Feeling grave, anyway

Sometimes I think I need to book myself a "Crazy, Table for One". Everyone was waxing eloquent about Sandra Bullock and George Clooney's new movie "Gravity". The only stunning planetary body you will find there is Sandra's; she's worked hard and each golden, toned muscle thanks her for it. I love space movies, from "Alien" to "Mission to Mars", but I just couldn't understand why the otherwise-terrific Alfonzo Cuaron didn't figure out that for people like us we need to see, um, space. You know, the vastness of it, the silence of it, the terror of it, the nothingness of it. For the whole movie, Sandra is within touching distance of The Blue Marble. How are we supposed to feel what being untethered to anything must be like?
While "Gravity" is not boring, it simply doesn't realize its potential. Like for instance, at the end when touchdown is achieved, we want to see the heroic, immediate American response to disaster and rescue. And this is where Cuaron decides to show nothingness.
Clooney, like Pitt, meanwhile are now simply appearing in movies playing themselves it seems; you can't see a trace of effort in what they do anymore.
I wish "Breaking Bad" was still playing. That at least made terrific, crazy, wonderful sense, yo.

Ulysses goes home

He was like an avenging angel. He answered all our prayers by punishing the guilty and uncaging the deserving. And when he left the world he was happy to go. He had shed his sins, paid his dues and was free. This was Walter White, no longer Breaking Bad.

The series finale was, in a word, uplifting. I don't know what's in Vince Gilligan's brain but it should be patented. It's as though he knew what we wanted. We wanted Jesse to survive, we wanted the amoral gang who had him like a hamster strapped to a wheel decimated, we wanted Todd to die painfully by Jesse's hand, we wanted Hank's body found, we wanted part of the money to go to Walt's family (he had suffered so much for it), we wanted, at long last, the truth to fall from Walt's lips.

We wanted Walt to pay, yes, but we felt his pain, too. How do you reconcile those two things? Gilligan did it by keeping to the tenor of what went before for five years. In the final shots of Jesse screaming in relief and an at-peace Walter White who can now fold his black-and-white wings, Gilligan stayed true to the Breaking Bad motif of madmen, retribution and redemption.

Walt was dying in a cabin in the woods, so lonely as he's plugged into his chemo that he begs The Disappearer to stay for a while. Any alternate scenario would be welcome to this. So he begins his last journey, dons his final avataar. He terrorizes the couple who shafted him on Gray Matter Technologies; they are so loathsome that we, too, enjoyed the mathematical precision of Walt's revenge. Jesse's cohorts make another appearance, as does Hank in a flashback which was a lovely touch; we liked the former and admired the latter and we wanted to bid them a fare-thee-well.

When Walt rigs the machinegun and mows down Todd's uncle's band of unlovelies I, for one, was screaming Yes! They deserved their bloody end, as did Lydia in a ricin denouement that was part of Walt's wonderful orchestra of Judgement Day.

When he tells Skyler that his whole odyssey was not just about family, “I did it for me..I liked it..I was good at it...I was alive”, well, that was it, wasn't it. A man whom destiny led astray twice finally took it in his hands. He could have been rich and accomplished via Gray Matter but he was nobody both at work and at home. So when he had nothing to lose, he became a legend, a man whose brain and talent was nothing short of masterful.

In the final shot where he lay on the ground and the cops moved in, the look of satisfaction on his face and the way the camera angle panned his body surrounded by the law, you immediately thought this was a night they would speak about in whispers in drawing-rooms when they spoke of Walter White, the great Heisenberg. You can't help but feel to your bones for a man like that.

I feel to my bones for Bryan Cranston, bringing Walt to life with a look in the eyes, a swelling of the chest, a pursing of the mouth. And precision. Always precision.

I feel to my bones for Vince Gilligan whose own Gray Matter is a thing of terrifying proportions.

What a trip it's been.

10 Things.....

...a girl can't do without:

1. Black nail-polish. 2. Red lipstick. 3. J Brand jeans. 4. White button-down. 5. Black jacket.  6. Mulberry bag. 7. SK II. 8. Blahnik pumps. 9. Moleskine notebook. 10. Fictional character to fall in love with. (Mine's Stacia Kane's 'Terrible' from the Downside Ghosts series.)

Yes, please

Ate at this table in a Goa home recently and I have to say, it's exactly what I want in my own dining-room. Just whispers taste, doesn't it? And yes, to accompany the rolled napkins, a butler served. Sigh.