Gravity (Part 2 of Gravity Blowout Special!)

A Night at the Theater...or, uh, A Day at the 'Mike

By Matt Marion

I never saw “Avatar” in theaters. I didn't get to experience the nation-wide satisfaction of having witnessed the best 3D-movie ever. Sure, I suffered for a few months, but, eventually, it was released on DVD and luckily I have a friend who buys DVD's. I watched it on a large flatscreen and soaked it in. After I watched it I was awestruck, but without that nation-wide satisfaction.

Gravity was my second chance. Respected friends and online critics raved for Gravity. “It's a ride.” “An adventure.” “Alfonso Cuarón's space epic.”

I arrived at a movie theater that required a distant memory to recall ever being there. A shady Carmike Cinema lay undisturbed by the main road traffic, allowing its inhabitants of mostly 60-somethings a safe hole to burrow into. Exiting my Oldesmobile—driven by 60-somethings (I'm in the right place!)--gave me a sense of camaraderie given the makes and models I was surrounded by. The Carmike, or The 'Mike, as I've learned it to be nicknamed, offered a particularly casual way of doing business.

Why pay before you can come inside? It's cold out there. Come in, come in. While we fill your bucket of popcorn to the standard 5 lbs., why don't you tell me what movie you'd like to see. Oh, that rather large drink size to your right, towering above the insignificant smaller portions? Yes, it is a liter. No, the two liter doesn't come out for another month. Check back in when “Catching Fire” premiers.

After meeting with my party of 5, we entered into the hole that so many crave in order to escape. Little did I know, this hole opened into infinity.

Through my admittedly untrained eye for critiquing film, I would like to ask for forgiveness of ignorance ahead of time. With that said...

Several flashes nearly made my eyes permanently roll in the back of my head. Was this Gravity at its finest, showing an ability to literally make the body illicit a physical response? No, it turns out the source was just a few previews involving a fresh-off-the-knife Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman getting away with being a retired Oscar winner, and some other guys I don't remember (I just wanted to mention Red and Gordon). There was also Rocky VII, where Sly seems to pick a fight with his former trainer, Mick, who comes back via time travel into his 70-year-old fighting prime, played by another retired Oscar winner.

Eventually the lights dimmed, I was cued to put on the glasses, and I was transported to (I think) the Hubble Space Telescope. The rest is 100,000,000 dollars worth of 3D magic.

I can't say much for the narrative, because other than Bullock's hyperventilating and Clooney's too-cool-for-school-veteran-among-veterans-astronaut captain persona, this movie really lacked in the story department. But the graphics, whoa buddy! This movie could unleash an interactive theme park ride that'll dick slap whatever Universal Studios ends up giving Avatar in 2016.

What this movie sacrifices in plot, it more than makes up for in an emotional experience, which is something I feel only an incredibly vivid 3D movie can do. We all hang at the mercy of ZERO G's with Bullock, mutually relieved by Clooney's voice. We sympathize with her hatred for that damn space tether and its unyielding fibers. The terror of colliding space stations exists in silent screams, mouths open but only for sucking in breath. It feels like Bullock has an insurmountable speed bump every 15 minutes of the movie. Every time the audience thinks, Oh, a space station, surely there's other people she can re-group with, surely she'll have a training montage to get ready for Russian space debris, surely—All wrong! She doesn't even get to land okay.

My favorite part of the film was the ending. Not that I was waiting for it, although Gravity makes you want to get off the ride the first time because you don't know if you're ready for what Cuarón's going to do next. But that's okay, because when it is over, you're glad you did it; and you'd do it again. 

Gravity (Part 1 of Gravity Blowout Special!)

A Night at the Theater

By Louis Lalire

Alfonso Cuarón’s visually sensational Gravity reminded me of the first time I saw Jaws. It comes from the same ancestral lineage as Steven Spielberg’s classic thriller, in that its plan is to throw its main character through a series of obstacles within a terrifying, contained environment: the boat at sea in Jaws, outer space in Gravity, and says, essentially, "let’s throw a non-stop mountain of trouble at this person, and see if they have the will to survive and make it home." Gravity executes this plan with near-perfection, maintaining an edge-of-your-seat level of intensity throughout its short 90-minute run time. Like Jaws, the reason it succeeds is because it supplants an element of dread in the audience’s head so strong that even when the characters we root for are relaxing on screen, we can’t, because we always know that the giant shark is still lurking, swimming circles around their feet.

The plot of Gravity does not break any new ground, and mostly acts as a means to set up the aforementioned “obstacle course” for Sandra Bullock, who plays first time astronaut Ryan Stone. Stone has some personal issues back down on the blue planet, but those elements mainly remain arbitrary in their need to project on Stone a will to survive and a reason never to give up. George Clooney is the only other character with a face in the film, and he's the aswer to the question: “If you had to be stuck in space with one other person, who would it be?” He plays NASA veteran Matt Kowalski, who is focused on breaking the all-time space walking record, and whose super-cool and calm demeanor (also known as “Clooney-ness”) acts as a welcomed counterbalance to Bullock’s space virgin strife.

I saw the film in 3D, and while I still think this format oftentimes detracts from the visual experience, it did not bother or distract me during the aesthetically beautiful Gravity. I have never been to space, a sentiment most of us can relate to, and have little to no knowledge of how things actually “work” in space, but the scale and movement of people and objects in Gravity conveys a strong sense of realism. Despite its out-of-worldliness, Gravity isn’t sci-fi. The believability of the situation it presents, even if it’s a situation that 99.9% of the population (you know, all non-astronauts) won’t have to think about on a daily basis, changes the way the audience experiences its own dread.

