schneiderdick

While this is impossible, Hollywood should never have been given the keys to the CGI kingdom. Fantasy and science fiction have been turned into absurdity, as evidenced by this awful film. More magic and nearly everything fake, Lucy the flick fits into the nonsensical -- and silly -- comic book movies designed merely to separate money from families and over stimulate the kids. Tell a story? Nah. Employ real acting? Nah. Kill a ridiculous number of people? Sure. It gets two stars because Scarlett is a delight to look at and she's married to comedy nerd writer extraordinaire Colin Jost. Anyone who thinks this is entertainment, art, or whatever, isn't thinking, and Brainiac Lucy would agree. Oh, and that we only use 10 per cent of our brain capacity is a proven myth.

While Christopher Nolan is a superb director, the film did little for me. That may be because of my age. I found the 1980 BBC miniseries "Oppenheimer" starring Sam Waterston as the famous scientist better written, better acted, and much more informative than the current film. Having said that, Nolan's film, no doubt, will be popular and informative for the younger generations which have shorter attention spans, aversions to a TV series produced four decades ago, and probably little knowledge of what it was like to grow up under the threat of nuclear annihilation. The current film tries to cover three segments of Oppenheimer's life: his younger years, the Los Alamos/Trinity segment of the Manhattan Project, and his persecution after WWII because of his communist ties. All three segments are sort of shuffled together like a poker deck between hands. The intercutting, while done well, is often jarring and confusing, but that is the hand dealt to feature film producers since they must stuff their work into the time slots allotted to them by theater owners. The miniseries, like a novel, allows the story to be stretched out in more lifelike proportions. Much has been said about the use of 70mm film, and even the producers suggested this large format added to the majestic nature of the subject matter, which by any standard is epic. However, the technical aspects of the film, while adding eye candy to the production, did little for the Oppenheimer story, which is epic in its own right. Large parts of the dialogue were difficult to decipher, a common problem with today's motion picture and television productions. Diction is no longer an essential aspect of the art form, having fallen to the god of realism rather than articulation. And the music was nothing short of banal, with an overpowering mix that got in the way of the story and the film. In short it was unimaginative and too loud, like Dick Wolf's more recent television productions such as his "Chicago" franchise. Oppenheimer tells an important story to new generations, and that may be its saving grace. For my taste, give me the BBC and it's 1980 miniseries with Waterston.

Nice to pass the time with this version of the Johnson County Wars in Wyoming, one of the major cattle wars of the 19th Century. Most of the acting is pretty good. Burt Reynolds is a bit over the top. Looks like the cast had fun dressing up. Pretty scenery. The UK ranching baron is a bit too prissy. So it was a Wyoming story shot in Canada, and yet another cowboy movie in which someone sang "The Cowboy's Lament," a song first published in 1910. The Johnson County War ran from 1889 to 1893.