Hi everyone! Long time, no see. I’m trying out a new thing on Substack — instead of long-form essays, I want to share (midnight) snack-sized takes on what I’m watching, reading, and listening to. I think this will motivate me to write more with less pressure.
Barbenheimer
I dedicated all of last Saturday to Barbenheimer at a Cineplex in my hometown with my friends Jack and Usman. I can’t remember the last time that everyone I know was obsessed with going to the movies — it might have been Black Panther in 2018, which coincidentally, I also watched with Jack and Usman, but separately. I think I saw Black Panther in theatres three times.
The Barbenheimer phenomenon felt like a rare thing as soon as it started taking shape, and I love to be a part of things, so I knew I would commit a whole day to it without question. We started with a 2 PM showing of Oppenheimer, then took a dinner break at a chain restaurant near the theatre to unpack all the celebrity cameos we caught in the movie’s three-hour runtime. The restaurant had mediocre-to-disappointing food but sangria that got me a little drunk before our 6:40 PM show of Barbie. The three of us emerged from Barbie bleary-eyed and experiencing sensory overload after sitting through five full hours of The Movies, gushed over Ryan Gosling, and caught a pretty 9 PM summer sunset. It was perfect.
Barbie
Barbie (2023) was occasionally delightful, especially when it portrayed girlhood and growing up, or whenever Ryan Gosling was on screen. It was also the longest and most diverse commercial I’ve ever seen. Its cast included Issa Rae as a Black president Barbie, Simu Liu as a Chinese Ken, Sharon Rooney as a fat Barbie, and a Barbie in a wheelchair. So, how does a movie so diverse still end up feeling so white?
I didn't go into this 100 million-dollar movie expecting radical feminism, but I also wasn’t prepared for its biggest emotional beats to replicate what writer Haaniyah Angus described as language from a “2014 Tumblr post on intro feminism [that] ignores any sense of intersectionality.”
Does Barbie deserve to be heralded as a new feminist classic? In a word, no. It might be the biggest movie by women and for women, but it's also intertwined with the burden of representing Mattel's brand and manages to include just enough feminist messaging and diversity to rehabilitate Barbie while still remaining palatable to the masses (therefore, achieving nothing besides a fun time, and that’s probably fine).
This movie broke the frame of a typical summer blockbuster, but as we head into a Mattel Cinematic Universe — the mere idea of which exhausts me beyond reason — we need to be wary of movies that are really just commercials with 114-minute run times. Maybe we don’t need movies that are tied to 100 brand partnerships before they even release.
Oppenheimer
I don’t have much to say about Oppenheimer (2023) aside from telling you that I mostly liked it. I thought every scene with Florence Pugh had some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard. I thought that the Trinity test scene was almost unbearably tense with a good payoff. I thought Cillian Murphy really pulled off high-waisted pants. Mostly, I was constantly distracted by the celebrity cameos, which kept taking me out of the film and itching to pull out my phone to go on Google.
I laughed a little every time I saw Josh Peck’s face in this movie. Devon Bostick played a guy who violently throws up when they drop the bombs on Japan, but to me, he will always be Rodrick from Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Leo from Being Erica. Rami Malek appeared in two scenes without dialogue and I fully believed he was assigned as a non-speaking extra until the end of the movie. Jack Quaid played Richard Feynman, who inspired me to get a tattoo of an atom at the age of 18 that I kind of regret because multiple people throughout the last nine years have asked me if it represents the show The Big Bang Theory.
Matt Damon. Robert Downey Jr. Josh Hartnett. Casey Affleck. Benny Safdie. Gary Oldman. Kenneth Brannagh. Matthew Modine. David Krumholtz. Tony Goldwyn. Christopher Nolan took this movie as an opportunity to cast an eclectic mix of notable-to-random Hollywood White Guys, and as someone who loves to check IMDb while I watch stuff, I really appreciated that.