The fear we would experience if a fleet of aliens with razor-sharp tentacles coming out of their stomachs attacked Ryan and Kowalski is much different than the fear we experience when Ryan slowly trots to a dot on the horizon, a space station, as the oxygen in her suit dwindles. The latter is more tangible, a claustrophobic dread that we can all connect with. Cuarón, who also co-wrote, co-produced and co-edited the film, and his crew, which includes cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, take full advantage of our own claustrophobia, filming their characters with tight frames, and pumping up the sound of each breath they take through the thin layer of glass in their helmets. The sound design, cinematography, and editing of the film are things to be marveled in their own right. Like in his last film, the apocalyptic and marvelous Children of Men, Cuarón spares cuts like the astronaut with the dwindling oxygen tank must spare breaths: don’t use them until they are absolutely, positively necessary.

It’s all very funny though, because outer space is such a vast expanse. With the exception of Earth, there are literally hundreds of thousands of miles of nothing surrounding our characters at all times, yet the audience is overcome with a sense of claustrophobia throughout the experience. Gravity is frustratingly tense, but only in the best way possible—it grabs you, ensnares you, and doesn’t let you breathe until its final shot. But in that final “hero” shot, our survival is celebrated. “We made it!” we say. And we release a huge breath and realize, that was one hell of a ride.

“Gravity”    

Warner Bros. 90 minutes. Rated R.

Dir. Alfonso Cuarón

Starring: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney

In Theaters Now

Cowboys and Aliens

A Night At the Theater

By Louis Lalire

One Snake-Hater, One Martini-Lover, Two Studs

Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens is not nearly as preposterous as its name implies, but rather a gritty adventure with a premise that answers the question: what would happen if Aliens attacked not in present-day, but in Arizona Territory, 1873? The film works because it keeps its poker face straight throughout, never meandering towards camp. The result is a flawed, special effects-laden and thoroughly entertaining summer blockbuster.

The Cowboys are led by Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), an amnesiac with a troubled past, who wakes up in the desert with a mysterious metal bracelet stuck on his hand. He was the leader of a large gang and has a bounty on his head, but people soon forget about such things when Alien ships attack the town and ‘lasso’ in all the women, children, etc., and Lonergan shoots down one of the flying saucer-types with his powerful bracelet gun. The determined, ruthless cattleman Colonel Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) heads up a posse to get all their captured loved ones back, including his not-so-loveable son Leroy (Paul Dano), and he realizes Lonergan’s newfound importance: “You. You’re going with us, I need that weapon—it’s the only thing that counts.”

This plot does draw comparisons to John Ford’s The Searchers, but with the green-blooded extra terrestrials replacing Chief Scar’s merciless Comanche. Unfortunately, that’s really all it seems this movie does with the Aliens. Instead of a successful genre mash-up, we get an old-fashioned western with the Aliens filling the roles of the Indians in a traditional Hollywood sense: there only purpose is to disrupt the cowboys’ way of life and to give ‘em something to shoot at. We know almost nothing about what these Aliens are motivated by (they want gold, for some reason, and perform horrible experiments on humans, for some reason), nor do these unimaginative creepy crawlers have a single line of dialogue. It boggles my mind how these Aliens appear to be so stupid, yet have incredibly advanced technology. But the movie simply doesn’t have enough time to explain such things, and while the Western aspects thrive, the Sci-Fi elements, like the aliens themselves, get buried in the desert. You come away feeling everyone involved in Cowboys just wanted to make a conventional western; it’s a sad thing being told that’s not financially viable.

The real strength of Cowboys is in it’s acting, led by the Brit Daniel Craig, who comfortably steps into the most old fashioned character role of them all: the quiet, gun-slinging, morally ambiguous lead. His American accent is on-point and his sharp blue eyes and physical presence will no doubt lead to even move comparisons to the great Steve McQueen, who famously played the quiet, gun-slinger role in The Magnificent Seven. Harrison Ford is equally convincing as Dolarhyde, the cattle baron with whom we grow to like over the course of the film. Few actors possess a better “I’m Fucking Serious Now Face” then Harrison Ford.

An "I'm Serious Now" Harrison Face in Action

Dolarhyde’s posse is both well-cast and consistently well-played, comprised of a saloon owner humorously named ‘Doc’ (the dependable Sam Rockwell), an otherworldly beauty named Ella (Olivia Wilde), a helpful preacher (Clancy Brown), a Native American named Nat Colorado (Adam Beach), and finally, a boy (Noah Ringer)—why you would take a small boy with you, I don’t know. All of these characters are played well and they each seem to get their own story time, the most engaging of which is the father/son relationship between Dolarhyde and his secondhand man Nat. The only reason I can theorize as to why Cowboys & Aliens has six accredited writers—yes, six—is that each character’s story was written by a different person. The story does get quite choppy at points.

But the posse’s quest never dulls, whether they’re stumbling upon a riverboat in the middle of the desert or running into Apache Indians (helpful ones this time), I was thoroughly entertained. The effects are mostly cool and rarely detracting, and the action scenes are well choreographed. One scene that stands out is when Craig leaps from his horse onto a small, flying alien scout ship to save Wilde. Once they destroy the craft and fall into a river, he amusingly proclaims in shock, “We were just flying! I don’t ever wanna do that again.” 

I only wished Cowboys & Aliens had a few more moments like this—let it have a little more fun with itself. After smelted gold covers and exterminates an alien, and the camera pauses the action and focuses on our heroes, Craig and Ford, the least I expect is a one-liner. It never comes. But perhaps that is ultimately avoided for the best, so Favreau can make the movie he wants to: a substantial summer blockbuster that pays homage to traditional Westerns, instead of that silly movie that’s remembered for teaming up James Bond and Indiana Jones in the Old West. He [mostly] succeeds.


3/5


P.S. We all remember the last time Indy and James paired up. James was less suave and more bald, but no less effective...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh-cVHdhTp4