CINEMISSES! Oppenheimer

In this episode, Matt and Tug delve into the complexities of the film Oppenheimer, exploring its themes of scientific discovery, personal turmoil, and the moral implications of nuclear warfare. They get into their initial expectations, the film's plot, and the impressive ensemble cast. The conversation also touches on the film's box office success and critical acclaim, as well as the song “Russians” by Sting as it provided some unlikely inspiration to writer/director Sir Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimer’s deadly toy indeed. 

Check us at INSTAGRAM

Find us on X

EMAIL: Cinemisses@gmail.com

Transcript

Tug McTighe (00:00)
Five, four, three.

You're listening to Cinemisses, a podcast about movies that one or the other of your two hosts just never got around to seeing. I'm Doug.

Matt Loehrer (00:09)
And I'm Matt reminding you that anybody can make a podcast about movies they have seen. We're here because we haven't. Thanks for joining us on Cinemass and action.

Tug McTighe (00:17)
I'm out.

Matt Loehrer (00:18)
Someday. Hi, buddy. So people go, someday we'll get that clapper. Is that what it's called, a clapper? There's a name for it.

Tug McTighe (00:19)
Someday.

I think

it's called a clapper or a slate, but I would rather have the clap, the clapper. And then the podcast goes off and then the podcast comes back.

Matt Loehrer (00:26)
a slate.

that turns the lights on and off. Yeah, it runs back much.

So our listeners will not know this. We had to table this. Because of some technical difficulties we're having that have since been resolved, we have all sorts of new technology, but.

Tug McTighe (00:45)
We had technical

difficulties on both ends.

Matt Loehrer (00:47)
Read it so that's solved. But speaking of tables, I did want to mention the saga of the kitchen table, because you know some of this. So for. I know, right? I know I'm learning from master, buddy, learning from the master. So. As you know, because you have grown kids and I have almost grown kids after 25 years of marriage and your kids are getting an apartment that you finally can get rid of.

Tug McTighe (00:55)
What a segue! I can't believe you don't write this shit down! Just come- right off the cuff! Ugh.

Matt Loehrer (01:12)
all your garbage because all you've had in your house is 25 years of accumulated garbage furniture, right?

Tug McTighe (01:13)
Yes.

Side note, we just got rid of my youth bedroom dresser.

Matt Loehrer (01:26)
And did it go to a kid? One of your kids? Well, okay, well, that's good, too. So we've got this kitchen table that I think I bought on Amazon for $400. And we've had it for a decade. And it's it's bowing in the middle. It's made of something called rubber wood. Like I don't even think it's real wood. No, it's just terrible. Like I agree. Right. Do not touch or sit near.

Tug McTighe (01:27)
I just chopped it up and burned it in the fire pit.

They don't make that anymore. It's probably toxic. It should not be used near food.

Matt Loehrer (01:51)
⁓ So I just hated I grew to just resent it. So finally we came somehow came into some money. And I said, let's get a nice table, you know, because we you know how it is you spent so much time at the dinner table and people come over and end up hanging out in the kitchen. So we spent a significant amount of money in. Red graphic design terms a lot on a very nice like a table.

Tug McTighe (02:03)
Focus, focal point of the house. Yep.

Matt Loehrer (02:13)
and six chairs and it's heirloom quality, hardwood, it's custom made for you. Yes, and we got it and within six days we were having dinner and I put a bowl of soup, not a scalding boiling bowl of soup, just a bowl of soup that I actually ate so it couldn't have been that hot on a placemat on the table. And afterward Robin said, you've left a scorch mark on the table.

Tug McTighe (02:16)
Adult. Adult shit.

Really?

Matt Loehrer (02:35)
Right? Like it's so it's like here's an heirloom piece of furniture you can have for the rest of your life and give to your kids. As long as you don't put a lukewarm bowl of soup on a place, Matt near it. It was insane. Yeah, just look at it. It's just like a museum piece. So I'm of course upset and like. Just. Just delivered just like I spent a lot of money on this to have like if you look at it. I looked at it wrong. It's got a scorch mark now, so we got in touch with the people.

Tug McTighe (02:44)
Why would you eat? You cannot eat on this table.

That's right.

Rep Bill.

Matt Loehrer (03:01)
They need to come and take it back. Because they said this has never happened before in the history of our tables, which I find hard to believe, but OK. And I think we're going to be without a kitchen table for a week. But at least they're going to do something about it. And as Robin said, it's not the end of the world. But you know what was the end of the world?

Tug McTighe (03:12)
Okay, let's do this.

I do.

Matt Loehrer (03:19)
It was almost the movie we're going to talk about today.

Tug McTighe (03:20)
It was very nearly the end

of the world. I believe you're talking about the creation of the nuclear bomb during World War II, which leads us very smoothly into the movie that we're going to be talking about today in season one of episode three, our arbitrary season breaks map 10, 10 and 10.

Matt Loehrer (03:27)
That's right.

It's season three, episode one, but either way.

Tug McTighe (03:43)
Either way, but we're gonna talk about Oppenheimer, which neither one of us had seen. So as we always do, we talk to the person who hasn't seen this movie about what they thought they knew. So let's start with you.

Matt Loehrer (03:48)
Direct.

Okay, when this came out, there was a ton of Barbie Heimer buzz around it, which as we learned was not an accident that was intentional. It was hard for me to separate the two and they were both really, really popular movies. So I didn't know a ton about it. I knew Nolan directed it. I knew Killian Murphy was in it and was the lead. I knew it was about the development of the atomic bomb because it was Oppenheimer. But historically,

My, I don't know about you, my primary secondary education in terms of history, a lot of revolutionary war, a lot of civil war, and then that's nothing really happened after about 1920.

Tug McTighe (04:29)
Right, right. Yes, in the 80s that was about it. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (04:31)
Yeah, I didn't. So I'm like, I think he's the bomb guy. ⁓ But I knew it would be a heavy duty and a real think piece because it's Nolan, but that's all I knew.

Tug McTighe (04:35)
He's the guy.

Well, I'm gonna, let me just ditto that. First time I've said ditto on the pod. But yeah, I knew it was Chris Nolan. I knew it would have a giant cast. It does in fact have a giant cast. Seems like everybody wants to work with Nolan. I knew it would be beautifully executed from a writing and a sound and an editing and a cinematography and it all A plus. All his movies are pretty awesome that way. And again, I knew it was about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project and full stop, there we go.

So now knowing that we're both new, let's go to the log line Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimer is an IMAX shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse pounding paradox. Well, that's tough to say of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it. So that is it's Paul was pulse pounding.

Matt Loehrer (05:22)
exciting.

Right.

Tug McTighe (05:25)
And it's a paradox. And by the way, you're also thrust into the world. ⁓

Matt Loehrer (05:29)
It's rare

to see the director mention in a log line, I feel.

Tug McTighe (05:33)
Yeah,

Steven Spielberg wasn't mentioned in the log line of Jaws, which as I recall is Killer Shark menaces beach town during July 4th.

Matt Loehrer (05:41)
Right. So kind of a paradox because as we'll talk about in a bit, Nolan was so not the kind of guy to be front and center. Like he's almost the invisible invisible director. But I think studios know that he's a draw that people are like, this is a movie. So that was interesting.

Tug McTighe (05:47)
Mm-hmm.

That's right. That's right.

Yeah, that's a little bit like Matt when when Jim Carrey was at the height of his Jim Carrey-ness. It was just like Jim Carrey in it doesn't fucking matter. And the studios know that Nolan is going to bring in people that if Spielberg had made an Oppenheimer movie, which he theoretically could have, it's not the same as as Nolan doing it. Right. So.

Matt Loehrer (06:02)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely.

Tug McTighe (06:19)
Yeah. So I think, yeah, for sure. 2023 it came out, Matt, like you said, summer when, when Barbie, when Barbie came out as well, as all his movies are written, co-produced, directed by Chris Nolan. It follows ⁓ the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist who helped develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II. It was based on a 2005, a book called American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. And it dramatizes a his sort of growing up in.

college studies, pursuing his PhD, his creation and direction of Los Alamos in New Mexico and his 1954 security hearing for being a commie. Killian Murphy, as you said, is Oppenheimer and the rest of the cast is fantastic and we will get to that as we get to it.

Matt Loehrer (07:04)
Yeah, it's a really strong cast. Even the small roles are cast with stars. The Senate aide played by Alden Ehrenreich, who's credited in the credits, Senate aide, he's the only fictional character in the movie. And I think he's kind of a proxy for we the audience. We can sympathize with him. He asked the questions that we wish we would ask.

Tug McTighe (07:14)
as Senate aid.

He asked the questions

we wish we knew. Yeah, for sure. ⁓

Matt Loehrer (07:27)
Yeah, but everybody else

and everybody else in the movie is somebody with a Wikipedia entry, right? These are people that are actual people that we can find out about. I just saw Alder Nerim Reyk in Weapons. If you haven't seen Weapons, was...

Tug McTighe (07:31)
Is a person? Yeah.

I'm gonna watch Weapons, I might watch it this weekend.

Matt Loehrer (07:43)
Really cool and we can talk about that because the way that movie is structured, I thought was really interesting. Something happens, they reset it, it happens.

Tug McTighe (07:47)
Yeah, I may watch

Alden in his best performance and that's as the young Han Solo in the often panned for no real good reason solo, which I fucking quite liked. somebody stick that in their pipe and smoke it. I like that movie. That movie was really fun. 100%. I'm still waiting for that Donald Glover Lando, cause I think that'd be awesome. Oppenheimer was announced in September, 2021.

Matt Loehrer (07:58)
I like it.

And Donald Glover's in it. And I like Donald Glover and much everything he's in.

Tug McTighe (08:11)
It was his first film not distributed by Warner Brothers since Memento because they wanted to release it. He's the torchbearer in this streaming, anti-streaming directors. They wanted to release it simultaneously on HBO Max and in the theater and he's like, fuck you guys, this is a movie movie. I'm a movie director. He suffers no fools on the streaming. So he had to take it elsewhere and that obviously wasn't a very long trip for him. He's gonna get produced by, anybody will take.

Nolan's call. ⁓

Matt Loehrer (08:37)
That

feels like ⁓ just kind of greed to me. Like if the point is to get people to go to theaters, which they will do, then you need to give them a reason to do it and saying, hey, go see this movie, but also we're just gonna throw it up on HBO Max in a week or the same thing. You're not gonna accomplish what you wanna accomplish.

Tug McTighe (08:52)
It's it's it's.

