The gravity of the situation

Note: Spoilers for Gravity. 

My experience of watching Gravity has been one, perhaps inevitably, of watching it on increasingly smaller screens ... and becoming increasingly less impressed with it.

It would have been hard to top my first viewing back in October of 2013, when I saw it on what bills itself as the world's third-largest IMAX screen, at the Melbourne Museum. Socks = knocked off.

A month later I saw it again on a "regular" movie screen, not in 3D, but still larger than ... well, if not larger than life, then at least larger than my TV screen. Socks = less knocked off.

When I finally did watch it a third time, last night, it was of course on my TV screen. Socks = dangling from my toes.

I guess at this rate, to keep things going, I'll need to watch it on a smartphone next, at which point the backs of my heels might not get cold.

The thing is, the parts that were supposed to impress me still impressed me. It just became harder to ignore the schmaltzy parts, of which there are many.

One of the most consistent complaints about Alfonso Cuaron's movie is the way the astronauts foolishly fritter away their small reserves of oxygen on chit chat. I think the scene that's most cited is when George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are floating over toward the International Space Station, relying on infrequent bursts from his thrusters and a hope that they are on the right trajectory. Her oxygen is at like 1%, yet he insists on peppering her with questions about what she'd be doing if she were home right now, and if there's a "Mr. Stone." The most ridiculous thing about that is not, perhaps, that he'd be wasting the oxygen, as you could argue that he's trying to keep her alert so she doesn't pass out. What's most ridiculous is that he wouldn't know the answer to his questions about her family already. If an astronaut were going to space and had lost a child to a freak playground accident, it would be in some kind of dossier he would have read at the very least, and more likely, it would have been the subject of a hundred newspaper feature pieces.

That one I noticed on both my first and second viewing. What I may not have noted those times, but definitely did this time, is the conversation he has with her after becoming untethered from her with no hope of survival. Now sure, he may just be indulging in the last minutes of chitter chatter he'll ever have. But before she has reached safety, when she's still trying to fumble with the lid of some hatch to get in to the ISS, he's peppering her with questions about whether she found him attractive or not. I suppose you could say that he's also becoming untethered from his own rational thoughts, except in the same breath he's also giving her instructions about what she needs to look for and what she needs to do when she gets there.

All this failure to understand the gravity of the situation, as it were, is clearly intended to spoon feed the audience what it needs to relate to these characters. But it's laid on a bit thick. On this viewing I noticed how awkward it was when, right before strapping on a pair and deciding to face her destiny with an open mind and a vigilant heart, Ryan Stone gives the deceased Clooney in her mind orders to go talk to her daughter in heaven and tell her that her mother loves her. It's a nice sentiment but her little speech goes on for like 90 seconds. That's 90 seconds that would be used much better on logistics related to your situation and the goal of arriving back home to terra firma.

One thing I couldn't help be distracted by is some of the film's retrograde gender politics. I wouldn't have noticed them at the time, but in the last few year's of increased sensitivity to these matters, I couldn't help but be aware of them. Although on the surface, Ryan Stone is a very strong female character, she has to be saved -- multiple times -- by Matt Kowalski. Her failure to disengage early enough from the arm to which she is attached means that she goes waaaaay off further into space than she otherwise would have. And while this sets up one of the film's best and most awe-inspiring shots, it also requires Matt to use most of his available thrusters to come out and pick her up, a rescue mission with an extremely low probability of success to begin with. He then later sacrifices himself for her by letting go of the tether so he won't drag her off, thus foiling her attempt to return the favor and save him. She also doesn't stop her repair task outside the shuttle until he tells her about the third time, leading to a slower response to the debris storm, though the film makes certain to absolve her of any guilt related to that. It's Matt, of course, who has to do the absolving, giving him yet another paternal aspect related to her child-like character. Now of course, there is a major disparity in their outer space experience, as he's trying to set a spacewalk record while she is on her first trip, but that doesn't do much to reduce the sense of a gender imbalance in the script.

