Maybe Black Mesa
Oct. 24th, 2013 12:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueMom brought home some flowers from a funeral, and we have no idea what they are. They look like Chinese lanterns crossed with horse chestnuts.
In one of those pleasurable serendipities, I was listening to an old Chicago bluseman sing "This Train is Bound for Glory" on the radio, and when I flipped stations at the commercial break afterward I got "Highway to Hell."
Ciro and I went out to see Gravity at Jordan's Furniture, which really is one of the stranger places I've ever been. I like it a lot, but it is also bizarre in ways that aren't easy to convey; it is totally unlike anything I could compare it to. I take people there in the same way I might take a London tourist to Harrod's. (But it makes less sense than Harrod's.) After the movie, we got ice cream cones and at them on a bridge made of jellybeans while we watched people at the trapeze school and choreographed fountains and a sculpture of a green monster eating a Yankee player. I had pistachio.
As for the movie, B minus. Competent but rote blockbuster genre fare.
Further thoughts behind the cut assume you've seen the movie. By which I mean not only spoilers, but an assumption that you know what I'm talking about.
I don't particularly want to slam this movie, because I don't think it's a bad movie, not exactly. It's smart for a studio blockbuster. It doesn't make me angry, which is something of an accomplishment these days, one feels.
It is, however, awfully thin soup. I went in knowing as little as possible, as I usually do, but I knew it was directed by Cuaron and had good word of mouth. I knew the phrase "film for grown ups" had been tossed around. Consequently, I was expecting the filmic equivalent of literature, particularly in context of other exceptional genre fare I've seen in theaters in the last few years, notably Upstream Color and Moon. And other space-station disaster films I love, including Apollo 13 and (despite its flaws) Sunshine.
Unfortunately, this film is neither smart nor personal. It's not dumb, but it's formulaic. If I didn't know from the credits that it was an auteur film (Cuaron wrote, directed, produced, and edited), I would have assumed a team of hired guns was behind it. There's no personality, no point of view, no specificity, no engagement with the material.
From the moment George Clooney detaches from Sandra Bullock, the film might as well be a video game. The opening cinematic is over. Clooney talks Bullock through a jumping puzzle as a tutorial. Then she's on her own, and has to solve a sequence of puzzles (combination of jumping puzzles and button sequence push puzzles) to get from point A to point B, with various save points/check points in between. Much of this is presented in first person POV with wall-to-wall music. Bullock's character is as much of a cipher as most video game characters; she has no goals or relationships external to the game, and her only past is a generic dead child, fulfilling the "never going to lose again" quotient.
Gravity: The Cake is a Lie.
I did like the moment when she was in radio contact with the man who had dogs. It was not capitalized on, but it felt like it was not a tickbox - like it wasn't just another smooth domino. I thought it might be leading somewhere unpredictable or revealing. But no, then she hears a baby, and once she had a daughter, and oh might as well just die now, because she has no other family or friends or reason for living. (She doesn't even care what radio station she listens to, y'all, because she's broody.) And yet in her fog of near-suicidal depression and complete lack of motivation, she applied for and was accepted into a competitive astronaut training program, I guess by accident, and then didn't make any friends there either.
How absurd to try to sell me on an internal journey that goes from motivated astronaut to given up on life years ago to "I do believe in fairies!" in 90 minutes with a character who has nobody to talk to and who is in environments that are meaningless to her, taking actions which move forward linearly and never suggest that another choice is an option. I have literally no means of access to her internal life. This was not a character who had an internal life, as far as I can tell. No disrespect to Sandra Bullock. It's a script problem. A glaring one.
We saw the film in 3D Imax, kind of over my objections, because I am tired of hearing "oh this film is different! It uses the 3D artistically." Ciro argues that in fact this film would be totally worthless without 3D's sense of physical distance - that it would be a complete waste of time in 2D. Possibly he is right. Yet I found the 3D distracting. Nothing felt to me like it had substance. I was looking at stacked flat planes rather than rounded objects with mass.
Also, if you're using 3D to give me you-are-there immersion, why are you still allowing yourself to use lens flare? And what on earth were you thinking with water droplets on the lens in the last shot? The last thing my attention should be drawn to in that moment is "here's this character, on her own - with a camera next to her!"
Furthermore, it would be nice to have some visual symbolism that goes beyond fetal positions and umbilical cords and "rebirths." Christ.
