Blu-ray Review: Gravity (2013)

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Although it was the silence of space that originally soothed Sandra Bullock’s brainy doctor turned astronaut Ryan Stone during her first week-long mission to install a system meant for hospital use into the Hubble Telescope, after her crew’s explorer is hit by a large amount of fast traveling debris and she loses audible contact with Houston, silence is the last sound that she wants to hear.

Initially thrust into a free-fall, spinning desperately out of the line of sight of her team, although she’s soon secured to a tether attached to the experienced, fast-thinking veteran shuttle pilot Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), the two try to remain both practical and level-headed while evaluating the insurmountable obstacles and major unknowns they face, after learning they’re the only two crew members left alive in space.

With their rocket left irreparably damaged by the space-storm of debris and with no outside guidance to tell them which nearby space stations may be left standing and/or where they can find if not a return flight than at least shelter until a rescue mission can be staged, the two race against time, fate, and a severely dwindling oxygen supply to survive.

And as Ryan faces overwhelming odds time and again throughout Gravity, she begins to grow in her response to such a harrowing trial, moving throughout the course of the film from a damsel in distress to a woman who winds up having to rely on an inner strength she didn’t know she had to save herself.

A monumental achievement not only on a technical level (given the audacious cinematographic effects that make it difficult to believe this was actually shot on a green screen and not on some sort of top secret moviemaking mission to space), Gravity is also mesmerizing for how deftly it tells its deceptively simple story so incredibly well.

Offering a rare female-centric character arc that could have honestly just as easily been played by either gender (in the same vein as Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking space horror classic Alien), Gravity is heightened so much more by the performance of Sandra Bullock.

Reminding us once again why we fell in love with her in Speed with another emotionally riveting rollercoaster tale of high-stakes action-driven survival, when Stone gets into the driver’s seat once again to put her fate in her own hands, in addition to getting a sense of Speed déjà vu, it’s impossible not to watch it and realize how far Bullock’s come as an actress.

Completely charismatic in what is at times an almost silent film (in terms of dialogue), we see in Stone all of the hopes, fears, regrets and frustrations of a woman we might recognize in ourselves and it’s a truly moving turn that makes Gravity that much more life-affirming and empowering – particularly so for women.

Letting her guard down completely, Bullock shows us the flaws, humor, charm, sadness and strength of a woman who is in the midst of the five stages of grief both personally and professionally.

In addition to the emergency situation that keeps spiraling out of proportion in space, we learn shortly into the picture that Stone is also in the midst of the same process of grief on a personal level as she confesses to Kowalski that she’d lost a young child in an accident that – like matter hurdling through the atmosphere – had happened in the blink of an eye.

While we initially meet her as a woman simply going through the motions in her life, suddenly she’s forced to ask herself if she really wants to give up or keep going as an existential yet physical manifestation of her emotional journey

A brilliantly written, understated, metaphor-laden script that – like J.C. Chandor’s All is Lost invites you to attach your own meaning onto it – one very interesting example of the writers' creativity in carrying out the theme of rebirth is in Ryan’s confession that in America, she would spend any time she wasn’t working driving since that’s where she was when she got the tragic news.

And sure enough, from the small rover-type space pods to the jet-pack she’s tethered to, she’s driving once again in space – taking part in one such activity that had been described as a “Sunday drive” by Kowalski before she must actually attempt to take it upon herself to set a destination. Likewise, it’s also fascinating when she reveals her fear that in training she was never able to stop or safely land the small rover vehicles, crashing every time – as if to say she wasn’t ready to stop driving yet until she knew she must.

Her last name alone also speaks volumes as it’s a stumble on a rock (or a stone) that had killed her daughter and sure enough, it’s a rock-like storm of space debris that sets the events in motion, suggesting the level of guilt she’d had been experiencing internally before she must put herself back into motion.

While I can only imagine how unbelievable the film looks in 3D, Warner Brothers’ mind-blowingly gorgeous Blu-ray does not disappoint, especially for those with home theater rooms complete with a big screen television (of at least 40 plus inches) and heightened home theater sound bars or speaker systems to bring every bar of the score to every roar of an engine to life.

