I can't help but quote Adam Driver's repeated "No, no, no!" Like, that has got to be the funniest line I've heard in the film and the one I can imagine repeating ad nauseum 10 years later.
You know, I've been thinking about all three of these movies lately. (Oppenheimer, unfortunately, in the sense of "what do I remember about this 3-hour Best Picture winner I saw in theaters only a year ago?" ... the answer being basically nothing! I'd recommend the miniseries from 1980 with Sam Waterston as Oppie if you're interested in a film that handles that narrative in a way that's genuinely interested in the politics of it.) Civil War and Megalopolis are, so far, in my top 5 films of the year behind The Substance (and maybe Hundreds of Beavers, if you count that as a 2024 film) and probably above I Saw the TV Glow? But I never really thought of them as a pair before reading this essay. I do think they're both movies that critics dismissed because they didn't know how to handle a movie that doesn't obviously align with contemporary political mores. (An exception that proves the rule would be Substacker Cole Haddon, who had an unabashedly positive review of Civil War... that flattened it into a Diverse Good Guys vs. White Supremacist Trump Analogue narrative. I like him, but that was a very dumb take!!)
I think if there's a thematic throughline between the two films, it's that they both condemn mainstream media as... kind of pathetic? Parasitic, almost. Wow Platinum makes zero sense as a character but a lot of sense as an allegory for access journalism.
When I saw the trailer of Megalopolis, I thought of Caligula for some reason. Whatever this film is, it's good it exists. I still have to watch it though. I did see the other two. I think Nolan may be a poetic filmmaker who looks to abstractions over concreteness. Maybe he's also gradually dipping his toes into political commentary in his own veiled way given our political climate these days. I interpreted Oppenheimer as a critique of how big forces and the society frown upon us associating with others who are of different belief systems, but he picked a safer timeline to focus on.
I can't help but quote Adam Driver's repeated "No, no, no!" Like, that has got to be the funniest line I've heard in the film and the one I can imagine repeating ad nauseum 10 years later.
You know, I've been thinking about all three of these movies lately. (Oppenheimer, unfortunately, in the sense of "what do I remember about this 3-hour Best Picture winner I saw in theaters only a year ago?" ... the answer being basically nothing! I'd recommend the miniseries from 1980 with Sam Waterston as Oppie if you're interested in a film that handles that narrative in a way that's genuinely interested in the politics of it.) Civil War and Megalopolis are, so far, in my top 5 films of the year behind The Substance (and maybe Hundreds of Beavers, if you count that as a 2024 film) and probably above I Saw the TV Glow? But I never really thought of them as a pair before reading this essay. I do think they're both movies that critics dismissed because they didn't know how to handle a movie that doesn't obviously align with contemporary political mores. (An exception that proves the rule would be Substacker Cole Haddon, who had an unabashedly positive review of Civil War... that flattened it into a Diverse Good Guys vs. White Supremacist Trump Analogue narrative. I like him, but that was a very dumb take!!)
I think if there's a thematic throughline between the two films, it's that they both condemn mainstream media as... kind of pathetic? Parasitic, almost. Wow Platinum makes zero sense as a character but a lot of sense as an allegory for access journalism.
When I saw the trailer of Megalopolis, I thought of Caligula for some reason. Whatever this film is, it's good it exists. I still have to watch it though. I did see the other two. I think Nolan may be a poetic filmmaker who looks to abstractions over concreteness. Maybe he's also gradually dipping his toes into political commentary in his own veiled way given our political climate these days. I interpreted Oppenheimer as a critique of how big forces and the society frown upon us associating with others who are of different belief systems, but he picked a safer timeline to focus on.