Well, they they wonder what what. They wonder why people aren't going because you put it on their TV, dumbass. It anyway, and you should go see he shoots him in IMAX. So even if you don't see it in IMAX, it's beautiful again, beautifully executed and rendered. Go see this on the big screen. There's a lot of shit to look at, right? ⁓

Matt Loehrer (09:14)
Yeah, this is

one to re-release later, like years from now. Put it theaters again and put it my Macs and go see it.

Tug McTighe (09:17)
100 % 100 %

Yeah, yeah. Well, mean I jaws is probably my favorite movie and I didn't see jaws on the big screen until this year I saw it three times this year in the big screen, but yeah, put these put these

Matt Loehrer (09:29)
Well, could you have?

Yeah, we have them. Put them out again. Oppenheimer premiered at Le Grand Rex in Paris on July 11th, 2023. It was released in the United States and the UK on July 21st by Universal. We talked about that. There was the Barbenheimer phenomenon. were it was encouraging people to see them as a double feature, which is something that had gone out of fashion for a long time. You go to a movie.

Tug McTighe (09:32)
Yeah.

And boy, boy,

that's five hours of movies. And ⁓ I don't know which one you see first, because they are not alike.

Matt Loehrer (09:57)
It's a lot.

Right. It really sorry again. Oppenheimer received critical acclaim, grossed almost a billion dollars worldwide. The third highest grossing film of twenty twenty three. So two other films out grossed it, which is amazing. Highest grossing World War Two related film, the highest grossing biographical film and the third highest grossing R rated film of all time. At the time of its release, we can talk about what the other two were because one of them was a very big surprise.

Tug McTighe (10:26)
I feel like...

Well, know Deadpool had to be one of them. Deadpool and Wolverine, okay. And another R rated, in 23, another R rated movie.

Matt Loehrer (10:30)
Deadpool and Wolverine, yes.

No, no, not necessarily in 23. This is of all time.

Tug McTighe (10:39)
of all time. Well then I have no idea.

Matt Loehrer (10:42)
It was, I told you this and you forgot, but it was Joker.

Tug McTighe (10:44)
It was fucking Joker. I never even saw Joker.

Matt Loehrer (10:45)
Yeah, which that's

amazing. I didn't either nominated for nominated for 13 Academy Awards, one seven, including best picture, best director for Nolan, best actor for Sillian Murphy and best supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr. and named one of the top 10 films of 2023 by the National Board of Review and then American Film Institute.

Tug McTighe (10:49)
Wow, look at me. ⁓ okay.

They should just National Board of Review and AFI should just every year just have a little placard that just says if Nolan releases a movie this year, it'll be here because all of his movies are named to that list. Let's talk.

Matt Loehrer (11:17)
Right.

The only one

he has that I think is not good is or that I don't know anything about is the one that he did for like $6,000 when he was a student. Yeah, every other. No, every other family is made is amazing.

Tug McTighe (11:30)
Right. That's the only one we did. Yeah, that didn't make a billion dollars. Yeah. And isn't highly inflamed. Right.

Sir Christopher Edward Nolan, July 30th, 1970, is same a little bit younger than me, is a British and American filmmaker, which I didn't know, which is the only way he could become a sir. But as we've been discussing, he's known for his blockbusters because they are blockbusters, but they're usually structurally complex, like memento happened backwards.

They're big there. They ask questions about why are we here? What are we doing? What's our future like? What's our past like? He's one of the greatest filmmakers of the 21st century by anybody's counting from critic critical acclaim. And he's also made over $6 billion worldwide. His movies. He's the seventh highest grossing film director of all time in quite a

know, rarefied air or about with guys like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. He was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2019 and received his full knighthood in 2024. So I hope they gave him a sword. He deserves a sword.

Matt Loehrer (12:30)
Yeah, do Americans,

is there an American counterpart to getting knighted?

Tug McTighe (12:34)
The Presidential Medal of Freedom? Medal of Freedom. The Presidential Medal of Freedom?

Matt Loehrer (12:36)
Yeah, but the president's always...

Yeah, I guess.

Tug McTighe (12:41)
Doesn't seem the same as being a knight.

Matt Loehrer (12:42)
I feel like we should do

something about, yeah, because if the president sucks, then you're like, great. Thanks a lot.

Tug McTighe (12:46)
Yeah, thanks fella.

Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks for nothing. He studied English literature at a university college in London. made several short films you mentioned. He made this feature film debut called Following, which I've never seen. then Memento, bang, Insomnia, bang. Dark Knight Trilogy, bang, bang, bang. I mean, The Joker, the middle installments, unbelievable. The Prestige, which everybody loves. I've never seen. I've got to get it seen.

Inception interstellar which interstellar I watched on a plane and I had to read like a hundred and fifty pages of Wikipedia entries to even try to understand what the fuck was going on And Dunkirk I want to see I just never got around to seeing that one either. I never got around to see in tenant people like tenant but they also Don't like tenant. So that makes me want to see it and then Oppenheimer in 23 which was his largest

box office, largest acclaim, Academy Awards galore, et cetera.

Matt Loehrer (13:37)
So there are several of these movies I haven't I haven't seen Insomnia. I haven't seen Dunkirk. And oh, wait, that's it. I guess I've seen all the rest.

Tug McTighe (13:47)
⁓ Look at you! Hey, you even fooled yourself!

Matt Loehrer (13:50)
I did the prestige was terrifying like the implications of it and you have to see it to know what I'm talking about. But Christian Bale Hugh Jackman ⁓ David Bowie as. They are they would they would call themselves illusionists, but yes. Right, really, really good. I think when he gets into for me when he gets into sci fi. I'm just like meh like I've seen better.

Tug McTighe (13:56)
Is that Christian Bale's on that one? Yeah. Are they magicians? Yeah, I can see that. Say no more!

Matt Loehrer (14:14)
Again, beautifully shot, beautifully acted. The concept I've seen better on episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. So.

Tug McTighe (14:21)
Right. I'm not coming to you for that. I Got that I got that sorted. I'm coming to yeah, I think it's a really great point Matt Nolan I'm coming to you for this Because I not everybody can do this And you can

Matt Loehrer (14:23)
Yeah, tenant was like that. Yeah.

Yeah.

Or I saw Interstellar and it blew me away because I never thought about this. I'm like, I think about this stuff all the time. So maybe good for you, though. Probably people that ordinarily would not check out that genre or say, don't like that. But when no one does it, they say, hey, I'll give it a shot. So that's going to.

Tug McTighe (14:42)
Right, right.

That's

right. So his work often features themes that are, know, like I said, existentialism, epistemology, metaphysical aspects to these movies. Are we here? Is this, when is it happening? How is it happening? Could things be happening in a multi-paralleled universes or planar? Yeah. And so he's

He's riding around all that and usually landing the plane. And frankly, for me, Academy do love that he makes movies that you walk out of like, I'm smart because I saw that movie. Yeah, you want to talk about it. Yeah, you want. Right.

Matt Loehrer (15:25)
Right.

And people want to have conversations about it. I love that. It's water cooler stuff, right? Like,

did you see this movie and what did you think about it? And what did you think really happened at the end? And the person you're talking to may think it was something completely different, but I think that's what art does. It makes you have those conversations.

Tug McTighe (15:42)
Right.

Speaking

of smart people, tell me and our listeners what your mom had to say about us watching Oppenheimer. She loves movies and watches a lot of movies and is a smart movie critic.

Matt Loehrer (15:50)
⁓ I told my yes.

Yes, my brilliant mother. told her we were going to do Oppenheimer to lead off the season. And she said, that's not the sort of movie I would have expected you guys to do. And I'm trying to find a way that that's not an insult. Like, yeah, exactly. There's I'm pretty sure Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, The Secret of the Ooze. ⁓ I don't know if she was impressed or just just flabbergasted.

Tug McTighe (16:05)
Yeah, right. She's like... She goes, RoboCop 2's laying out there.

The secret of the ooze has been uncovered by you guys.

Well, I do not,

no, not impressed, not impressed. He is famously enthusiastic for using film, not shooting digitally. He wrote a bunch of his movies with his brother, Jonathan. He doesn't like to use CGI. In fact, they largely claimed that there was no CGI in this. He builds sets, he builds the places.

Matt Loehrer (16:24)
Not impressed.

Tug McTighe (16:43)
He runs a production company, Syncope with his wife, Emma, who he met in college. she and he and his brother have been intertwined ever since. And they're all, they're all together working on this. So really, really, really interesting stuff.

Matt Loehrer (16:54)
It's really scary. Yeah,

she met they met the first week that she was at college. Yeah, and look at him now. So that's pretty great.

Tug McTighe (17:00)
Isn't that funny?

Total gold digger.

Matt Loehrer (17:05)
And we talked about he's a notoriously private person and I don't know anything about him about his life. I saw what.

Tug McTighe (17:13)
He wears a suit when he's shooting.

He wears a suit. Yeah, he dresses up. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (17:17)
Really? That's pretty cool. ⁓

He even when I saw a picture of him, I thought I wouldn't have recognized that guy as personal.

Tug McTighe (17:25)
Yeah,

is that one of the is that one of the production assistants? No, that's cool

Matt Loehrer (17:28)
Yeah, it's

a producer. I don't know. He's expressed this desire to be kind of a tabula rasa or a blank slate. ⁓ Thank you. said, I see I watched a Nolan movie.

Tug McTighe (17:36)
⁓ very good. and your mom's always been smart. She didn't say

it. She intimated it.

Matt Loehrer (17:43)
Exactly. He said, quote, I actually don't want people to have me in mind at all when they're watching the films. And I didn't. Like, I wasn't thinking about him the way you might think about David Lynch or, you know, Spielberg behind the, you know, behind the camera, whatever. He supposedly doesn't own a smartphone or have an email address. His wife handles interactions with the studios and producers and distributors. And he hand delivers scripts to his actors.

Tug McTighe (17:56)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So just to old school kind of mentality, he, I've heard this quote a lot and you know how these famous quotes are attributed to all kinds of people, you know, over the years, you don't really know who said it, but it doesn't matter. But I have heard this quote that says something to the effect of you should, you should make your life quiet and nondescript. So your work can be bold and powerful and explosive. And I think he sort of adheres to that. He's like, Hey, what I'm

I am what I make ghost ghosty. thing I'm making, you don't need to know about me. I'm letting this speak for itself.

Matt Loehrer (18:39)
That's great. You'll know me by the work that you see. think that's fantastic and it shows a lack of ego that you don't always see with these kind of directors. I thought that was cool.

