Gravity Movie Review

Gravity is a beautiful and poetic movie. It is a technical marvel and one of the tensest 90 minutes of movie viewing I can recall. And it is about one of the little talked about, but ever present, dangers of space travel and orbiting earth.

There are so many satellites floating around up there and every now and then something comes apart, leaving space junk out there. This space junk sometimes travels at mind-boggling speeds. If it comes into contact with a shuttle or another satellite or an astronaut on a spacewalk, it could have devastating consequences. The particular event in Gravity, directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuarón, along with his son Jonás, is the destruction by missile of a Russian satellite. All those little pieces of debris are orbiting at a speed of 20,000 kilometers per hour. They rip through the space shuttle where mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) are completing work on the Hubble. The two are left stranded in space, their only remaining hope being the escape pods on the International Space Station. And at the speed the debris is traveling, they have about 90 minutes before they’re in for another shit storm.

To the Wonder Movie Review

“Weak people never bring anything to an end themselves. They wait for others to do it.”

There’s a reason I have such trouble remembering details from any of Terrence Malick’s films. He composes them with fleeting touches. There are no traditional movie scenes involving events or actions coupled with dialogue. These are the things that are easy to recall: “Remember that scene when so and so says…?” With Malick the best you get are snapshots that almost float freeform from one to another. They are like memories of a life remembered, says star Ben Affleck in one of the DVD extras. Even the one Malick film I’ve seen more than once, The Thin Red Line, stands in my memory more as a series of images in no particular order, but because there’s no real A to Z plot there’s no glue to hold it together in my mind.

The Tree of Life Movie Review

Do yourself a favor if you’re going to watch The Tree of Life: set aside a block of time during which you won’t be interrupted. This is a movie that needs to be experienced in its entirety as single entity. It is not a traditional narrative film. Containing experimental elements, it is more a philosophical exploration of life’s origins and the binary nature of the world we live in. If you’re open to new experiences and ready for a thought-provoking movie, then by all means give it a shot. If, on the other hand, this doesn’t sound like your cup of tea or you read some kind of plot description somewhere that sounded like it’s a good story, then turn back now. This isn’t for you.