It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements); Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology — it is a lot. Manohla Dargis in the NYT.

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer

When I was a child, everybody loved J. Robert Oppenheimer, I won’t say he was a household name, but in our household, it was close. Growing up, people talked about him in the same way they spoke of Einstein. My mother, back before I was old enough to have a say, even had the barber cut my hair “Oppenheimer Style,” so when I went to the movie with Michele, Richard Taylor, and Tracy Grubbs, I was a little surprised that most people don’t know Oppenheimer’s Promethean story. That’s too bad because he is a fascinating, brilliant, and complex man.

Maybe it is an age thing; perhaps it is because my generation grew up crawling under our desks, at least through grammar school, every time the air raid siren, high on a tall pole right in front of the school, went off; or maybe it is just my quirky/perverted personal interest, whatever the reason, I feel like I have known the Atomic Bomb/Oppenheimer story my whole adult life. I admired J. Robert Oppenheimer until I was in my late teens; then, at the end of the 50s, I saw Hiroshima, mon Amour, leading me to read John Hershey’s Hiroshima – voted the greatest piece of American journalism of the 20th century, BTW – and I became aware of the Horror we unleashed on Japan. Unleashed on the whole world, really, and Oppenheimer was the face of that Horror.

I thought that our dropping of The Bomb on Hiroshima was a mistake at best and, by almost any measure, a war crime, and I still feel that way. My parents, my parent’s friends, and any random adult, who lived through World War II, thought I was wrong. They thought the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to get Japan to surrender. So did Oppenheimer, sort of, and for a while.

Oppenheimer, the movie based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is a tour de force as a movie, a stand-alone piece of art. I expected the film to follow the book -which I thought was excellent but not as good as The Making of The Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes – and it does follow the book but in a Nolandesque sort of way. Oppenheimer is a different art form. Different from the book and almost anything else. Maybe the best description is that Oppenheimer is what used to be called an Art Movie. Except Oppenheimer feels like a summer Blockbuster. It is three hours long, and the experience feels much shorter.

At its core, this is a movie about the rise and fall of a scientific superstar at a time when there were such things, and almost all of it is brilliant people talking. No car chases, just brilliant people talking and a soundtrack – is that the fitting descriptor? – that is like another character (or completely silent).

The movie is filmed both in color and in very contrasty black and white, and counterintuitively the earlier scenes, like Oppenheimer studying physics in England and Germany, are in a deep, rich color, almost like Rembrandt, and the later scenes, Oppenheimer’s downfall, is filmed in black and white. But the movie jumps around in time – duh, it is a Nolan movie, after all – so, as it jumps around in time, the film jumps from color to black and white and back to color. It isn’t very clear at first, but it keeps you involved, and that is part of its power, and you get used to it.

It seems to me that Oppenheimer is not so much an entertainment – although it is very entertaining – as an invitation to think about what we’ve done. The Horror and devastation brought on by the scientists at Los Alamos are never shown, although the scientists’ reaction to it is. Especially Oppenheimer’s reaction and dismay. Toward the end of the movie, there is a scene between Oppenheimer and President Harry Truman meeting in the Oval Office in which Oppenheimer says something along the lines of “I have blood on my hands.” Truman dismisses Oppenheimer’s lament, saying, “Nobody will remember that you made the bomb; they’ll remember that Harry Truman ordered it be dropped.”

As Oppenheimer leaves the Oval Office, we overhear Truman saying, ” I don’t want to see that crybaby again.” Both know what they have done, and both are, in a way, ashamed. Whether they should have been ashamed, whether we should have dropped the bomb or not are questions without answers, and Oppenheimer doesn’t try. But it does raise the question.

I walked out of Oppenheimer stunned. If art is supposed to make us think, to ask questions – and I think it does – then Christopher Noland’s Oppenheimer is art, even great art. It is powerful movie-making, the acting is terrific – especially Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. – and I want to see it again, but I didn’t walk out smiling like I did when we saw Barbie.

Leadership contains certain elements of good management, but it requires that you inspire, that you build durable trust. For an organization to be not just good but to win, leadership means evoking participation larger than the job description, commitment deeper than any job contract’s wording. Stanley McChrystal

We saw two – slightly fictionalized – biographical movies the last couple of nights; one on a black icon, Harriet Tubman, and one on a good ol’ boy white icon, Carroll Shelby. The movies couldn’t be more the same in many ways or more different. Both movies are true stories of the American journey, slightly fictionized for more drama, and both used actors that bore a resemblance to the real people, other than that, they are as different as their black and white characters.

Harriet, the Tubman movie, was good but not as good as I had hoped, more like a very good classroom film for social studies class than a rip-roaring thriller (although her life was a real rip-roaring thriller). Part of the problem is that we know the ending, part of the problem is that the movie is much more subtle than Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave – and I, we, have become jaded – and part of the problem is we saw it in an almost empty theater. Still, it is a movie I recommend if not super enthusiastically.

For starters, Harriet Tubman is a real American hero. In General Stanly McCrystal’s book, Leaders: Myth and Reality – which the quote at the top comes from – Tubman is one of the examples he uses. She not only escaped from slavery, but she also went back into slave-country to help others escape. Over and over again. Most of the movie takes place before the Civil War and, while many owners saw the war coming, the slaves really had no idea, they only knew that trying to escape was a high-risk venture, a risk that most men wouldn’t take. In many ways, this is a more revolutionary film than it will get credit for, this is a black film with a black sensibility and, while there are white people involved with the Underground Railroad, Tubman is clearly responsible for her own manumission (or emancipation, if you prefer).

Ford vs. Ferrari, the Carroll Shelby movie, is really a movie about friendship, between Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles. They, along with a lot of other people not in the movie, built a racing car that became its own American icon, the Ford GT40, that went on to beat the Ferraris at Le Mans. Michele loved this movie and when I asked her why she said that it had everything; a friendship story, a father-son story, and a rivalry story between Henry Ford the Second and Enzo Ferrari. Like Harriet, I liked Ford vs. Ferrari but not as much as I had hoped. I think that might be because I am too close to the subject. Michele thought it was terrific and, while she is a car person, she didn’t know much or particularly care about the GT40 story. One rave review I read referred to the Mustang as a sports car so I’m inclined to think that even though the movie has lots of cars and racing, it isn’t really a car person’s movie, it’s just a good people movie. Sitting here, thinking about it, there is a lot of good car stuff in this movie, not the least of which is Matt Daman driving around in a 427 Cobra with its almost orgasmic V8 bark.

As an aside, when we first planned to go to Harriet, it was playing in San Mateo but a week later, it was only playing at 10:30, so we went to the Century Theater at Tanforan in San Bruno, where it was playing three times. As an aside to the aside, Tanforan was a horse racing track when I was a young kid and, during the early stages of World War II, it was used as a holding area for Japanese-Americans being rounded up before they were sent to more permanent Concentration Camps in the boondocks (like Manzanar in the Owens Valley or heart Mountain in Wyoming). Now it’s a shopping mall. End aside to the aside. San Bruno is not as wealthy an area as San Mateo and it is disturbing that the people of San Mateo lost interest before the people in San Bruno. There were a lot of trailers before Harriet and all but one were for black movies I hadn’t heard of. That makes me a little sad. End aside.