Has Christopher Nolan Met a Human Woman?

That was my overwhelming thought while watching Oppenheimer, which has something like 470 male characters, three speaking female characters, and at least two exceedingly cringe sex scenes (both involving Florence Pugh) that I wish I could wipe from my memory. Emily Blunt will likely be Oscar-nominated for playing Oppenheimer’s Long Suffering Wife, which only demonstrates Hollywood’s depressingly low standards for what counts as an award-worthy female role, especially in Oscarbait films about Great Men and their resentful wives. The only good thing to come out of this exhausting tradition is responses like this Reel called “All Women in Christopher Nolan Movies.”

-Inkoo

—I got to go long on my many thoughts on Oppenheimer on The Film Stage podcast, alongside my friend Robyn Bahr and her two co-hosts. If you’ve seen the movie, this biographical article underscores how hokey and contrived the script and its themes are.

—I didn’t publish anything new this week, so I’ll bump my doomer piece on Hollywood’s slow suicide. A small update: After months of ignoring the striking writers, the studios finally signaled this week that they’d like to resume negotiations, so that’s promising.

—I’ve been thinking a lot about how the truism about reality TV manipulating and editing cast members into the most deranged versions of themselves needs to be accompanied by the acknowledgement that some reality shows twist genuine monsters into harmlessly quirky characters. That dynamic is a big part of why I stopped watching 90 Day Fiancé last year after being pretty obsessed with the franchise for few years. But the Duggar show, also on TLC, may well be one of the most egregious examples of that positive editing to ever exist. I saw the Shiny Happy People docuseries on Amazon this week, and holy shit, it was incredibly, flabbergastingly disturbing, laying out how the fundamentalist sect that the Duggars promoted on their series essentially created an ecosystem of abuse, in which husbands abuse wives and wives abuse their children, sometimes when they are just babies. (The oldest Duggar son, Josh, was accused of sexually assaulting his sisters, and his parents not only covered it up but apparently forced his victims, i.e., their daughters, to go on a televised interview to downplay his actions. Fucking barf. Ironically, they spared the rod when it came to his sex crimes, and now he is in prison for child pornography.) Going back to the sect, believers participated in that abusive system as part of an adherence to the unhinged doctrines of an asshole who never married or had any children himself but had plenty to say on how his followers should raise their families. (Unsurprisingly, he was later accused of rape, and, based on the stories in the docuseries, seems to have targeted underage girls for his sexual predation.) It’s a tough watch, and a bit too slick for my tastes, but definitely worthwhile.

—On a lighter note, it’s been more than 20 years since I saw Farewell My Concubine, but I have an extraordinarily soft spot for Chen Kaige’s Palme d’Or winner, which stars Leslie Cheung (RIP) and Gong Li as two vertices of a queer(ed) love triangle set in the Peking Opera. Film Movement is releasing a reissue this fall that restores the 20 minutes that Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein edited out from the version that’s been distributed in the U.S. I’m looking forward to watching the original cut when it becomes available in September.

—Living through India’s next-level heat wave. A harrowing medical and infrastructural travelogue from my (extremely impressive) colleague Dhruv Khullar. This was published in 2022, but I assume is no less relevant this year.

—Zoo denies rumors that its bear is a human in disguise. This article notes toward the end that in some panda conservation centers in China, workers do dress up in bear costumes so the animals “feel more relaxed.” Looking at these pics, though, “relaxed” isn’t exactly what I’d feel.

—SUCCESSION LIVES.