Come December, keep in mind there is already a Star Wars thread - Movie Reviews

[Reply #760 on:]

You neither cheer for Godzilla nor celebrate his peril.

Then why are you watching?   

We had pretty simple entertainment in the '70s

Yes, but we had some great Godzilla movies.  (The '60s Godzilla movies were even better, though.)

[Reply #761 on:]

I remember my dad laughing at some of those in the '60s

Also, I just bought a shirt that's a different take on The Great Wave of Kanagawa.

Show spoiler

[Reply #762 on:]

I watched Oppenheimer (A) tonight.

Nolan stresses repeatedly that Oppenheimer is NOT a documentary, nor a docudrama, e.g. the Warriors of the Air series on Apple TV that's getting a lot of buzz.

Interestingly, an actual documentary of Oppenheimer's life is included on the second disc in the blu-ray package, in addition to a lot of material about the making of the movie, including that the black and white scenes were shot on black and white film and not made by simply desaturating the color print. And I was surprised to learn that most or all of the special effects were practical, in-camera effects as opposed to post-shoot CGI work.

The biggest surprise to me is that some of the filming was done in the actual homes where Oppenheimer lived in Princeton and Los Alamos. And in Einstein's office at Princeton!

Before watching the movie I had a fair understanding of the Manhattan Project including Oak Ridge, Hanford, Los Alamos, and the Gadget. I didn't know many details of the Trinity test itself, though, and nothing about the storm that might have delayed the test. When Truman was trying to impress Stalin in Potsdam he had no idea that Stalin already knew of the test and had lots of detail on the project and the bomb design itself thanks to spies and sympathetic scientists like Fuchs.

I guess that it doesn't matter all that much, but I would have liked the movie to have mentioned that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was not an implosion-type plutonium bomb like the Trinity test, but a Uranium gun-type bomb, presumably because the scientists were 100% sure it would work and still thought of the implosion bombs as fragile and fussy.

One of the books in my queue is Dr. Richard Rhodes' book about the development of the atomic bomb. I'd previously read his book on the development of the hydrogen bomb but only learned yesterday that the device used in the first H-bomb test was not designed by Teller, or Ulam, but rather a guy named Richard Garwin, whose biography I'm reading now.

[Reply #763 on:]

The Report (2019) was an effective reminder of the moral urgency against and moral revulsion towards the gwot torture program.

[Reply #764 on:]

It's time for a new film review thread!  Someone who is witty, prepare a title!