Category: Rami Malek

OPPENHEIMER

By Marc S. Sanders

Christopher Nolan is one of the modern-day directors that you can rely on for brainy science fiction whether they are in embedded in dream subconsciousness, intergalactic space travel, transcendences of time, or even putting a fresh polish on a favorite superhero.  With Oppenheimer, he triumphs with exploring the actual prophets of science in the twentieth century, particularly its title character J Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist played convincingly well by Cillian Murphy.  Nolan doesn’t just stop at the assembly and discovery of science though.  He uncovers the consequences of Oppenheimer’s innovation and genius insight.  Dr. Oppenheimer might have been the man who knew too much and arguably that cost him quite a bit, personally.  Additionally, the so-called lab rat of his atomic bomb, namely the planet Earth, suffered the expense of a, at the time, troubling present day, and a still ongoing future. 

This movie seems to start right in the middle of its story and as a viewer you need to claw your way through the dense foliage to find its beginnings and what comes afterwards.  The first two scenes of the movie are titled “Fission” and “Fusion.”  There are no time periods specified by a font caption, however.  The differences in various points in history are distinguished by where J Robert Oppenheimer is located during select points in his life.  For seconds at a time, the film will change its photography from vibrant color to black and white, for example.  The characters will either look more aged with grey hair and some wrinkles or during more youthful time in their lives.  At one point Oppenheimer is being recruited by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr) to head the department of a new kind of weapon development.  Work the science to make a difference.  There’s another time period where he’s being interrogated in a small room by a governmental suit and tie committee.  Oppenheimer is also in his classroom or debating and working with colleagues.  Another story observes his progress with building the atomic bomb among a collection of other engineers and scientists in a desert town, Los Alamos, specifically built at his own request, under the order of the nothing but militant Colonel Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), to conduct his work and research while hiding in plain sight. 

The film also covers Oppenheimer’s association with possible suspects of the Communist Party during the stressful pre-cold war era of McCarthyism.  Questions arise if his reliable brother Frank (Dylan Arnold) is a communist or even his mistress (Florence Pugh).  Does that in turn make Oppenheimer a communist as well?  If that is the case is J Robert Oppenheimer, the man tasked with ultimately ending World War II in favor of the Allies, sharing secrets with Russia and/or the Communist Party?

Nolan’s film gets easier to watch as it moves along, but you must get used to his pattern of filmmaking.  If you have never seen a Christopher Nolan film, I do not recommend you start with Oppenheimer.  His work is recognized for fast paced edits of different time periods and conversations.  There is much information to decipher. As well, there’s a very large collection of welcome characters to sort through, who worked with or against Oppenheimer.  Having only seen it once, I was captivated with the picture, but I know that I need to see it again.  The quick edits, working beautifully against the soundtrack orchestrations of Ludwig Göransson (nominate him for an Oscar, please), happen a mile a minute.  I appreciated this method because it enhanced the urgency of Dr. Oppenheimer in the eyes of the world, first as the savior of the united Allies against the last remaining superpower of the Axis countries, Japan. Then later focus is on whether it is in the United States’ best interests for the regarded physicist to have security access to the country’s most secret weapons and technological progress in a post war age.

People have been cajoling about how they know the ending to Oppenheimer.  They drop the bomb, of course!  (Twice actually.)  However, they do not know the entire story adaptation that Christopher Nolan as director and screenwriter presents. 

Cillian Murphy is perfectly cast. Give him an Oscar nomination.  He serves the confident, assured scientific leader who becomes envious of competing powers who achieve the impossible, like splitting the atom, while also admiring peers and mentors like Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein (Kenneth Branagh, Tom Conti).  All these men are interested only in what can be accomplished.  The superpowers that fight in war, though, are interested in how these accomplishments of modern science can be used to their advantage at a cost of collateral damage.  It is these conflicts of interests that Nolan admirably demonstrates over the course of the film. 

