Gravity

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/combined

Sandra Bullock, in Gravity, gets the chance to reassert her megawatt stardom in a role that commands your attention from beginning to end. She gets to stretch her acting legs in a marathon performance that could well be the cornerstone of her career. Whether she’s out in space or out of her spacesuit, in homage to Barbarella (1968), this movie is all-Sandra, all-the-time and she’s open for business. 

In the emotional department, she can break you down with a glance and keep you cheering for her even when her character’s spirit wanes. She also handily demonstrates that the best way to overcome gravity is with the help of some of the best surgeons money can buy. I could go for that kind of work if I could come out the other side looking as good as she does.

Sandra Bullock gives her best Jane Fonda impression in this shot from Gravity.

No doubt about it, she’s real and makes you want to jump up on the screen and tell her everything’s going to be okay. This is easily her best film to date and certainly has the substance lacking in many of her most popular films.

Alfonso Cuarón directs. If you aren't familiar with his landmark films Y Tu Mama, Tambien or Children of Men, you've doubtlessly seen his work when he directed the Harry Potter/Azkaban installment. What he presents on the screen is some rare high-drama and some mind-blowing special effects that make a whole new, and valid, argument for the 3-D process. If you’re not a sufferer of motion sickness or vertigo, you must see Gravity in this format.

I don’t know a lot about the details of working in the zero-gravity environment, but everything seems to fit the science as I understand it. Perhaps I’ll hear from some experts in this area.

In many ways, Gravity is the perfect date movie. Women get to watch the reigning queen of chick flicks do her empowering thing while guys don’t get compared to Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Gosling, Richard Gere or Ashton Kutcher. They do have to measure up to George Clooney, but only his face, formidable as it is, because the rest of him is covered up by thick bulky space suit. Even this slight portion of him might be enough to earn him some Oscar attention early next year as Sandra undoubtedly will.

This is the kind of movie where everybody gets what they come to see. Unlike films like Alien or Prometheus, I can’t tell if it will be as interesting ten years from now and for that I’m giving Gravity three and a half Wilders.

   

Our Overlooked Film of Significance for the week: Children of Men. This is the rarest of scifi movies – a British scifi film that’s actually watchable. More than that, it's a minor masterpiece with a really hard-to-believe story that's pulled off with wit and expert film making  Not unlike French rock-n-roll, the Brits haven’t been able to produce (m)any noteworthy scifi movies since Kubrick was in his prime.

Prisoners

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392214/combined

Prisoners tries real hard to be the epic kind of thriller that The Silence of the Lambs was, but falls way short. Although nicely photographed and generally attention-grabbing for about two and a half hours, there’s just too much missing for it to be the movie it wants to be.

First, there are hero issues. There are too many. Two fathers, one and a half mothers, a cop and a suspect are all involved with two girls who vanish in broad daylight. Father #1, played, maybe over-played, with intensity by Hugh Jackman and Terrance Howard’s more believable Father #2 go after the first suspect they come across. Then a cop played by Jake Gyllenhaal gets assigned to the case and wants so badly to make the lambs stop screaming he’s willing to bend some rules.

Then Mother #1, Viola Davis, gets involved with what the dads are doing while Mother #2, Jackman’s wife, retreats into a pharmaceutical fog. All of this is fine as far as thrillers go and the director does keep us interested in these people far longer than the story should allow. There are just too many characters to root for and no one really ends up earning our admiration or support. It might be Jackman’s 16-year-old son who is having a tough time living up to dad’s hyper-masculine countenance. You might feel sorry for Paul Dano as Suspect #1, but then again, he probably could have solved the whole thing for us in the first hour and we all could have gone home. Bad differently-abled character - no sympathy for you.

 Hugh Jackman begins his assault in Prisoners

In addition to having no hero worthy of Clarice Starling, there’s no villain in sight to compare with Hannibal Lector. What we get is a bizarre kind of B-movie, People Under the Stairs styled denouement and a shady priest with corpses in the closet thrown in for additional ickiness and to help add another hour to the film. (Fans of Sweeney Todd, the play-not the movie, might appreciate Len Cariou in the role of the priest.)

The worst… The very worst… After 160 minutes there are a lot of holes that don’t quite get filled in, if you’ll excuse the expression. It’s a shame because the movie looks great and there are some fine actors in roles that simply weren’t completely fleshed out. These lapses caused me and some others in the audience to leave the theater scratching our heads and then scratching each other’s heads for camaraderie.

This is the kind of movie you might rent for a buck or just wait for it to come to cable to watch on a rainy day when there’s nothing else on. And for that I’ll give it one Wilder because I did like looking at the pictures.

 

Our Overlooked Film of Significance for the week: Just see The People Under the Stairs. It’s a schlocky, cheaply-made, B-movie that somehow rises above its pedigree, with more substance than you might expect.