Tug McTighe (18:42)
That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. That's like when you're

a, a, athlete and the ones that I think I, I grabbed, not, think the ones I gravitate to towards the, toward the most are the ones that let their play do the talking. Like I, I, remember Marcus Allen, when he came to the chief's famous Raider, and then he's a hall of famer came to the chiefs and the rookie running back said, Hey, what if, what should I do if I score a touchdown today?

And Marcus Allen goes, act like you've been there before. Right? So like, hand the ball around and walk away. Right? ⁓ So I like that.

Matt Loehrer (19:13)
That's great.

Very cool.

Yeah, there's a lot of production notes we could get into and I'm not going to get into a lot of it. long story, slightly longer. American Prometheus was the book. and it was optioned again and again and again. And when a story is optioned, that basically means someone gives you money. And for six months or 12 months or at most 18 months, you've got time. they've got time to put something together to actually make it. And if they don't.

Tug McTighe (19:35)
for a period of time, right.

Matt Loehrer (19:40)
then the option expires and you can shop it around to somebody else. So for years, these guys would just, they sold their book and they were just getting option money, which I would think would be pretty great.

Tug McTighe (19:49)
That would be great. what

happened here is a little bit like Lord of the Rings until Peter Jackson. People got this book and loved this book. And then they're like, I don't know how to make a movie into it. I don't know how to make a movie out of it rather. So that's hard. And that happens a lot where you're like, fuck, how do you film this thing? Because it is a lot of math. Hashtag math the movie. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (20:02)
Yeah.

Oliver Stone was one of

right Oliver Stone was famously one of those people it was shopped around to him. And I think he optioned it for a bit and then he said I can't get my head around this. And then when Nolan actually did it, they came back to Stone and he said, that's that's it. I couldn't have done that. But that's he knew. Yeah, so ultimately it did come to Nolan. Robert Pattinson had worked with Nolan before and on Tenet.

Tug McTighe (20:24)
There's no way I could have done that. That's right.

Yes.

Matt Loehrer (20:33)
and had given him a book of quotes or something from Oppenheimer. So he had put that bug in his head. So no one wanted to do this anyway. Ultimately decided to make this movie and ended up at Universal because, you know, Warner Brothers had said they were going to put it on HBO Max the same day. And he said, no, Universal. He had this crazy, like, hostage demand list of a billion things. ⁓

Tug McTighe (20:48)
Correct.

This is the shocking stat, so carry on.

Matt Loehrer (20:56)
20 % of first dollar gross on this, which is crazy. It might have gotten worse. Yeah.

Tug McTighe (21:01)
So that means first dollar

made, not after it's made money, not profits, first dollar made 20%.

Matt Loehrer (21:09)
Yeah, so he's making that right out right out of the chute and then ⁓ the production budget and marketing budget of 100 million each and I didn't realize and maybe a lot of people don't how much marketing costs it cost as much they spent as much money marketing this as they did to make the entire movie.

Tug McTighe (21:25)
You

have to figure that into when you're calculating the profit margin of a movie. You have to calculate all those numbers. And a lot of people don't think about it.

Matt Loehrer (21:33)
Yeah. So if a movie makes

50 million, movie makes $50 million and they lost money and you're like, how could that be possible on $20 million budgets? Cause they had $50 million marketing. So, he made a ton of money. He got what he wanted. ⁓ universal made the movie.

⁓ Some scenes were shot in color and others were in black and white. This was the first movie to use IMAX photographic film, was specifically created by Kodak for this. So that's how important IMAX was to this.

Tug McTighe (21:59)
And also how important Nolan is to them. We'll make film for you.

Matt Loehrer (22:02)
For sure. ⁓

They said supposedly the color black and white was to quote, convey the story from both subjective and objective perspectives. But I believe it was so you could keep track of where they were in time because there's so much time shifting in this. So when it's him, it's color. When it's the Senate hearing, it's black and white. When it's that interview, it's still color, but it's kind of like a 1960s style, like a real flat.

Tug McTighe (22:27)
Yeah, not

sepia tone, but just a lot flatter. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (22:30)
Yeah, different color palette too. So

I thought that was interesting. And you see that a lot in movies where, it's time cop and there's young Jean Claude Van Damme and old Jean Claude Van Damme, but you can tell them apart because one's got a high.

Tug McTighe (22:41)
Yeah, different.

has an eye patch or a mullet or something. Well, how do you know it's evil smock?

Matt Loehrer (22:44)
Yeah, one's got an eye patch. One's got a mullet and that's how you keep them apart.

Yeah mustache. goatee sorry.

Tug McTighe (22:49)
That's

That's a good tea. but yeah, I, it took me a minute to get what they were doing, Matt. But then once you get into the flow and he's just such a good editor too, that you're like, okay, I get it. Color is happening now. They're, they're in the midst of studying or learning or meeting each other or building the bomb. Black and white is them talking about those times that, that period in history. And it's funny, the black and white.

the colors takes place in the 40s, the black and white takes place in the 50s. But that's how they framed it up. he's tricky. He's tricky, right? Sticky is not the right word, he's got concepts that he plays with.

Matt Loehrer (23:17)
Right. Yeah. I think it helps your brain. yeah.

Yeah, I think it was really helpful and you don't have to concentrate. I think your brain kind of fills in like your brain. Hey, when I see this black and white, I know we're talking to Robert Downey Jr. and Alden, Aaron, right before the Senate.

Tug McTighe (23:35)
Hunter.

And as you

well know, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, that could have fallen apart quickly. Cause there is a lot of dialogue and a lot of speeches. All right. So principal photography was 85 days that they realized there's we'll never make our budget if we shoot for three months all over the country. So we compress filming down to 57 days, which I cannot fathom how even just, just from a three hour perspective, runtime perspective.

Matt Loehrer (23:46)
Yes.

Tug McTighe (24:06)
But also the locations, the storylines, the people, the sets, the props, just that's crazy. Obviously. Out Los Alamos today doesn't look like it did in 1940, so they built a Los Alamos. They spent three months building a fake Los Alamos and use it for six days, three months. We're shooting for six days. Oppenheimer's.

Cabin where he and his family were living in Los Alamos is the real Oppenheimer's cabin. Gary Oldman, an unrecognizable Gary Oldman who plays a bit of a douchebaggy Harry Truman, had only one day to shoot. And again, we'll talk about this at the cast, but there's lots of people that were on set for one day and they're like, I'll do anything for this guy. Right. They were going to shoot in the Richard Millehouse Nixon library, but it was unused. It was unavailable. So the Oval Office you've seen.

is a dressed up set from the Julia Louis Dreyfus series, Veep, one of our favorites here at Cinemas's World Headquarters. And man, I told you, did not, when we talked after we watched, I didn't even know who was playing Truman.

Matt Loehrer (24:57)
I did enjoy this.

Yeah, it took me a second.

Tug McTighe (25:04)
Man.

Matt Loehrer (25:05)
The very first person to see the final cut in a private screening was...

Tug McTighe (25:09)
Spielberg, had to be Spielberg.

Matt Loehrer (25:10)
Absolutely. No one said he had some very kind things, but really just to watch him watch. I wasn't even supposed to watch it with him, but seeing the great master watching was sort of irresistible. And we have grown up with Spielberg our entire lives. So when he's referred to as the great master, it impressed on me how there's a how old I am, which I hate. But also how revered he is by these younger generations.

Tug McTighe (25:19)
Right, how can you not? Yeah.

1, C, 1, hold.

by these filmmakers,

that's right. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (25:36)
for sure.

And actually, fun fact, it was Spielberg himself, who discovered Senedade and young Han Solo Alden Ehrenreich at the bar mitzvah of a friend of his daughter. you don't

Tug McTighe (25:46)
You never know guys, there's

still a chance for me and to be discovered. Knock wood.

Matt Loehrer (25:50)
⁓

Last thing in production notes, it was scored by Ludwig Goranson, who also scored Tenet and who ended up winning a deserved Oscar for best original score for this. He estimates that music plays for two and a half out of the three hour runtime of this movie. Other Academy Awards this movie won are best picture, best director, best actor, best supporting actor, best cinematography and best editing. that's all.

100 % well deserved. The editing, especially, there were a billion cuts, like, cut, cut, cut.

Tug McTighe (26:15)
Yeah. Really, really hard. Yeah.

I love this score really atmospheric really drama building tension building and then tension releasing. I just really liked it.

Matt Loehrer (26:28)
Frequent Nolan collaborator Hans Zimmer was not available since he was committed doing the Scores of Dune one and two. I actually don't love his work. So my favorite is Michael Giacchino, by the way, if you like him. But ⁓ so I was thrilled to have Ludwig Gorinsson do this and I thought he did an amazing job.

Tug McTighe (26:38)
Okay.

Yeah, really good. Um, all right. Tomato meter, 93 % that's an a popcorn meter, 91 % another a so critics and moviegoers alike high rating. Uh, it grossed 331, 330 million in the U S and Canada and 645 in other territories, 975.8 mil worldwide. 190 of which came from IMAX.

Matt Loehrer (27:11)
That's amazing. Right?

Tug McTighe (27:12)
Which is a shit ton of IMAX people

because IMAX is like 20 buck ticket. So a lot of people want to this on IMAX It's the third as we discussed third highest grossing already film of all time The other two were as we said were let me remind me again ⁓ And will be versus Deadpool, all right despite that Yeah, right despite the all that all those accolades it was never one

Matt Loehrer (27:25)
Joker and Wolverine versus Deadpool.

I've seen one of those and it was not that great.

Tug McTighe (27:37)
at the box office.

Matt Loehrer (27:38)
in which one prevented it from doing so. Yes, which I thought it was closer.

Tug McTighe (27:40)
Barbie. ⁓ it's friend

and nemesis. Oof. Why Barbie?

Matt Loehrer (27:44)
I thought Barbie just edged it out.

I thought Barbie just edged it out for a box office, but it wasn't even close. Barbie made so much money. 1.3 billion.

Tug McTighe (27:52)
What was the Barbie numbers?

just again, I need everybody to hear it's with a B. That's a lot of money. Geez. Speaking of a lot of money, Little Bear makes a lot of money off of this pod. And by a lot, mean zero, but hopefully someone hires Little Bear for some graphics work graphics work. No, I'm not. I'm running out of segues.

Matt Loehrer (28:00)
That is automatic.

If you're getting tired of these, you're running out of gas here.

Tug McTighe (28:17)
You've heard of the Manhattan Project. Well, meet the Brandhattan Project. Today's episode is brought to you by Little Bear Graphics, a small but powerful marketing and design firm that knows how to make your brand go boom. Little Bear creates logos, websites, and campaigns so sharp, you'll wonder if Einstein himself had a hand in the creative process. Need a visual identity that's explosively great, but that won't start a chain reaction that may or may not destroy the world? Then check out littlebear.graphics today. Matt's work is nuclear commission approved.

and no radiation will leak out of your head.