A telling scene for me, that I won’t forget, is when Robert Oppenheimer meets Harry Truman (Gary Oldman, doing an unforgettable cameo).  As the physicist exits the Oval Office, having shared his concerns and scruples with the Commander in Chief, Nolan includes a throwaway line delivered by the President, that I won’t soon forget.  It will not be spoiled, here.  Yet, the dialogue speaks volumes of what the United States held important regarding the servants who did the country’s bidding.  The scene closes like a stab in the heart, and suddenly science is no longer just facts within our planet.  Science is now questioned on whether it should ever be acted upon. Those questions certainly have remained as long as I’ve been alive to read about our never-ending world climate.  These inquiries will be here for many generations after I’m gone as well; that is if men and women’s recklessness with science doesn’t destroy the Earth before then.  At one point, Oppenheimer shares a small fraction of possibility for the end of the world when they activate and test their first atomic bomb. Matt Damon’s Colonel Groves’ asks for a reiteration of that observation.  Is this finding worth even the smallest, most minute risk?

Emily Blunt portrays Kitty Oppenheimer.  She’s marvelous as a lonely alcoholic wife to Robert, and a mother minding a home built in the desert while her husband serves an important purpose.  I didn’t take to her presence in the film until her grand moment arrives during an interrogation scene.  As the character gives her testimony regarding Oppenheimer’s communist ties, Blunt locks herself in for a wealth of awards in late 2023/early 2024.  Once you’ve watched the movie, you’ll likely know which scene I’m referring to and you can bet it’ll be that sample clip shown on all the awards programs.  This might not be Blunt’s best role, because it is rather limited within crux of the film, but I’d argue it is her greatest scene on film that I can remember.

Oppenheimer is a three-hour film, and it demands its running time.  There are so many angles to the man that few really know about.  Many know it was he who instrumentally built the atomic bomb that to date has only been used twice within a period of four days.  Thankfully never since.  Nolan emphasizes how unaware we are of how carefree the doctor’s government supervisors performed with the weapon he agreed to build.  Don’t just drop the bomb once.  Send a message to Japan by dropping it twice so they know to no longer engage in this ongoing war.  Choose the area where an army/government official didn’t honeymoon though.  It’s too beautiful a region.  Tens of thousands of men, women and child civilians perished immediately following the strikes.  Many others died weeks later following exposure to the nuclear effects that followed.  All issued as a horrifying cost to end a war that was already being won now that Hitler was dead.

Mechanically, Christopher Nolan does not disappoint either.  I watched Oppenheimer in a Dolby theater and I highly recommend it over a traditional one.  However, beware of the sound.  It is a LOUD!!!!!  Your seat will rattle early in the film when Cillian Murphy is shown in close up imagining the collision of atoms, protons, and neutrons.  How a star naturally dies in space runs through Oppenheimer’s consciousness as well, and then we see how a black hole forms.  Nolan offers a Cliff’s Notes edit of science doing its job.  Murphy performs so well when he’s not speaking and cut against the quick edits of Nolan’s visual and sound effects of science at play.  It shows how an educated scientist thinks beyond what is documented on a chalkboard or in a textbook.  J Robert Oppenheimer used to teach about the building blocks and natural destruction that occurs within the universe.  Regrettably, what he learned about natural function soon becomes manufactured capability when the professor accepts the task of building scientific destruction with his bare hands. Man stole fire from the Gods.

Oppenheimer is so dense in the scope of science and the scientist behind it.  That’s a huge compliment.  It’s an engaging film with much to tell, and a lot more to think about afterwards.  It accomplishes what the best movies do.  It leaves you thinking long after the film has ended.  More importantly, it’ll leave you frightened for the future based on the behavior of this planet’s past. 

Oppenheimer is one of the best films of the year.

