Oppenheimer (2023)

I don’t think it's important to know who Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) is before going into Maestro.Although it is a film about the famed American composer’s life, the story doesn’t flow like a conventional biopic. There is no emphasis on particular events or moments in the artist's life that helped shape him.Nor are there many scenes that would contribute to filling out his biography and solidifying an already legendary status in the pantheon of great composers.

The movie is more of an old Hollywood romance, with a big score, and beautiful black and white cinematography. The two leads, Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan, are fully invested in their characters and a specific, somewhat complex affair.They are soulmates, star-crossed lovers. This is a transcendent love story, larger than life, while meticulously examining each individual musical note. It encapsulates something both intricate and simple in all the right ways.

As a child, I was always enthralled by toy commercials, especially, those for action figures. They all had a similar format of children manipulating dolls within little plastic sets (usually replicas of castles, caves, and dungeons that may or may not be sold separately).There was always a cutaway of a slack-jawed kid in disbelief at how awesome the figures were.As a child, these carefully constructed scenes felt immersive and fun and made me want the toy of course! That was the point after all.

I think a lot of us have special relationships with toys.Boomers were the first generation of children from the burgeoning (and since obsolete) middle class to benefit from their parents' disposable income.This combined with the development of cheap production methods and the advent of plastic and rubber, saw an entire industry born specifically targeted to youths.It started with magazine ads and quickly moved over to the TV screen where Saturday morning cartoons became launching off points for products marketed directly to kids.More often than not those products were toys.

I believe Boomers wanted for their children what they pined for as youths themselves.Toys, toys, and more toys.As a child, I spent countless hours after school and on the weekends playing with my X-Men and Power Rangers figurines. There’s a familiar, sentimental feeling even now as I recall those early formative years with my collection of play items.A feeling successfully captured in Toy Story.

Apart from the fact that they’re both brilliant American screenwriters and directors, Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig don’t have much in common. Their filmographies couldn’t be more different. The Inception director is known for making intellectually intriguing large-scale films which tell expansive stories about enigmatic characters and often present like a puzzle for the viewer to solve. On the other hand, the Little Women director is known for making tender slice-of-life movies focused on one or a few ordinary people which explore the emotional and philosophical implications of patriarchy and the human condition itself. Not just that, their two latest films, Barbie and Oppenheimer are films about the world’s most famous doll and the world’s most famous weapon of mass destruction respectively. So, yes, on the face of it, the entire phenomenon of ‘Barbenheimer’, this joint hype for the two films because they’re releasing on the same day, is just a meme and an example of people getting lost in the sensationalism that comes with the growth of pop culture.

It works brilliantly as a marketing strategy for both films, representing our obsession with paradoxes and filmgoers’ love for claiming favourites amongst films. It also does something which neither film could have hoped to do alone – unite two seemingly disparate groups of filmgoers. A Greta Gerwig film draws a crowd of Indie film lovers and a large percentage of the viewers are women. Similarly, a Christopher Nolan film draws a crowd of people who enjoy large-scale intellectual exercises and is often majority male. Please note that these are gross generalizations and it’s entirely possible that there were theaters packed with men who watched Little Women or women who watched Interstellar. Nonetheless, these are representative statistics, and thanks to ‘Barbenheimer’ the two crowds crossed paths. But instead of waging war over which film is better and jeering at each other, they mostly decided to join hands and go see both!