I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we are so back. For the second year in a row, the movie event of the summer is not a grey sludge of a superhero movie – maybe nature is finally healing. The box office successes of Top Gun: Maverick in 2022 and Barbenheimer in 2023 might be outliers rather than a sign that movie theaters can be viable businesses again in the long term, but I’m going to enjoy while it lasts, especially with the fallout of Hollywood studios’ refusal to come to the negotiating table looming over the coming weeks and months.
To memorialize this increasingly rare moment in pop culture, here’s a recap of everything I saw at the theater during Barbenheimer release week.
Saturday, July 15: I Visit the Land of the Amish
The darkest hour is just before dawn, so naturally I kicked off the week by seeing Moses (live and on stage, please kill me) with my parents at Sight & Sound Theatres in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Watching horse-drawn Amish buggies trot by our car, I could only conclude that some higher power, via my mom, was trying to teach me a lesson about idolatry and the folly of setting your heart on earthly things.
Sight & Sound Theatres is basically the MCU but for the Bible. Instead of endless movies and TV shows about superheroes, the company produces endless musical dramatizations of biblical stories. Next year’s protagonist is already decided – David – and I have to confess to some morbid curiosity about whether they’ll use actual lions in the scene where he famously defeats a whole den of them with just the power of God and anime on his side. It’s not as far-fetched a possibility as it may seem to the uninitiated – live animals are a hallmark of the company’s productions, which feature real-life horses and sheep thundering down aisles and onto the stage. Maybe religious indoctrination of farm animals burdens them with an unquenchable thirst for the spotlight, like the rats of Nimh gaining human intelligence from their time as unwitting subjects of scientific experimentation.
I wish I could say any part of Moses surprised me or evoked genuine emotion, but the sheep were pretty much the only thing that made me sit up straight – and that was mostly because I’d never seen them move so fast and it freaked me out. Elaborate set designs and actors who hit all of their notes couldn’t distract from the sheer tediousness and predictability of both the message and the way it was delivered. It’s probably for the best that the minds behind Sight & Sound Theatres aren’t more ambitious in their storytelling choices (I just thought about a version of Moses in the vein of Hamilton and felt a shiver run down my spine), but at least the spectacle of a quirked up Christian white boy rap battling Pharaoh and rhyming “let my people go” with “or God’s wrath you will soon know” would be memorable and weird and shed fresh light on the original text. As it was, Moses was the same old snooze-fest I remember from summers spent at church camp, albeit with a shinier coat of paint slapped on top.
My skepticism put me in the minority of a crowd bursting at the seams to voice its approval. The last time I heard such thunderous applause in a theater was when Thor did something dramatic with lightning and his hammer in Avengers: Endgame; for Christians, Moses parting the Red Sea and receiving the Ten Commandments is apparently just as thrilling. It makes sense when you consider that the Bible was one of the first franchises – its stans have had more practice than anyone whipping themselves into a frenzy in the name of worship. Ultimately, the fact that Sight & Sound Theatres fails to attempt anything new or creative in its retelling of Moses’ story doesn’t matter. The people who come for the show – many of them making an hours-long pilgrimage in a tour bus – are perfectly happy to settle for boring.
Wednesday, July 19: This Barbie Is Whelmed!
When I think of Greta Gerwig, two things immediately spring to mind: coming-of-age stories and mother-daughter relationships. Both are front and center in Barbie. The journey from innocence to enlightenment that Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie embarks on allows Gloria (America Ferrera), the woman who plays with Barbie in the real world, to connect with her standoffish teenage daughter and recapture a sense of whimsy that she had lost to the monotony of adulthood. But unlike Lady Bird and her mom or Jo and Marmee March, Barbie (the one who essentially comes of age, or at least comes of consciousness) and Gloria (the mother experiencing her own epoch) aren’t actually related by blood – one character is a doll, and the other is her owner. They don’t butt heads about who they are or the type of people they want each other to be, as Gerwig’s girls and maternal figures are wont to do, because Barbie isn’t a person at all. As Barbie goes from having no inner life at all to choosing the pain and beauty and messiness of life in the real world over an eternity of perfect days in Barbieland, Gloria acts as a guide teaching Barbie what it means to be a woman.
Gloria, on the other hand, isn’t challenged to reevaluate her perspective on the world or her place in it to nearly the same degree. Her Barbie-hating daughter, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), makes her entrance by calling Barbie a literal fascist, but by the end Sasha is willing to embrace the Barbie of it all because she sees the joy and creativity it sparks in her mom. Gloria is even able to channel her frustration over the impossible contradictions of being a woman into a new type of doll, one that’s grounded instead of aspirational – Ordinary Barbie. Much has been made of how much Gerwig “gets away with” in this movie despite the corporate overlords breathing down her neck, but evidently no jokes at the expense of the all-male Mattel C-suite are off-limits so long as the narrative ultimately frames Barbie as an empowering force for women that’s worth believing and investing in. After all, Barbie helps Gloria and Sasha find common ground again; Barbie boosts Gloria’s career by giving her the opportunity to pitch a lucrative new product to her company’s CEO; and the all-powerful Barbie God, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), is so benevolent that she grants her plastic creation the gift of humanity simply because she wants it.