The type of film that benefits from post-cinema discussion with friends, Gravity is a highly recommended addition to your home library. And although it’s loaded with amazing special features that show you the massive amount of work that went into Cuaron’s four-year long opus, walking you through various sequences of the film from one department to the next (although unfortunately not the destruction of the International Space Station), one of the strongest assets in addition to an extra Ultraviolet Digital HD copy of the film is a short film by Jonas Cuaron.

Giving you the other side of Ryan Stone’s radio transmission by bringing you into Greenland to see what life is like for a fisherman who’s caught between joy and grief himself, it’s a beautiful addition that deepens the experience of the feature presentation. Furthermore, it adds extra meaning to one all-important scene where – once again in another evolution of character defined by plot – Stone discovered how much she needed others at last and was so glad to hear something other than the sound of silence as humanity translates regardless of language once Stone makes an effort to reach out and let herself be heard.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: All About Steve (2009)

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When she accepted her Razzie award for Worst Performance by an Actress in All About Steve, Sandra Bullock gamely arrived with a red wagon filled with DVDs of the movie, asking people to watch it and really consider if it was truly the worst turn or if perhaps they should rethink it.

And although I certainly can't speak for the Razzie voters, I can speak for myself and I'm brave and bold enough to admit that-- against popular opinion-- I actually thought that the flawed but well-intentioned Steve had a better ratio of laughs per act than Bullock's blockbuster summer smash The Proposal.

Riskily venturing into the now traditionally stage set realm of screwball comedy, All About Steve obviously derived its approach and off-the-wall spirit from Preston Sturges' sillier concept movies such as The Palm Beach Story along with the more ridiculous elements found in Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby.

Steve centers on Bullock's compulsively red go-go boot clad, off-the-charts IQ, trivia buff Mary who works as a newspaper “cruciverbalist” aka the crossword puzzle constructor for "The Sacramento Herald." Prone to talking aloud to her hamster Carol and obsessing over every minute detail, the movie introduces us to our lonely and overly literal heroine who longs to create puzzles that are “solvable, entertaining, and sparkle” on a daily basis.

Advised to “be normal” by her boss and forget about her delusions of Will Shortzian grandeur, Mary, whom we already suspect may suffer from something beyond obsessive compulsive disorder such as Asperger's Syndrome (as some critics have noted), finds herself in for a blunt wake-up call by a rude elementary school class.

Less interested in her role in creating crosswords and far more fascinated by the fact that the beautiful but klutzy chatterbox doesn't appear to have anything resembling a social life, it's the insistent judgment of the kids that talk her into not canceling the blind date with a news cameraman that her parents set up for her.

Expecting that he must be a closeted gay guy whose mother is trying to push onto any available woman, Mary dresses down until that is she sees the All-American attractiveness of Bradley Cooper's Steve standing in her entryway. Deciding to ramp it up, she puts on her rightest, clingiest and most see-through ensemble of underwear and little else and before he can form a complete sentence in the car, Mary's stifled sex drive goes into overdrive and she's all over Steve like a pen on one of her puzzles.

Not enjoying her form of random trivia chatter as foreplay, Steve comes up with a half-baked excuse to break the date and then utters the kind brushoff that becomes the kiss of death of telling her he wished she could be on his out-of-state assignment with him but he has to go.

Suffering from the intense heat of the moment that's textbook erotomania, after Mary builds a whole puzzle wherein the contents fit the title of this movie and loses her job, she begins chasing Steve around the United States, erroneously believing that he believes as strongly as she does that they're destined to be together.

While he refuses to lead her on, Steve's associate, the cocky newsman angling for an anchor position (Thomas Hayden Church) pulls Mary aside and tells her that the commitment phobic Steve won't mean anything he tells her and that she needs to be persistent to go get her “Steve on.”