Matt Loehrer (28:46)
Nice. Love it. Love those.

Tug McTighe (28:48)
All right. So this is an amazing ensemble cast. everybody that showed up is somebody, even the that guys and that ladies are somebody's. so Nolan said that one interesting aspect of filming with this ensemble cast that were playing real people was it in a fit, gigantically famous story.

was that everybody could do all this research and came in super prepared on knowing who their people were and what they were, you know, who they were playing was and what they were like. So there's just an interesting aspect to playing a real person where you can do this kind of research. Olivia Thoroughby, who you may remember, Matt, from our episode as the rookie on, she was the rookie judge on in Dread. Please listen to that.

Matt Loehrer (29:31)
Anderson.

Tug McTighe (29:32)
She was ⁓ really smart about her character and had these encyclopedic details about Lily Hornig. And that helped her help him shape the character. She contributed some dialogue. Another interesting fact about him that you learn here, Matt, is as buttoned up as he is, sounds like he's open to suggestion and open to collaboration, which makes me super happy. ⁓

Matt Loehrer (29:53)
I also

think, I was just thinking the same thing and how gratifying and satisfying that must be for the actors to be respected in a way that they can come in and say, hey, I did my research. This is what this person was like and have the director say, awesome, let's roll with that.

Tug McTighe (30:00)
For sure.

Let's do that. Right.

So great.

I'll fix this. Robert Downey Jr. Claimed that due to the copious amount of dialogue he had, a ton of dialogue, he just memorized it all. he just work and worked his butt off to get it cause he didn't want to blow it. which like, dude, bro, I can you imagine just sitting down and go and I'm just gonna memorize this.

Matt Loehrer (30:27)
Now, as much as I love movies, and this is me being a jerk, I've always kind of thought a lot of actors, and maybe right, maybe wrong, are just kind of stupid, right? But there's gotta be something to being able to memorize pages and pages and pages and pages of dialogue, especially as much as Downey had in this movie. Like, when I do that, I don't even know where I keep, leave my keys most of the time.

Tug McTighe (30:35)
I don't know that far, yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

No,

God no. God no.

Matt Loehrer (30:54)
Yeah, I don't think I could do it. So credit.

Tug McTighe (30:56)
So again, everybody's a

pro, everybody's bringing their A game, and that's why you get a movie like you get here.

Matt Loehrer (31:01)
All right, well.

Tug McTighe (31:02)
Why

don't you talk about some of these key people? not go all the way down the list, but let's talk. I want to get to the plot. Let's talk about some of these key folks.

Matt Loehrer (31:09)
⁓

this started killing Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory. He did not have to audition for this movie. He just showed up.

Tug McTighe (31:18)
He just got to be in it.

Matt Loehrer (31:19)
Emily Blunt, who I like more and more the more I see her. As Catherine Kitty Oppenheimer, his wife, former Communist Party USA member. She, Damon.

Tug McTighe (31:22)
You and me both.

Well, you don't have say

that too many. You don't say that too much in 2025. Here's my friend, Matt Lora, former Communist USA party member.

Matt Loehrer (31:35)
I don't know, maybe it's fresh again. Maybe people want commies again. She took a pay cut. Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr. all took big pay cuts to do this movie. And she said, Killian Murphy is the best actress she's ever worked with. And she's married to an actor. Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, ⁓ he was on a break from acting as a promise to his wife.

Tug McTighe (31:48)
saying something.

Yeah, right.

All Leslie.

Matt Loehrer (32:01)
And the only condition was if Christopher Nolan offers me a job, I can do it. Robert Downey Jr. as Louis Strauss, retired Naval Reserve officer and a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. His favorite film.

Tug McTighe (32:03)
I'm going.

his not his favorite movie.

Matt Loehrer (32:14)
yeah, no, his favorite film of his own.

Tug McTighe (32:16)
he's ever been in. Yeah, that's awesome. And Robert Downey Jr., man.

Matt Loehrer (32:18)
doing it.

Yeah, when he won the Golden Globe, Rob Lowe watched his speech and said, I'm so excited. I'm going to text him. He said, I'm so glad you won. That's a beautiful acceptance speech. And boy, do you deserve it. And then he hit send and realized he sent it to Bradley.

Tug McTighe (32:30)
That's who Rob Lowe has in his phone.

Matt Loehrer (32:32)
Right. Yeah, I would. You would be my Bradley Cooper. I would send it to you. I meant to I'm in Senators John January. I said to you.

Tug McTighe (32:35)
That's right.

That's right,

I would say thank you, I appreciate your support.

Matt Loehrer (32:41)
Florence Pugh as Jean Tetlock who he was having an affair with. I was surprised that J. Robert Oppenheimer got as much action as he did because I thought he was kind of a drip. What's he doing? He's all over the place.

Tug McTighe (32:52)
He was a freaking boring skinny dude, but he was banging. He was banging.

He's all over the place. Illicit affairs, Matt. Illicit.

Matt Loehrer (32:59)
elicit when Nolan approached her about playing the part of Jean, he said it wasn't a huge role. And she said, I would play an extra like a coffee barista in the background just to be in. And then Josh Hardinett, who remember Josh Hardinett back from back in the day? Yeah, Did they defrost him for the show? He played the role of Ernest Lawrence, a nuclear physicist, kind of a cowboy, kind of like

Tug McTighe (33:08)
I'll do anything in a no- yeah, exactly.

I do a sort of lot of cold storage, right?

Right?

Yeah, kind of like, but now hold on. That guy could pick up some chicks.

Matt Loehrer (33:24)
The muscle.

For sure. I don't know. he's done a push-up in his life. Oppenheimer, I don't know. ⁓ He was, Hartnett was one of the three finalists to play Batman in Nolan's Batman series, ⁓ but respectfully declined the role. Well, then sure you did. But he later said he regretted the decision.

Tug McTighe (33:30)
Oppenheimer, yeah, that's a good looking fella. Correct. Maybe even a pull up.

I gotta tell you, I could see it.

Matt Loehrer (33:52)
and wished to build a creative relationship with Nolan because he loved his work and now he got to work with him.

Tug McTighe (33:56)
This whole movie, bro, I'm looking at Lawrence. I'm like, who is it, Tug? Who is it, Tug? Who is it, Tug? Could not figure it out until we started prepping this pod. Of course it was Martinet. God, it's raining, it's raining.

Matt Loehrer (34:06)
Well, it's because he's what's like he's a man. I remember seeing him in shows

where I remember seeing him in movies where he was like he played the teenager, right? ⁓ Glenn Powell also auditioned for the role of Ernest Lawrence, didn't get it.

Tug McTighe (34:13)
Yeah. Anyway, yeah.

Yep.

It's working out for Glenn Powell. Running Man's getting nice reviews. We're go see it. Yeah. See it do it together. All right. Casey Affleck is Boris Pash, a US Army military intelligence officer. Rami Malik shows up as a nuclear physicist who helped create the Chicago office. Kenneth Branagh, Benny Softie, Jason Clark, Dylan Arnold, Robert Youngers, Robert, ⁓ Robert's younger brother and another a part of

Matt Loehrer (34:22)
yeah, we're going to do that one too.

Tug McTighe (34:45)
So Robert, just a theoretical physicist and his little kid brother, a particle physicist. Brad and Chris and I drink beer. That's our claim to fame. ⁓ And then frickin' Tom, right, sorry, go ahead, Matt.

Matt Loehrer (34:52)
Right. Yeah, my brother has an

My brother has an NBA. And I have a PBR, so.

Tug McTighe (35:01)
Yeah, that's right.

Tom Conti is Albert Einstein. David Desmalsian as William Borden, Kansas City guy, by the way. Yep. ⁓ The aforementioned Alden Ehrenreich, David Krumholz. ⁓ I'm just gonna run these names down. Matthew Modine, Scott Grimes, Jack Quaid from the Boys and son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid.

Matt Loehrer (35:08)
Oh, really? I didn't know that.

Love that.

Tug McTighe (35:22)
Olivia Thirlby, James Reymar, Gary Oldman. Okay, so anyway, a lot of people.

Matt Loehrer (35:27)
This is

Scars-Bard, one of this, it's the Stellan Scars-Gard.

Tug McTighe (35:29)
One of

the Sweden's scars guards.

Matt Loehrer (35:33)
Yeah, so not a lot

of that guys.

Tug McTighe (35:36)
No, you brought, I brought up Crumholds who I love. He's been in a lot of stuff, but you brought up James Reemar who is in one scene in this and is fucking James Reemar. He's absolute that guy.

Matt Loehrer (35:46)
Oh yeah.

Yeah. Scott Grimes been in a billion things and I didn't recognize him. Right. Yes, for Mordell. And did you see Serenity, the Firefly movie? Okay, so I love Krumholds in that. He was Mr. Universe.

Tug McTighe (35:49)
Scott Grimes, geez. Scott Grimes from Orville.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, he's awesome. All right, team, here we go.

Here's the plot. Are you ready? Hold the phone. Cheers.

Matt Loehrer (36:06)
Cheers to you.

In 1926, 22 year old doctoral student J. Robert Oppenheimer grapples with anxiety and homesickness while studying experimental quantum physics under Patrick Blackett at the University of Cambridge in England, who doesn't seem to like him very much at all. He clashes with Blackett, leaving him a poisoned apple, but he later retrieves it when he meets Niels Boricca's. Only I think because

Tug McTighe (36:23)
Agreed.

Matt Loehrer (36:32)
He's afraid Niels Bohr is gonna eat it and die.

Tug McTighe (36:34)
Right, except he wasn't afraid he was gonna kill his teacher. This was a weird scene for me. It didn't come back. It didn't pay off. During my research, I learned that this was some dramatized version of something that actually did happen with Oppenheimer's tutor. I don't know. just, I don't know. Maybe it was just.

Matt Loehrer (36:48)
Maybe back then they just,

people did that all the time. Like it was normal.

Tug McTighe (36:51)
Just went to the counter, grabbed

some cyanide and said, fuck you, bro. Take a bite. ⁓

Matt Loehrer (36:55)
Well, we learned that

from we learned that from Godfather to that back in the day, if you wanted to kill somebody, you were probably going to get away with it. Right now, there's no DNA on that Apple. Nobody nobody was around. There's no cameras. I thought maybe there was some mental instability and it would never came back. So that was weird. Anyway, Niels Bohr says go study theoretical physics, physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany. And he says,

Tug McTighe (37:02)
100 % yeah 100 %

I think that's probably what they're trying to do. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (37:23)
good idea. So he does that.

