The Sun Theatre in Yarraville was prepared for the dual releases of Barbie and Oppenheimer, the hype around which -- each movie separately and the two as box office opponents -- I have somehow managed not to discuss thus far on my blog.
Perhaps a little more prepared for one than the other, as we shall see.
To end the suspense, Oppenheimer was the movie I saw. That's why I chose this poster. It was my first time out at the movies since I saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, an unthinkable three-week drought, only one of which can be explained by being out of town on my ski trip.
I might have preferred to watch Barbie -- any time you have to sit down for a three-hour movie, it feels like a chore -- but I already have writers assigned to review that movie. Since I had some vague notion I might get the review up for Oppenheimer on Friday before the weekend, which is technically still possible despite the fact that I haven't yet started writing it, I opted for Christopher Nolan's three-hour opus, which would start at 8:50 and get me home sometime after 12:30. (Leaving no realistic chance to start writing the review last night, and making the whole decision-making process questionable at best.)
The real way to go would have been to go to a double feature, but since I was going out to dinner with my wife, there was no way that was happening.
I won't be able to go too many more days without seeing Barbie, so will probably try to go by Tuesday at the latest.
Especially after seeing how the Sun prepared itself for her arrival.
This is what I saw first when arriving at the cinema, and the small print will prompt me to explain it if i you can't read it:
On one side of the marquee it reads "HI BARBIES!" and on the other side it reads "HI KENS!" For the record, this is the first time I have ever been to the Sun when anything other than the names of the movies playing appeared on that marquee. Or I should say, maybe some other message appeared -- but the names of the movies also appeared.
My ability to snap this photo was short-lived, since almost immediately afterward they started changing it to this:
Same message still there, but now pushed entirely to the left, with OPPENHEIMER 70 MM now appearing on the right. As though someone in theater management had remember their journalistic oath not to show preferential treatment to one of the two political parties.
At first I wondered if it was a clever staggering of the marquee message based on the start times of certain films. But I had to toss out that theory when I remembered that the only reason I wasn't myself attending the 70 MM version of Oppenheimer was that it started at 7:30, when I was eating Italian food with my wife back in Altona. (More on the version I did attend in a moment.)
When you got inside, though, it was all Barbie.
How about this?
Or this?
Or this?
Yes, that last is an over-sized Barbie package where you and your Ken (or your Barbie) can take a photo. I didn't have a Ken or a Barbie with me so I had to settle for a photo of this woman taken on the sly. (Besides, it would have been weird to pose in there without even going to the movie.)
I want to say Barbie was playing on about three screens -- at least three screens -- and the place seemed to be full of people gabbing about the movie, having either just gotten out of it or getting ready for it to start, clogging the hallways to keep me from passing as they rested obliviously in their state of pre- or post-viewing. At least one of the screenings was sold out, which is unheard of these days. There may have been earlier sellouts but the earlier showtimes no longer appeared on the screen.
And as you can get a sense of from this last picture, the prospective and past Barbie attendees were usually dressed up in an outfit accentuating the color pink, or at least something clearly celebratory. I didn't see any drag -- in fact I only saw one man that I was sure had just come out of the movie -- but I have to suspect that element was or would be present as well.
How did Oppenheimer counter this?
Well there were no Oppenheimer-related promotional materials except for the poster advertising its arrival that had been on the wall for months already. I guess the studio didn't sent a mushroom cloud in front of which viewers could pose. But the movie had been accorded the cinema's biggest screen to play in glorious widescreen format. I may have discussed in the past that this is one of the cinemas that set itself the task of outfitting a screen to play The Hateful Eight in 70 mm nearly ten years ago now, and I believe still shows it sometimes. I've also seen 2001 in this format here.
When I'd checked that 7:30 screening earlier in the day just to gauge what percentage it was sold, to give myself an idea whether my own screening at 8:50 was likely to sell out, most of the tickets did seem to be bought. Those people were in the middle of their movie when I arrived so they were nowhere to be seen.
But there was my own screening about to start, so where was the Oppenheimer contingent for this one?
Well, I was a full one-third of it.
That's right, although the 70 mm Oppenheimer did get the royal treatment, the other instance was put on one of the theater's smaller screens, in an auditorium with only 40 seats. They were leather couch seats, a benefit for a movie this length. But the couch cinema is almost always used for smaller, more independent releases, the ones that haven't invested a huge budget in their sound design and are expected to attract a more niche crowd.
In this auditorium, two other solo men and I were dispersed about as far away from each other as we could be. Both of those men were over 70. In fact, I joked to myself that they were watching the movie because they were contemporaries of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
It's too early to know what the verdict will be from the U.S. box office, but all signs point to Barbie right now. That three-hour running time does tend to kill off a lot of interest, even in the latest movie from the guy who made three Batman movies.
While Barbie seems likely to win the battle (i.e. the opening weekend box office), the outcome of the war (the critical reaction) is less certain. You reading this may already know the critical response, but I haven't sampled it yet, in part because I'm about to write my own review and I don't want to be influenced.
I will say that Oppenheimer will definitely have a shot in that regard. My positive feelings for Oppenheimer, while muted in some respects, are probably more uncomplicated than for any Nolan film since The Dark Knight. To be clear, I think Inception is the better film, but my first viewing of that film did leave me wanting, and I only appreciate it more after two subsequent viewings. The third Dark Knight was fine, didn't love it. Interstellar has its problems despite some obvious strengths. I famously didn't like Dunkirk when I first saw it (and only appreciate it a little more on a second viewing), and Tenet is problematic despite strengths -- kind of like Interstellar, except Interstellar is better.
So you have to take being less of a Nolan fanboy into consideration when you receive my words of Oppenheimer praise, but yeah, this is kind of Nolan "returning to form" -- despite still being at least 30 minutes longer than it probably needed to be
I'll see if Barbie's 114 minutes hit the sweet spot in the next couple days, and surely report back.
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