Watching Mary chase after the news van both literally and figuratively from one outrageous news story to the next wherein all share the same common thread of centering on outsiders from a baby born with a third leg to deaf children does test your patience in how you view the film.

Essentially, just like the bystanders on both sides of the third leg issue in the film, Steve has been broken up into two camps. There are those who see the work as a movie about a flat-out crazy woman and others view it as a screwball misfire.

And while I obviously tend to go in the latter direction and acknoweldge that some of the Miss Congeniality and Forces of Nature tactics used by Bullock are weakening with every new film, All About Steve is nowhere near as bad as Speed 2: Cruise Control, The Lake House or Gun Shy. In fact, despite it's uneven tone, it's far more original than yet another “pretend to be my significant other” comedy like the high gloss blah of The Proposal.

Produced by Bullock and indicative of the peculiar and admittedly less than popular taste in some of her material, overall, if you watch Steve in the zany manner in which it was intended as our heroine soon realizes that in all her adventures she's really discovering herself as a human being without the blonde, beautiful pretty boy, I think you'll find yourself surprised to discover how funny the movie really is, even in spite of a few questionable choices.

And likewise, as far as the crazy charge went for Mary herself, she is the opposite of Jim Carrey's dangerous Cable Guy and more in the vein of Stiller's Something About Mary character with a bit of the overly intellectual Big Bang Theory meets Adam analytical, literal, and logical mindset that's unable to separate a man's subtle “get lost” line from an invitation to throw those boots on and join him across the United States.

Presented in a nice high contrast Blu-ray transfer of the film that does an impressive job of balancing the sun-drenched landscapes into a natural blend rather than going for the overly cheery, everything-in-focus phony comedy brightness, the Fox 2-disc edition also comes with a digital portable copy of the movie to laugh along with when you're taking a break from your crossword puzzle on a long commute.

And while overall, Steve would've benefited from a sharper rewrite in defining Mary as anything but a psycho stalker since she very well could've been Fox's second Asperger's character this summer after Adam, luckily even without that, Bullock knows physical screwball comedy inside and out.

In her hands, even something as mundane as forgetting the auto-lock feature and getting caught mid-clench in a seat belt or writing a driver's license number on her arm in case hitchhiking becomes deadly manages to make us remember just how good Bullock is in letting us trust her instincts as an actor to the point that we laugh along whether she's a beauty queen or one hell of a cruciverbalist.

Text ©2010, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com
Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: The Proposal (2009)

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Something's Gotta Give, North to Alaska
AKA
While Guy Friday's Green Card Was Taming Prada's Shrew

Veteran choreographer and Wedding Planner executive producer Anne Fletcher danced her way from her thematically ideal directorial transition in Step Up to kneeling down in the filmmaker's two nuptial obsessed follow-ups 27 Dresses and The Proposal.

Although Step Up spawned a sequel, Fletcher's sophomore effort, 27 Dresses which featured Grey's Anatomy, Ugly Truth and Knocked Up star Katherine Heigl earned a poor reception as just another "chick flick" cliche-riddled offering in the much maligned rom-com genre. Additionally, poor timing hindered Fletcher's Dresses from becoming an ideal fit as it was last year's first spring bride, reaching theatres weeks before other dead-on-arrival titles such as What Happens in Vegas and Made of Honor tried to romance ticket buyers. Yet, despite its benign familiarity, Dresses along with Honor starring Heigl's Anatomy costar Patrick Dempsey, were buoyed by their likable cast's tireless efforts to win us over along with a few unique twists on the predictable paradigm.

It's this same “cast as cheerleader” spirit that thrived to keep us entertained throughout Fletcher's early smash summer hit The Proposal, which was elevated before you even entered the theatre due to the star power of one of America's favorite sweethearts in the form of Sandra Bullock as its poster girl along with a nice unlikely Wolverine boost for Ryan Reynolds' increasing fan base. Likewise, The Proposal most likely drew in audiences seeking frothy, flirty fun and female escapism, which ironically is in stark contrast to the seasonal ATM of major movie studio franchise event movies like Wolverine that sound a bugle call that only fanboys can hear and are undeniably Hollywood's popcorn and butter as opposed to bread and butter.