Tug McTighe (37:25)
So he goes and completes his PhD and meets Isadore Robbie, who is Krumholtz. They then meet Werner Heisenberg. He says, Oppenheimer says America is not thinking about this in a big enough way. So that's why he's in Europe. And he just, keep finding the guy that's pushing the boundaries and they keep going to meet. So these guys are being drawn to each other, right? A little bit like the

light is being drawn into a black hole. See what I did there?

Matt Loehrer (37:49)
That was a neat

part. That was a neat part earlier in the movie when they were, think they were interviewing him because you know, we jumped back all over the place and they said, wasn't America or like, like Berkeley, wasn't that like the best place for this? And he said it was because I made it that

Tug McTighe (38:03)
right right right to get

Matt Loehrer (38:03)
I thought that was really cool, but he had to go to Europe and meet Heisenberg ⁓

famously of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which I don't know what that is, but I know that it is, I think.

Tug McTighe (38:12)
⁓ but it sounds

fancy and smart.

So here he's at Berkeley. He goes to teach at Berkeley, California studio technology. He marries Catherine Kitty Pooning, a biologist and ex communist. He has this off and on affair with Jean Tatlock, a troubled communist psychiatrist. And she ends up killing herself. When he said, he said, I don't know if it's causal because of him, there's a little bit of they're leading you to, he said, I can't see anymore. And then she. ⁓

Matt Loehrer (38:37)
I think he was just unstable.

That was the thing.

Tug McTighe (38:39)
You all agreed, 100%.

So again, like you said, man, he got a lot of action for being kind of a boring dude and a 5'11", the real Oppenheimer was 5'11 and 128 pounds.

Matt Loehrer (38:51)
Right, I called him in my notes, I said he was a drip and a waif. ⁓ Killian Murphy, who was already pretty slim, lost almost 30 pounds by sticking to a strict diet and abstaining from alcohol during filming. Apparently not drinking alcohol, like makes you lose weight, which I've never heard. But the real General Leslie Groves, who's played by Matt Damon, was significantly overweight, not as

Tug McTighe (38:55)
dripping away.

BORING!

I guess I'll never find out.

Matt Loehrer (39:16)
Matt Damon was not as overweight as the real Leslie Groves was. But so though he did not try to gain weight for the role, he just got to eat Mexican food and drink margaritas the whole time during the filming. Yeah, well, Killian Murphy was eating like an almond.

Tug McTighe (39:19)
Real guy was heavy.

Sounds fantastic.

and smoking like a hundred cigarettes a day. ⁓ So look, here's what you have to do in this movie. You have to just go with it. There's a lot of science and a lot of math and a lot of scientific jargon. There's a lot of American Communist Party Red Scare McCarthy era stuff that to your point earlier, we don't learn about a lot that you just have to go look. And they say it in the movie, not

Matt Loehrer (39:32)
Probably.

Tug McTighe (39:55)
Moscow communist communist like we need to protect people and take care of some of the downs on they they kept saying that so there's just a lot of stuff you have to just like just sort of dive into the lake and and it the movie will help you help you understand

Matt Loehrer (40:00)
Right.

You heard a lot of that today, though. You hear that all the time. That's a very true communism's never been tried kind of thing. Like we don't want bad communism. We want good communism. Like, oh, OK.

Tug McTighe (40:17)
Sure, but I don't

think nobody, I don't think there's a lot of communist meat. Maybe there are, there was a whole episode of Seinfeld about the Communist Party, but you just have to go with it and let yourself sort of be taken down the river of the story.

Matt Loehrer (40:30)
Yeah.

Yeah, it was interesting to me how aware Oppenheimer was about connections. They made a point to show a lot of visual things like raindrop patterns and which was really cool. He's always got all this stuff going on in his head that he.

Tug McTighe (40:42)
And yep.

He has a lot of, yeah,

he has a lot of, they showed it visually that he has a lot of noise in his brain. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (40:50)
And I thought that was really neat. I like that

a lot. In nature, the atmosphere is subatomic world. can't see that we're not aware of, but he's acutely aware of. And at the same time, he's such an idiot, myopic moron about people and how people connect. And, I don't know why they would think that I'm not loyal to America just because I'm going to these communist party things. Pull your head out, man. ⁓

Tug McTighe (41:01)
Yeah, exactly.

Right. Well,

and they do make that. think that's that came out for me as a recurring theme. They say several times some version of you. can be being a genius doesn't make you smart. So I think there's a lot of that. So nuclear fission is discovered in 1938 and they're all like Matt, they're all like, whoa, fission. Yes. Like a touchdown got scored. The Germans split the atom.

Matt Loehrer (41:28)
Yeah, they know that was great.

Tug McTighe (41:33)
⁓ as soon as that happens, Oppenheimer goes, well, fuck we're in, the Nazis are going to weaponize this. so now it's 42 Leslie grows. The car army. Colonel comes to recruit Oppenheimer to be the director of the Manhattan project. Oppenheimer says, let's build it out in the desert in the middle of nowhere. and they get together and he brings all these great minds that he's met over the years together in New Mexico to figure out how to build the atomic bomb.

⁓ he is terrified that Heisenberg who's leading the Germans will yield the fission bomb for the Nazis sooner than the Americans. So this is a, this is the introduction now of the ticking clock, right? They're way right. They spray. So he brings all these guys in Robbie, Hans Beth, Edward Teller, all these guys, Enrico Fermi, who's famous zillard, who's famous. All these guys are.

Matt Loehrer (42:07)
Yeah, they're way ahead of us, right?

Tug McTighe (42:19)
really important historical characters in science and in this story here. And then he's friends with Einstein. So he goes and checks talks to Einstein and Einstein's like, Hey man, I came up with the theory 50 years ago. You're going to, I'm out. I don't know what's going to happen.

Matt Loehrer (42:31)
I think it's so funny that he and Einstein both are like, you know, I'm really not math, a math guy. Like I could be that I'm not a math guy either. Maybe I'm the next Einstein. No, the next. The next Bob Einstein, maybe.

Tug McTighe (42:35)
I'm not a math guy, I math. ⁓

I don't think you are, but you're my friend. That's all that matters to me. The

Bob Einstein. You're not even him. That's Albert Albert Einstein is Albert Brooks. Bob Einstein is a super super day of Osborne. So as they're doing their math, they realize that an atomic detonation could start a chain reaction that would be unstoppable.

Matt Loehrer (42:52)
Super Dave. I wish I wish I was Super Dave.

Tug McTighe (43:05)
would eat the atmosphere and would destroy the world. Oppenheimer concludes those chances are near zero.

Matt Loehrer (43:11)
This was terrifying. And it was a big point in the movie. was one of those high points where it's like, this could kill all of us and just destroy the planet. ⁓ might not though. Enrico Fermi, who's mentioned in the movie and appears in the movie, proposed the Fermi paradox in 1950 as a means of explaining why we haven't had extraterrestrial visits on Earth. ⁓

Tug McTighe (43:13)
Yes. Yes, it was.

What should we do? Keep going. Keep going.

Why is that?

Matt Loehrer (43:38)
Well, there were a number of reasons, actually. There were like four reasons. but one of the possible explanations is that intelligent civilizations tend to destroy themselves. Right. And that's what the potential outcome of this was a chain reaction that would just destroy all life on the planet. So before you get to a point where you can journey out into space, like Star Trek, you've already blown up. Yeah.

Tug McTighe (43:47)
We find ways to kill ourselves,

You've already blown yourself up.

So Teller wants to quit and leave the project because he thinks fission is dumb and fusion is where it's at. And he's the one that wants they called it the super the super bomb. He Teller Teller wants to create the hydrogen bomb. So then Oppenheimer says stay don't quit stay work on the H. ⁓ Yeah. So the thing about.

Matt Loehrer (44:17)
work on whatever you want.

Tug McTighe (44:20)
Oppenheimer that they keep coming back to is he is a theorist He is not a maker or to your point. You may just made a mathematician really he can run the numbers, but he can't He can't build the stuff So he saw he's in the numbers that are being created He's like well the unstoppable chain reaction is out there, but it's near zero, but it's all only a theory right and so they're so giddy with with the theory

that they just keep building the stuff that could kill them. And I think the film did a really good job because that created a lot of tension. Look, we know what happened. You and I are both Gen Xers and 80s kids. The gold war was in full effect when we were growing up in high school, grade school and high school, and finally ended when we were in college. But we were get under the desk. We were right. The Russians are coming. The Red Scare. We were Cold War.

The fear of Russia dropping a nuclear bomb on us in 1983 was fucking real. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (45:14)
100%. It was

a yeah, no, we knew words like glass nose and perestroika. These were words that American like grade schoolers should know. It's hard to communicate to my kids and younger people in general, even people five to 10 years younger than me. ⁓ mutually assured destruction on a global scale was something we lived with on a daily basis. I

Tug McTighe (45:20)
I'll be right correct.

It was surreal, ⁓ 100%. And if we,

if it didn't matter who launched one, this is the whole point of the movie War Games. If we launch one, they're gonna launch one and then everybody blows up.

Matt Loehrer (45:36)
Yeah, that was the whole point.

It's a point of war games?

Tug McTighe (45:43)
Yeah, the whole movie, the whole point of WarGames is if we launch

Matt Loehrer (45:44)
That was the point of

it. The computer was right. My brother is four years younger than me. He was born in 1976. He was convinced. I, I wonder what it was like for him. I imagine he was terrified on a daily basis. I didn't really think it was going to happen, but he was positive it was.

Tug McTighe (46:01)
Yeah,

look man, in 1985, Sting released his first solo record, Dream of the Blue Turtles. One of the songs is called Russians. I hope the Russians love their children too. It was about blowing each other up. So it was for real. Sure I do. Funny ha ha or funny hmm.

Matt Loehrer (46:16)
OK, do you want to hear something really funny or interesting or Well,

maybe it's not funny, but it's relevant. That song is the lyrics on that song is partly what inspired Nolan to make this movie. See? Right, you're just. That's you, you're just you're like molecules in a.

Tug McTighe (46:30)
That's how I fucking do this.

Matt Loehrer (46:37)
Nuclear, I don't know, who knows. But that is true. That's something he said. He had remembered that lyric from the song and it always stuck with him. Far out.

Tug McTighe (46:39)
Exactly. Alright!

There you go. All right.