As I say, I don't want to slam this movie. But as Ciro puts it, this is every story in Asimov's or Analog. And we'd rather have something from Small Beer Press.
In one of those pleasurable serendipities, I was listening to an old Chicago bluseman sing "This Train is Bound for Glory" on the radio, and when I flipped stations at the commercial break afterward I got "Highway to Hell."
Ciro and I went out to see Gravity at Jordan's Furniture, which really is one of the stranger places I've ever been. I like it a lot, but it is also bizarre in ways that aren't easy to convey; it is totally unlike anything I could compare it to. I take people there in the same way I might take a London tourist to Harrod's. (But it makes less sense than Harrod's.) After the movie, we got ice cream cones and at them on a bridge made of jellybeans while we watched people at the trapeze school and choreographed fountains and a sculpture of a green monster eating a Yankee player. I had pistachio.
As for the movie, B minus. Competent but rote blockbuster genre fare.
Further thoughts behind the cut assume you've seen the movie. By which I mean not only spoilers, but an assumption that you know what I'm talking about.
I don't particularly want to slam this movie, because I don't think it's a bad movie, not exactly. It's smart for a studio blockbuster. It doesn't make me angry, which is something of an accomplishment these days, one feels.
It is, however, awfully thin soup. I went in knowing as little as possible, as I usually do, but I knew it was directed by Cuaron and had good word of mouth. I knew the phrase "film for grown ups" had been tossed around. Consequently, I was expecting the filmic equivalent of literature, particularly in context of other exceptional genre fare I've seen in theaters in the last few years, notably Upstream Color and Moon. And other space-station disaster films I love, including Apollo 13 and (despite its flaws) Sunshine.
Unfortunately, this film is neither smart nor personal. It's not dumb, but it's formulaic. If I didn't know from the credits that it was an auteur film (Cuaron wrote, directed, produced, and edited), I would have assumed a team of hired guns was behind it. There's no personality, no point of view, no specificity, no engagement with the material.
From the moment George Clooney detaches from Sandra Bullock, the film might as well be a video game. The opening cinematic is over. Clooney talks Bullock through a jumping puzzle as a tutorial. Then she's on her own, and has to solve a sequence of puzzles (combination of jumping puzzles and button sequence push puzzles) to get from point A to point B, with various save points/check points in between. Much of this is presented in first person POV with wall-to-wall music. Bullock's character is as much of a cipher as most video game characters; she has no goals or relationships external to the game, and her only past is a generic dead child, fulfilling the "never going to lose again" quotient.
Gravity: The Cake is a Lie.
I did like the moment when she was in radio contact with the man who had dogs. It was not capitalized on, but it felt like it was not a tickbox - like it wasn't just another smooth domino. I thought it might be leading somewhere unpredictable or revealing. But no, then she hears a baby, and once she had a daughter, and oh might as well just die now, because she has no other family or friends or reason for living. (She doesn't even care what radio station she listens to, y'all, because she's broody.) And yet in her fog of near-suicidal depression and complete lack of motivation, she applied for and was accepted into a competitive astronaut training program, I guess by accident, and then didn't make any friends there either.
How absurd to try to sell me on an internal journey that goes from motivated astronaut to given up on life years ago to "I do believe in fairies!" in 90 minutes with a character who has nobody to talk to and who is in environments that are meaningless to her, taking actions which move forward linearly and never suggest that another choice is an option. I have literally no means of access to her internal life. This was not a character who had an internal life, as far as I can tell. No disrespect to Sandra Bullock. It's a script problem. A glaring one.
We saw the film in 3D Imax, kind of over my objections, because I am tired of hearing "oh this film is different! It uses the 3D artistically." Ciro argues that in fact this film would be totally worthless without 3D's sense of physical distance - that it would be a complete waste of time in 2D. Possibly he is right. Yet I found the 3D distracting. Nothing felt to me like it had substance. I was looking at stacked flat planes rather than rounded objects with mass.
Also, if you're using 3D to give me you-are-there immersion, why are you still allowing yourself to use lens flare? And what on earth were you thinking with water droplets on the lens in the last shot? The last thing my attention should be drawn to in that moment is "here's this character, on her own - with a camera next to her!"
Furthermore, it would be nice to have some visual symbolism that goes beyond fetal positions and umbilical cords and "rebirths." Christ.
As I say, I don't want to slam this movie. But as Ciro puts it, this is every story in Asimov's or Analog. And we'd rather have something from Small Beer Press.
