MOVIE: Iron Man (2008)

by benmweilertNo Comments
Iron ManYear: 2008Rating: PG-13Length: 126 minutes / 2.10 hours After decades of superhero movies, it’s interesting to go back and watch some of the films that kicked off this whole interconnected cinematic universe. One wonders if, had a movie like Iron Man (2008) flopped, we’d even be in the aftermath of one of the most ambitious movie projects of all time. As it stands, the founding film for the MCU is a solid story that has great character growth and fun action sequences that would come to be the MCU standard for many of its films. As far as superhero origin stories go, Iron Man feels the most realistic. There’s no radioactivity. No dead parents. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has a solid motivation to fight evil after he realizes his own technology that made him rich is being used to inflict suffering on others. Of course, this realization had to come at his own suffering to humble his otherwise cocky attitude...
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MOVIE: Oppenheimer (2023)

by benmweilertNo Comments
OppenheimerYear: 2023Rating: RLength: 180 minutes / 3.00 hours Christopher Nolan's filmography has been building to this movie. Over decades, Nolan has had gimmicks in his films that make them stand out. Oppenheimer (2023) uses many of them to create a compelling story that's half scientific discovery and half political drama. That a movie like this—about unleashing the Pandora's box of nuclear weapons—hadn't been made like this before is perhaps the more impressive feat. The way Nolan weaves the two halves of the story together is masterful. However, the actors definitely do a lot of heavy lifting here. It took me a second viewing to piece together that the black-and-white segments followed Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) while the color segments focused on J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy). This visual stylization hearkened back to the way Nolan made Memento (2000) unique. The shifted timelines between the black-and-white/color segments evoked Dunkirk (2017)., I'm just glad that I could actually understand what everyone was saying,...
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