All right, that brings us to our second mention of our lovely sponsor who didn't blow up the world with his nuclear level creative concepts. That's Little Bear Graphics. Yet there's always time. A lot of the important stuff from this episode's movie Oppenheimer is about splitting atoms. But our sponsor, Little Bear Graphics, is about something else. Fusion. Little Bear brings ideas, visuals, and strategy together into one perfectly stable isotope of awesome.

Matt Loehrer (46:57)
Yet.

Tug McTighe (47:12)
From logos to websites to brand and merch, Little Bear will turn your brand from barely glowing to full on radiant. Find them at littlebear.graphics. They've been turning creative energy into marketing reactions since, well, since before Killian Murphy made fedoras cool again. That's right, marketing reactions. These are words that are connected to nuclear stuff. So why don't you save me from myself and continue on the plot.

Matt Loehrer (47:35)
That's pretty good.

after Germany surrendered in 1945, some of the scientists questioned the bomb's relevance. They're like,

Tug McTighe (47:41)
Right, so

they're hard charging on the Manhattan Project. And Germany surrenders and Hitler kills himself. So they're like, great, we're done. They're like, bullshit, we have to keep going.

Matt Loehrer (47:47)
Yeah, I can't help myself. I like it's over, right?

Yeah. Oppenheimer says we've got to continue. And he was probably not wrong. Right. So there's the Trinity test in the desert that for some reason they had to wait until it wasn't raining. So explain that to me. They're like, there's weather coming in when they did their test. And I'm like, what if it's raining in, in Japan? Are you going to knock the bomb? That made sense to me.

Tug McTighe (47:56)
We're still at war with Japan is what they say.

I don't have an answer for you. I don't have an answer for you. Yeah.

And well, they did. I will say what they did.

They that called back to earlier when they were riding horses in the desert and he said this took Emily blunt. This storm will blow over. always does it overnight and then it's beautiful in the morning. But again, we could just if you cut out that five minutes of waiting for the rain, the same outcome. And what is that outcome? They build the bomb, they test the bomb, they cannot fathom. Like they're all cheering at first.

Matt Loehrer (48:35)
Yeah, exactly. It worked.

Tug McTighe (48:44)
And then everybody's a little bit like, holy shit. Remember they had a little side bet on megatons or TNT. know, I think it's five. I think it's 10. And he's like, it's 50. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (48:52)
Right. It's 50. Yeah. And it's always

I think bigger than they thought it would be. So then the military comes in. So it worked, right? Military is like, Hey, thanks.

Tug McTighe (49:02)
Yep, within 10 minutes, it

feels like within 10 minutes of Trinity, they got two crates on the back of a truck driving away, and those are the bombs. Do you know what, Matt, do you remember what they're called? The bombs, what they were named.

Matt Loehrer (49:08)
Yeah, you're like, hey, you know.

One was fat man. Maybe was it fat man little boy? Hey, I did learn something. Right, so that was interesting to me. That was really an interesting point in the movie where Oppenheimer's like, OK, what's next? They're like you're done. We're we'll see you. It's our problem now and he's like, well, I mean, surely you want me involved in this and you want my advice like no, we're good. We just drop it right?

Tug McTighe (49:15)
Correct? That made a little boy, well done. Two points. ⁓

we're good. We're good.

Right,

we just throw it out of a plane and it'll work. But that is another sort of existential crisis in this movie. They knew they were making a bomb.

They knew philosophically they were making a bomb, but they were not, every day that they were working, they were not making a bomb. They were solving the problems of nuclear fusion. You know what I'm saying?

Matt Loehrer (49:58)
Yeah, they were doing they were doing a math problem.

Tug McTighe (50:00)
They were doing a fucking math problem. That's right. That's right. And he's like, this is not good. And Matt Damon is like, the second this works, I've got to give them a fucking answer. And literally Trinity goes up. They have the little welders glass. He turns around. He goes to a phone and he calls and says, it worked. I'll be there tomorrow. Like, yeah. Yeah. Again, you're part.

Matt Loehrer (50:02)
But Lawrence, who's the thing? That Josh Hartnett character, he was making it.

Tug McTighe (50:24)
They thought they were the machine. They were just a tiny part of the machine.

Matt Loehrer (50:27)
Right. So that was, ⁓ you kind of felt for him there at that point where he's like, ⁓ you don't need me at this point. I've done all I need to do.

Tug McTighe (50:31)
Absolutely.

Well, you know what it's

very similar to the crisis that Chris Knight faced in Real Genius when they were making the laser beam and they needed then Kent made the mirrors and the tracking system and Laszlo Holyfeld said, well, what's the why would you have to do this? If you have all you need is a mirror and a satellite and you could vaporize a human target from space. Now, what movie go?

Matt Loehrer (50:40)
Right?

that would be real genius I believe. but fortunately they were able to fill a car with popcorn and I was a house right I was a whole house and then I don't know what happened.

Tug McTighe (50:55)
Real genius. underrated.

Not a car, house! The whole house!

Dr. What's his name? Dr.

Douchebag's house. Dr. Bad Guy and Ghostbusters house.

Matt Loehrer (51:08)
can't.

Yes, that guy was amazing. He was a great bad guy in 80 and also the guy that played Kent was a good bad guy and other stuff too. Like he was he was ⁓ kind of important. He was a poor man's Billy's APCA.

Tug McTighe (51:12)
He's crazy. Great.

100%. Those guys both had a nice 80s run.

Zapka Billy's okay. Okay. So Oppenheimer. So they bomb Hiroshima Nagasaki Japan surrenders everybody on the planet is cannot believe what happened. Oppenheimer is guilt-ridden. He's haunted by the destruction and he also knew he theorized earlier. Well, when we whoever builds this it will just create an arms race. We will not be able to even if we never

Matt Loehrer (51:23)
Right. There you go.

Tug McTighe (51:49)
drop one will not be able to stop building them and pointing them at each other. So he goes in and tells Truman Truman thanks him. Hey, you saved a lot of lives. You brought a lot of boys home. Hey, I'm really sad about this. But the president says, hey, look, this wasn't you again. This is not your bomb. I'm the one that dropped him. Right. Drop two of them, he says. And then he says, thank you. But then Truman

Matt Loehrer (52:06)
Right.

Tug McTighe (52:12)
Calls him a crybaby says don't I don't never want to see that crybaby in hearing in which frankly was a bit of a tone break I don't think Truman was that kind of a guy and I'll tell you why I don't think he was because I've been to the amazing Truman library in Independence, as everyone should know he's a Missouri guy So independence is about 30 minutes away from where I'm About 50 minutes or an hour away from Matt where he's sitting and there's an amazing

Matt Loehrer (52:16)
great.

Tug McTighe (52:34)
series of displays about these moments where there's a letter that the army said, President Truman, there's something because he didn't know any of this was being built. He knew he knew of a project at Los Alamos, but he didn't know what they were doing. And there's these letters from probably from the Matt Damon character. It's like, I have something we need to brief you on. And the coolest part about the museum is that you turn right and there's a hallway and down at the end, there's a shaft of light.

Matt Loehrer (52:43)
really?

Tug McTighe (52:59)
and a little like a little thing this big. I'm holding my fingers about two inches apart. And as you're walking down to it, the room is getting smaller and the ceiling is getting lower. And you see all these pictures of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and all these communicates from the government. And when you get down there, it's it is the it's the pin that a soldier pulled out of fat man.

to make it active. The car, yeah. Like the pin in a grenade. The bomb is live. yeah, and no one knew what it was. No one knew it existed at the Truman, because we, the tour guide was telling us this. No one knew it existed. And it was somebody's grandpa on fucking an oligay, pulled it out and picked it up and put it in his pocket. It sat in his house for 50 fucking years.

Matt Loehrer (53:21)
like a quarter pin? Wow. Right, right, right. Okay. And it's this big, huh?

Wow.

Tug McTighe (53:43)
And his family's like, hey, Truman Library, do you want this? And they're we're sending a plane right now. Right? So.

Matt Loehrer (53:48)
He was

in a, you like, what is this in my jacket pocket? yeah.

Tug McTighe (53:52)
I've been

using it as a key. It's the door stop over there, right? But that's a really cool really cool museum

Matt Loehrer (53:56)
Right?

That's cool. So yeah, my initial take was my initial take hot take in incoming was the same. The trim is kind of a jackass. But when you think about it, he was a he was a military man. He was a soldier. He'd been involved in greater military decisions with more death even before the bombing, like the Battle of Okanoma.

Tug McTighe (54:05)
Ouhate King coming.

It was.

Matt Loehrer (54:19)
Sorry. The Battle of Okinawa killed 250,000 people on both sides. And every day of the Pacific War, circummit, 1945 was tens of thousands of mostly civilian deaths. So people were dying all the time. So for Oppenheimer to come in as a scientist who never served in the military, who's like, I feel really bad about this. I can see why a soldier would be like, I don't have a lot of use for your

for your scruples at this point.

Tug McTighe (54:44)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, you're for your empathy. You're not even empathy for your for your fucking sadness. That's right. You didn't do it. Yeah. And and he did save. Right. It saved lives. Right. This is this is where like Thanos is a great character, because what Thanos is saying is we're all going to go extinct unless I kill half of us and I'll take that fucking burden.

Matt Loehrer (54:51)
And you don't have to make this decision. This isn't this way to this isn't on you. It's on me. So

Yeah, I think it was.

Okay, I have a lot of issues with that whole scenario, by the way, but yeah. ⁓

Tug McTighe (55:12)
Well, we talk about it later, but yes, I

agree with you. And, and, and when you are the president and you see billions of lot, not billions, billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of millions of lives being lost and you can learn, you can stop it in a day. These are, this is where the term acceptable losses comes from.

Matt Loehrer (55:26)
Yeah, you.

Right. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm saying that's the decision he made and he was authorized to make it and he was the only person who could make it. So for a guy to come in and be like, oh, I feel really bad about this. Like, I don't want hear it. And he did not openly call Oppenheimer a crybaby. That was made up for the movie, but he did later award him a presidential citation and a medal for merit in 1946.

Tug McTighe (55:31)
No, no, I'm not saying it's right for everyone here.

We'll talk about that in a moment, All right, so then Oppenheimer now we're sort of wars over he's teaching He's now on the United States Atomic Energy Commission the AEC his his stance That we should de-escalate and we should stop stockpiling weapons Generates controversy tellers has got the hydrogen bomb working

Matt Loehrer (55:51)
Okay.

Tug McTighe (56:16)
in it, right as the cold war we discussed earlier is beginning. Louis straws is Robert Downey. He is mad at Oppenheimer for publicly dismissing straws concerns about sharing radioactive isotopes with other countries, right? Because again, they're scientists and he ridicules them. and then Oppenheimer wants to talk, wants to talk to the Soviets because they detonate their own bomb.

