For the week of February 25th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Gravity to Blu-ray. Nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Picture, this visually stunning thriller stands as one of 2013's landmark features; director Alfonso Cuarón has crafted a more-than worthy follow-up to his 2006 masterpiece Children of Men. As he did with that earlier picture, Cuarón distinguishes Gravity as much by what it isn't as by what it is. For all its blockbuster trappings – big stars (Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, plus a neat little audio cameo from an actor well versed in the mechanics of the astronaut-movie genre), huge action setpieces, and a use of 3D that rivals the effects in James Cameron's Avatar - Cuarón never falls prey to the bloat and overwrought pomp of most four-quadrant epics (*cough the Transformers series cough*). His film runs a lean and mean ninety-one minutes and dispenses with all nonessential narrative beats: we follow two astronauts (Bullock and Clooney) as they try to make it back to Earth after space debris destroys the rest of their team. That's about it, and like last year's similarly minded All Is Lost, Gravity proves that viewers don't need much more. Cuarón's emphasis on the increasing perils that Bullock and Clooney face generates sheer white-knuckle terror. His sense of staging and momentum are unparalleled, and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's love of long, unbroken takes means we often get no hard cuts to break the suspense of a given moment. This rollercoaster approach to movie-making has caused some critics to call the film pretty but shallow, yet Cuarón and his co-writer (and son) Jonas clearly have more on their minds than popcorn entertainment. In their conception of Bullock's Dr. Ryan Stone, they've created a potent (if not terribly subtle) metaphor for the challenges of engaging fully with life. In Gravity's opening moments of calm, we realize that Dr. Stone has taken to the emptiness of space for very personal reasons, and her minute-by-minute decisions to keep going when everything goes to hell represents nothing less than a struggle for rebirth. It's a remarkably physical performance, but in her actions, we get a full portrait of a woman whose demons exceed any of the space-born catastrophes she faces. Bullock is at the top of her game here (she's even better than her Academy Award-winning Blind Side work), and the movie around her responds in kind.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown remarked that "for some, [Gravity] will be a profoundly religious film, with themes of salvation, redemption and restoration surging beneath the surface. For others, it will be a profoundly human drama, with a fight for survival amidst the chaos and randomness of disaster and the forces of nature. The brilliance of Cuarón and co-writer Jonás Cuarón's barebones storytelling is that it allows for so many fundamentally different interpretations, yet culminates in the same thought: life is worth living, however short-lived it may be (And no, that isn't a spoiler, one way or the other). Beyond the script, visuals and performances lie too many achievements to list, from the film's rich sound editing and mixing to composer Steven Price's stirring score, Mark Scruton's art design, Andy Nicholson's production design, and so on and so on. There is no element out of place in Gravity. No component lacking, no piece missing. It's as pure and perfect as filmmaking gets, and the experience is tremendously affecting. What little criticism has been leveled against the movie amounts to nitpicking. Yes, the fact that Dr. Stone just happens to be on her first space flight and Kowalski just happens to be on his last is a bit contrived, as is Stone's relative inexperience. And yes, there are a few scientific inaccuracies. (Albeit very few, and none that take a serious toll. Much as he enjoyed the film, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson made a point of noting several scientific flaws, one of which misses the point of the title entirely.) Does any of it matter? Not one bit. Gravity is an extraordinary tour de force and the film to beat at the Academy Awards."
Not to be outdone, Paramount is also streeting one of its big 2013 Academy Award-nominees on Tuesday: the wry dramedy Nebraska. The film finds director Alexander Payne working in a smaller, more intimate realm than his last feature, the sprawling family saga The Descendants, though both pictures deal with how family bonds fray and restore over time. In Nebraska's case, that bond involves Woody Grant (Best Actor nominee Bruce Dern) and his son David (Will Forte), who has grown increasingly tired trying to cope with his father's drinking and dementia. However, David bucks against the rest of his family's discontent at Woody after Woody becomes convinced that he has won a million-dollar sweepstakes, a sweepstakes that David agrees to help him "collect" on a road trip from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska. What's surprising about Nebraska is how Payne doesn't quite give you what you might expect from this setup; as he and screenwriter Bob Nelson have written it, Woody's condition precludes a lot of the usual father-son bonding that might normally occur on such a trip, and Dern is brilliant at using silence to convey the uncertainties of Woody's mental state – we see lucidity come over his face in flashes and then disappear. Instead, Nebraska is a film about saying goodbye, about the loneliness and unexpected warmth of getting old, and the minor-but-vital attempts David makes to help Woody face a rapidly diminishing future. This sounds bleak, and it is, at times, though not as dark as Payne's great About Schmidt. His sympathy for all characters, be they sympathetic (Dern, Forte, and the great June Squibb, who also picked up an Academy Award nomination for her work here) or otherwise (Stacy Keach, in the showiest turn of the film), keeps Nebraska from turning into a slog. It's another reminder of why Payne is one of the best contemporary American filmmakers.