NO TIME TO DIE

By Marc S. Sanders

Any die-hard James Bond fan should absolutely love Daniel Craig’s final outing in No Time To Die.  Not only does the film work as a salute to the more serious aspects of past Bond films (not just Craig’s installments), but it is working with its tongue placed firmly in its cheek.  That is not to say that I still did take issue with a few narrative choices the film steers into.

Years have gone by for Craig’s interpretation of the famed secret agent.  He’s comfortably in love with Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux) from the prior film Spectre, and known daughter of Mr. White, one of Bond’s prior adversaries.  Suddenly though, Spectre seems to be back with a vengeance.  The imprisoned Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) somehow seems to be involved and 007 puts his guard back on opting not to trust Madeleine or anyone ever again.  The story jumps to five years later and Bond’s CIA friend, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) has convinced him to come out of seclusion and assist with recovering a kidnapped scientist who holds the formula to a deadly nanobot virus manufactured through plant life.  Bond travels to Jamaica to complete the mission.  From there, the story gets more complicated and more interesting.  Though I dare not spoil what comes next.  This film has a lot to tell in the near three hour running time.

Daniel Craig always had some sort of challenge with the general public while playing James Bond.  First, how dare he be blond?  James Bond is not blond.  He survived that ordeal to continue to make more films.  His second film suffered in storytelling due to a writer’s strike.  During press junkets for his fourth film, Craig was quoted out of context noting that he’d rather “slit his wrists” than play the character again.  As well, his films broke convention in the long running EON Production series, as each film served as a continuing story with much more serious, dramatic and sorrowful undertones than was ever presented before.  None of these challenges seemed fair to me.  After 25 films, you gotta stir the pot a little bit on a character that has been on screen for nearly 60 years.  It’s not enough that his gadgets change with the times of technology. 

I divert into this observation because No Time To Die offers some shocking developments for the Bond character, but when you return back to Craig’s first film, Casino Royale, you really start to understand why this latest picture goes in this wildly off direction.  In other words, the four films Craig performed in prior to this 2021 installment seemingly spell out the inevitable conclusion of his tenure as James Bond.  So, reader, when you go to see this last film from arguably the most controversial actor to play 007 to date, give some thought to what has already been covered before and maybe you’ll agree it beautifully makes a lot of sense.

As an action film, No Time To Die works solidly.  There’s amazing stunts and vehicles with car chases galore and nail biting shootouts.  I think this film has the longest pre-credit sequence of all the films and it’s amazing where one of the feature attractions is the famed Aston Martin DB5 against a slew of Range Rovers and motorcycles.

Rami Malek fills in as the lead villain eerily known as Safin, complete with the signature facial deformity, a shattered kabuki mask and a hell bent determination to destroy the world by means of turning people’s DNA against themselves.  Just go with it.  There’s not much weight to this dastardly mission.  It’s Malek’s performance that works. 

A new agent is also in the works and what’s this?  She is identified as 007????  Again, the newer films bravely go against convention to keep it interesting. Lashana Lynch plays Nomi.  This character was angled extensively in trailers and press junkets but honestly doesn’t live up to the hype enough.  The actor is fine.  She’s just not given much to make any kind of impact.  Ana de Armas is the actor who really makes a splash in a brief moment dressed in a gorgeous evening gown while giving high kicks to bad guys and armed with an adorable naivety about her and a killer machine gun.  Her character is reminiscent of the Bond girls who elevated the tongue and cheek elements of the series.  In a three hour film, more room should have been left for de Armas to play.

Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), Q (Ben Whishaw), Tanner (Rory Kinnear) and M (Ralph Fiennes) all return making for a solid support team for Bond.  It needs to be noted how well cast the Craig films always remained. During the five film series, each one of the characters had their memorable moments for sure.

