No Matter How Crazy You Are You Can Still Find Someone To Fiddle With Your Junk
“James Hancock wanted to meet a woman who shared his core values. But when you’re a strict Objectivist, it can be a little tricky.”
Courtney Barnett, "Avant Gardener"
A tad tardy to this one, but she is Australian so here in this hemisphere the video qualifies as practically new, right? Just agree with me, it’s easier. Okay so, I want you to stick with this one all the way through. You will spend the first minute or two checking all the references she either intentionally or unknowingly makes, and then you will find yourself focusing on the video for a little bit and then small stuff will jump out you, like the way Prison Islanders pronounce it “pseudo EFF-a-DRIN” then, almost imperceptibly, the song will get under your skin until suddenly it’s over and you’re all, “Huh, that was pretty good!” I mean, at least that’s the way it worked with me. Anyway, she’s all over town this week, if you want to go see her live it should not be that hard.
Man Forced To Deny Winebar Bathroom Sex Romp Lasted 17 Minutes
“Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) says he did not have sex with a woman in the bathroom at The Owl’s Head in Bay Ridge on the Friday before the government shutdown.”
Bronx Fixed
Gross. RT @jyarow: New public golf course in the Bronx has city views from every hole. It opens in 2015. pic.twitter.com/ayPGsPEIyZ
— Kofi Appiah Biney (@kofiabiney) October 16, 2013
The Bronx is back! Under the roar of the 678 going across the Whitestone bridge, and at a cost to the city of $97 million, Trump Golf Links is nearly here. Yes, after the city’s hundred-million investment, they handed it over in a 20-year deal to Trump, who’ll dump some borrowed money into it to build a clubhouse. The city will allegedly make $10 million on the investment over the next two decades. Now I will be marching to City Hall to burn my city tax bill on the front steps BRB.
"Gravity" Sucks: Two Perspectives
by The Awl
Defying “Gravity”
I was tardy for Adria’s 24th birthday celebration at The Golden Unicorn, an endearingly tacky dim-sum restaurant in Chinatown. To celebrate her somewhat belated transition towards a no-training-wheels adulthood (successful acquisition of an affordable apartment and a job away from coffee machines and people who want their bagels scooped out), she had decided to throw a large party.
My public excuse for my tardiness was “getting lost,” but privately the truth was linked to my inability to leave my apartment in time. One of Adria’s birthday presents was the shaving of my beard, leaving a gross moustache reminiscent of Nintendo’s Mario Bros or 70s gay porn. This DIY present contributed to my lateness. The reason my public humiliation as a stache-wearer would give her joy is rooted to the beginning of our friendship: I had made a joke about her carb-consumption at a fancy literary party for the 2010 National Book Award Awards. I felt comfortable making a callous joke only because there was no way she would be offended, in my head. Then I joked about her literary journal totebag, as she loudly announced: “Elias, you don’t know me well enough to say that!”
Since then, we have gotten to know each other very well. So when Adria expressed her wish to watch a film at the cinema on her birthday, I immediately agreed. The circumstances gave her full liberty to choose the film, and soon enough I was trying to place 3-D glasses on top of my prescription glasses, in anticipation of the film Gravity, an outer-space thriller named in honor of the physical force.
“What an experience!” is the consensus of the dithyrambic reviews the film has garnered. Starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, and with Alfonso Cuarón on the director’s spaceship, it was the opposite of experience, as least as we live it.
“Gravity” Is A Transcendent Piece Of Crap
A couple of years ago, when a terrible break-up left me desperate to fill up all of my newfound free time with social interaction, I went over to a friend’s house and watched him play Grand Theft Auto. After I saw him drive through a bunch of beautifully-designed streets, rob some girls with digits-in-all-the-right-places, and shoot a rocket launcher at a fleet of cop cars, I went home. I learned a valuable lesson that mind-numbing night: No matter how perfectly-orchestrated the sound, no matter how artistically-chiseled the graphics, no matter how hair-trigger the gameplay, watching someone else play a video game is boring.
That is exactly what watching Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is like.
