So Barbenheimer, huh?

I watched both movies with hubs a couple of weeks ago, and enjoyed them both. Some mild spoilers ahead.

Barbie is visually stunning, very funny and very clever, and yes, quite feminist. The main Ken (the one played by Ryan Gosling, whose job is beach) is excellent as a dim yet eerily realistic villain. He has no issues crushing everything Barbie holds dear out of aggrieved entitlement masquerading as heartache.  Never has the song “Push” by Matchbox Twenty been used more literally and to a more resonant effect than in the beach campfire scene. The sage Weird Barbie is as awesome and crazy as anything that Kate McKinnon ever plays. Margot Robbie is otherworldly pretty as Stereotypical Barbie, who gets hit with a realization of how shit the real world still is for women. America Ferrera delivers a poignant soliloquy that has been circulating on social media.

Ryan Gosling’s skin looks just like shiny plastic, a marvel of makeup art. Excellent side characters like Alan (played by Michael Cera) and various other Barbies and Kens enhanced the movie. And yes, that last sentence in the movie is hilarious.

Overall, well worth viewing.

**

I was dreading Oppenheimer because of its three-hour runtime. I am happy to report that the movie was exquisitely done, so I didn’t feel bored or restless for even a moment. The combination of flashbacks on Oppenheimer’s career with ‘current’ events covering the hearings that led to him being stripped of security clearance were done quite effectively, keeping the tension high and the narrative moving at a good clip.

I’ve always thought Cillian Murphy was creepy, and his creepiness, exacerbated by the era-appropriate accent and his emaciated frame, made him an excellent vessel for the portrayal of a self-absorbed, chain-smoking, skirt-chasing, brilliant, arrogant, tortured mid-twentieth-century father of the atomic bomb. Emily Blunt, whom I would watch if she were reading her shopping list aloud, did a lot with a relatively small role of Oppenheimer’s smart, unconventional, alcoholic wife Kitty, with whom he shared a strong if somewhat nonstereotypical bond. To me, the most exciting part of the movie were the portrayals of all the physicists (many of them theorists, *swoon*) whose names are found in textbooks and on letterheads of national labs. Oppenheimer brought quantum mechanics to the US, and the postwar physics boom in the country was largely due to the success and brainpower influx associated with Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. I loved seeing the big names ‘in the flesh’ and witnessing their very human interactions and often fraught relationships. Robert Downey Jr was excellent as the scheming Lewis Strauss, and Matt Damon did a solid job as a General Groves.

Overall, it was an excellent movie. I am very glad I saw it.

What say you, blogosphere? Did you see either movie? Both? What did you think?