LA: re. Gravity
But, IF it shows at the Marathon, here's a song suggestion for R.F:

Here's a piece I did on the visual effects for the film. Review to follow tomorrow.
http://www.boston.com/arts/movies/2013/09/28/gravity-proves-there-are-rules-spac...

Also (sorry not to be done yet):

What *is* the punchline to the joke Clooney tells in *Gravity* about the woman walking down the street at Mardi Gras with a horrible hairy man, except the man turns out to be. . . He never says. I assume the punch line is "a woman," and call me touchy, but on behalf of my inner horrible hairy woman, I was offended! (Not to mention: was that not a typical stupid Hollywood-ish "the whole idea of Lesbians is inherently funny" joke?)

And: Why does Sandra Bullock pant and whimper and whine like a damsel in distress for the first half hour? Is Clooney panting and whimpering? No. Clooney is the one who knows how to rescue people, and where to find the vodka, and which space ship is Russian and which is Chinese, and how long it takes to get there, and a third of his performance is telling Sandra Bullock to calm down and stop using up all the oxygen in the room, and is it not just an episode of *The Honeymooners*?

Okay, on the plus side: big budget Hollywood movie that's #1 in the nation stars, for a change, a woman over 40 who looks awesome and doesn't die.

But on the other hand: she doesn't know what to do except for what a man tells her to do; she's a mom whose only daughter dies because she, Mom, is unlucky or unChristian or distracted or a single mom or working for a living; the whole point of her getting lost in space is to make her beg God to take care of her dead child (she who has never known how to pray); her only identity is as a mother (and as an astronaut who has never been able to test-land a space capsule at NASA's astronaut school). . .

Unlike Clooney, who makes it clear that he's got a voracious sexual appetite and is banging babes whenever he can - interstellar banging! - our Sandra is a kind of casta diva - she's a born-again Christian! birthed in a Russian space capsule! virginal, blank, with no desire except to apologize to the daughter she *didn't kill*: can we please not blame her for what isn't her fault? Certainly, she has no libido, unlike Clooney, who juts his big jaw in her blanched face, and tells her across light years that he's always been attracted to her.

But I mean don't we take it for granted that Sandra Bullock in real life is gay and that Clooney is either gay or pretending to be? (Why would he be dating a new woman every year if he didn't want us to think they were bearding for him? Is that his secret? He's too boring to be gay, and so he's paying women to pretend to beard him, so that he seems to be hiding that he's gay, even though he's dully conventionally straight? What do you call a beard whose job is to give people the impression that you're hiring beards, even though you're not? A fake beard? A goatee?)

And with her short hair and gym body - her Kim Darby haircut from *True Grit*! - Bullock actually looks like a baby d**e or a 30-year-old gay guy gym bunny. . .

So it's two gay-or-pretending-to-be-gay movie stars playing a man who doesn't whimper and a woman who does - playing a 1950s couple, in other words, presumptively heterosexual; and Clooney apotheosizes into the Holy Ghost, delivering viscous fluid to Sandra - seed of the Lord, perhaps? - and Sandra, born again in a Russian ship, gets thrown to earth because she can't fly a space capsule without help, but maybe she can give birth to Our Savior in Lake Powell, Arizona, which is actually on the border of AZ and Utah - either she's pregnant with Clooney's ghostly seed, or she's walking north into a John Ford western - and John Ford was gay, too! (Ask Ward Bond.)

So it's a gay gay space movie wherein everyone is distracting you from homosexuality by making tired jokes about Lesbians and sending Bullock to like Joseph Smith to birth Jesus.