There’s no story to follow, no characters to care about, and nothing of substance to learn about space travel seeing as it’s basically one giant “artistic license” to get Sandra Bullock to walk around in her underwear for awhile. The whole movie-going experience — which costs me $18 bucks for IMAX 3D — is the same thing as going over to Alfonso’s house and watching him play a version of Tomb Raider that somehow incorporates the icy game controls of NHL’94 — but even more boring than that.
Here’s the plot: Big Screen Actor flings around like a pinball, grabs ahold of another Big Screen Actor, almost runs out of air, gets knocked into something else, grabs ahold of something, performs some function that isn’t made entirely clear to get home, almost runs out of air again, has something bad happen to him, pinballs again through space, runs out of air again, pinballs again, gets low on oxygen, and then flies back down to Earth. As my ladyfriend said exiting the theater, “it’s Mr. Bean in Space.”
"Gravity" Is A Transcendent Piece Of Crap
A couple of years ago, when a terrible break-up left me desperate to fill up all of my newfound free time with social interaction, I went over to a friend’s house and watched him play Grand Theft Auto. After I saw him drive through a bunch of beautifully-designed streets, rob some girls with digits-in-all-the-right-places, and shoot a rocket launcher at a fleet of cop cars, I went home. I learned a valuable lesson that mind-numbing night: No matter how perfectly-orchestrated the sound, no matter how artistically-chiseled the graphics, no matter how hair-trigger the gameplay, watching someone else play a video game is boring.
That is exactly what watching Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is like.
There’s no story to follow, no characters to care about, and nothing of substance to learn about space travel seeing as it’s basically one giant “artistic license” to get Sandra Bullock to walk around in her underwear for awhile. The whole movie-going experience — which costs me $18 bucks for IMAX 3D — is the same thing as going over to Alfonso’s house and watching him play a version of Tomb Raider that somehow incorporates the icy game controls of NHL’94 — but even more boring than that.
Here’s the plot: Big Screen Actor flings around like a pinball, grabs ahold of another Big Screen Actor, almost runs out of air, gets knocked into something else, grabs ahold of something, performs some function that isn’t made entirely clear to get home, almost runs out of air again, has something bad happen to him, pinballs again through space, runs out of air again, pinballs again, gets low on oxygen, and then flies back down to Earth. As my ladyfriend said exiting the theater, “it’s Mr. Bean in Space.”
In the last scene of the movie — which is kind of the whole thing in a nutshell — Sandra jettisons from her space escape pod into a lake. She swims out, but is weighed down by her heavy spacesuit. So, you know, she’s about to run out of air again. To save herself, she quickly — and not dramatically at all — takes off her suit and swims to the surface. But then, instead of going straight up, she has to avoid the giant parachute from her escape pod falling onto her, so she takes a weird angle to almost make sure to get caught momentarily in a bunch of reeds. Adding to the suspense. “Will she ever get oxygen?!” Spoiler: She does, because this is a movie that doesn’t take any chances.
There are attempts to get us to care about the characters. George Clooney is given a few good lines as the Cowboy on His Last Mission before playing the hero to Sandra’s sobbing Damsel in Distress. And Sandra, we learn briefly, likes “the silence of space” (despite it really never being silent during the entire time she’s up there) because her daughter died back home on Earth, which was a big bummer. But that’s it as far as character development or general interest. You do not need infinite-monkeys-in-front-of-infinite typewriters to come up with these cookie-cutter characters. You need 12 donkeys with sticks tied around their tails. Put them in a sand pit, have a drink at the saloon, come back in an hour, and you’ll have roughly the same quality of writing as Gravity.
Defying “Gravity”
Early on, we comprehend the infuriating inadequacy of Ryan Stone — which by the way is Sandra Bullock’s character, in case you assumed otherwise — in any and absolutely all space activities. If there is any way for Dr. Stone to sabotage the endeavor of staying alive, she WILL find it. Additionally, Matt Kowalski — the George Clooney character — WILL suffer the repercussions of her incompetence. And he will do it with a charming smile even though this was supposed to be his last flight as an astronaut before retiring. His sweetness and patience towards Ryan are almost as infuriating as his eventual self-sacrifice for her survival.