The regrettable ingredients in No Time To Die lie in the lacking treatments of Lashana Lynch and Ana de Armas for sure.  Forgivable for the most part however.  Still, the story steers into one angle that I wish it didn’t when a young child is brought into the fold.  Children in serious peril was never part of the Bond formula.  So, while this is another new convention for the long running series, I think it was a poor choice.  I see the necessity of the young character to the story, but was it ever really necessary to put a child amid massive gun play, car wrecks and explosions.  There was something a little unsettling about that aspect of the film and the imminent danger to the girl really isn’t needed to heighten any kind of suspense.  Rather than play dramatically, it moves a little too disturbing.  Early on in the film, another child is placed in disturbing peril as well.  The story options here just don’t seem altogether appropriate.

No Time To Die is an appreciated conclusion to Daniel Craig’s version of the character.  There are great puns for Bond to deliver.  His interactions with Q and M are biting and fun.  His love story portrayal with Madeleine works more solidly here than in the last film they shared together, and his tete a tete with the villains, Blofeld and Safin, are equally strong.  These different relationships broaden the dimensions of Bond.  He’s no longer a cookie cutter character.  There’s a motivation to the guy. 

Having seen the film twice, I have an even further appreciation for this new film.  Hans Zimmer comes in to do the original score and particularly salutes the unexpected favorite among fans, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service with select notes and rhythms from that film.  Granted the script for No Time To Die makes obvious references as well.  I also appreciated the wink and nods to Bond’s very first adventure, Dr. No.  There was just a lot of smart, subtle honors presented here. 

Still, the best reference is left for one of the best lines in the film.  When Bond meets Felix’ partner ahead of a mission, Daniel Craig as 007 has to ask “Who’s the popular blond?”  After five hugely successful films, over a fifteen-year span, any one of us better know that the only blond that matters is “Bond.  James Bond.”

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

By Marc S. Sanders

The aftermath of Rami Malek’s electrifying performance of Freddie Mercury might just follow the same trajectory of Jessie Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg. People will never be able to see past the one accomplishment and every role hereafter will be measured against this moment. Bohemian Rhapsody will likely be Malek’s best film of his career.

Bryan Singer, and more importantly an uncredited director replacement, have assembled a by the numbers music biopic complete with defiance against naysayers, sexual discoveries, band discourse, drugs, booze, illness, a wildly eccentric lead and an altogether sensational soundtrack. This isn’t me complaining however. The film might be formulaic but what else should I expect really?

Though I’m dubious if the compositions really were spawned as depicted, I nevertheless loved every second of Bohemian Rhapsody. Yeah, I doubt “Another One Bites The Dust” finally sprung to life during an in studio scuffle but as soon as the bass began to play, I was in the moment. Movies should always touch you naturally. The emotional response should never feel forced. It should be be triggered. The music of Queen has that effect for me. Not every song. Some lyrics are downright silly. Yet if “We Are The Champions” is going to be re-enacted during a Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium following a series of setbacks for Mercury, you are going to get caught up in the moment.

The song introductions are the highlights of the film. They carry an energy that leads to lip sync and toe tap. However, the movie doesn’t stop there. I appreciated the strife between Freddie and his disapproving father, his affection for his bandmates and the eventual conflict among them, his struggles with loving Mary, his wife, while coming to grips with his bisexuality, his betrayals among those that used him, and finally his AIDS diagnosis. Every aspect is given enough attention. Still , we are treated to a near full shot for shot re-enactment of Live Aid, one of Freddie’s final performances before his eventual surrender to death.

Called me biased. Yet I’m not a die hard Queen fan. I just found the period set up authentic. The music editing to be well orchestrated and the cast to be spot on. A Mike Myers appearance (look for him but you won’t see how apparent he really is) is inspired.

The film ultimately belongs to Malek. Awards season will be generous to him. He’s comfortable and assured in the attire, the skin, the gravitas and even the teeth of Freddie Mercury. This was a film circulating the press for many years. Everyone seemingly wanted a bio pic. Finally, it has arrived and no one else could have played Freddie Mercury so beautifully as Rami Malek. He’s a miracle!