Still just below the surface, since the films all come from the same "machine," they have much more in common than fanboys and Bullock fans would like to admit. For, typically franchise films try to up the special effects and jaw-dropping “big scene” quotient with every installment and likewise studio made romantic comedies seem to work the same way.

And while some like The Proposal are also guilty of using way too much CGI, traditionally rom-coms don't employ the technology department as much. However, they do follow the same patterns of repeating what's worked before. Remember how many gross-out rip-offs we had after There's Something About Mary became a huge success? They do this from the film's inception by gathering ingredients that have proven successful in the past for a screenplay that's as easy to predict as a good guy verses bad guy showdown in an action movie.

Then when that's in place, they assemble a familiar cast as if recruiting instantly recognizable players for an all-star baseball team by ensuring the audience knows the MVP's curveballs well. By staying within the same talent pool, they present individuals we've seen in variations of the role before and whose confidence we already have in the fact that Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds can hit a rom-com out of the park.

Although Julia Roberts was the first choice for the leading lady but as IMDb reveals would not take a pay-cut, Bullock has fun playing her serious, dominating and humorless wicked witch, hell on heels Devil Wears Prada like boss trapped in a typical Sandra Bullock rom-com such as Miss Congeniality, Practical Magic, Forces of Nature, Love Potion No. 9, Two Weeks Notice, While You Were Sleeping and Hope Floats.

Yet this time around, Sandra Bullock doesn't become the lovable free-spirited Sandra Bullock we were first enchanted by in Speed until nearly an hour into the movie. For her role as Margaret Tate, she plays the stereotypically gender like “male” to Ryan Reynolds' more sensitive, loyal, Two Weeks Notice meets His Girl Friday like "female."

A stiletto wearing dominatrix book publisher (a chick flick mandate!), Sandra Bullock's hotshot editor raises the blood pressure of the entire instant-message based office who pings her every move to one another in constant fear. Yet instead of the warnings flying around the floor's computer screens, it's Margaret who is struck with a warning early into the film that as a Canadian citizen, she will soon be deported unless she solidifies her citizenship in America.

And since Reynolds' loyal assistant Andrew is wrapped around her finger anyway, out of desperation to stay in the country she blackmails him with an Indecent Workplace Proposal of a quickie marriage and quickie divorce in exchange for his added demand that he finally gets the chance to become an actual editor.

Equally ambitious and risking jail time if he doesn't sell the relationship to the authorities, the muscular Wolverine star makes us swoon in obligatory shirtless moments while also reminding us why we fell in love with him in Definitely, Maybe as the American version of a young Hugh Grant. Yet although he agrees to Bullock's plan, he's the opposite of chivalrous for the first half of the film by testing her mettle via a public on-the-street proposal and bringing her to his grandmother Betty White's 90th birthday in his native small town Alaskan home.

Predictably the two go from loathe to love but the movie never fully convinces us of the chemistry between the leads other than the fact that they're both so darn likable as actors. Aside from the kiss that moves from acting to passion (again unconvincingly and blink-and-you-miss-it quickly) and one morning of tangible sexual tension, they never connect on the most basic conversational level.

Still, to its credit, The Proposal nicely sidesteps our internal questions about the easily spotted age difference between the much younger Reynolds and older Bullock since their roles not only swap “gender” tradition but “age” and “power” statuses as well. Most films would've thrown in a few lines about unease that likely Margaret would've had dating a young hottie. Yet perhaps realizing that if the situation had been reversed and we'd think nothing of a silly, mean-spirited middle aged male boss given a lesson in humanity by his younger female secretary as they fell in love, it is simply ignored.

