Oppenheimer, Mori Calliope, Pissing & Other Conundrums

August 18. 5 days before I’m hurried back into school, 4 days since I’ve returned to white people land and had uncomfortable conversations with myself, 28 days since I saw the Barbie movie, I went to a screening of Oppenheimer, completing the double feature across two countries. I loved it. Been a while since I knew what good movies were like (admittedly, not that I was particularly seeking good movies out).

Nolan in the WIRED interview described how he encountered the life story of Oppenheimer, and immediately felt the need to make it into a movie. After learning about this man for the first time, I can say the instinct wasn’t wrong. Robert Oppenheimer wasn’t just an interesting man, he was a captivating, larger-than-life figure — through his young scholar years when he was haunted by visions of the infinite universe, later establishing himself in America, to his troubling private life and difficult personality, which eventually lead to him taking on the Manhattan Project, to him creating the deadliest weapon humanity has ever seen and his reaction of it, one thing was consistent. Combining the excellent dialogue writing and Cillian Murphy’s killer performance, every time Oppenheimer spoke, or the times he noticably lacked dialogue, my eyes couldn’t leave the screen. A character put it best when he called Robert a “salesman of science”, somebody who can convince anybody of any crazy scientific idea through his words. His unequivocal intellect and way with words beautifully contrast with moments where he makes mistakes, fails the people around them, and the same fierce words now contain a desperate and pathetic quality. You know, like how a full, flawed human being would act.

That’s still barely touching the last hour and a half of the movie, where the atomic bomb is made, and Oppenheimer comes to terms with what he has created. As the non-linear narrative from different time periods and different color schemes come together, the plot starts getting intense, and the movie delivers one gold scene after another. The explosion scene itself was intense and smoldering, as you’d expect; the scene right after the experiment proves to be a success is so effective at conveying these people’s relief; and the scene where the crew waits for Oppenheimer’s speech in the auditorium, when the thumping audio motif, that played during moments of intense emotions, finally comes full circle, and Robert performs a generic victory lap while the world slowly drowns him and his doubts out, was one of my favorite scenes in anything I’d recently seen. Up there with Kim’s “God, please” in Disco Elysium.

The meeting with Truman, the US president at the time, is obviously a very easy target for both sides of the political isle — the right complains about how they made the president apathetic (and also they kinda just hate Oppenheimer as a guy), and the left celebrates the movie for exactly that. I found it a bit odd, though, considering how obviously the scene was portraying a much more nuanced perspective. Oppenheimer feels like the blood is on his hands. Truman tells him nobody gives a flying fuck who made the bomb. It’s him, and this country, who dropped it. At that moment, any pretense of moral superiority is dropped and the two powerful men are confronted with something much, much bigger than either of them —what they have done to the flow of history. Plenty of people have probably said their piece on the scene of Oppenheimer’s conversation with Einstein at the end, but I’ll still say it was an incredibly poignant moment, although a very sour note to end this heavy, long film.

If I watched it again, I’d probably have more cohesive thoughts about it — maybe I’ll even change my opinion on the movie wholesale, but for now that’s all I’ve got. Now let’s talk about why I, The Drowning Man, the song by The Cure in 1981, am doomed to never enjoy the theater experience.

You see, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is 3 hours long. Considering it’s the first time I’d really sat through any movie of that length, I thought it would be a pretty good idea to grab a drink. It was the worst mistake of my life.

I go to the movies just infrequently enough to forget how weak my bladder is, and every, single, time, my goldfish brain thinks it’s a good idea to grab a drink or two, and I end up having to go to the bathroom two or three times during the film.

Now, when it was some bullshit like Spiderman: No Way Home, I didn’t mind it that much, but every time I had to leave a good movie, a part of my soul leaves my body as well. As I slurped down my Coke Zero like some manic goblin and felt a force bubbling inside my system during the Oppenheimer screening, I reckoned with my sinful existence. I tried to channel my inner Sun Tzu and strategized exactly when and how I would go to the bathroom, and succeeded once during a particularly predictable scene. Until I felt the force welling up again at the scene where they’re about to do Trinity, and my life flashed before my eyes.

