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Entries in Gravity (54)

Wednesday
Nov082023

My best IMAX Experience

by Cláudio Alves

As a last hurrah, Oppenheimer has been back on IMAX screens since last week, allowing interested audiences to revisit it in the format before the film comes to streaming on November 21st. Enjoy your last chance to see Cillian Murphy's bronzed pores projected sky high, closeups galore for titanic portraiture, faces the size of monuments. Indeed, this year, because of Nolan's blockbuster biopic, it seems like big screen superiority has been more discussed than usual, with cyclical discourse about the latest pictures to shine bright on IMAX. So much so that it got me thinking about my best experiences with the giant screens…

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Saturday
Dec192020

The Astronaut Dramas of the 2010s

by Juan Carlos Ojano

Two-time Oscar winner Goerge Clooney directs and stars in Netflix’s final awards contender to drop to streaming during this calendar year, the science fiction drama The Midnight Sky. Based on a novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton, the film follows a lone scientist (Clooney) in the Arctic who must contact a group of astronauts to stop them from returning to earth. This is Clooney’s first film as an actor since 2016’s Money Monster and his first as a director since 2017’s Suburbicon. The film will join a curiously large cinematic trend of 2010s Hollywood: the astronaut drama...

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Monday
Feb292016

The Mad Six

Glenn here helping out with the post-ceremony rush. The highlight of last night’s Oscars was surely the six wins for Mad Max: Fury Road. That haul solidified its place as not just one of the most successful Oscar titles of all time, but no doubt the strangest, too.

 

We may all say that most people were predicting at least four of five of those, but the path to those six wins has been rather extraordinary in the truest definition of that word. Who among us a year ago truly could have predicted that we would be here a year later celebrating six Oscars to a movie about a renegade road warrior, an amputee heroine, and a group of sex slaves rising up against an evil warlord in a post-apocalyptic future with the aide of a gang of elderly motorcycle ladies? While we can be disappointed – very disappointed – that they didn’t add a seventh for George Miller’s direction, any movie winning six golden statues is not only a rarity, but a moment to be extremely proud of so hats off to the team behind Max. It won as many awards as the last two best picture winners combined and it doubled the amount of awards of the next highest winner (The Revenant) on its big night. You done good, Max! May more films like you spring forth from your imposing shadow.

Mad Max: Fury Road joins some fine company, with only 26 films having ever won more awards. 26 over 88 years ! More impressive still, is that Miller’s post-apocalyptic action spectacle is a member of an even smaller collective of only five films to have won half a dozen golden statues without a Best Picture prize to go with them. It’s an interesting quintet to say the least.

The five classics after the jump...

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Tuesday
Aug052014

Sandra at the Top

Yesterday Forbes published their annual list of the top-grossing actresses of the year. They figure in gross earnings and endorsement deals and everything. The list is as follows: 10. Kristen Stewart 9. Natalie Portman 8. Amy Adams 7. Scarlett Johansson 6. Cameron Diaz 5. Angelina Jolie 4. Gwyneth Paltrow 3. Jennifer Aniston 2. Jennifer Lawrence 1. Sandra Bullock. So here's Matthew Eng chasing our very tiny recent Sandra fest with this climactic love letter. - Nathaniel

Sandra at the Spike Awards this summer with two of her most important co-stars Hugh Grant and Keanu Reeves

I don’t particularly get people who don’t like Sandra Bullock.

Yes, the 82nd Best Actress statuette deserves to be sitting comfortably somewhere on Gabourey Sidibe’s mantelpiece and yes, The Blind Side is a pretty foul piece of limo-liberal fabling. Yes, she is a performer of some obvious limitations that are strikingly evident in even her strongest comedic performances. And yes, she has given us All About Steve and The Proposal and the Miss Congenialitys and Two Weeks Notice and all those other “duds” we love to roll our eyes at in public almost as much as we love to sheepishly watch them in private whenever they pop up on FX or Lifetime or HBO.

I’m more than happy to make couch potato time for Two Weeks Notice, a funny/frisky valentine to New York that’s patently flawed but genuinely sentimental, and even The Proposal, a ridiculous container of rom-com contrivances that would make Kate Hudson cringe, but which has plenty of good moments to spare. No, I haven’t yet laid an eye on All About Steve, which is likely for the better, but I do own While You Were Sleeping and Miss Congeniality, and I’ve sat through the latter’s sequel, um, three, maybe four times.

Why am I glued to these movies when I still have so many unseen Bergmans? [more...]

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Sunday
Mar232014

Link a Prayer

Hello Cinema our friend Amir started a podcast on Iranian cinema. It's an interesting listen even if you know nothing about the topic, particular the first section on how Amir and Tina came to love cinema
Coming Soon Ellen Page will star in Queen and Country based on a comic book about a British intelligence operative
Comic Alliance on the petititon to cast an Asian American as Iron Fist in the upcoming Netflix series. This is SUCH a good idea, because that character was obviously envisioned as white for very problematic reasons given that he's totally tied to Asian culture.

Shadow and Act there's a Spike Lee box set coming this June which will include the first ever Blu-Ray of Summer of Sam so that's great news.
/Film an infographic on Hollywood disasters. They love destroying New York City but it's not the only city they ruin
Vanity Fair rejected movie poster designs for Gravity
House Next Door a look back at Madonna's most beloved song "Like a Prayer" which just turned 25 years old!
Kevin Maguire the X-Men do the Oscar selfie 
Playbill a history of Les Misérables which is reopening on Broadway. It just keeps coming back. 

Release Date News
Everest, that mountain climbing adventure with Jake Gyllenhaal and Zero Dark Thirty's Jason Clarke (among others in a fairly stellar cast) will hit IMAX and 3D screens on September 18th. In case you didn't hear James Gray's long delayed The Immigrant will open (finally) on May 2nd, nearly a year after its Cannes debut - nothing like striking when the iron is hot! And because they're just never going to stop and neither is Hugh Jackman despite his vague protestations, the X-Men have dates scheduled through 2018

And Today's Watch(es)
Kevin Bacon goes a little Footloose on The Tonight Show (looking pretty good for 55) and it turns out Jennifer Lawrence recorded not one but two lipsynch numbers for American Hustle. The deleted one is to Santana's "Evil Woman" - I'm not embedding it here because it starts playing without asking it to. That is NOT okay in embeddable videos.