Despite this one refreshing commitment, The Proposal garnered just passive smiles when it should've gone for laughs as though it was a background in-flight entertainment feature. Ultimately, the motivation of Pete Chiarelli's weak screenplay seems to have been to give Taming of the Shrew a While You Were Sleeping makeover with a Green Card premise. Yet throughout the film and in order to pad the running time, it's filled with moments inspired by dozens of other films, making The Proposal an unintentional "Scene It" rom-com game wherein you can guess the influence you're viewing onscreen whether it's Picture Perfect or Something's Gotta Give.

As a fan of Bullock, it's hard to look past the film's many, many missteps involving the star including a ludicrous strip sequence, a CGI eagle flying off with a dog and a downright embarrassing hip-hop dance in the woods with Betty White which made me recall Forces of Nature rather than While You Were Sleeping. Sadly, it's a part she's played so many times that-- without any respect for the characters or audience and with nothing new to work with from an inept screenwriter-- the undeniable talent of Sandra Bullock disappears to the point that she's just repeating herself like “Sandra Bullock” has become an interchangeable character instead of a gifted actress in need of better material.

Although it's hard not to smile during the movie, I was startled to realize that I hadn't genuinely chuckled during the entire film. And despite another superlative Disney Touchstone Pictures Blu-ray transfer that duplicates a theatrical level of quality in picture and sound, sadly I can only recommend The Proposal as a benign time-waster for a sick day. Along with the terrific high definition transition, the Blu-ray boasts an extra disc including a digital copy that's compatible on both Mac and PC computer. It's easily the only extra worth investigating as it comes with a laughless outtake reel and an alternate ending that again pulls from more rom-coms including Six Days, Seven Nights and The Wedding Singer.

Needless to say, my favorite feel good genre of the romantic comedy is in desperate need of resuscitation as far as original screenplays are concerned. However, until more great scripts get not only written but sold and produced as well, one temporary fix would be to cast actors you wouldn't immediately expect to find in the interchangeable films such as Charlize Theron, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly and Naomi Watts whose very presence would make the film feel infinitely fresher since it's against their type. And likewise, this would free up actresses like Sandra Bullock to show their range in something that doesn't have her tripping, slipping or playing second fiddle to a really bad male stripper.

Sandra Bullock

Text ©2009, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com
Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited.

The Lake House

Director: Alejandro Agresti

Working from a script by the Pultizer Prize winning playwright of Proof, David Auburn, Argentine director Alejandro Agresti was charged with the task of not only helming the remake of the foreign fantastical romance Il Mare but also overseeing the first cinematic reunion of Speed stars Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. With references and allusions to Hitchcock’s Notorious and Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the film centers around the magical story of two people living in two different years (2006 and 2004) who manage to cross the time barriers by interacting via a mailbox on the lake house property in which they’ve both resided. Sandra Bullock plays Kate, a hardworking doctor in ’06 who, as the film begins, leaves a note to the new tenant of the property with a polite request to forward her mail. Architect Alex (Keanu Reeves) gets her welcome note as he moves in eighteen months earlier and thus begins one of the most creatively yet somehow emotionally icy romances to grace the screen last year. Although admittedly a bit of a disappointment, the film receives ample support from a clever screenplay, a wonderful soundtrack (see two selections below), and excellent international supporting players like Christopher Plummer, Willeke van Ammelrooy (Antonia’s Line) and Shohreh Aghdashloo (The House of Sand and Fog). While viewers definitely stay engaged to the film, we’re always held at a bit of a distance due to the gloomy cinematography and somewhat sleepy performances by its usually excellent two leads with otherwise superb natural chemistry. Expected to be a major smash, The Lake House was the first film simultaneously released on DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-Ray, although a bit of a warning for die-hard romantics—while the wholly earned happy ending will put a smile on your face, a film that begins with a death on Valentine’s Day makes it sort of an unsuccessful offering for “date night.” Note to fans of Speed: paying homage to Reeves’s character in their earlier film together, the onscreen dog in the film was named Jack by Sandra Bullock.

Soundtrack Selections from iTunes

"Time Has Told Me" by Nick Drake

"This Never Happened Before" by Paul McCartney