The true, dramatic story of Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Oppenheimer' villain • Hacker News Board

Re: The true, dramatic story of Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Oppenheimer' villain

#71

Post by fingerlocks » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 6:03 AM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #70

fingerlocks wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see it. For the highest grossing, three out of ten are original non-sequels if we are being generous in 2005, versus two of ten in 2023.

It's certainly quite hard to see things when you close your eyes. You intentionally ignored the lists of movies I referenced to try to find one you could spin into being 'not so bad.' And even in your cherry picked sample, there's still a decline - substantially more so when once one factors in your quite creative counting. Modern Hollywood has always found itself in ruts, as efforts at stable revenue generation grad…

I scrolled down to the top 10 highest grossing section in each link you posted and counted the number of non-remakes, sequels, or “spandex” movies. Those are your links and the categories you defined.

Sorry I’m not really following the entirety of your rant.

Re: The true, dramatic story of Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Oppenheimer' villain

#72

Post by somenameforme » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 9:27 AM UTC

fingerlocks wrote: post #71

somenameforme wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly quite hard to see things when you close your eyes. You intentionally ignored the lists of movies I referenced to try to find one you could spin into being 'not so bad.' And even in your cherry picked sample, there's still a decline - substantially more so when once one factors in your quite creative counting. Modern Hollywood has always found itself in ruts, as efforts at stable revenue generation grad…

I scrolled down to the top 10 highest grossing section in each link you posted and counted the number of non-remakes, sequels, or “spandex” movies. Those are your links and the categories you defined. Sorry I’m not really following the entirety of your rant.

You ignored 40+ films from both years, and these films made the difference even more strikingly apparent than your cherry picking.

As for your understanding, I think there are generally two types of films in Hollywood. There's the largely uninspired make a buck type film, and there's the more creative works where you have a group of people who actually have a pretty neat idea. 'Hollywood' did not remake the Little Mermaid because there was some wave of inspiration where they felt they could really create an amazing film. It was just an uninspired sifting through an IP bucket to find what could be remade to make a movie for the year. And that drivel is what they dug up.

And this is of course nothing new. But what's changed has largely been the ratio. I reference the spandex films not because there's anything inherently wrong with the genre, but because it's become the clearest embodiment of this uninspired conveyor-belt style film-making. The overwhelming majority of these stories may as well have been written by ChatGPT, and the future ones probably will be! And Hollywood is absolutely spamming us with them at this point. But there's nothing inherently awful about the genre. The Dark Knight was clearly an inspired and quiet good film, yet of course it was also spandex.

I've absolutely nothing against Hollywood and am more than happy to see an inspired film. In recently saw Dune 2 yesterday - a sequel of a remake!? But I have no interest in watching 'conveyor belt films', and that is currently the vastly overwhelming majority of what is coming out of Hollywood. And that's not how it used to be.

Re: The true, dramatic story of Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Oppenheimer' villain

#73

Post by dreamcompiler » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 9:02 PM UTC

ant6n wrote: post #3

There’s a lot of bits in the Oppenheimer film that seem simplified. For example that Los Alamos appears to be a fairly small operation, a bunch of shacks in the prairie, a kind of physics camp for a team of nerds. In reality the Manhattan project at Los Alamos was a huge operation, like 8000 people living there in 1945, a kind of university/research campus and town, but the movie doesn’t really show the scale. Also,…

Nolan tried to avoid pure CGI shots in the movie. Since modern Los Alamos looks almost nothing like it did then, he built a fake Los Alamos at Ghost Ranch and filmed there. I'm guessing he didn't have the budget for 1000 buildings so he took some artistic license.

Re: The true, dramatic story of Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Oppenheimer' villain

#74

Post by dreamcompiler » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 9:05 PM UTC

sandspar wrote: post #37

vasco wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's impressive about the movie is that they managed to create drama, artistry and tension in what's fundamentally something you can't really make a movie about because in the end it's just a story of some physicists that successfully accomplished something without anyone really opposing them in any material way. Feynman made it way more interesting in his book without needing to create fake villains! You could m…

Feynman has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance in the movie. During one of the successful tests, there's a brief shot of a cheerful guy playing the bongos.

Feynman's role in the actual project was pretty limited too. He was not one of the major figures.

Re: The true, dramatic story of Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Oppenheimer' villain

#75

Post by ant6n » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 6:59 AM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #4

ant6n wrote: post #3

There’s a lot of bits in the Oppenheimer film that seem simplified. For example that Los Alamos appears to be a fairly small operation, a bunch of shacks in the prairie, a kind of physics camp for a team of nerds. In reality the Manhattan project at Los Alamos was a huge operation, like 8000 people living there in 1945, a kind of university/research campus and town, but the movie doesn’t really show the scale. Also,…

Every picture I have seen indeed shows it was a bunch of shacks and hastily built buildings. I'm not for sure a tour of Los Alamos was necessary. An overhead shot might have worked.

The few images on Wikipedia look fairly different than the movie to me, for example this overhead shot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Y#Gun-type_weapon_desi...