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.