! Ed Harris, who’d been to space himself in The Right Stuff, but who’s best known for his roles in eccentric productions like Knightriders, Creepshow, and Walker, rules the roost down in Houston, but he has able support from the likes of Clint “Ticks” Howard and Gary Sinise, who would get a chance to attend a bar-b-que before going to space in Mission to Mars! Kathleen Quinlan from Wild Thing helps ensure that the family scenes are not a drag, as they could easily have been in a story like this! It helps that the editors ably keep things bouncing around from the ship to Mission Control to the home front so that you never get tired of any one group, location, or situation!

Well, it’s a solid middlebrow Hollywood picture, and that can hardly be denied! It doesn’t juice up the action or overplay the drama or invent bad guys or try to lay blame! It looks good thanks to the portly cinematographer, Dean Cundey, and it projects an air of absolute plausibility! And the moment where Lovell’s young son (played by Miko Hughes, who was Gage in Pet Sematary) asks “Was it the door?” always makes me momentarily misty for some reason! Good work, Ron Howard, ha ha! I give Apollo 13 three steely-eyed missile men!

Burl reviews Best of Enemies! (2015)

Ha ha and bon mots, it’s Burl, with a review of a documentary that presents us with the full story of the non-friendship between Gore "Shadow Conspiracy" Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.! The picture is called Best of Enemies, and like any decent doc it manages to give us a nice, polished version of not only that story, but of the situations and events that surrounded it!

Ha ha, and that’s a pretty appealing prospect for ol’ Burl, since the times in question – it’s the late 1960s, we’re talking about here – and the political and social events occurring within them are of special interest to me! I also once met a fellow whose job was to cat-sit Vidal’s felines! Yes, this poor soul had to go live in Gore Vidal’s spectacular Italian cliffside villa, of which we get glimpses in this movie, and live there for four or five months at a stretch, his most onerous duty to feed the great man’s cats while Vidal was off living in New York or somewhere! Ha ha, pretty sweet deal!

I can’t say I have any such tenuous connection to Buckley, which suits me fine because frankly I never much liked the guy, ha ha, and probably wouldn’t have cared for his catsitter neither! So I’ll happily admit my sympathies were overwhelmingly with Vidal in the great tête-à-tête featured in this picture! And of course the contretemps in question happened over a series of debates during the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1968, during which the ABC network, unable to cover the conventions the way the other more monied networks did, hired these two high-toned palaverers to debate the issues of the day!

Their debates mainly ended up as exchanges of erudite trash-talk, ha ha! Vidal was better at this, though Buckley, despite merely being smart and not the towering intellectual giant he believed himself to be, manages many full-throated runabouts that demonstrate a quick wit, but never, unless I blinked and missed it, a great deal of depth! Ha ha! I guess that’s the pitfall when you’re trying to mount an intellectual defense of an ideology that by its nature resists such defense!

Of course this all leads up to the famous blowup which took place in the ninth of the ten scheduled debates, held in Chicago while police and protestors engaged in a full on, if rather one-sided, war on the streets outside! Buckley found himself pushed just that much too far when Vidal called him a “crypto-Nazi,” and instead of responding with a passionate rebuttal explaining just exactly why he wasn’t a crypto-Nazi – and I for one would have been curious to hear such a rebuttal – growled “Ha ha, listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered!”

Well, this insulting, threatening utterance was the climax of the debates, and framed the relationship between the two men for the rest of their lives, and not incidentally helped father a terrible era of insult journalism which we still suffer today! Ha ha, it’s really too bad! But this is an entertaining picture, and does a nice job setting the context , and remains even-handed in its treatment of the protagonists! The set-up is a bit laborious if you already know anything about these guys, but that’s to be expected I guess! And it maybe goes a bit hard on milking the drama of the Buckley’s meltdown, but that’s equally to be expected! The only other major problem is that we have to look at and listen to that patrician reptile Buckley a lot more than I’d have cared to, but that’s part of the price of the ticket, ha ha! I give Best of Enemies three collapsed ceilings!