On the topic of selling out, Gerwig told The New York Times that Barbie is more complicated than a straightforward advertisement: “I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing.” I think that’s true. It’s just that the balance hangs around 30% subverting the thing and 70% doing the thing. The final concoction is undeniably fun, but it’s a little depressing to me that we aren’t aiming any higher than trying to Trojan horse a compelling story inside a brand-approved PR machine. “Things can be both/and,” according to Gerwig. In that case: I had a good time at Barbie and I resent being treated as a data point that Mattel’s marketing team wants to convert into a successful sale. America Ferrera’s Big Feminist Speech was one long yawn to me and I’m glad it’s in the movie, as basic as it is, because it probably radicalized some 11-year-olds who just learned what patriarchy is. Barbie is my least favorite Gerwig feature to date (Little Women remains unbothered at the top) and at certain points, it made me laugh harder than any of her previous movies combined. Charli XCX’s “Speed Drive” is the best original song on the soundtrack and it’s unacceptable that we continue to let her forgo bridges entirely (I’ll never shut up about “Yuck!” being only two minutes and 18 seconds long). Women contain multitudes, okay?
Saturday, July 22: My Parents, the Movie Star of Their Youth, and Me
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is about:
The power of friendship
Women brandishing swords
Tom Cruise’s death drive
Tom Cruise’s messiah complex
AI is really bad you guys!!! It’s the death knell of privacy and security as we know it! Ahhh!!
Trains and comically small European clown cars
Women who are so hot and so prone to dying before Tom Cruise can save them
Close-up magic, for some reason
Did you know Vanessa Kirby has blue eyes? No? Well buckle up, because you’re about to become intimately acquainted with them.
Sunday, July 23: Oppie Goes Boom
If Greta Gerwig’s calling card is mother-daughter relationships, then Christopher Nolan’s is Important Men™ – tortured geniuses and misunderstood misanthropes, soldiers and visionaries and masters of their craft. Sometimes these men have wives and mistresses and daughters, but what’s a planet to the sun? Just another piece of debris swept up in a star’s irresistible, obliterating gravitational pull. Oppenheimer is everything you’d expect from Nolan cranked up to eleven, complete with timeline fuckery, a pulsing score that reverberates in your very bones, a showcase of style and form and technical prowess (at the expense of thornier philosophical and spiritual pursuits), and, of course, a whole bunch of Important Men.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of guys in Oppenheimer, ranked from least to most compelling to me, personally.
Gary Oldman as Truman
When Gary Oldman won Best Actor in 2017 for cosplaying Winston Churchill (over the likes of Denzel Washington, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Daniel Kaluuya), I sensed that there must be some kind of sinister sorcery at work. The deal Oldman made with the devil has become clear to me now: in exchange for an Oscar, he agreed to shroud himself in prosthetics that make him look like a candle mid-melt for the remainder of his career. Can he come up with something else??
Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr
This man and his silly little accents. Leave Agatha Christie alone! Get a job (that isn’t butchering her novels)!
Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge
The likeliest post-Nickelodeon career trajectory for Josh Peck was starting a nostalgia-mining Drake & Josh rewatch podcast, so he’s already punching above his weight just by being in Oppenheimer at all.
Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss
RDJ now that he’s done with the whole Iron Man thing and is taking roles that actually require him to act:
Rami Malek as David Hill
One year after Gary Oldman won his fraudulent Academy Award, Rami Malek bagged Best Actor for a performance that was also 90% prosthetics: the god-awful fake teeth he wore as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. At least Malek negotiated better post-Oscar terms with the devil than Oldman – the chompers are nowhere to be found in Oppenheimer. And if you’re going to cast anyone as a Chekhov’s gun, he’s your guy. Very few people are better suited to lurking in the background of scenes in a vaguely menacing manner.
Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence
I would suffer through an undergraduate physics course if this bespectacled version of Josh Hartnett were my professor, and that is all I will say on the matter at this time.
David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi
My close personal friend Michael-from-10-Things-I-Hate-About-You is all grown up!
Krumholtz’s portrayal of Rabi is the closest we get to a real human being in Oppenheimer, and he’s also one of the few Jewish actors playing a Jewish character. Good for him.
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer
For someone so constitutionally incapable of writing a female character with more substance than a single slip of tissue paper, Nolan sure knows how to pander to women. What else would you call the homoeroticism of Arthur and Eames in Inception, or treating Cillian Murphy as his muse for nearly two decades? The Tumblrinas know what you are, Christopher.