I'd thought this viewing would be useful in helping determine if Gravity might be an outside contender for my top 25 of the 2010s, a list I will be forming a little more than 18 months from now. It was only my ninth ranked film of 2013, though that did come along with a five-star rating from the original socks-knocking incident. A third viewing might tell me which was more accurate, the five-star rating (which would certainly make it a contender for my top 25) or the ranking of ninth from the year (which, extrapolated outward, might make it only ranked somewhere in the 80s for the decade).

And yeah, technical brilliance and all, the writing in this movie is just too distracting to reward it with those kind of accolades. I still like the movie quite a bit, and felt the tension and stress of that debris field as much as I ever had. But that star rating is more appropriately 4.5 or even (gasp) four than it truly is five.

Thank goodness that technical brilliance is a very important factor for me, because Gravity is a movie I'm glad to support. I may just wait for a future incarnation in which it's available on a big screen, rather than my smartphone, for my eventual fourth viewing.

Frittering away my advantage

Welcome to the day Gravity -- Alfonso Cuaron's first movie since his 2006 masterpiece Children of Men -- comes out where you are.

You, if you live in the United States, that is.

I live in Australia, so I got it a day earlier. Two days earlier, really, when you consider that movies come out on Thursdays here, and we've got a day on you to begin with.

This is not particularly usual, as movies often don't come out here until three weeks to a month after they come out in the U.S. Not with Gravity, though. We get Gravity first.

So have I seen Gravity yet?

Nope.

Dammit.

It's looking like it'll be next Wednesday -- Tuesday where you are, you who live in the United States -- before I see it.

Dammit.

I had Australia Opening Day as a day free from childcare, when I could have strolled into any theater at any time of the day and laid my eyes on a movie I have been anticipating specifically for something like two years, and abstractly for the nearly seven it's been since I saw Children of Men.

But I had a full day already scheduled, including shopping before having a friend over for dinner, and completing some other time-sensitive odds and ends. I knew it wasn't going to happen.

However, the pull was strong. I really considered chucking those obligations and just going for it anyway.

Why I didn't:

1) My wife and I have discussed seeing it together. We have pretty easy access to babysitters these days with several family members living in the same city, and we've barely made use of them yet. We have a guilt-free babysitting session coming to us.

2) The IMAX theater at the Melbourne Museum is playing Gravity only from 4 p.m. onward. During the day, they have to show those shorter IMAX movies about aquatic creatures and the Serengeti, so they can get a few extra bucks from the people going to the museum. I couldn't see a 4 p.m. show because I had to pick my son up at preschool at 5:15. This is probably not the only place in Melbourne to see IMAX 3D, but it's definitely the closest, and it stands a great chance of being the best. Museums generally go above and beyond in presenting you the full IMAX experience.

And I understand 3D and IMAX are both musts for this movie. I don't know why they're a must, per se, because I've intentionally avoided learning anything more than the basics about Gravity. That means clamping my hands over my ears and closing my eyes no fewer than three different times the trailer came on at the theater.

I do know that there's supposed to be an "unbroken" take that lasts something like 18 minutes. That's the Alfonso Cuaron I know and love. I put "unbroken" in quotation marks because unlike during Children of Men, there may be digital trickery involved with this one. But Cuaron at least owns up to the trickery. In fact, I also heard something about him inventing a new camera or a new technique in order to do the shot. I can't be more specific, though, because like I said, I've been in zero information mode about Gravity, and will remain so until next Wednesday.

I do know that it has a 97 on Metracritic, the sum total of a whopping 42 positive reviews. That 97 also includes zero mixed reviews and of course zero negative reviews.

Wednesday. Wednesday. Wednesday. It can't get here soon enough.

Well, at least I can think of it this way: I only have to wait for it to be Tuesday in the states.

