Colette Arrand

Tag: movie review

  • Movie Review: The Thing (2011)

    Movie Review: The Thing (2011)

    Forget, for a moment, that The Thing is a prequel/none-too subtle remake of John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing, which was a masterpiece of latex and animatronics. The Thing, after all, was a remake of Howard Hawks’ 1951 The Thing From Another World, a McCarthian allegory for the secretly infectious capabilities of communism that had, at it’s source, the 1931 novella Who Goes There?, the elements of which have been mined again and again, often to rousing success. Yes, it’s moderately upsetting that, in a year where everything from Conan the Barbarian to Johnny English got a remake or a sequel, John Carpenter and Howard Hawks couldn’t escape unscathed, but if we want these things to remain sacred, we’re going to need to burn Hollywood to the ground. We can’t learn anything from that mindset.

    Instead, let’s note how The Thing is representative of the nadir in American horror films, the product of some 30 years of devolution due to the mistaken belief that the isolation at the heart of terror wasn’t what moved viewers to the edge of their seats, but buckets of blood, focus-tested plot machinations and, oh yeah, ear-piercingly loud spikes in the music. All of these things happen in The Thing, to the point where it’s a relief when the film, already under the impression that everything old is new, moves into the kitchen of the besieged Antarctic research station, where the Thing stalks its prey as if it’d morphed into a velociraptor. For two minutes, it was nice be reminded that, yes, movies have the capacity for real fear.

    Here, the discovery of an alien specimen and his (it’s never “her” in these instances) spacecraft below two miles of Antarctic ice is greeted with the sort of warm enthusiasm one expects from a classroom of bored students in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation. Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an American paleontologist, is asked along on a mission to the site by Dr. Sander Halverson (Ulrich Thomsen), who is unnecessarily built up as an unethical, slightly villainous dude with designs on unending fame for “his” discovery. You’d think that a movie aiming to massacre a group of people one by one in ways grotesque wouldn’t need a bad guy beyond the monster, but The Thing wants us to root hard for the American girl and the pack of misfits surrounding her, so Halverson is first a headstrong jerk, then a floating head awkwardly photoshopped onto a CGI conglomeration of limbs, stingers, and teeth. It is hard to register even a blip of sympathy for the men and women trapped in Antarctica; no matter how much blood flies: The word “prequel” renders the whole story non-essential, no matter which scientist is the megalomaniac with a questionable grasp on the scientific method. In fact, The Thing makes a strong case for The Thing as it’s hero. After crash-landing and taking a 1,000 year powernap, his crankiness at being woken up by an electric drill is nothing short of understandable.

    There’s really not much to discuss when it comes to The Thing. Winstead is able as the plucky paleontologist, and some of the scenes, under different circumstances, would have been quite tense. Most of the movie, though, is spent deep frying The Thing, or on second guessing party members who don’t quite understand each other. I’ve read that Winstead’s character was inspired by Ripley, from Alien, but that transformation doesn’t take place until the very end of the movie, when we’re good and ready to see the baton passed to Kurt Russell’s gang. The movie’s two most effective scenes happen right at the end. Unfortunately, they’re among the film’s most inconsequential.

    That’s a small part of why The Thing, despite the fact that it is by no means a terrible movie, represents the nadir of American horror movies. I suspect a large part of my misgivings ultimately has to do with my inability to separate The Thing and The Thing in one major department: The special effects. In a movie like this, special effects do the heavy lifting. In 1982, The Thing set a high watermark for special effects, and everything in that movie is more visceral, more convincing than what’s on display here. Having read a review or two, there seems to be the consensus that special effects today are better than they were in the 80s because of the advancements in computer technology, which has effectively rendered whole segments of special effects making useless.

    I think the people who say that the special effects are better now are wrong, for one big reason: Special effects aren’t special anymore. This has been the argument since the special edition re-releases of Star Wars, and while I appreciate the hard work and dedication that goes into rendering a monster like The Thing, I’m less impressed by the ability to point and click something into existence than by the effort exerted to make that thing exist in real time and space. You can argue that a filmmakers’ imagination is no longer shackled by physical or monetary restraint, and, to an extent, that’s true. But movies like The Thing were special because filmmakers like Carpenter refused to let what was possible get in the way of his vision. You give a team of guys a computer and no limits, and what do you get? A wriggling, incomprehensible being assembled from spare, gooey body-parts; a creature who looks incapable of even a facsimile of life.

    But this is where we’re at now. We’re over-saturated and overstimulated. Instead of doing something new, George Lucas has spent the better part of a decade adding bodies into crowd scenes and erasing puppets from his film prints. Instead of making his debut with something new and original, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. has sucked the marrow out of something he idolizes, because old horror movies are the only ground studios are willing to allow new faces to tread on. And yet we, the audience, apparently clamor for more of this sort of thing, eating regurgitation after regurgitation, sometimes the regurgitation of a regurgitation. It’s like they see us, too, as The Thing, as if they’ve deemed us incapable of digesting organic material. Maybe they’re right.

