Hey, remember when I talked to Alfonso Cuaron and Sandra Bullock last month about Gravity? This week’s NOW features my subsequent, never-before-published conversation with Cuaron, who is just the nicest guy in addition to being a legitimate cinematic genius.
(Also, he signed my HD-DVD of Children of Men, because I am just that perverse.)
Also in the paper, I take a look at TIFF Cinematheque’s Free Screen spotlight on American filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson, and for the NOW website, I augment our Gravity coverage with a look at five other films that tried to be realistic about space travel. Fun fact: Two people raised eyebrows at the inclusion of Alien while giving 2001: A Space Odyssey a pass, which is interesting because it’s not like 2001 has aliens in it or anything.
And over at MSN, I chatted with Eduardo Rodriguez and Jaime Murray, director and star of Fright Night 2: New Blood, about their intriguing new take on the same old story. Because vampires are always worth having around, especially when their last name is Dandridge.
Apollo 13 should be disqualified from the “realistic” list due to all its idiotic “WHOOSH!!” and “ZOOM-ZOOM!!!!” noises in the vacuum of outer space, which utterly unravel any of the film’s pretensions of verisimilitude.
I’d rather see Soderbergh’s Solaris remake on there, personally. I’m surprised you didn’t give a plug to Sunshine, though all of its silly flying-into-the-sun stuff is kind of hard to justify as realistic.
It’s funny — Soderbergh’s SOLARIS was on the list for the longest time, but in the end I felt MAROONED was more deserving. As much as I love SOLARIS, the space-travel aspects of it are pretty minimal; Soderbergh has described it as a movie about people in rooms, not a science-fiction film, and in the end I think he’s right.
And the quantum stuff at the end of SUNSHINE, as well as pretty much any scene involving Mark Strong, kinda ruled out the realism aspect …