Day: September 22, 2013

You may not have yet seen Jonathan Glazer‘s Under The Skin and if you have you may not be down with it, but you have to admit that this extended trailer delivers a fairly accurate semblance of how the film looks, sounds and plays. Here’s my Toronto Film Festival reaction.

In his mostly ecstatic review of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity (Warner Bros., 10.4), TheWrap critic Todd Gilchrist describes it as “a hard-science tale.” The $80 million dollar 3D epic certainly feels technologically realistic but the term “hard-science” suggests something dry and matter-of-fact and perhaps even 2001-ish. That’s not how the film plays. Director-cowriter Cuaron spends a lot of time exploring the emotional travails of Sandra Bullock‘s novice-astronaut character, Dr. Ryan Stone. Gravity, truth be told, is basically an emotional-woman-in-peril movie first and a “hard science” thing (if you want to call it that) second. Gilchrist calls it “a virtuoso technical achievement and a powerfully visceral cinematic experience” — definitely. He also says “it offers a uniquely poetic portrait of hope and survival.” I’m less sure about “uniquely” since Bullock’s response to her life-threatening situation isn’t radically different from the responses of Doris Day and Karen Black in vaguely similar films of the past, as I pointed out on 9.19. Gravity is a brilliant achievement, but “hard science” it’s not.

Kyle Patrick Alvarez‘s C.O.G. (Focus Features, 9.20) is a personal-odyssey drama about a Yale graduate (Jonathan Groff) trying to immerse himself in some form of rural reality (i.e, an apple farm) as a way of shaking himself out of his elitist academic realm…or something like that. (C.O.G. is an acronym for Child of God — is there anyone on the planet who can’t be so described?) Jeremy Seifert‘s GMO OMG is a doc about a guy looking for naturally grown, non-corporate foodstuffs. GMO is an acronym for “Genetically Modified Organism.”

I’ve seen and reviewed four of the 18 films that opened two days ago — Rush (positive as far as it goes), Prisoners (mixed positive), Haute Cuisine (positive) and The Wizard of Oz 3D (mostly positive). I walked into a Toronto Film Festival screening of The Art of The Steal and walked right out again 20 to 25 minutes later because it seemed too genre-ish. I haven’t seen A Single Shot, After Tiller, Battle of the Year 3D, C.O.G., The Colony, Generation Iron, IP Man: The Final Fight, Jerusalem, My Lucky Star, Plus One, The Short Game, Thanks for Sharing and Zaytoun. This is the way of the movie world these days. I should have seen one of two more openers, I suppose, but a one-man band can’t keep up and write this kind of column (six or seven stories per day).

“There’s no escaping that [this] film will jerk tears, but it doesn’t deserve the pejorative label that might suggest…Felix von Groeningen seems to innately understand that sorrow truthfully communicated and shared can be cathartic, rather than depressing.” — The Playlist‘s Jessica Kiang, filing from the Karlovy Film festival.

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I was mildly okay with Ron Howard‘s Rush (Universal 9.20) for the most part, but I haven’t felt moved to review it. I’m still not there. I’m waiting for the insight or ignition. I admired the craft and verisimilitude and the ’60s/’70s vibe, and I enjoyed the visceral vroom-vroom…but it didn’t stay with me, possibly because I didn’t sense much of an undercurrent (or at least an undercurrent that meant something to me personally). Is it because I didn’t care all that much about James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) or Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl)? The former struck me as an instinctual, good-natured, hot-dog libertine with a lion-like mane ; the other as an edgy, screwed-down, not-especially-likable hardass. Am I glad I saw Rush? Yeah. Would I see it again? Possibly. Will I buy the Bluray? No offense but probably not. And that’s not a putdown. I might rent the HD version on Vudu.