    Rating:

    The Thing. Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. With Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Dr. Kate Lloyd), Joel Edgerton (Sam Carter), Ulrich Thomsen (Dr. Sander Halversen), and Eric Christian Olsen (Adam Goodman). Released October 14, 2011, by Universal Pictures.

  • Movie Review: What’s Your Number? (2011)

    Movie Review: What’s Your Number? (2011)

    It’s really hard to even begin a review of a movie like What’s Your Number? without selfishly floating a few things out there, so bear this in mind as I try to figure out what, exactly, I saw:

    1. As a man in a household consisting of myself, a sister, and a mother, I’ve seen a ton of romantic comedies. I was practically raised on a diet of Audrey Hepburn and John Hughes, so I’d like to think that I know what works, what’s funny, and what’s romantic. I consider myself not dude-at-a-chickflick, but an unbiased judge of these things.
    2. As a frequent grocery shopper, I often catch glimpse of magazines like Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, the former being the magazine with the article that is the crux of this film. Other than learning a few overly-complicated methods to the male orgasm (hasn’t friction worked for centuries?), I’ve learned that a good amount of the magazine publishing industry relies on making women feel insecure about their looks, their weight, and how many men they have or haven’t slept with.
    3. As a human being, I can’t help but be sad (and a little angry) about how much money our society pumps into these industries. It seems like every other romantic comedy is an artless slice-of-“life” debating the merits of one relationship crisis article or another. He’s just not that into you? You’ve worn twenty-seven bridesmaids dresses but have yet to be the bride? You’ve slept with twenty dudes? Whatever. There are well over six billion people out there. Twenty isn’t a fraction; it’s a crumb.

    But our biological clocks are ticking from the moment of conception, so I suppose it’s not all that unreasonable to feel pressure/begin panicking when, on the eve of thirty, no significant headway has been made towards our mutual goal of not dying alone. This, I suppose, is why I’m supposed to feel sympathy for the plight of Ally Darling (Anna Feris), the woman who has slept with twenty dudes and who is freaked out about the Marie Claire article (researched by a Harvard doctor, no less!) that says she’ll never find happiness.

    This, of course, is absolute crap, but go along with it for a bit. In an effort to find her one true love, Ally decides to put off everything, including her sister’s (Ari Graynor) wedding, to track down her twenty ex-loves. Because a woman can’t be expected to do these things on her own, she turns to her neighbor Colin (Chris Evans) who, as the movie has it, knows how to find people. Of course, some people are right out. Colin, for one, since he’s a womanizer and would put her over her number. Julie, a girl she slept with in college, because she’s a dude now. Gerry, a puppeteer, because puppeteers are probably more interesting than divorced guys and Miami gynecologists. She’s really hoping to settle for two options, though: A Senate hopeful (Anthony Mackie) and the son of an incredibly rich guy (Dave Annable), neither of whom question her motives for looking them up again some 5 or 15 years after their last contact. Naturally, the one who’s right for her is right under her nose, having sex with every woman in Boston. Naturally, he comes to realize that she’s the only woman he’ll ever need to have sex with again.

    I’d feel bad about spoiling the end of the movie were it not a bastardization of the same ol’, same ol’. The film’s every element is predictable. For example, if I told you that the black senatorial candidate was a Republican, would you be able to guess his sexual orientation? If I said that Ally had a “weird” hobby, would you guess which smokin’ hot bro suggests she make it her career? If I told you that the events of the film surround the wedding of her sister, would you be able to guess which character would grab a fretting Ally by the shoulders on that day to say “Go to him?”

    If you can (heck, even if you can’t), it’s probably obvious that Ally’s not a person worth your interest. To the point, she seems like a terrible person, oddly infatuated with the idea of snatching money and power without earning either, to the point that she makes her sister’s wedding about her. None of this would be a problem were the situations comic in nature, but the movie can’t, at any point, decide if Ally is somebody we should be rooting for or somebody we should hate for being a slut, and Anna Ferris, once tabbed as one of the funniest women in Hollywood, can’t make anything about her stick. In a way, the movie’s funniest moment is when Ally’s father tells her to be herself. If she really followed through on that advice, she’d be a gibbering collection of lies she’s told men so she’d get laid.

    But getting laid, as every romantic comedy would have you know, is terrible unless it’s with one partner, for the rest of your life. Last night at a Waffle House, I wound up having a conversation with the waitress about this movie. She was pretty drunk during it and couldn’t remember much, but she said “There was nothing wrong with her [Ferris]. A number’s a number. You should own it.” Her number was one. At this, the restaurant Awwwwed. Maybe someday romantic comedies will go back to being about nice women like the waitress at Waffle House, who fall in love with nice people and whose lives are complicated by more than magazine-issue stereotype. Until then, we’ll always have the rom-com slut. We’ll always have our insatiable appetite for slutshaming.

