Gravity: Underpants and Confusion

Okay, so I owe my dad a post about peeing in New York (that was weird to write) and it's coming, I promise - especially since I have another travel week on the horizon - but first: my review of the critically-discussed movie Gravity. Massive spoiler alerts. Sort of.

As a disclaimer: I'm not really into space. I actually think space is pretty stupid and don't understand why anyone would want to go there. Did you run out of amazing places on Earth to visit? Yeah? Liar. It takes forever to get NOWHERE in space. There's no wine. You can't bring your dog. I'm pretty sure there's no internet. No bookstores. Space is literally infinitely boring.

So the whole premise of the movie - some lady like, falling out of her spaceship or whatever* - is not that sympathetic to me. If you fall out of your spaceship, that is your fault. For being in space in the first place. I feel much the same about people who get eaten by bears while camping in remote areas. Do you know that we invented hotels? People bring you new soaps every day. Nice soaps. And towels. You want to sleep in dirt, fine. But don't blame the bears. You failed a Darwin test. There are no bears in hotels.

Anyway, you're like 'so why the fuck did you go see Gravity, you joyless harpy?' Fair question. Kyle had two free movie passes, and we'd heard Gravity was kind of visually ill when viewed on IMAX/3-D, and that was happening at the theatre near Kyle's house, and the idiot government is still shut down - you might have heard - so no museums are open, and it was rainy, so we were like 'let's just do that'. Everyone likes George Clooney. Even if he's in stupid space.

Before we left, we spent a moment with the new inhalation contraption favored by cool kids and people like Action Bronson. Kyle took a shot of E&J in the basement, because that's where they keep their E&J. We had weird/great/unnecessarily strong mango margaritas at a Mexican place near the train station. This paragraph kind of explains the rest of my review.

We got tickets to the 5:30 show. It took forever to get popcorn and Junior Mints, and once I was out of the line we walked through the first door we saw with 'Gravity' scrolling across the marquee line. Inside, the ONLY seats left were in the middle of the very front row. It didn't seem like we had much choice, so we just sat.

It was close to 5:40 - figuring three to five minutes for previews, we didn't think we were in such bad shape. But everyone was SUPER SETTLED IN. No shuffling around or anything; it was sort of intimidating. I was a bit put off. How seriously can you take any situation where every person in the room is wearing the same silly glasses? On screen, Sandra Bullock was deep into some existential crisis, and I was like, Jesus, space movies are IMMEDIATE bummers.

But whatever, we were there, so I tried to commit. Even though the first row of a 3D IMAX movie is unpleasant as HELL. It should be illegal to sell tickets to those seats. If you have any kind of seizure disorder, I am almost sure you could sue AMC for triggering the shit out of you.

After ten minutes, I was pretty bothered by the lack of set-up. Was this movie just throwing conventional narrative structure out the window? That seemed unlikely, given the target audience. Something was wrong. Kyle was on the same page.

"Do you think this is maybe the middle of the movie?" It seemed possible. We had no idea what was going on. Then George appeared. He and Sandy already seemed familiar. He dropped some knowledge. I elbowed Kyle: "Yo, let me look at the tickets." He handed them over. They said 5:30, and it was only 5:58, so this must be the beginning. It took another five minutes for me to realize the movie might be playing on several screens.

"This has to be the middle of the movie." We agreed. "Should we leave and find the right theatre?" We could not decide. Kyle'd become invested. That more or less settled it. And it was cool, I kind of was too, and we'd likely have similar problems in the right theatre at this point. I was mostly just annoyed that no one seated around us had the decency to be like 'hey, morons, this is the middle of the movie' when we walked in.

Anyway, onscreen: Clooney gives Sandy a pep talk, justifies her child's death-related depression, then disappears. I assume George died earlier in the film and that was his space ghost or something.  The talk works, because he's George Clooney, and Sandy's inspired to live or whatever. So she punches a LOT of buttons in an attempt to send herself back to Earth - like honestly, she gets out an instruction manual and just presses a ton of shit randomly-  it's exactly how I approach every DVR/cable set up I've ever encountered, so now I'm pretty confident I could be an astronaut. Then she blasts back to Earth and lands on a tropical beach, and gets out of her pod and lies on wet sand (gross) and cries, and she's wearing a tank top and underwear and I was like "When did she take her pants off? Did they burn off on re-entry? Is this Bali?" And those remain my biggest questions about the movie. Because then it ended. Also, Sandra Bullock is like, 50 years old and looks AMAZING in her underwear. Just wanted to shout that out. Hot-ass middle aged people in this movie, if that's a drawing point for you.

I asked Kyle if  we should  find someone and explain what we did wrong and see if we could watch the beginning parts that we missed, and he replied "I don't really feel like I need to, and now we have time to catch the Sox game." Which - word. Because it was probably better with more George Clooney, but even the parts in space that we did see were pretty boring, because they were in SPACE and that shit is boring as hell. So then we both went home. On my way, I bought some brown rice sushi at the Foggy Bottom Whole Foods and it was terrible. But there was still a whole box of Junior Mints and half a bottle of wine in my purse, so I'm chalking it up as a win.

Overall, pretty great little Saturday.

*My confusion regarding the premise of the movie will become clear in a moment.