A poem a day in April from Rutgers English PhD students and friends.

Sunday, April 6, 2014

What's so Great About Gravity? (SPOILERS!)

What’s so great about Gravity?

A. asked last night and again this morning. This coming from someone who nominated The Great Gatsby one of the most over-rated great novels ever. Chew on that. Well, you could say superlatives did them both in. Maybe it was because we had waited until everyone and their aunt had seen the movie. We couldn’t take pride in it, in the best underrated movie of the year. Gravity lost a lot of gravity with us.

---Maybe it’s like we thought. It looked like the kind of movie you had to be in a mood to watch, and it was. We just didn’t know what else to watch. So we said, What the heck?

The archetypes were overdone and cliché. When Sandra Bullock is floating in the fetal position?
            ---Oh, yeah. That was awful.

I like Sandra Bullock, but this role didn’t do it for me.
            ---She was kind of whiny (I offer).
I feel bad for saying this. I think about the Piss and Moan Club my Dad formed for my little sister and sometimes my Mom, too, because they couldn’t just put up with a little discomfort for a couple of hours so that we could enjoy a nice family hike in nature. It was funny. —It’s still kind of funny. Not funny enough, though.
            ---I would be winy, too if I were space-sick. (Space-sick? Space-sick.) And she was fearful, but that was just who her character was for that part of the film.

I feel like they were letting the film ride on the special effects. The images of space were beautiful, Sandra Bullock was hard to warm to, and George Clooney was himself. That's all.
            ---Clooney's always going to be himself: cartoonish. I mean, his name is George Clooney. He was Buzz Light-Year in the flesh.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe realism and fantasy are competing for the storyline—for Sandra Bullock's storyline.
            ---Hmm! I like that. The best scene was when she hallucinates. I believed it, too. Why shouldn’t it have been true? Everything Clooney had done in the movie was ludicrous. Why shouldn’t he have made it back to the ship, miraculously, in his little jet-pack, with Hank Williams playing? Survivor of the Future. Buzz. Wall-e.

            ---The worst scene was definitely the last one. I mean, she’s made it; she’s back on Earth. The filmmakers mark the moment with music—that makes sense, because space was represented by silence. Opportunity for some real poignancy...aaand they blow it.

4 comments:

  1. no spoiler alert???!!! damn!! (nice poem, though.)

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  2. oh, I was only half serious, laur k! it's my fault for being apparently the last person on the planet to see it.

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  3. No, shame on me for assuming I was the last person on the planet to see it!

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