Matt Loehrer (56:29)
Again, stop filming.

Tug McTighe (56:37)
Right, then Strauss goes all the way back to 1947 to when he believes Oppenheimer made a mean comment to Albert Einstein about it.

Matt Loehrer (56:44)
which we saw right at the beginning of the movie. So that's how much time jumping is happening. And at the same time, I get why Oppenheimer openly consorting with communists when he says, I think we need to cooperate with the Russians, then of course that's not gonna look great, but.

⁓ I do want to mention what some of Nolan's contemporaries had to say. We mentioned, ⁓ Oliver Stone's approval. His quote was, sat through three hours of Oppenheimer grip by Sir Christopher Nolan's narrative. The screenplay is layered and fascinating, familiar with the book by Kieberd and Martin Sherwin and Martin Sherwin actually, had cancer and died, before the movie came out, which was a shame. I once turned down the project because I couldn't find my way to its essence. Nolan has found it.

This has been compared to Stone's JFK, another three hour political epic with an ensemble cast. And Nolan in fact screened Stone's JFK for the crew before production to show them the kind of movie he had in mind. So it's a cool circle.

Tug McTighe (57:35)
There we go.

Full circle. You know what that is? Fusion.

Matt Loehrer (57:39)
Yeah, exactly. Dennis Dylan who've said, where Oppenheimer is right now has blown the roof off my projection. It's a three hour movie about people talking about nuclear physics. Right? There's this notion that movies in some people's minds become content instead of an art form. I hate that word content. And I actually agree. hate the word content because it's, you know, it's grumpy cat. It's every piece of garbage on, on Instagram.

Tug McTighe (57:40)
Thank you. I'll be here all week.

Totally, dude, right?

I agree with it too.

Matt Loehrer (58:06)
That movies like Oppenheimer are released on the big screen and become an event brings back a spotlight on the idea that it's a tremendous art form. It needs to be experienced in theaters and I don't disagree at all. Yes.

Tug McTighe (58:12)
Yes.

Thank you, Denny Villeneuve.

All right. So we're, we're ratcheting toward the end here, right? So it's now 1954. Ops tross wants to eliminate Oppenheimer's political influence. He orchestrates a private security hearing before security board concerning the renewal of his government clearance. Wow. What an inciting incident. Um, and again, during which his loyalty to the United States, his

Matt Loehrer (58:39)
Yeah.

Tug McTighe (58:43)
His his dalliances with communists his whole life is being sort of examined and everybody but him and his attorney but his wife knows that this is a fucking kangaroo court and you're gonna get just railroaded you're not gonna get your clearance and your your political mathematical careers can be over. It's just too much like you've talked about Matt too much.

of him not recognizing that these kinds of things he did were gonna be a problem at some point.

Matt Loehrer (59:08)
Right?

Tug McTighe (59:09)
⁓ so I do think the more of these scenes you see, and the more you hear straws talking to Senate aid, cause straws don't, sorry, straws is trying to be made a cabinet member. So he's at his cabinet confirmation hearings and you're like, straws sure knows a lot about all this straws sure knows what happened. And then you're wondering if.

Matt Loehrer (59:20)
Yes.

Tug McTighe (59:30)
He, he was the orchestrator of the whole thing. You find out later. was spoiler alert. ⁓ but then you shake with terror, Matt, because you realize every day in Washington and Moscow and Paris and London and everywhere governments are operating, this shit is happening and it's horrifying. right now your government is doing things you think only other governments do fact and

And Downey nailed this fucking performance. That's why he the Oscar.

Matt Loehrer (59:58)
Oh, great. 100 % and it's before I get into other stuff like you've been you and I have been in the working world for 30 years, 35. I don't know whatever it's been. And we've had experiences where there's personality conflicts and people have motives that don't align with ours and they will screw us over and whatever. And it's the same thing.

Tug McTighe (1:00:09)
years.

Matt Loehrer (1:00:25)
No, you know that's like because you're dealing with people, right? You're like, ⁓ here's the person that is my boss, but is going to screw me over because or take my work and say it's theirs or not give me a promotion even though I deserve it or whatever. Or maybe I don't deserve it. Who knows? But this stuff happens. It's the same thing at this level, right?

Tug McTighe (1:00:25)
I'm looking at my notes. Yeah. No, 100%.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Only global

chain of only global chain atomic chain reaction that might wipe us all out. Yes. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (1:00:49)
Yeah, it's the same.

It's the exact same personal interactions. Everybody has every day.

Tug McTighe (1:00:53)
Exactly.

They're just dudes and chicks. Shit comes out of their ass just like it comes out of yours. Sorry, Matt's mom.

Matt Loehrer (1:01:00)
now you're apologizing. I'm getting so I have some issues. So there's that like it's the same stuff we deal with every day. These are just people that can control whether we drop a bomb on another country, right? I have some issues with Strauss, but the more I think about it, the more I respect how we were introduced to him versus how we ultimately come to regard him. ⁓

Tug McTighe (1:01:02)
Alright, so...

Well,

that's your character growth or de-evolution in this case.

Matt Loehrer (1:01:28)
No,

I think it's a zigzag, right? I think it's misdirection. He seems to genuinely admire Oppenheimer when they first meet, but Strauss is trying to make a good impression on him. There are a few memorable incidents. He insists on correcting the mispronunciation of his name.

Tug McTighe (1:01:36)
100%.

because Oppenheimer pronounces it properly, Strauss.

Matt Loehrer (1:01:45)
he says it's

rous and he's like, actually, it's straws. ⁓ He gets defensive when Oppenheimer calls him just a lowly shoe salesman and says, well, a shoe salesman, which so when that's presented, you're supposed to believe that it's Oppenheimer being an egoist and kind of a jerk and insulting.

Tug McTighe (1:01:48)
Right.

It's a shoe salesman.

Right, and I think Oppenheimer

was just saying, well done. I think Oppenheimer's actually saying, well done.

Matt Loehrer (1:02:08)
Yeah, and then he's offended when Oppenheimer doesn't jump at taking the job. Oppenheimer's like, I'll think about it at the time. So in that part of the movie, not knowing either of these characters, I see him on the receiving end of Oppenheimer's ego. Later, I see him as a guy who's easily slighted and

Tug McTighe (1:02:17)
Yeah, here's your Mystic.

Quit your belly

wakin' ya. Hey, talk about crybaby. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (1:02:28)
Right. So

when it comes, when it, when you realize later that he's been harboring this grudge forever and is just trying to get payback, then, then you're like, that's what all that meant. I thought that was.

Tug McTighe (1:02:39)
That's what we've been doing for the last 10 years, bro. So you could get back to the sky because he made a joke. You thought, yeah, yeah. So Kitty Oppenheimer's wife is so mad at him for not defending himself, not defending them because Oppenheimer is just really stoically taking a lot of their shit in this. Well, they keep calling it not a hearing, clearly a hearing. She vigorously defends herself and her husband.

Matt Loehrer (1:02:42)
Right.

Pretty much. It's pretty thin skinned.

It's a hearing.

Tug McTighe (1:03:04)
And then because of a lot of what she says and does, the board no longer thinks he's disloyal to the U.S. But it was a foregone conclusion that he was not going to get his security. So so they're like, all right, you're not going to be. I think the one guy goes, you're not going to get treason charges. Well done. But we're not giving you your security. So this this now damages his public image and limits his influence on American nuclear policy.

Matt Loehrer (1:03:19)
That's good.

Tug McTighe (1:03:28)
I believe you have some thoughts.

Matt Loehrer (1:03:28)
OK, this was the

this was the biggest problem I had with the movie. It's not that he's not going to go to jail for the rest of his life. It's not that he's going to be hung by his neck until dead. It's not that they're going to take him out. It's that he's going to lose his security clearance. That's right. He's not going to get he's going to or like, you know, I'm sorry, but we can't give you.

Tug McTighe (1:03:42)
He's gonna lose his card key. He doesn't get his card key again.

Matt Loehrer (1:03:50)
that prime parking space, you're going to have to take a regular parking space like everybody else. Right, like we did this whole movie for that, like the stakes just seem really stupid to me. no, Oppenheimer, I'm so sorry that you don't get your cue clearance. But otherwise, your life is pretty much the same. Geez.

Tug McTighe (1:03:52)
Yeah, cut to there just unscrewing the Waffenheimer.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You don't get your parking space. That's my favorite. We'll see you go home. Have fun.

⁓ Emily blunt was great in this man. I thought she never backed down. Did she win?

Matt Loehrer (1:04:16)
she, was interesting. She, ⁓ did, I think we got to meet her as kind of a alcoholic wife who was going nowhere. And, ⁓ she really kind of emboldened herself throughout the course of the movie.

Tug McTighe (1:04:26)
Yeah.

Yeah, she urged him to fight. She was really good. Like you said, I like her every time I smore more every time I see her. well for sure. And by the way, go back and watch some clips of maybe one of her first movie, but first time we ever saw her was ever where it's Prada. She's fucking great in that movie. That's a soft spot in my heart for that movie. Part two is coming out. You and me both, we're both fashion plates. ⁓

Matt Loehrer (1:04:36)
She's a legit movie star. Like, I like her a lot. I would watch her in anything.

I believe so.

Yeah, and I do love fashion movies, so that's...

crazy for it.

Tug McTighe (1:04:57)
Okay, I have two minor beasts with this character I'd like to talk to you about. character of Kitty.

Why did we have to show she's a terrible mom who doesn't like kids? They tried to give their first getaway. And why do we have to keep clearly showing she's taken a nip from the flask every five minutes? So she's a boozer. She's a bad mom and a boozer. Neither one of those characterizations added anything to the story, nor did any of them come back to make a point or drive the plot anywhere.

Matt Loehrer (1:05:04)
I forgot about that. Great.

That's the problem. She went from being a terrible person to being a pretty good person, but we didn't see any of the in-between. And that's what I never, I never understood that about that. There's, A, there's a billion things in it. I mean, this is so packed. This movie is packed. So maybe they said, you know what? I really want to show some character development for this, for Emily Blunt, but we just can't do it. So.

Tug McTighe (1:05:28)
Yeah. It's just weird.

Dance, just dance. Yeah.

Well,

and I have another theory that's just come to mind. It is the biopic problem.

Matt Loehrer (1:05:47)
I'd love that.

