Review: "Roma"

“Roma” is the sort of movie other filmmakers love, and audiences have to endure.

It’s a mesmerizingly beautiful film by writer/director Alfonso Cuarón, his first since “Gravity” five years ago. Shot in black-and-white and set in Mexico City during 1970-71, it’s a semi-autobiographical look at his childhood seen through the eyes of the family maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio). 

The cast is largely made up of non-actors, and the camera pans slowly around as if we were standing there witnessing the various familial activities play out, documentary-style.

Problem is, the quotidian doings of most families aren’t especially interesting, and neither is this one. The first half of the movie is a dreadful bore. Children fight, servants toil, the patriarch of the family, a physician named Antonio (Fernando Grediaga) leaves for an extended business trip and is barely seen again.

I appreciate Cuarón’s attempt to summon the spirit of his family life from nearly a half-century ago. But “Roma” plays out more like home movies that run on and on, seemingly without organization or end. The director, who edits his own movies and even won an Oscar for his work, seems too love in love with his own footage to carve out the fat.

The movie does finally gain some momentum in the last hour, when it becomes clear to the mother, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), that her husband is not coming back. The kids slowly wise up to the reality of their situation, and the normal sibling antagonisms get ratcheted up to a frightful level.

Cleo’s budding romance with Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), a rough sort from the other side of the tracks, takes an abrupt turn with a potentially life-changing development. Fermín is a devotee of martial arts, and I’m sure the most talked about scene will be his fully nude demonstration of his skills for Cleo using a hotel bathroom shower rod as a makeshift staff.

I’m puzzled as to what Cuarón hoped to accomplish with this scene. I think he intended it to be dramatic and even a little scary, but it plays more like a pornographic Bruce Lee spoof.

The family has four children, three boys and a girl, ranging from roughly age 6 for the youngest up to about 12. Only the oldest boy, Toño (Diego Cortina Autrey), is given anything like a distinct personality, as he continually rebels against his mother’s authority in his father’s absence. The other kids register as a sort of blur, horsing around in the background while Cleo is working, or making spoiled demands for ice cream or movie trips.

I’m not opposed to slow-moving movies. I nearly put “Ghost Story” in my top 10 list last year, and that contains a 10-minute scene of Rooney Mara doing nothing but eating pie.

But “Roma” has a self-indulgent listlessness that serves not to draw us in, but push us out. The experience of watching is a very pure form of cinema: observation without any sort of emotional intrusion.

Cleo is a cinematic construct for looking at the family, not a fleshed-out character unto herself. I believe Cuarón is trying to make some sort of statement about power dynamics, and how Cleo is essentially their beloved servant who’s almost a piece of property.

Trouble is, by not giving the character anything like an interior, he uses her just as badly as a filmmaker.

Video review: "Gravity"

Despite being only 91 minutes long, “Gravity” is a bona fide cinematic epic, a film with a big story and jaw-dropping special effects. Seen in IMAX or on a big screen, it was an engrossing adventure, part thrill ride and part sobering drama.

But how will “Gravity” fare on video, where even the largest flat screen TV can’t match the big canvas of a movie theater? We’re about to find out.

My take is it’s still a thoroughly engaging experience, but a more intimate one. No, the heart-churning sequence where the Hubble Telescope is taken out by space debris doesn’t carry quite the same weight when you’re not enveloped by those images and sounds. But the scenes where it’s just Sandra Bullock trapped in her spacesuit, frantically huffing away her last few breaths of oxygen, become even more gripping.

Story-wise, it’s essentially just a tale of survival. Ryan Stone (Bullock) is a medical engineer and novice astronaut, while George Clooney plays Kowalski, a glib veteran. They’re the only two left alive when their shuttle and the telescope are destroyed, and must make a desperate attempt to reach a nearby station before it, too, is turned to fragments.

Big screen or TV, “Gravity” boasts a whole lot of heft.

Extra features, which are the same for Blu-ray and DVD versions, are somewhat disappointing. There are three making-of featurettes, titled “Gravity Mission Control,” “Shot Breakdowns” and “Sandra’s Surprise!”.

You also get a short film by screenwriter Jonás Cuarón, “Aningaaq,” and a public service documentary, “Collision Point: The Race to Clean Up Space,” narrated by Ed Harris.

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Review: "Gravity"

Everyone knows they're going to die, Dr. Ryan Stone muses during a rare peaceful moment in "Gravity," but it's an odd thing realizing that your death will happen today -- in the next few minutes, most likely. This gripping new science fiction dramatic thriller is the story of one woman accepting, and then rejecting, the embrace of her impending doom.

Director Alfonso Cuarón, who co-wrote the screenplay with his son Jonás, uses state-of-the-art cinematic technology to make a very old-fashioned type of movie. It's classic "you are there" filmmaking, in which the audience is inserted right into the harrowing action, experiencing it unfold from the perspective of the characters as it happens.

The characters aren't very deeply drawn, because they're mostly there to serve as a stand-in for the people watching. Stone, played by Sandra Bullock in a mesmerizing turn, is something of an enigma at the start -- a medical engineer given a crash training course by NASA to fix a faulty computer on the Hubble telescope. By the end of her journey we don't know too much more about her than when we started, other that her resignation has turned to resolve.

Using a mix of CGI and live-action shots, Cuarón creates a landscape in space hundreds of miles above the surface of the Earth that feels genuine, both in its eerie beauty and its utter lethality. A thoughtless mistake can quickly result in a horrible death, made even more dreadful by the knowledge that it will occur in total silence, since sound doesn't transmit in space.

Watching entire space stations rendered into dust without any corresponding sound effects somehow makes it even more terrifying.

It seems as if Cuarón's camera is roaming freely through this space, so occasionally it is very far away from Stone and Matt Kowalski, the savvy veteran astronaut played by George Clooney. Other times we're right up in their faces, or even seeing things from out the claustrophobic viewport of their helmets.

Likewise, sometimes we're assaulted by the sounds of a Stone's heavy breathing as she rapidly consumes her precious oxygen, or by the musical score by Steven Price. The voice of mission control (Ed Harris) soon fades away completely, though Stone and Kowalski still keep transmitting as if they can be heard.

Ostensibly it's in case they do manage to get back into contact with those on the ground, but we get the sense their self-narration is mostly for posterity.

Things are set into motion mere minutes in, as a cascade of destroyed satellites creates a minefield of debris. Their space shuttle is shattered and the rest of the crew killed, and Stone is sent tumbling off into the darkness of night. Kowalski is a jabber and a teller of tall tales, but his bravado is comforting to the withdrawn, clinical Stone, and when they're separated she begins to panic.

I can't go into all the different legs of Stone's arduous journey to find a way back safely to Earth, since it would spoil your experience. Suffice it to say it makes "Apollo 13" look like a cakewalk. Stone must leverage her meager skills as a space voyager against her analytical mind, learn to risk all instead of playing it safe, and improvise on the fly.

Watching "Gravity" is much more a visceral experience than an intellectual one. The movie grabs you by the chest and sucks the air out of your lungs, and while you're sitting in the theater it's an utterly immersive experience. I'm just not sure if it's the sort of film that lingers in your brain for months and years afterward.

Still, I'd be lying if didn't call this one of the best films I've seen this year, because it is.