Pun Salad

Pun Son and I went to see Oppenheimer on a (relatively) small screen in Barrington, NH. No IMAX experience for us!

Not that it matters but: we went out to dinner beforehand at a very good Italian restaurant across the highway from the theater. A young couple came in while we were eating; I couldn't help but notice the guy was dressed in neon pink, and the shirt he was wearing was open down approximately to his navel. Huh, what's the deal there?

Once we got to the theater, where Barbie was also playing, all became clear. People are dressing up to go see Barbie, even in little Barrington!

On to the Oppy movie: it's a biopic, wonderfully acted, impressively shot through with amazing effects. But it has some of the little irritations of biopics, notably dialog used to convey biography. ("I'm off to Germany to study quantum mechanics with Heisenberg, because nobody in America knows it well.")

One of the main plot drivers of the movie was Oppy's leftist flirtations and resulting security concerns. Although the screenplay doesn't portray him as a simple martyr to the "red scare", it comes pretty close. And Robert Downey Jr's character, Lewis Strauss, is portrayed as a manipulative villain. Neal B. Freeman strongly objects to that history. And David Harsanyi claims "Yes, It's Reasonable To Wonder If Oppenheimer Was A Soviet Spy."

I'm a Richard Feynman fanboy, and he has a very very minor role here. (Bongo-playing, watching the Trinity test behind a glass windshield.) But I've seen contemporary pictures of him, and the actor they got to play him, Jack Quaid, is a dead ringer.

I had a difficult time understanding some of the dialog. I'm not sure where the problem resided: the lousy sound quality of the movie itself, the theater's lousy audio system, or the lousiness of my elderly ears. A Google search says it might not be just me.