Amazonia

If you're watching a wildlife documentary, you expect a few things. Firstly, you expect wonderful  photography and amazing close-ups whether you're looking at an elephant or following a centipede. Generally you expect voice-over - sometimes someone like Stephen Fry reading the script, or sometimes you get the narrator on camera, like David Attenborough. You don't really expect a plot, except perhaps a loose one where you're following a group of animals over the course of a season or a migration.

Amazonia gives you the fabulous photography. It also happens to be 3D, but I don't think that adds much. It doesn't have any narration at all, which was mostly a pleasure, except when I was wondering what the particular creature I was looking at was. It does, however, have a plot. A capuchin monkey is being transported in a small plane, and the plane goes down in the rainforest in a thunderstorm. The pilot climbs out, never to be seen again, and there is the monkey, languishing in its cage with only its toy monkey for company. the next morning an enterprising mongoose unlatches the cage and the monkey is free to explore the forest.

The exploring monkey is cute and provides a nice vehicle for showing off assorted other wildlife. Walking around on the forest floor it encounters spiders, snakes and frogs. Climbing the trees, it meets other monkeys and birds of prey. Floating down the river on a clump of plant matter it encounters alligators and dolphins sloths. Then there's the encounter with a jaguar. Just to remind you that this is an animal we're looking at, the monkey gets involved in predation and takes and eats a bunch of birds' eggs out of some nests.

Generally speaking it's all good fun, and my only criticism is that the selection of wildlife did seem a little contrived  -our monkey friend didn't run into the same species twice - it was always something new. And as I said, I did wish from time-to-time that Stephen Fry was there to tell me what the amazing bird with the multi-coloured turkey-like head was. My favourite animal was the baby ( or pygmy) armadillo which was completely endearing and the thing I learned was how close to Rio de Janeiro the rainforest comes.

Amazonia 3D is what it says on the box, an amazing photographic experience packaged in a story about a small monkey.

Anne's rating 3.5/5

Gravity

A few weeks ago we discovered that The Roxy Cinema in Miramar has what they call Tuppence Tuesday which means that on Tuesdays it costs a mere $10 to go to a regular movie and $14.50 to go to a 3-D one. Given that parking is free and handy and the decor is fabulous, this is really too good a deal to pass up. So we put in our multifocal one day contact lenses (so we didn't have to put 3D specs over our regular specs), drove to Miramar and bought two of the last three seats, which tells us other people feel the same way.

Gravity is a simple story - three astronauts are working on the outside of the international space station when a bunch of debris comes hurtling through space and kills one of them, damages the space station and separates the remaining two from it. The remaining two are Jack Kowalski (George Clooney) and Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and it's a pleasure to see them being like we expect George Clooney and Sandra Bullock to be (unruffled, charming and slightly self-deprecating in his case and neurotic and a bit clumsy in hers) and yet completely convincing as astronauts marooned in space. I don't mean I forgot I was watching George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, but I was completely absorbed in their plight. This simple story is both gripping and nail biting and most things that can go wrong do go wrong.

Even without the nail-biting action, Gravity is an experience that you shouldn't miss. In the same way that few of us will get to go to Antarctica, even fewer of us will get to go to space. But for 90 minutes, you'll get some idea of what that could be like. The view is sensational, and (literally) out of this world. You'll appreciate the concept of weightlessness and more particularly how there's nothing to slow you (or other things) down once you or they start moving. You'll get the sense of claustrophobia engendered by being in a space suit and breathing a limited supply of oxygen and a sense of how lonely and quiet it is hundreds of kilometres above earth. You'll flinch as space debris seemingly whizzes past your head.

Visually, Gravity is big, beautiful, surreal and spacious. And happily it's emotionally as well as visually satisfying. Movie going as it should be, I think.

Anne's rating: 4.5/5 Ian's rating: 4/5