The film’s character issues stem from the horrendous dialogue, written by Alfonso and his son, which has a clichéd blandness that can be attributed to one of two things: (1) ESL issues, which probably isn’t the case after seeing displays of Cuarón’s impressive fluency in interviews; or, more likely, (2) trying to make everything as simple as possible for the global market. (This is a $100 million movie, after all.) So, instead of anything interesting or memorable — honestly, I’ve been spent the last 20 minutes trying to remember the film’s dialogue — you get revealing snippets like, “I’m going to die,” and “Keep it together,” and “I’m either going to survive or burn up during re-entry, so I guess ‘dem’s the breaks, kid!” No, folks, it’s not easy to create dialogue for one actor to say to themselves, which Sandra does for most of the movie. It worked in Cast Away, but only because Tom Hanks was given that volleyball to talk to. Usually, it comes off as forced. And that’s the case here.
And there are incredible moments in Gravity. This film represents a great achievement when it comes to IMAX 3-D technology and digital projection. It looks amazing. In one scene, an astronaut is completely wiped out by a bunch of space debris, to the point where you see Earth poking through the big hole in his face. Sandra Bullock’s tears float into the camera. You start looking at her from outside of her helmet, but then the camera goes inside of her helmet to shows her oxygen displays, and then go back out to see her worried face. Throughout much of it, I was sitting there asking myself how the fuck did they do that?
Then I remembered. Oh yeah, computers.
It’s computers, people. They use computers to do all of this. Computers. For moments in films made before CGI like the opening scene of Touch of Evil or the big killer reveal at the end of Young and Innocent, it was fun to ask “how’d they do that?” And answers like “They had to make sure to physically rack focus while moving in from so far to so close,” or “the stunt man was using a flame-suit” were kind of interesting. But nowadays the answer is “they had a bunch of green-screen and some lonely neckbeard guys sat in front of computers for a while until they pushed the right button to make it look good.”
Like Gravity, Alfonso ‘s Children of Men had nifty visual tricks going on that amazed you by how long they shot seamless scenes without cutting. The difference, however, was that there was a whole lot more going on in Children of Men in regards to little things like plot and substance than in Gravity. When people died, or when Clive Owen was put in peril, it mattered. The extended shots were cool and learning about how they were done was a nice bonus, but it all worked to serve the story. Gravity is the other way around. The story, or lack there-of, serves the shots. If you’re not seeing Gravity in IMAX or in 3D, you’re basically watching a high school TV production final assignment that your precocious neighbor shot for $20 in a week.
What puzzles me about Gravity is the fact that no one else can see how worthless it is. The movie is 97 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic gave it a 96 percent positive rating, and IMDB has it at 8.7 out of 10, which ranks it as the 44th best movie of all time. People are actually asking if it’s the best space movie ever.
Hey everybody, let’s calm down here. It’s not.
Aliens is the best space movie of all time. 2001 is also an acceptable answer. Event Horizon is scarier, Apollo 13 is more suspenseful, hell, Mission to Mars has more fleshed-out characters. Gravity? This is a middle-aged man being given $100 million to throw together a Sandra Bullock vs. CO2 video game and then force us to sit there and shut up and watch him play.
Rick Paulas did not like that movie.
Defying "Gravity"
by Elias Tezapsidis
I was tardy for Adria’s 24th birthday celebration at The Golden Unicorn, an endearingly tacky dim-sum restaurant in Chinatown. To celebrate her somewhat belated transition towards a no-training-wheels adulthood (successful acquisition of an affordable apartment and a job away from coffee machines and people who want their bagels scooped out), she had decided to throw a large party.
My public excuse for my tardiness was “getting lost,” but privately the truth was linked to my inability to leave my apartment in time. One of Adria’s birthday presents was the shaving of my beard, leaving a gross moustache reminiscent of Nintendo’s Mario Bros or 70s gay porn. This DIY present contributed to my lateness. The reason my public humiliation as a stache-wearer would give her joy is rooted to the beginning of our friendship: I had made a joke about her carb-consumption at a fancy literary party for the 2010 National Book Award Awards. I felt comfortable making a callous joke only because there was no way she would be offended, in my head. Then I joked about her literary journal totebag, as she loudly announced: “Elias, you don’t know me well enough to say that!”