Was I really about to miss the fucking bomb scene in the movie about a bomb due to my biological (and also psychological) imperfections? Was I really about to leave the auditorium, without having seen Nolan’s artistic rendition of the explosion? Was I not to become deaf, destroyer of ears?

I held my bladder as hard as I could. Alas, my resistence was futile and I ran out of the screening in a dash right after the bomb has been detonated. As the bone-shattering sound spread through the auditorium I just left, it kinda felt like walking away from an explosion. It was kinda cool.

Anyways since one tragedy wasn’t enough Mori Calliope’s new EP also came out


It’s not good, what a surprise. The same overblown, 2013-sounding production, the same painfully generic choruses, the same vocal quirks that feels like she never aged past 14, and somehow, an even worse lyrical miracle spherical moment. I am truly astonished at the consistent garbage she’s been putting out for 3 years, but considering her earlier output as DEMONDICE, her agonizing artistic stagnation seems more understandable.

Simply put, Mori Calliope hasn’t and won’t ever artistically progress, because she’s completely detached from the wider music world. Like the Japanese group FAKE-TYPE, with whom she has extensively worked with, her music sounds like a horrific mashup of several genres — pop, rock, electro swing and hip hop, while not understanding how any of them work. Hiding under the pretense that she’s “not like the other musicians”, that what she’s doing is “experimental”, Mori can comfortably copy the most basic level understanding of those genres and paste them into a traumatizing amalgamation of musical tropes that had gotten out of style 17 years ago. Her kawaii vtuber persona, as well as the fans that specifically come for that, doesn’t even allow her to advance in the lyrical department, which is why all of the lyrics sound absolutely soulless.

The worst thing is, I’ve heard what a good Mori Calliope song sounds like. Exactly once, in fact.


“end of a life”, a track Mori released by the end of 2021, despite still having some annoying qualities to it, was a genuinely good pop rap song that actually meant something. The lyrics, despite having the writing chops and edge of a random Chinese teenager writing to an audience of no one, talks earnestly about her nights spent in Japan as an obscure artist, her ambitions, her angst, and her relationships, all of which she let go, after becoming a virtual idol. So when she finds herself wanting those days back, wishing those people will still in her life, she feels an immense guilt and calls herself a hypocrite, as she’s the one who made the trade, the one who wished for her currently lifestyle. That’s some genuine emotional depth, that her vocal delivery, more subdued than usual, doesn’t ruin like it always does. Her depiction of a distant memory is beautifully backed by a whimsical yet melancholic lofi beat courtesy of indie producer Pretty Patterns, and the harmonies are without debate the best Mori has ever done. Yeah, it’s no Kendrick, but the last time I checked, Drake doesn’t exactly go that deep and yall still gobble that shit up. For a pop rap track, “end of a life” does everything I want it to do, which is probably why despite minimal marketing and no recognizable names attached to this thing, the track is still one of the most popular she has ever done. People can hear quality when quality does come up.

But it was very obvious this wasn’t a new direction Mori wanted to go into — taking the rest of the catalogue into account, this barely even counts as a detour. She released this song purely for herself, and it shows. From the music itself, and from how she legit cried while explaining the lyrics on stream. People moved on quick, but to me, this was a deathblow to Mori’s music. If she only made soulless or edgy garbage with the emotional intelligence of a 14 year old, I wouldn’t see the contrast between that and the actual person behind all of the flashiness. When I did on this track, though, it became apparent that she didn’t have anything else to offer. She hasn’t lead an interesting or even relatable life besides this one snippet in “end of a life”, and the horrific mish-mash of genres isn’t an involuntary decision, but a necessity. A necessity that she needs to keep producing music for her corporate idol overlords to rack in profit. And that’s just fucking sad.

Still not as sad as my piss ruining my Oppenheimer experience tho