The year that filled up

Now that we're past Thanksgiving, it's time to get in that reflective mood as the year starts to close down.

Too early for year-end lists, mind you, but not too early to start assessing what kind of year 2012 has been.

I don't think this has been a great year for movies, but it certainly has been a full one.

When was the last time you can remember hearing about four major releases that had to be shifted to the following calendar year?

Most release years include one or two movies that must move their release dates forward for one reason or another. But in 2012, The Great Gatsby, Gravity, Gangster Squad and G.I. Joe: Retaliation all jumped to 2013.

Must have something to do with the letter G, though The Grey, Goon, Gone, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Good Deeds and God Bless America were all spared.

So the market is becoming more competitive but less good. What else is new?

Then again, the best part of the release schedule is still largely ahead of us. And it was from now until the end of the year that the first three of the four delayed titles were scheduled to come out.

With The Great Gatsby, the reason for the delay (to May 10, 2013) is listed on wikipedia as "delays in the production schedule." But conventional wisdom suggests that perhaps Warner Brothers didn't want to send Leonardo DiCaprio up against Leonardo DiCaprio. The Great Gatsby was supposed to come out at Christmas ... which is when Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, starring one Leo DiCaprio, is also going to quench our Quentin thirst.

Gravity -- Alfonso Cuaron's long, long-awaited follow-up to 2006's Children of Men -- is cruelly having an entire year tacked on to that wait. Originally slated for the day before Thanksgiving this year, the movie now won't bow until next October 18th. It sounds like the reason for the delay is all the CG required in post. I'm reading that Cuaron is experimenting with all kinds of innovative technology, including an "uninterrupted" 17-minute take (though the article suggests that the take is done with digital assistance, unlike the long takes in Children of Men, which were au naturel).

Gangster Squad fell victim to that old problem of having a trailer containing subject matter that was rendered controversial by real-world events. The Gangster Squad trailer they were showing this summer had a bunch of baddies with tommy guns blowing away patrons in a movie theater from behind the screen. The shooting in Aurora, Colorado during The Dark Knight Rises pretty much killed that particular trailer. And not only is that scene now gone from the movie, but the whole movie was moved by four months from September to January 11th (a release date that would be a sign of very low confidence by the studio in most cases). Maybe it was reshoots, maybe it was just trying to keep a wide berth from those tragic events.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation has the most number of apparent reasons for its delay from this past June to next May. The "official" reasons are that 3G is being added in post-production and that Paramount is trying to boost interest in international markets. (Since when aren't international markets interested in Hollywood action movies?) However, the unofficial reasons include all of the following: reshoots to avoid the early death of Channing Tatum's character, after Tatum had officially become a star in 2012 (hey, it's not a spoiler if it isn't going to end up happening in the movie); a desire not to compete with Tatum's Magic Mike, which was set to open the same day (in a situation that echoes the potential Christmas Day DiCaprio double feature); and, um, that's it, but the rule of three dictates I list three things.

And come to think of it, it isn't only movies that start with G that have jumped ship from 2012. I just thought of a fifth movie that was supposed to come out this year, but didn't: World War Z. The adaptation of Max Brooks' popular zombie novel would have been part of that crowded late December release schedule had it not been for production delays and the seven weeks of reshoots that were required earlier this year. With or without those reshoots, the trailer tells me this movie might be a bigger disaster than an actual zombie apocalypse.

Of course, now that I've analyzed the reasons for the delays of five major would-be 2012 films, it seems pretty clear that none of them were delayed only because "too many movies are already coming out in 2012." In each case there seem to be other factors, even if they are as simple as too many movies by one of the movie's stars coming out during the expected release window -- not too many movies in general.

What I think this really illustrates is how over time, making movies is becoming an increasingly complicated proposition, with studios finding profit margins to be ever thinner, and the need seeming ever more paramount to fine-tune the movie until it's a perfect product released at a perfect time.

Or, maybe it's just a statistical blip.