Products

Go to the archives

Weekend Butler: “Oppenheimer” (No thanks), “Killers of the Flower Moon” (And the Oscar goes to…?). Life imitates LeCarre. Married people are 545% happier! Jelly Roll needs a favor! Handle hard better! And more.

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Aug 23, 2023
Category: Weekend

WHY I SKIPPED “OPPENHEIMER.” WHY “KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON” IS A MUST-SEE MOVIE FOR ME

“Oppenheimer” has audiences sitting in theaters for 3 hours.

 “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which opens on October 6, is longer — 3 hours and 26 minutes.

I didn’t see “Oppenheimer,” but when “Killers of the Flower Moon” is finally in theatres, my aged kidneys and I plan to be at the noon show.

What’s my problem with “Oppenheimer?”

If you’ve seen the movie, take this quiz: When was the first atomic bomb exploded? Was the atomic bomb ever tested before it was dropped on Hiroshima? What is “Trinity?”

The short answer: “Trinity,” the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, was exploded on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico, 230 miles south of Los Alamos.

The full answers can be found in Nadira Goffe’s excellent article in Slate, “Oppenheimer’s Glaring Omission.” 

40,000 people, most of them Hispanic homesteaders or residents of the Mescalero Apache Reservation, lived in an area that appears, in “Oppenheimer,” as empty desert. They were not told to evacuate, or warned that there would be radioactive fallout — the official explanation was that there had been “an explosion at an ammunition dump.”

There was fallout on vegetables and animals consumed by the locals. That made cancers, birth defects and stillbirths inevitable, as was genetic damage that led to mutations in the next generation, Goffe writes: “For 63 years scientists in the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission and its successor, the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, have been assessing the long-term health effects in the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in their children.” Follow-up studies of the Trinity test in New Mexico: zero.

Now let’s turn to “Killers of the Flower Moon.”  The film is adapted from David Grann’s best-seller about a series of murders in the Osage community in Oklahoma in the early 1920s.  Why were the Osage dying? Because they’d been moved onto worthless land — until they struck oil and became instantly rich. “In 1923 alone,” Grann writes, “the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million. The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world.” They built mansions and bought fleets of cars. A magazine writer at the time wrote: “Every time a new well is drilled the Indians are that much richer. The Osage Indians are becoming so rich that something will have to be done about it.”

After two dozen were dead, the Osage sent Barney McBride, a white oilman, to Washington, to ask the federal government to intervene. Later his naked body was found, stabbed over 20 times, and the FBI got involved.

The film was shown out of competition at Cannes. It got a 9-minute standing ovation. Would it help you follow this long story, in which bodies pile up at a fearsome rate, if you read the book? Why not? [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle download, click here.]

Here’s the trailer of the Martin Scorsese film.  

You ask: Did it have to be sooo long?

Scorsese has a ready answer, and it’s a challenge to moviegoers:  “It’s a commitment. I know I could sit down and watch a film for three or four hours in a theater, or certainly five or six hours at home. ‘Now, come on,’ I say to the audience out there, if there is an audience for this kind of thing, ‘Make a commitment. Your life might be enriched. This is a different kind of picture; I really think it is. Well, I’ve given it to you, so hey, commit to going to a theater to see this.’ And then he makes the point that Christopher Nolan, the director of “Oppenheimer,” didn’t:  “Spend the evening, or the afternoon with this picture, with this story, with these people, with this world that reflects on the world we are in today, more so than we might realize.”

Life is choices. I look around and see writers and actors on strike for a fair share of the vast income that big companies bank. I see kids stalled in their careers because companies prefer low-salaried gig workers to real employees. I see investment banks buying up apartments that can be, at inflated rents, money-makers. And I think, “’Flower Moon’ is a political movie disguised as a love story. It has Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, and it’s the last film Robbie Robertson scored for Scorsese. Do I have time for that? Bring it on!

A MOMENT OF INSPIRATION

“Handle Hard Better.” Three cheers for Kara Lawson

WEEKEND MOVIE: “OUR KIND OF TRAITOR”

It’s adapted from the John LeCarre novel.  Read the Butler review.

Watch it on Amazon Prime video.

Why now? Because, the Times reports, the Wagner mercenary leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, was on board when a private jet crashed north of Moscow on Wednesday, killing 10 people. This echoes the ending of “Our Kind of Traitor.”

MAYBE DIET GINGER ALE IS A GOOD IDEA AFTER ALL

The Harvard Gazette has nothing good to say about sugared soft drinks.