'FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY'..........DESTROYER OF WORLDS.......

Fat Man And Little Boy (1989)    What better time to post about this one......while Baby Orange casually flirts with nuclear Armageddon in between gold games........

            And yes, we've heard the spot-on gags about the title of this film perfectly describing the two main opponents of the U.S.-Korea showdown.........like everybody else, we slapped our heads, wishing we'd thought of it first......

              This particular chunk of history has always fascinated us, , so we've pounced on any book or film that dealt with the events leading up to the creating and dropping of the first atomic bombs.......

              "Fat Man And Little Boy" makes an interesting companion piece to MGM's 1947 flag waving, deeply reverent and patriotic version "The Beginning Or The End", which we covered in a previous post.  "Fat Man", was crafted by director Roland Joffe and writer Bruce Robinson, both riding on the acclaim of "The Killing Fields."

               With their egos sufficiently engorged, Joffe and Robinson's take on 1945 Los Alamos reeks of self-satisfied, hip revisionism........history as viewed through a warped, distanced sensibility.....you can easily detect the creative smugness behind it.  Though the movie sits up on its hind legs and begs for adoration and awards, critics and audiences sniffed out the pretentious phoniness of it.

                In Robinson's script, General Groves (Paul Newman) and Robert Oppenheimer (Dwight Shultz)  are nothing more than artificial screenwriter chess pieces.....Groves reconfigured as a growly-voiced Patton and Oppenheimer as a wobbling neurotic........it's history rewritten as a fuzzy daydream somewhere inside Robinson's head and Joffe directs it all with ponderous solemnity, as if it delivering holy scripture......

              Interestingly, both this film and "The Beginning Or The End" inaccurately shoehorn in the fatal nuclear accident that befell a Los Alamos scientist (it didn't occur until after the bomb was constructed and dropped). In the older film, the poor fellow politely expires by fainting away. "Fat Man", to its credit, is at least unflinching in portraying John Cusack's agonizing death from a massive dose of radiation......functioning as a preview of horrifying events to come......

               Some fine acting and a few lively scenes here and there, but considering the powerful subject matter, an artsty-fartsy botch of a movie.....like a coffee table book waiting for someone to flip through its pages and admire it...... 2 stars (**).....not quite da bomb.....