John Carpenter doesn’t get the hype around Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer.
“Oppenheimer was OK. It was alright,” the Master of Horror said in an interview for music journalist Larry Fitzmaurice’s Last Donut of the Night newsletter. “Everyone’s praising it as the movie of the century — I don’t know about that.”
When asked if he liked Nolan’s movies in general, Carpenter responded, “Yeah, I guess, sure.”
However, Carpenter was impressed by Bradley Cooper’s “terrific” Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, which he “enjoyed a great deal.”
Combined with his previous comments about Barbie, we can count Carpenter as among the relatively few moviegoers who didn’t get the Barbenheimer phenomenon as a whole. In October of last year, he said Barbie wasn’t for “my generation” and admitted the “patriarchy business” went “right over my head.”
Carpenter’s interview served as promotion for his new album, Lost Themes IV: Noir. The 10-track project dropped today (May 3rd) and was made with his frequent collaborators, son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies.
Be sure to read why we named Oppenheimer one of the best films of 2023 and check out our interview with Ludwig Göransson about creating the movie’s score.