Day: October 6, 2013

I wanted to see Gravity on a really huge IMAX 3D screen so I caught it last night at the AMC Universal CityWalk plex. It played just as well the second time. Not all that differently from my first viewing at Telluride’s Werner Herzog Cinema, but I was able to appreciate the expert crafting and shaping all the more. It’s a very, very high-end thing. I tried counting the number of times Sandra Bullock goes “aaahh!” It might be only 20 or 25 but it felt like 45 or 50. The only bad part of the show was sitting through one giant-sized IMAX trailer after another for a series of blunt, rib-thumping action-fantasy flicks — Ender’s Game (awful), Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, 47 Ronin (swords and robes), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (same old crap). At least I didn’t have to sit through trailers for Thor: The Dark World and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

I’ve always hated Universal CityWalk. Coarse, lowbrow, overwhelming, garish, fatiguing. Ground Zero for people who would flinch at the idea of watching All Is Lost or Blue Is The Warmest Color. It’s the ideal place for people who mainly want to watch primitive genre films. I was riding on a garage elevator with seven or eight kids and was telling myself, “Concentrate on the things you have in common with these guys…don’t get into a twist about how exotic they seem.” On top of which an IMAX ticket costs $20 bucks plus the lowest parking fee is $15. Plus I waited through 25 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic to just get to the booths where you have to pay. $35 for front-gate parking and $25 for preferred parking?

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[Warning: spoilers contained herein] Ben Stiller‘s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (20th Century Fox, 12.25) is a smooth and supple dreamscape romance about a timid, do-little Manhattan daydreamer (Stiller in the title role) who suddenly morphs into a fearless adventurer at the drop of a hat, and in so doing gets the girl (Kirsten Wiig) at the end. To me it’s an odd duck fable — smart but soft, manipulative but emotionally plain-spoken for the most part — that’s aimed at the none-too-brights who went for Forrest Gump and/or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In my book it tries too hard to soothe and mollify to rate as an Oscar contender. That’s not a putdown, just a qualifier. The fact that Mitty is playing the New York Film Festival almost three months before its Xmas day opening suggests that Fox and Stiller are expecting award-season traction. Well, at least it’ll make money. Watching it is like sitting in a warm bath. It’s comforting. Every frame says “steady as she goes.”

Mitty is a first-rate thing in terms of Stiller and Wiig’s performances and in several below-the-line ways. (The subtle CG is excellent and often elegant.) But the second half is really quite silly or at least willfully bizarre, and I’m sorry for that. As a longtime Stiller fan I was really hoping to be stirred or even mesmerized. Nope.

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