Academy Awards Blog part I: The movies I saw (Gravity).

My mother tells me that the Academy Awards are "her Super Bowl".  

Okay...she says the same thing about the Tonys...and the Grammys...and the American Music Awards...among others.  And why not...since I live in her house I do force a lot of sports on her.  I have to admit that I do enjoy two of those four...the Oscars and the Grammys, and since the fans pick the winners at the American Music Awards I allow them too.  Fluffy, nonsensical entertainment.

This years Academy Awards were an anomaly of sorts because of the nine nominees I saw a record three of them.  Two in the theater and one at home on blu-ray.  Those were "Captain Phillips", "Gravity" and "American Hustle".  They were joined by "Her", "Philomena", "The Dallas Buyers Club", "12-Years a Slave" and "The Wolf Of Wall Street".  My pick...if it mattered, was a push between "Captain Phillips", which I saw less than 48 hours before the award ceremony and "American Hustle" which I had seen twice in the theaters.

Neither one of those films won.  "12-Years a Slave" did.  Apparently it was deserving of the honor.  It was a period piece and it was politically correct, so it stand to reason they were on the podium at the end of the evening.  Not sure if I will see it, but I might.

The big winner in tech awards was of course, "Gravity".  A film I had seen and didn't really like.  I am vanilla on Sandra Bullock, whom I have enjoyed in several roles including the one she won an Oscar for in "The Blind Side".  I do think she was unfairly judged for her outstanding work in "Demolition Man", but she played second fiddle to Sylvester Stallone.  

Back to "Gravity".  To me it wasn't that great a movie.  Okay, of all the places that someone could be stranded, space is one of the worst but the way the movie was presented it didn't make me feel that way.  This is to say that I found the story to be empty and unsatisfying.  

It was positioned to be an Academy Award contender and the director, Alfonso Cuaron did a fine job, well deserving of the Academy Award he got for directing what had to be a huge production but I focus more on the story and whatever intention that the writer had of making us feel lost and alone in the soundless blackness of space just didn't happen.  

 

Movies evoke emotions.  If they have done their job right, you leave the theater feeling like you went somewhere with the characters in the movie you saw.  For example:  In Apollo 13, you felt like you were aboard the spacecraft in the cold and dark with Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton and you felt stranded right along with them and you rooted for the people on the ground when they improvised them safely back to Earth.  In Gladiator, you felt for Maximus when he finally killed off Commudus at the end despite Commodus trying to mortally injure him in the final battle, and finally, you were happy that the Jews escaped the Holocaust, flet Oskar Schindler was a hero and you wanted to be in line to lay a rock on his tomb in Israel..

Gravity did not evoke any emotion in me whatsoever.  Her supporting character of Lt. Kowalski was played by George Clooney, who was trying to strike a balance between Buzz Lightyear and Andy Taylor from the Andy Griffith Show and he failed miserably.  The problem there being that you wanted Sandra Bullock to take up the slack, but mainly her Mission Specialist Ryan Stone was seen bouncing off the Shuttle and the International Space Station and hyperventilating.

There is a scene when basically the entire space station is coming apart around her ears and all her character can do is smack the instrument panel and scream.  I felt the same way because for all of the fright and tension that should be in the scene and in the scenes before I should be out of breath but I'm left feeling unsatisfied 

Cuaron probably won the Academy Award for taking us outside of the pod she is trapped in and dropped the sound to mimic the soundless vacuum of space, and as a viewer, I felt like the director was giving a break from Bullock's whiny portrayal of Stone.  That and that alone would get my vote if I had one.

Since the ending is a chance for any movie to redeem itself Gravity does a fair job, with lots of action and tension until the parachutes on the spacecraft open.  It's at that point where unlike the rescue that a parachute would provide from falling from height the ones that ultimately save Stone from becoming a depression in the steppes of central Russia caused the film to end in the same slow, tedious manner in which the rest of the movie was paced.

Some of you who have seen the film likely disagree with me, and if you do, leave a comment.  When the moment strikes I'll write about the other movies I've seen.