Martin Liebman wrote that "Nebraska is a film about faith. It tells a story of little desires shaped over a long life and the belief that there's the possibility of something good even in something that's too good to be true. It's not about greed or proving someone wrong. Woody pursues the one million dollars with an admirable drive and determination, but not for reasons one might think. In fact, a valid question would be just how much Woody knows about what exactly it is he's doing, and his prospects for success, before even stepping foot in Nebraska. Is there a master plan, or at least a pretty good idea, inside that head? Where people see only wild hair, a gashing forehead wound, and a crazy old man, is there a purpose beyond collecting money? Or is Woody truly a senile old man whose adventure, and whatever may come of it, is a complete product of whatever's left of a largely warped imagination? The film hints a little bit in both ways, but considering its simplistically uplifting finale, one cannot help but hope it's the former, that Woody somehow expects good to come of the trip whether he returns home with a million extra dollars in his pocket or not. Either way, the movie allows for some wiggle room that adds immense replay and discussion value in the search for answers which perhaps only an imagination as wild as Woody's and a heart as strong as that which beats in his chest can find."
From Disney and Marvel comes the superhero sequel Thor: The Dark World. This Dark World has extra heavy lifting to do, considering it's a follow-up to what many found the weakest of the recent Marvel features; the first Thor deservedly made stars out of Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston, but it also suffered from a scope that exceeded its budget (the CGI used to realize Thor's homeworld of Asgard would have looked dated in 1995), some questionable creative choices (director Kenneth Branagh shoots what feels like every other scene in a Dutch angle), and a threadbare plot that's so busy setting the table for The Avengers that it sometimes neglects to give its title character anything interesting to do. Luckily, The Dark World is, on the whole, a much stronger work. Building off the end of The Avengers, Thor (Hemsworth) has just imprisoned his duplicitous brother Loki (Hiddleston), but a new threat emerges in the form of Malekith (Christopher Eccleston), a Dark Elf whose pursuit of a mystical energy source tied to Thor's Earth-bound love Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) puts the entire universe at hazard. None of this is terribly original, but the film's helmer, Alan Taylor, has ample experience working in a fantasy mode (he's one of the regular directors on Game of Thrones), and he's able to create a far more satisfying dramatic experience than Kenneth Branagh was. Now that the threat isn't limited to a small town on a New Mexico backlot, the stakes feel higher for our hero, and Taylor ably cross-cuts between the different forces involved in this intergalactic struggle. His not-so secret weapon, however, is Hiddleston, who gets about half the screentime as he did in the first Thor and still walks away with the picture – besides having all the best lines (reportedly penned by Hiddleston himself and Marvel consigliore Joss Whedon), his Loki has the only thing resembling a complex dramatic arc. Part of Loki is desperate to find redemption for his traitorous actions, and that's why he agrees to help his brother fight Malekith, but just as big a part is consumed kingly supremacy, and Hiddleston isn't afraid to let those instincts operate simultaneously. This is a film that ends in a cracking, multi-dimensional battle between Thor and a seemingly unstoppable villain destroying England, yet Loki's what you remember when all is said and done. Thor: The Dark World isn't perfect – the film jettisons much of the fish-out-of-water humor that was the previous movie's saving grace while turning Portman's character into a passive damsel in distress, and Eccleston's Big Bad is a bland central threat – but the members of the Marvel Brain Trust have (mostly) reassured audiences that they will be able to deliver satisfying future adventures for Thor.