Since then, we have gotten to know each other very well. So when Adria expressed her wish to watch a film at the cinema on her birthday, I immediately agreed. The circumstances gave her full liberty to choose the film, and soon enough I was trying to place 3-D glasses on top of my prescription glasses, in anticipation of the film Gravity, an outer-space thriller named in honor of the physical force.
“What an experience!” is the consensus of the dithyrambic reviews the film has garnered. Starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, and with Alfonso Cuarón on the director’s spaceship, it was the opposite of experience, as least as we live it.
QUEL EXPERIENCE!
There is a Greek saying: “When you hear about lots of cherries, bring a small picking basket.” That is, in the face of overwhelmingly positive sentiment, it’s best to lower one’s expectations. Regardless, we equipped ourselves with the largest popcorn basket available, SourPatch kids and a DIET Coke that weighed more than an Olsen twin.
The absolute worst of all unfortunate events that accompanies watching Gravity: you cannot even enjoy your traditional snacks during the film, unless you are 100% space-proof, and/or an alien who does not get nauseous. Be advised that the intensity critics refer to is purely physical. By purchasing tickets to this innocuous saga, you are signing up for the mundane version of Disneyland’s Space Mountain your mom would not decline riding with you.
In Gravity, the entire script can be predicted by anyone familiar with the transparent techniques blockbuster screenwriters employ. The “story” that unfolds is a non-story. Specifically, our main cast of three, then two people is doomed in space after their spacemachine gets hit by evil galactic residue. The blatant absence of artful storytelling in the film promises to offend those who know that it’s small intricate details and a gradual buildup that create intensity in a viewer.
[GIGA SPOILER ALERT!]
Early on, we comprehend the infuriating inadequacy of Ryan Stone — which by the way is Sandra Bullock’s character, in case you assumed otherwise — in any and absolutely all space activities. If there is any way for Dr. Stone to sabotage the endeavor of staying alive, she WILL find it. Additionally, Matt Kowalski — the George Clooney character — WILL suffer the repercussions of her incompetence. And he will do it with a charming smile even though this was supposed to be his last flight as an astronaut before retiring. His sweetness and patience towards Ryan are almost as infuriating as his eventual self-sacrifice for her survival.
[THE END OF THE GIGA SPOILER ALERT!]
“Gravity” Is A Transcendent Piece Of Crap
A couple of years ago, when a terrible break-up left me desperate to fill up all of my newfound free time with social interaction, I went over to a friend’s house and watched him play Grand Theft Auto. After I saw him drive through a bunch of beautifully-designed streets, rob some girls with digits-in-all-the-right-places, and shoot a rocket launcher at a fleet of cop cars, I went home. I learned a valuable lesson that mind-numbing night: No matter how perfectly-orchestrated the sound, no matter how artistically-chiseled the graphics, no matter how hair-trigger the gameplay, watching someone else play a video game is boring.
That is exactly what watching Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is like.
My primary issue with Ryan was her total lack of backbone: how did this weakling ever manage to become a medical engineer who is needed outside of our stratosphere? Is she not an ideal candidate to be scooping out people’s bagels? (Probably not, she’d drop them, burn them and cut herself.) In reality, my issue is not with Ryan, but the writers who assume I would be willing to care for and empathize with a soulless person with no nerve or gut.
Viewers need not know everything. Audiences don’t require much from storytellers: simply give us some idiosyncrasies that humanize the character. It is important to specify that by “humanize,” I don’t mean turn to realism or incorporate real-world accuracy. A Jerri Blank crooked smile or even an unidentified substance in a canister (ala Frank Booth in Blue Velvet) would work tremendously well. We, the audience, do not even need those quirks to make sense. We came here to be distanced from our reality, not to be hyper-consciously reminded of said-realities as a result of our absolute failure in relating with your creation(s).
