"Gravity" and The Limits of A Perfect 10

a version of this review originally appeared in my column at Towleroad.

There's a brief scene in Nicole Holofcener's engaging indie hit ENOUGH SAID that repeats enough times that it could be the chorus if the movie were a song. A massage therapist (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) arrives at the home of a fit male client who lives on the top floor of his building. Every time she arrives he pops out with a killer smile looking down to greet her. He never thinks to help her as she arduously lugs her massage table up the entire steep flight of stairs.  

Excuse the stretch but this is sometimes how it feels to write about movies. Especially the ones that are true lookers that you're still just not that into.

By any definition GRAVITY is the movie of the moment and by some measures it will come to be regarded as The Movie of the Year...

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I, Linkenstein

Big Screen
Artsbeat Alfonso Cuaron talks us through a dizzy-making scene in Gravity
Flick Filosopher "Hollywood, you are 300 movies away from making me want to marry you" The manic pixie dream guy bit is fab. It's so hard to imagine... which is the point. 
Guardian Olivier Hirschbiegel reacts to the terrible reviews to his Diana biopic 

David Poland 22 weeks to Oscar. He correctly sees that there are very few locks but bizarrely thinks Forrest Whitaker is a lock for Best Actor for The Butler
BuzzFeed live action footage (and actors) that helped created The Little Mermaid 
i09 thinks I, Frankenstein might be the most insane movie of 2014
Movie City News asks a great question about Amy Adams in American Hustle 

Small Screen
Salon interviews Adam Scott on his television breakthroughs and his new film A.C.O.D.
i09 Honestly I did not see this coming. Halle Berry, whose big screen career is still going well (consider how much her ermegency call center movie made), will headline the tv series Extant about an astronaut whose baby might be half alien

Look! A new Halloween opening for The Simpsons courtesy of Guillermo del Toro so naturally there's a fair amount of Pan's Labyrinth up in there. Lots of movie referencing but the funniest bit I think is that misanthrope naughtiness of the Alfred Hitchcock cameo via The Birds. 

Finally, can I just say "amen" to this Vulture piece requesting a moratorium on anti-heroes as the leads of television series?  I mean you're not going to top Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Walter White, Carrie Bradshaw (yeah, she was one. deal with it) and Nurse Jackie... so let it die a natural death now instead of death from ubiquity. Mark Harris has also wisely noticed that this trend has now poisoned the broadcast networks without the antidote of the artistry that made this type of protagonist so popular on cable television in the first place.

Percussion. Strings. Winds. Links

For Musical Nerds
BuzzFeed definite proof that The Little Mermaid's Prince Eric was a homo 
The Exploding Kinetoscope best words I've ever read about Judy Garland's For Me and My Gal
Pajiba more of those new photos from Into the Woods

Miscellania
Sillof's Workshop look at these AMAZING custom toys, If Dr Seuss wrote Jurassic Park
Grantland Mark Harris joins me in my eternally losing war against Category Fraud (this time with Daniel Brühl in Rush) and talks Enough Said, too 

The Film Doctor five notes on Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, now on DVD
L Magazine see, I'm not the only one that thinks Cuarón's Gravity is a disappointment!
/Film wait they're making Fargo into a TV series and it's the William H Macy role that's the lead? Don't they know that people loved that movie because of Chief Marge Gunderson?

Elephantitis
Finally, MNPP reminded us that we can all get our Alexander Skarsgard loincloth dreams back on since his Tarzan flick is no longer (apparently) in development hell. Word is that Christoph Waltz is the villain now. Many will greet this as very good news but this makes me sad. It's not that Waltz isn't a good actor but remember how lame it was the last time he was a threat to pachyderms?

Who wants to go back to there? I do not. And I even kinda liked that movie more than most but Waltz was not the why. How about a few more surprises in casting, Hollywood? Aren't there literally a hundred famous actors in Waltz's age range that might be a fun curveball as the villain? But instead we're going to get somebody who already abused elephants. (sigh)

Podcast: All About TIFF, Our Festival Takeaways

For this week's podcast, a special Toronto International Film Festival edition. Your regular players Nathaniel, Katey and Nick welcome Tim Robey from the Daily Telegraph and Angelo Muredda from Film Freak Central to discuss our experiences at this year's TIFF. We cover festival favorites like the joyful experiment Strange Little Cat, super-lengthy documentary At Berkeley and Clio Barnard's follow up to The Arbor, The Selfish Giant and spend time with 12 Years a Slave which blew (most of) our minds. (It also blew the TIFF audience's mind and took home the coveted People's Choice prize, that Oscar bellwether, with Philomena in second place) 

We also hit mainstream titles like the Daniel Brühl pictures Rush and The Fifth Estate. No one really liked Labor Day which Angelo calls "my summer of erotic pies" and which reminds us uncomfortably of previous Kate Winslet projects. Some slightly more divisive experiences include the sci-fi wow of Gravity, Jafar Panahi's Closed Curtain, the erotic thrillers Stranger by the Lake and Eastern Boys, animation giant Sylvain Chomet's first live action feature Attila Marcel, as well as two doppelganger movies The Double &. Enemy starring Jesse Eisenberg & Jake Gyllenhaal respectively.

Mixed in with these pre-release screening buzz-discussions there's plenty to chew on in terms of Oscar's Best Foreign Film category including possible entries from Singapore (Ilo Ilo), Romania (Child's Pose), Chile (Gloria) and Cambodia (The Missing Picture). And, last but not least our panel loves Jonathan Glazer's long awaited Birth follow up Under the Skin (starring Scarlett Johansson) and offers up advice for any readers who'd like to go to TIFF next year.

Clockwise from top left: Strange Little Cat, Gloria, Gravity, Eastern Boys, and 12 Years a Slave

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download it on iTunes. 
(I tried something new in the processing / uploading so let me know if the sound is okay and how it compares to other weeks) 

TIFF 13 Takeaways

TIFF: "Gravity" & "Eleanor Rigby: Him / Her"

Here's to grand ambition, the spiritual cousin of self-sabotage; whatever scale filmmakers are working on, it's a thin (blood)line that separates them. An noble arguable failure and an unwieldy arguable success from the Toronto International Film Festival will illustrate…

GRAVITY
The very talented multi-hypenate filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón has been MIA from cinema for the past seven years. He's presumably been huddled over various computers or engulfed in endless meetings trying to work out the logistics of bringing this epic outerspace survival drama to the screen. [more...]

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