Kenneth Brown's Blu-ray review calls Thor: The Dark World "a more rewarding successor to The Avengers than Iron Man 3, as it more directly and effectively deals with the aftermath of Loki's invasion of New York. Marvel could have shelved the series' resident Trickster or, worse, made him the primary antagonist of a third film. But the studio that Jack and Stan built is much smarter than that. Taking the path least chosen, Marvel introduces additional complexity and duality to Loki's character; a move typically attributed to more "serious cinema." And yet that's precisely what The Dark Worldand screenwriters Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely pull off. Hiddleston's Loki is infinitely more interesting than before, and he was already one of the MCU's biggest scene stealers. Hemsworth ups his game as well with a more three-dimensional, slightly less humorless Thor than we've seen, complementing Hiddleston's colorful flourishes and outbursts grimace for grimace and grin for grin. Together -- or in the company of Hopkins' Odin, Elba's Heimdall, Russo's Frigga, Alexander's Sif, Stevenson's Volstagg or Eccleston's Malekith, all of whom turn in excellent performances -- the brothers are simultaneously a perfectly compatible and perfectly disastrous odd couple, and the implied history they share is more palpable than ever. Make no mistake: whenever the film drifts from Thor and Loki's sides, it does so at its own peril…That said, any ensuing whiplash is more a product of Marvel over-exerting its control than of Taylor's original vision going awry. Lest ye forget, the studio ordered last-minute re-shoots to inject more humor into the mix after determining The Dark Worldwas, erm, too dark…Even so, the Thor series continues to churn out some of the MCU's most delightful surprises. I can't wait to see where Odin's boys go next. Hopefully farther and farther away from Earth with each new entry in the franchise."
The Criterion Collection is offering up the acclaimed – and controversial – romantic drama Blue Is the Warmest Color. The winner of the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Blue Is the Warmest Color finds director Abdellatif Kechiche pushing the intimate-epic form of his last film, 2007's The Secret of the Grain, to even greater extremes, both literally and figuratively. For three hours, Kechiche lasers in on Adèle (newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos), a teenager whose sexual awakening deepens beyond anything she felt possible when she begins a years-long relationship with free-spirited college student Emma (Léa Seydoux, of Midnight in Paris and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol fame). As with The Secret of the Grain, plot takes a backseat to visceral sensory touches: Adèle's unself-conscious eating habits, her and Emma's feverish couplings, the rivers of snot and tears that flow when their union begins to disintegrate. It's a remarkably intense picture, and Kechiche has come under fire – from both critics and his young stars – for sensationalizing Adèle's experiences, especially in terms of the sex scenes between Adèle and Emma. Though few in numbers, each one is incredibly graphic and lengthy, and Kechiche films them with an attention to detail that, many have argued, crosses over into pornographic territory. Now, while Exarchopoulos and Seydoux simulated the most explicit beats using lifelike prosthetics, it isn't difficult to understand the discomfort they claimed to have felt during production, considering the intimacy with which Kechiche has each one explore the other's body. But that intimacy is also part and parcel of Blue Is the Warmest Color's greatness, and it is a great movie. In heightening everything about young love, sex included, Kechiche manages to pull off a rare feat – he lifts what might otherwise be a routine coming-of-age story into the realm of operatic tragedy. One of the year's best films.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "The film is very beautiful but so raw and intense that at times it feels like it is heading for self-destruction. Structurally and stylistically Blue Is the Warmest Color has plenty in common with Kechiche's coming-of-age drama Games of Love and Chance, which follows closely a group of teenagers living in the unfriendly banlieues on the outskirts of Paris. In it Kechiche's camera acts as a casual observer while the teenagers try to survive, fall in and out of love, and eventually realize that their prospects for success as adults are extremely bleak. The film never slows down and ends very abruptly, like many contemporary documentaries do…The two big and widely discussed sex scenes give the film its identity. They are very raw and intense, borderline intimidating. Both also happen to be quite long - possibly a lot longer than they should be. (Since the film's success at the Cannes Film Festival, Exarchopoulos has publicly stated that Kechiche pushed her too far). But the rawness and intensity are also infused in the drama that ensues later, thus proving, or at least for the duration of the film, that sex and love are inextricably linked."