The selective revelation of information to the audience can be a powerful technique in reaching a broader audience. Manipulating the gaps that can emanate mystery within stories is effective. In film, Terrence Mallick’s Tree of Life has been recognized as a triumph of subjectivity: the viewer can decipher the meaning s/he chooses. In prose, Lydia Davis’ Varieties of Disturbance in its entirety serves as an example of powerful narrative manipulation. The multitude of ways in which a reader may interpret Davis’ “Lonely” has everything to do with the reader: it may be a sarcastic farce, a cry for attention, the expression of insecurity and even be seen as the result of fear.
The biggest problem with the film Gravity is the creators’ inability to enable the universality of the characters without making them totally empty. In a clear attempt to birth individuals whose individuality is not the point, the creators fail in breathing tactility in their project, resulting in the production of characters without characteristics.
EMPATHIC TRANSFERENCE: IS THE TRUTH OUT THERE?
An analytical comparison of Gravity to the 90s science fiction show “The X-Files” emphasizes its weakness. The contrasting approach of “The X-Files” unfolds on a dual level. First, the show’s refusal to be confined within the constraints of the suffocating realism Gravity strives to achieve. Second, its depiction of paranormal phenomena functions as a means to maximize audience curiosity and foster empathy.
Gravity is primarily concerned with the idea of recreating an otherworldly experience in a realistic manner, which remains faithful to the scientific circumstances. The intellectual requirements it imposes on audiences are very limited, along with the provocations it triggers. The viewing experience itself, and letting oneself indulge fully in it, is the most this film has to offer. By creating a realistic simulacrum of being in space, as a 3D film that is also highly fact-driven in representing current technology, the film’s fatal flaw is its accurate depiction of a reality so complete that it becomes dull.
“The X-Files” is fixated with the quest of an absolute truth too, often rationalizing the occurrence of surreal phenomena in an attempt to construct a reality that resembles, or brings the characters closer to, “The Truth.” But rather than focusing on accurately presenting the most current methods employed by the FBI, the show’s creators succeed in giving breath to the characters, the villains, the layered conspiracies and even the aliens.
When following the adventures of FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, one finds it easy to believe surreal, unrealistic and flat-out absurd events. That is because these characters have managed to invite audiences to project in them meaningfully, forging an empathic transference. When Scully’s puppy got eaten by a prehistoric dinosaur in a lake the duo was investigating for paranormal phenomena, I felt sad for the character. I even caught myself willing to follow the narrative tangent in which this puppy was named “Queequeg” after the harpoonist in Moby Dick, keeping up with a Scully family tradition of picking nicknames from the classic novel (in which Herman Melville masterfully neglects the rules of realism in favor of the rich language of symbolism and allegory).
Of course, one can make the case for Gravity being an allegory in its entirety: despite its loyalty to realism in regards to technicalities, the broader goal is the immersion in a concept totally subversive. Personally, I find it much easier to relate to Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia, as well as the entire Sex & The City cast. That includes both film versions.
Before exiting the movie theater, the birthday princess quickly decided to sneak into another film. Insidious: Chapter 2 was much, MUCH better. At least in that one the annoying people died, too!
Much like a one-night-stand partner whose performance is ranging between poor and mediocre, I would advise you to refrain from indulging in the physical experience Gravity offers. If you want to feel a similar intensity, just ride the L-train during rush hours, or watch “The X-Files” until you are late to your friend’s birthday celebration.
Elias Tezapsidis is a generalist writer and an aspiring human being based on Avenue D. Also, a twitter handle and a website. One day, a book?
New York City, October 14, 2013
★★★★ The children had half-raised the blinds, letting in the copious morning light. The high clouds were a fluctuating filter. There was a little haze, a little breeze. The sun was warm enough to gently cook the abandoned beer and Rioja bottles on the roof, coating their insides with fat droplets. The remains in the glasses were clumping and separating. In the bright sky over the shadowed afternoon streets, a perfect dab of cirrus decorated the zenith. There was a bold streak of cirrus leading away from it, and a charmingly lit and shaded airplane flying medium-low, but nothing beat that one spot of white, precisely overhead. It was weird, it had to be weird, to keep craning to look at it. Yet there it was, just exactly so, the momentary pivot of the whole composition.
Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald? Glenn Greenwald! Glenn… Greenwald. [Sighs.] Glenn Greenwald.