Review: A herculean human effort plus two cute robots equals triumph for ‘Good Night Oppy’
When the world’s first robot goes on strike, it is not to be the first to do so.
When the world’s first robot goes on strike, it is not to be the first to do so.
So ends the final act of “Good Night Oppy,” starring Fred Thompson and Olivia Wilde, the latest in a series of dramas set in the early 1950s where an aging hero and a young damsel find each other in an unlikely scenario. The film, which premiered at the Sundance, has emerged as a cult favorite because of its offbeat subject and intriguing set of characters.
While critic Richard Schickel of Variety noted that “the first half-hour in this film is much more conventional than the second,” he still called the film “a delightful and rather unsettling comedy of manners” that also “bears little resemblance to the kind of action- and action-suspense movies that are made today.”
Writer/director John August took the time to speak with the Hollywood Reporter to discuss how he was able to shoot the film in 16mm and how he was able to keep it as a “herculean human effort” and not a “crap shoot” to use a more apt phrase than the one being used here.
He discussed the “bizarre” nature of the film and how he chose to shoot it in 16mm film.
“The story is not about this robot that just goes on strike, and this robot that’s being taken care of so that it becomes a new thing that we can call a robot. It’s about the humans being the new thing, and you can’t understand why this thing is happening. So the film was shot in 16mm film, and you just never saw 16mm film at home, and I remember all about it — how it was shot, the lighting, all these things — and that became a theme throughout the film and through about the third half of the film, and it was all about these 16mm films that we were watching at home.”
With regards to some of the more unusual aspects of the film, he noted that “we had a story idea that was really interesting, about the robot that was making some sort of human contact that we weren’t really sure