Tug McTighe (1:05:51)
Everybody knows she was not clearly know she was an alcoholic because she's a real person and They must have known she No, let's see you're jumping ahead But everybody if she's if she was truly an alcoholic and you're making a biopic You're like what we better show her being an alcoholic. I don't have a plot because you're not making a life story You're making a movie. I don't have a plot point

Matt Loehrer (1:05:55)
Mm-hmm.

and all real people are alcoholics.

Okay.

Right. So you're saying

because we have that information, we have to include that information. Okay.

Tug McTighe (1:06:18)
Correct, correct.

So there was some of that in Ray too where you're like, well, then this happened. Like, why did we need that? I know what happened, but who cares? It doesn't drive the story forward. So all right, 1959. This is when Strauss is straws is being trying to be confirmed. This is where Senate aid is there. Hill, who is Remy Malik shows up.

Matt Loehrer (1:06:25)
I get it. It doesn't drive the story. Don't include it.

Tug McTighe (1:06:42)
unexpectedly to testify and tell everybody the story that straws doesn't like Oppenheimer because he belittled him and maybe said something Albert Einstein and this and that the third thing. So again, sort of out of nowhere, sort of, we got 30 minutes left in this movie. We need to wrap this shit up. Sort of a ⁓ ghost outside the machine for me.

Matt Loehrer (1:07:02)
I agree. I'm glad they gave Rami Malek something to do. Cause I like him.

Tug McTighe (1:07:05)
So then lost doesn't. Yeah. So anyway, got outside the machine deus ex machina, but nonetheless, Stross doesn't get his cabinet spot. They make a comment that some unknown senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy was the deciding vote. I don't know if that's true. ⁓ In 63, Linden B. Johnson presents Oppenheimer with the Enrico Fermi Award flashback to their 47 conversation. The one that pissed off Stross in the first place.

Matt Loehrer (1:07:05)
⁓

That's not true.

Tug McTighe (1:07:31)
with Einstein, Einstein said, Hey, you know, when I first met you, were giving me that award, out at Berkeley, et cetera, et cetera. Well, I got to tell you, knew from the moment that I met you, that that award wasn't really for me. was for you. Cause you wanted to do something grand or show some something. And that's what. Lyndon B Johnson giving him an award after they railroaded him out of government. It wasn't for him. It was for them.

Cause they were all there shaking Oppenheimer's hand and they all shout on him in that tiny room. Nobody fought for him, but his life. Absolutely.

Matt Loehrer (1:07:59)
Right, so it them absolving themselves.

Tug McTighe (1:08:03)
so again, he has this conversation with Einstein, in which Einstein talks about that award I just mentioned, but then Einstein, and he talked about this worry that Oppenheimer was having, right, that, hey, I was really terrified that I was gonna start a chain reaction that would destroy the world.

And this is that moment where Einstein says I'm passing it on to you. there's it just all sort of fuses again together. to your point, man, we, was felt like a hundred conversations in 80 different places in five different timeframes that all bulleted back down together. And of course it was Einstein, no accident, the father of all this with equals MC squared. ⁓ and, and just a nice

Satisfying ending, I thought.

Matt Loehrer (1:08:42)
Yeah, I did too. It bookended it well and it answered that question. Cause from the beginning, we're like, what was that conversation? And they end it with us.

Tug McTighe (1:08:48)
And

they showed it to us five times.

Matt Loehrer (1:08:53)
I really like that,

All right, so what do we think? Closing thoughts, buddy.

Tug McTighe (1:08:55)
Well, obviously I'm, I'm not a very good poker player in these podcasts. I really liked this movie. really great movie walks a very fine line. We joke about exposition and that was funny that that guy, that security guard sure knew a lot about where everybody was going to be and what was going to happen. But this whole movie has a lot of talking and explaining.

Providing details you might not understand until you need to understand them and you still might not understand them I think it could have gone off the rails I think they have to explain a lot They have to talk Shh The old show don't tell they have to tell a lot But still do a pretty good job of showing. ⁓ it never lost its way. I fucking loved it. I thought it was great

Matt Loehrer (1:09:32)
Okay, I've kind of in the couple weeks since I've seen it, I've kind of changed my tune on it. Like, I don't think I'll ever see it again. Because it was really long and I know what happened. But when I think of it as artistry, I think it's brilliant. It's beautifully done. The the person that won best editing, which I think we said her name earlier, if we didn't, we should have. But you can Google.

Tug McTighe (1:09:53)
Co-editor

that won. Awesome.

Matt Loehrer (1:09:55)
Totally deserved it. There's so much editing. And I don't think I mentioned this. Did you know there were no storyboards in this? None of this was storyboarding at all. But when you watch it, I'm like, surely somebody storyboarded this and this and this and this.

Tug McTighe (1:10:02)
No, no. They just...

They just went

in and fucking blocked it out and shot it.

Matt Loehrer (1:10:11)
And then later said, hey, I wanna put this in here and put this in here and I want this. Right, just amazing. So, you know, regardless of whether I think the stakes were high, which I don't think they were for the whole thriller part of it, like, it's a thriller because he didn't get his clearance. I don't care about that, but.

Tug McTighe (1:10:16)
really fucking hard by the way so well done.

Yeah, no, historical

drama. It's not a thriller. There's nothing thrilling about it. You knew it. You knew it was going happen.

Matt Loehrer (1:10:33)
No, but

for sure. learning about Oppenheimer was good. So I felt smart. That's pretty good. I didn't know that stuff.

Tug McTighe (1:10:38)
Yep. Beautiful

again, beautifully. Look this way. Go to the movie. Beautifully rendered, beautifully shot, beautiful story. Well told acting music. Great. All great.

Matt Loehrer (1:10:46)
Sure. Cinematography,

music, acting, the performances, everything was really great. So I'd recommend everybody see it once.

Tug McTighe (1:10:54)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not gonna, it's not gonna be a yearly watch like the whole Dome maybe.

Matt Loehrer (1:10:57)
No, but it was

like what you would expect from a Christopher Nolan movie. It was beautifully executed.

Okay, so, sin a hit, sin a miss, I think I know, but you tell me.

Tug McTighe (1:11:07)
gonna

hit it moved pretty well, dragged a bit, it dragged a bit at the end, not in the middle. Because you're like, OK, can we just get to you know, it's going to happen. Even because even though you knew you you you knew what was what is going to happen because it was a movie. You knew what happened, so you just go. But. I loved it, I loved it, I thought it was great. I also liked we didn't talk about. It's a cold open, there's not a lick of credits.

It just starts. ⁓ so I thought that was cool. ⁓ yeah, well, yeah, it's well worth seeing everybody. Well, we're seeing.

Matt Loehrer (1:11:35)
Nice. Execution is great. Obviously, the subject matter may be dry, but they certainly made it more interesting than it could have been. If you if you view it as an art piece. So I've like percolated on this for the last week. ⁓ Nolan mentioned he woke up in the middle of one night with the last three to four scenes of the film figured out, and he just wrote it away on a pad.

Tug McTighe (1:11:49)
10 days or whatever.

Matt Loehrer (1:11:59)
and what he wrote remained unchanged throughout the filming of the movie. That last idea he had. Killian Murphy said, there's no deleted scenes in his movies. Like if you buy the DVD or Blu-ray, there are no extras because the script is the movie. That's amazing. He knows exactly what's going to end up. He's not fiddling around with it trying to change the story. That's the movie. And we've seen lots of directors that do that. They're like, I don't have an ending.

Tug McTighe (1:12:10)
There's nothing. What I shot is in there. Yeah.

Matt Loehrer (1:12:27)
We'll figure it out. He knows what he's going to do and he gets it done. He creates amazing work. I'd say, Cinahit, as I said, my brilliant mother said, this doesn't seem like the kind of movie you guys tend to do, but she's right. It's a think piece. It tackles weighty subjects and I give him full credit. ⁓ Definitely worth watching. You'll feel smarter after you watch it.

Tug McTighe (1:12:42)
Yeah, me too.

I love that. That's the best critic blurb. Four stars, you'll feel smarter after watching it. All right, hey, thanks everyone for listening to Sin and Misses. If you like what we're doing here, please help us grow the show by subscribing, sharing some episodes, or writing a review. It really has helped. And even better, tell someone you think...

Matt Loehrer (1:12:50)
Right.

Tug McTighe (1:13:01)
⁓ That might like it get to give it a try and we want to hear from you So follow and comment on socials and please drop us line at cinemass at gmail.com with ideas to make the show better and recos for movies We may want to cover Matt. I am asking you a great question because you have not seen this movie and I'm gonna ask you. is our next cinema? This is and what does you Matt our cinema sir think he knows?

Matt Loehrer (1:13:22)
All right, the next cinemas is another movie I know. I feel like I've seen a lot fewer movies than you have, but I haven't seen this one. I'm gonna start over.

Tug McTighe (1:13:28)
You know you've just seen the wrong ones.

No, that's funny, go!

Matt Loehrer (1:13:33)
The Next Cinemass is another one I never saw. It reunites two comedic actors who co-starred in a movie we discussed early in our first season, which I think was our most popular episode to date. I know this movie mostly from memes, and I know a lot of people who just love it. The movie is Stepbrothers starring Will Ferrell.

Tug McTighe (1:13:43)
Buy it with a bullet.

Matt Loehrer (1:13:52)
and John C. Reilly. What I know about it, I assume it's about two adult men, probably immature goofballs, who become step brothers and initially hate each other but grow to be best friends or something.

Tug McTighe (1:13:58)
What? Wait a minute, are you sure?

Well, welcome to, you've already delivered the plot, so good job. But yes, I'm pumped. I had never seen Talladega Nights, so I think it's only fair that you've never seen Set Brothers. I have a lot to discuss, and this is a movie I will watch again. There's zero reason for me to watch this, because I kind of haven't memorized. ⁓ So, but I'm looking very forward to it. All right, that's season three, episode one, buddy. How do you feel?

Matt Loehrer (1:14:20)
I

Alright,

I'm feeling great. I hope we have a new theme song. ⁓

Tug McTighe (1:14:29)
Yep, Matt, Matt dabbling

in AI again. So we got a new theme song composed by Matt.

Matt Loehrer (1:14:34)
That's right. If anybody will, it was, I

will give a, I want to give a shout out to Suno, which is an AI music app that you can pay $9 for a one month subscription. And you're like 2,500 credits. You can make a hundred songs if you want to. It was a lot of fun. So, enjoy the new song.

Tug McTighe (1:14:46)
for 17 million credits.

So we got a new theme song,

we're have some little bear bumpers. It's very exciting.

Matt Loehrer (1:14:57)
It is. So until next time, I'm Matt.

Tug McTighe (1:15:00)
I'm Tug, that's a wrap.