I happened upon Gravity on HBO this evening, somewhere around the 30-minute mark. George Clooney was already dead (right?) and the terrified Sandra Bullock was tumbling head over heels and going “aahh! aahh!” For some reason I watched the remaining two-thirds. The fact that this technically impressive thrill ride managed to get serious traction for the Best Picture Oscar is even more of a head-scratcher now than it was earlier this year. Now more than ever it’s clear this was essentially a high-tech perils-of-Pauline movie. It dazzled by virtue of the first-rate VFX, and that’s what classed it up and made it seem so special to the easily impressed. I will always respect the exacting, highly skilled efforts of director Alfonso Cuaron and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, both of whom won Oscars, but their real masterwork was Children of Men…c’mon.
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Now that things have calmed down and we’re less than two months from the start of a new season we need to admit for the record that Gravity became a highly favored Best Picture nominee because it was expertly sold and hyped as something it really wasn’t at the end of the day — i.e., a movie that had a soul. I just watched it and I’m telling you that it’s just about gears and levers and buttons that were pushed exactly the right way. And a good portion of the Academy wanted to bypass (or more precisely had decided to ignore) 12 Years A Slave to give this thing a Best Picture Oscar because the tech stuff was so cool?
“Running a mere 91 minutes, Gravity is a tightly constructed, threat-heavy survival saga,” I wrote eleven months ago. “One hair-raising ‘oh, shit!’ thing happens after another…crash, bang, boom, clank. But honestly? I’d be lying if I said I felt genuinely immersed in the reality of the story and the inner life of the characters in the same way I did with Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien or Children of Men. I was 100% aware at all times that the ‘uh-oh’ stuff is happening to Bullock and Clooney because an $80 million dollar sci-fi thriller requires wowser visceral excitement or the under-30 ADD types will get bored.
“This is the reality of big-time filmmaking today. 2001: A Space Odyssey could not and would not be funded by a major studio today. Breathtaking visuals and loud, high-impact action whammies have to happen, period. That or your typical Shanghai viewer will start texting.”
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