The Heat

“The Heat” begins with a scene possessing the ingredients to actually be interesting. A gaggle of male FBI agents have come up empty in their search of a suspect’s house. Then, Special Agent Sarah Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) enters and immediately intuits the location of some drugs and the hiding spot of some guns. And like Kobe Bryant hitting one of his patented ridiculously angled twenty foot jump shots and then taunting everyone within a fifty foot radius, Ashburn lords her impeccable investigating skills over all her colleagues. She can do this job better and faster than an entire room of men and their obvious fury with her skills compared to theirs is palpable. But rather than making this the point of the scene – her skill set compared to theirs – the movie does pretty much what you’d expect to and brings it all back down to her relationship status. When Kobe gloats, he has hosannas penned in his honor about how he's “Doin' Work”. When Ashburn gloats, well hey, that's why she’s still single.

The potential for commentary on the ever-incendiary male/female workplace dynamic arises again and again, but alas, it’s not to be. Rather than give any real thought to its relationships and situations, “The Heat” is content to explore them by simply inserting two females into the overly-familiar framework of so many dude-centric buddy cop comedies of yore. “The Heat” is just “Lethal Weapon” with ladies, “The Other Girls.” And if Ashburn is the no-nonsense, primly-dressed, curse word-averse rule follower than the odds are 1-1 that her friend and foil will be strictly-nonsense, shaggily-dressed, curse word devotee rule breaker. And she is. Det. Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) is the brash Boston cop whose beat becomes interlocked with Ashburn’s case involving…..uh……well…… “The Heat” is something of a paradox in so much as it seems entirely disinterested with its plot while simultaneously putting way too much time toward its plot.

It is directed by Paul Feig, a man who has a knack for staging gags and for letting his actresses rock the ad-lib to the extreme. To wit, McCarthy, who often takes her sweet time winding to the punchline in “The Heat” before, improbably, barreling right past that punchline and into another punchline, and one that’s usually fairly foul-mouthed. She has a ferocious comic energy here, one that actually compliments Bullock’s fastidiousness pretty well, and it’s why you wish that Feig and his writer Katie Dippold had any desire whatsoever to do something more with these characters. Instead Mullins is, more or less, a monster who has alienated everyone in her department on account of her behavior, while Ashburn is her own kind of monster who has also alienated everyone in her department on account of her behavior. They’re just a pair of do-it-their-own-way cops forced to work together and better understand the value of teamwork while learning a little bit about themselves in the process. And that just seems like such a colossal waste, unless you’re figuring in box office receipts in which case......yippee ki ay.

Feig is set to helm the all female “Ghostbusters”, a concept which doesn’t so much bother me because women have no right to wear the professional paranormal investigations and eliminations uniform as it does because of, well, “The Heat.” Plugging women into something that already exists in its own rigid way and simply having them copy of the moves of the dudes that came before seems like a wretched disservice. Wouldn’t be more interesting to tell new stories or, at the very least, to employ genre constrictions to subvert them rather than just saying, Hey, women can be in meandering, occasionally humorous buddy cop flicks too.

Gravity

“Gravity” is the sort of film Hollywood should be making all the time and just isn’t. Visual effects are prevalent in the movies these days but too often are a crutch, a cover-up for narrative deficiency, or merely showing off for their own sake. Director Alfonso Cuaron, working in perfect harmony with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, has crafted an occasionally transcendent little piece of Cinematic Experience in which the effects mix seamlessly with the story he’s telling because the story he’s telling very much is the visual effects. Yet even though “Gravity” is propelled very much by those visual effects, it remains Hollywood to its core by also relying on good old fashioned Star Power.

The story of “Gravity” is deceptively – well, maybe that make that glaringly – simple, and that simple story is contrasted against the jaw-dropping camera trickery at work throughout. Its opening is a virtually uninterrupted twenty minute shot that glides and winds its way through the earthly orbit where astronauts Kowalski (George Clooney), the old pro, and Stone (Sandra Bullock), the specialist tasked to assist with a bit of Hubble repair on this first trip to space. Alas, back on earth the distant voice of mission control (Ed Harris, thus echoing Gene Kranz of “Apollo 13”) indicates a Russian attempt to shoot down their own satellite has gone awry. Debris hurtles toward our defenseless spacewalking astronauts. Communications are cut. Their shuttle is smashed to smithereens and their fellow NASA men and women lost. They are on their own in space, short on precious oxygen and looking for a way home.

Anymore movies of this ilk seek to address the plight of humanity, to be about our world and its present ills, to function as commentary as it goes about kicking ass. "Gravity", however, is much, much less “2001” than it is Spielberg’s “Duel” or Rodrigo Cortes’ “Buried”, a sorta real-time thriller that proves Murphy’s Law applies even in space. Which is not to suggest it lacks thematic ambition. It does not, and that is also, I fear, where perhaps the film partially miscalculates.

As established, “Gravity” is first, foremost and throughout a story being told visually, and yet when Cuaron and his son Jonas, with whom he wrote the screenplay, turn to theme they do so through either awkwardly wordy passages or images that have not earned their supposed weight. The latter is tied directly to the end, which feels less spiritually uplifting than it wants to be because of the former. Stone is saddled with a tragic, and tragically thin, backstory, yearning to illuminate effects of isolation both on the Earth and above it. And thus, Cuaron’s film shoehorns in monologues and helpings of characterization that distinctly feel as manufactured as his set pieces feel effortless. One scene meant as Stone’s turning point to the drive for home is so jarring and frustrating you’ll know it’s a fake straight away.

It’s weird, and it’s weird because “Gravity” is so regal in the way it looks that nothing Cuaron could have these characters say would live up to what they and we see. Earth can be a lonely place, after all, but never more so then when the entire planet itself is right in front of you…..so close, so far.

That we still find ourselves tethered to emotion and not just sensation is a testament to Ms. Bullock, who has chopped her hair and significantly dialed down the every-woman charm she oozes in such abundance. She seems more terse and withdrawn and impatient with Clooney’s glibness in the face of doom. As such, “Gravity” emerges less than some sort of metaphorical rebirth than a closed-off woman opening up to the battling back, fight and (space) flight. Her moments of weakness are as winning as her moments of strength, and that duality is what prevents me from betting onboard with the attitude of the finale.

For all the soundless explosions and zero gravity spins and dips that caused my weak-willed stomach to order my eyes shut, the shot I will remember most involves Stone floating wordlessly in a space station airlock moments after surviving another frenzied ordeal. She closes her own eyes and just…..floats. Physically re-grouping, mentally re-charging, preparing to forge on. It is open to symbolic interpretation, but I will go with a more literal reading. Even when you’re all alone in space, sometimes you just need a moment to yourself.

Watching The Heat Solely Through Stills

They begin at odds.

They let their guard down.

They come closer together.

They bond.

They unite.