Barbenheimer!!!

I'm back from my trip and all of sudden people care about movies?!?!

Hello to the newsletter faithful,

I haven’t missed a whole lot of weeks since I started this thing back in 2018, but I was out of the country and trying my best to unplug from the internet grind while I could, so I took a little impromptu summer break. I’m back now and excited to be back in your inboxes.

The timing turned out to be incredible….-y bad. For a guy who goes to the movies 60+ times per year, and does at least 55 of those alone, it’s a cosmically perfect form of torture to get several excited invitations from friends to go to not one but two movies on the same day during the only weekend where I was unavailable to do so. Since when do you people care so much about movies?!?!

Such is the power of Barbenheimer, a true blue cultural phenomenon in a way the movies haven’t had in years. I’m ecstatic. In a move that might seem crazy to anyone who doesn’t know me well, I actually did try to go see Barbie at a theater in Milan, only to find out that the English language versions were all sold out (even then I considered the Italian dubbed version…).

Today, on my first day back stateside, I did go see Barbie. Jet lag be damned.

That review is coming on Friday, as well as a plug for the surprisingly awesome They Cloned Tyrone on Netflix and a whole host of movies I watched on the back of an airplane seat.

All of this is preface for a programming note: I think I’m going to review Oppenheimer for the following Friday, August 4th, for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I want to see the movie as God (I assume) and Christopher Nolan intended it: in 70 mm IMAX.

For those who are unfamiliar, this isn’t just digital IMAX, which is already a rarity if you don’t live in a big city. It’s a MASSIVE film projector that puts out essentially 12K resolution on a screen that’s six stories high (Nolan says the Oppenheimer film reels are 11 miles long and weigh 600 pounds). There are only 19 such theaters in the country. Luckily for me, four of those are in Southern California (here’s the one I’m going to, so you can see how huge it is). However, every single screening is completely sold out this week, and the earliest one I could find was next Tuesday…at noon, in the second row, Lord help us all.

Because these are clearly two of the most important movies of the year, and their relevance doesn’t appear to be fading away any time soon, I think it makes the most sense for this newsletter to blow them both out separately in a big way.

This might be the only time in five years when I truly feel like most people reading this have seen a movie before me. It makes me a little uncomfortable, if I’m honest. The best practices of the content game would tell me waiting is a terrible idea, but I hope you’ll have patience until next Friday. In the meantime enjoy my Barbie thoughts in a couple days!

Talk to you then,

Matt