A NIGHT AT THE MOVIES

So we went to see Gravity the other day in 3D. The glasses make me feel like Jack Nicholson, so I started annoying the ticket-taker with some scenes from Five Easy Pieces, and had to hide from Security. I realize Nicholson probably does wear those glasses all the time to prevent the Lakers from looking like a one-dimensional team.

Anyway for 90 minutes I was glued to my seat. At around the 91st minute I realized I WAS stuck to the seat with somebody’s gum. I couldn’t even move my feet, which were sucked into a mucilaginous soda-related quagmire.

I don’t want to give away the whole movie so I will only give away the plot. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are on a shuttle mission to repair the Hubble telescope. The Russians decide to blow up one of their own satellites, and it causes a barrage of space junk to rain through the universe destroying all the space stations. Can you believe after all this time we are still blaming shit on the Russians?

Anyway, to continue ruining the movie, Sandra Bullock had a daughter or something and she was killed or something. I wasn’t really paying attention because I was so focused on Sandra Bullock’s plastic surgery. It looked to me like she had her nose done, her chin done, her cheeks done and her lips done. And my boss Maggie could probably tell you 10 other things she had done. I would tell you if she had her cans done, since I am an expert on that, but I couldn’t really see them through the friggin’ space suit. So Sandra, if you are out there, show me your boobs and I will tell you if you had them done.

I have no idea what the plastic surgeon put in there, but her nose looks so sharp that it might have been the thing that killed her daughter. I definitely wouldn’t let her too close to balloons or cheap radial tires. Her chin has a big cleft in it now- it actually looks just like George Clooney’s now that I think of it. The two are good friends so I hear so maybe they got a deal on them. I remember her being kind of cute but now her face looks really angular, like she went to a cubist plastic surgeon.

They don’t get back in the space shuttle in time and end up being severed from their tethers, hurtling around up there until Clooney finally gets control of his jetpack and points them toward another space station. But of course Clooney doesn’t have enough bluster in his thruster (never happened before I swear!) and he has just enough juice to point Sandra towards the airlock before he hurls himself off into the starry abyss, lost forever until he hooks up with some alien chick.

They keep trying to communicate with each other through some NASA radio contraption, which is futile. Instead they should be using Twitter, so they can say what they REALLY think about Brad Pitt.

She runs out of oxygen and fuel, and she is just about to bite the spacedust. Then Clooney reappears, lets himself into the cabin, and tells her how to drive the thing. She is excited to see him, whereas my wife would be like, “I KNOW how to drive already, so just sit back in your seat and don’t touch the radio.” But alas, it’s all a dream. Now tell me ladies, if you were going to spend precious intergalactic time having a dream about Clooney, would you dress him in a space suit???? So that was another thing that was totally unrealistic.

She re-enters the atmosphere in some damn space pod that she pod-jacks from the Chinese space station. She figures out the controls even though they are written in Asian hieroglyphics. Meanwhile I almost have an accident if I drive a car with an automatic transmission because I keep applying the brake thinking it’s the clutch. Sandra touches down flawlessly right next to a beach, and walks off into the sunset, Hollywood style.

But I was thinking, wouldn’t it be funny if after all that she finally gets back to Earth and a big crab comes up to her and bites her on the toe, and she dies from an infection. To make it a happier ending, the crab also dies from it.



Incidentally, the Space Station and the Hubble Telescope are in different orbits, as is the Chinese Space Station, and any satellite that would have been blown up by the Russians. Therefore the events in the movie could never have taken place. That bothers some space purists, but look at all the other impossible plot twists in past movies. For instance, in “2001: A Space Odyssey” a chimpanzee throws a bone in the air and it becomes a spaceship. It is highly unlikely that he could have thrown the bone all the way into space. I have a bunch of others that I’ll tell you about another time.