Tag: Sandra Bullock

Ocean’s 8

Gary Ross’s film has a strong, gender flipped cast, but it’s a hollow retread of Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s 11”

The real heist of “Ocean’s 8” is how they managed to fool us into thinking this was something new. Gary Ross’s film is effectively a remake of Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s 11,” but with a gender-flipped cast. And instead of a radical experiment, a fresh point of view on a spectacularly male franchise, “Ocean’s 8” is an incredibly safe, unassuming, if amusing, retread with some slightly different faces.

“Ocean’s 8” starts just as Soderbergh’s film does. Danny Ocean is up for parole, but this time it’s Debbie Ocean, played with George Clooney’s same suave charm by Sandra Bullock. She’s been spending her entire prison stint concocting a brilliant heist, and now she’ll assemble a team and make it happen. Also, Danny Ocean is dead…maybe.

You know, you don’t actually have to do this, Elliot Gould explains to Debbie in a cameo. Sometimes just knowing you can pull off the job is satisfaction enough. To hear that line, it sets decidedly low stakes for “Ocean’s 8.” Even Debbie Ocean is only in it for the thrill and precision of the heist and little of substance, so why are we?  Continue reading “Ocean’s 8”

Gravity

“Gravity” is a jaw-dropping sci-fi that rewrites the rules of cinema.

For all of the innovative, jaw-dropping, never before seen CGI wonder in Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity,” the impossibly balletic movement of Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera and the impeccably seamless 3-D effects, one of the film’s most impressive and memorable things is something Cuaron has withheld.

In space, there is nothing to carry sound. Satellites collide and rupture into millions of pieces, jetpacks soar and glide through the stars and astronauts dangle from floating space stations, clinging with their last ounce of strength to avoid floating into the distance, and nothing is to be heard.

Although the swell of an orchestra will remind you this is a Hollywood film, “Gravity” shatters the mold of what it is to be epic. Today’s tentpole movies are all noise and bombast; the multi-million dollar visual effects are par for the course. Unlike “Avatar,” “Life of Pi” and “Hugo” before it, 3-D and CGI are not here to enhance. Working through technology that needed to be invented, Cuaron has invented something breathtakingly original.

His focus on sights, not sound, story nor style, has nearly taken cinema back to its silent day roots and helped to imagine a future vision for what cinema can be. Continue reading “Gravity”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

On the heels of a much-undeserved Best Picture nomination for “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” I began to wonder how it could’ve appealed to so many Academy voters. On paper, Stephen Daldry’s film is total Oscar bait, but in execution it feels more genuinely hurtful than exploitative, melodramatic and weepy.

Much of that has to do with “Extremely Loud’s” extremely unlikeable lead character, the 9-year-old Oskar Schell. Oskar is portrayed brilliantly by the first time actor Thomas Horn, who carries the film and has a strong assertion over this character’s mannerisms, but Oskar’s irritating characterization, either stemming from Jonathan Safran Foer’s popular novel of the same name, or from Eric Roth’s (“Forrest Gump,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) screenplay, does the movie wrong. Continue reading “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

The Blind Side

“The Blind Side” may be the most manipulative film all year. Some have criticized “Precious,” the other “black” film this year, for manipulating audiences through unfathomable hardship. But I will take the tragedy of that brave film over the very fathomable hardship of this one, a wholesomely safe movie that tugs the audience’s heartstrings as though they were attached to marionettes.

Sadly, “The Blind Side” is not the most cliché movie I’ve seen from 2009, but it’s the kind of highly orchestrated familiarity that attracts those wit white guilt, the black audience and the juvenile type. There’s a group of token rich white women that serve as Sandra Bullock’s friends that are only seen gossiping at an exclusive restaurant in front of overpriced salads. I can imagine this group greatly enjoying “The Blind Side,” discussing it as if it was a mature film and as if they now knew something about cinema.

In reality, this is a film with zero character development and a highly accessible plot that loses all of the true story’s authenticity. It’s the heartwarming story of Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron), a drifter foster child who’s brought in and cared for by Leigh Anne Tuohy (Bullock). Tuohy pays for his education, gets him to go out for football and until he is eventually drafted by the NFL as recent as last year.

It’s important to take this true story with a grain of salt, because this definitely is a story in which lives were changed, families grew and dreams were accomplished, but we get very little of that here. This is just a movie designed to make the widest audience possible feel warm and fuzzy inside, and the result is fairly tepid. Continue reading “The Blind Side”