Just the Ticket #86: Gravity
I'd hate to repeat myself--for one thing, sound does not echo in space, and for another, it makes me seem unoriginal--but I can't help it when I keep watching the same kind of movie over and over again.
I've given Dark Tide, Open Water, Titanic, The Perfect Storm, and Captain Phillips far more mention than they deserve in recent weeks, even subjecting myself to the surprisingly un-torturous All is Lost. Now, I have sat through Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, and the voice of Ed Harris as Mission Control.
Gravity starts out with an idea that could have been molded into a less desirable, more insanity-prone film (one of the government conspiracy variety): Russia has shot down one of their own satellites, which is now a cloud of fast-moving (read: 20,000 miles per hour) debris that has caused a chain reaction by smashing into almost every other country's satellite and blacking out communications on a global scale. One could almost picture Cuba Gooding, Jr. or Aaron Eckhart or some other poorly cast direct-to-video action movie star gallavanting around the streets of Moscow, sleek pistol in hand, thwarting a long-term, unfathomably convoluted Soviet domination plot with a defected cyber-geek in tow.
That doesn't sound nearly as bad as watching two people, who may or may not be just hazy faces projected onto space helmets worn by stunt doubles, as they float around the entirely fake nothingness of space by themselves until one or both of them suffocate to death.
But in all seriousness, Gravity is nowhere near that bad. In fact, you might even say Gravity isn't bad at all. Sure, it goes through the same paces as any One-Damned-Thing-After-Another disaster movie that came before it, and sure, it's 3D and almost none of it is real, but it still looks awesome. Not to mention Sandra Bullock, who spends nearly the entire film in a mechanical apparatus that makes it more cost- and time-effective to wet her pants than to unstrap herself and run to the bathroom, with nothing more expressive than a tennis ball on a stick to sharpen her acting skills against. Gravity is not just an expensive 3D disaster spectacle; for Sandra Bullock, it is the pain-in-the-ass epitome of improvisational acting, and she proves time and again throughout the course of Gravity what George Clooney's character told her: that no matter what little you have to work with, there is always something. And that, dear Ticketholders, is something.
A
More Oscar buzz in the next issue of Just the Ticket, as I head for the open fields of Nebraska.
I've given Dark Tide, Open Water, Titanic, The Perfect Storm, and Captain Phillips far more mention than they deserve in recent weeks, even subjecting myself to the surprisingly un-torturous All is Lost. Now, I have sat through Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, and the voice of Ed Harris as Mission Control.
Gravity starts out with an idea that could have been molded into a less desirable, more insanity-prone film (one of the government conspiracy variety): Russia has shot down one of their own satellites, which is now a cloud of fast-moving (read: 20,000 miles per hour) debris that has caused a chain reaction by smashing into almost every other country's satellite and blacking out communications on a global scale. One could almost picture Cuba Gooding, Jr. or Aaron Eckhart or some other poorly cast direct-to-video action movie star gallavanting around the streets of Moscow, sleek pistol in hand, thwarting a long-term, unfathomably convoluted Soviet domination plot with a defected cyber-geek in tow.
That doesn't sound nearly as bad as watching two people, who may or may not be just hazy faces projected onto space helmets worn by stunt doubles, as they float around the entirely fake nothingness of space by themselves until one or both of them suffocate to death.
But in all seriousness, Gravity is nowhere near that bad. In fact, you might even say Gravity isn't bad at all. Sure, it goes through the same paces as any One-Damned-Thing-After-Another disaster movie that came before it, and sure, it's 3D and almost none of it is real, but it still looks awesome. Not to mention Sandra Bullock, who spends nearly the entire film in a mechanical apparatus that makes it more cost- and time-effective to wet her pants than to unstrap herself and run to the bathroom, with nothing more expressive than a tennis ball on a stick to sharpen her acting skills against. Gravity is not just an expensive 3D disaster spectacle; for Sandra Bullock, it is the pain-in-the-ass epitome of improvisational acting, and she proves time and again throughout the course of Gravity what George Clooney's character told her: that no matter what little you have to work with, there is always something. And that, dear Ticketholders, is something.
A
More Oscar buzz in the next issue of Just the Ticket, as I head for the open fields of Nebraska.
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