    Rating:

    What’s Your Number? Directed by Mark Mylod. With Anna Faris (Ally Darling), Chris Evans (Colin Shea), Ari Graynor (Daisy Darling), Joel McHale (Roger), Blythe Danner (Ms. Darling), Andy Samberg (Gerry Perry), Anthony Mackie (Tom Piper), Dave Annable (Jack Adams), and Aziz Ansari (Jay). Released on September 30, 2011, by 20th Century Fox.

  • Movie Review: Red State (2011)

    Movie Review: Red State (2011)

    Throughout my educational career, I’ve managed to frustrate many instructors—most of them smarter than me—who liked me, who liked talking to me, who liked my work, but ultimately had to give me a grade lower than what I was capable of. My mom, she’d drive 40 minutes from the suburbs to Detroit and stand in line patiently to speak with one of my teachers, just to be told that I was failing to live up to my potential. There was much hand-wringing; all of it justified. What do you do with potential that refuses to realize itself? That’s a question you could ask of Kevin Smith, whose Red State represents the first film of his that’s free from the yoke of an overseer. It comes close, very close, to being his first film as a mature artist, but ultimately fails to live up to its potential.

    This can be said of most of the movies Smith has done since Clerks, which was a great first feature, a great independent comedy, but established the director as a maestro of dick jokes and Star Wars references. Chasing Amy was close to greatness, but for its solipsistic treatment of sexuality. Dogma came close, but couldn’t walk away from Jay and Silent Bob. Clerks 2 refused to grow up. After the failure of Cop Out, Smith threw up his hands and declared himself done with the mainstream. He was going to make a movie his way, on his terms, and thus we have Red State, which has few comedic elements and manages, at times, to be one hell of a gripping movie. Instead of being a platform for Smith, whose rabble rousing about the state of Hollywood and the width of airline seats has not gone unnoticed, it ends up being a scene-stealer for two old hands—Michael Parks and John Goodman—who dance around Smith’s weaknesses and deliver two of the more compelling performances of the year.

    To get there, however, we’ve got to get through some stuff about a trio of high school dudes who want to hook up with a chick in her trailer. None of the teens are really that important, save that they’ve got great names (Billy-Ray!) and some of the worst movie hair I’ve seen in a long time. If Red State is a horror movie, then it is very much a Dead Teenager sort of horror film, where the teens don’t count for much beyond cannon fodder. They debate whether or not sleeping with the same woman in succession is a “faggoty” endeavor, but are off on their merry way to meet a woman named Sarah (Melissa Leo), who isn’t quite what her online profile picture indicated. In short order, the boys are knocked out and taken to a compound belonging to the Five Points Baptist Church, headed by Pastor Abin Cooper (Parks).

    Five Points: They’re a lot like the Westboro Baptist Church in that they protest funerals (including “that dead pope’s funeral in Italy”), but their extremism is taken, well, to the extreme. They aim to entrap fornicators, philanderers and homosexuals, torturing and killing them in the name of the Lord. This’d be entirely ridiculous were it not for Parks, who delivers his film-dominating sermon with such conviction that the existence of a guy like Abin Cooper is nothing short of plausible. His congregation of sons, daughters and grandchildren are enthralled by his routine, responding to his every call, exalting his words, laughing as he moons around the pulpit. He’s a charismatic guy, and charisma’s really all you need. Worse though, he’s a charismatic guy on the lunatic fringe, which is what makes him dangerous.

    After an altercation with the police (including, as the chief, the underutilized Stephen Root), the ATF are called in to search the premise for illegal weaponry. The point man on the operation is Special Agent Keenan (Goodman), who is caught off-guard when Cooper and his clan open fire from the compound. Once he radios in this situation, he’s given an order he struggles with: The complete destruction of the Five Points church. Though the film rushes through it, Goodman is good in the ensuing firefight, as is Parks, but both men are at their best when the gunfire is quiet and both are allowed to speak. Like Dogma, Red State is a film dealing with the dangers of belief. Red State is much more ambitious than Dogma, however, as it’s clear how much Smith fears what our beliefs can drive us to do. The Armageddon of Red State is intense, personal—it is not an apocalypse of loopholes, and Goodman’s character finds nothing funny about a group of nutjobs willing to turn machine guns on the society that mocks them.

    But the movie itself does. Maybe it’s necessary to laugh at Abin Cooper’s demise, to see him brought low. If that’s what we, as an audience, need to bring closure to the film, then fine, Cooper’s a fine boogeyman-cum-fool. I’d like to think, however, that we’re smarter than that, that we can deal with and rationalize Cooper without the film reaching for obvious jokes. People like Cooper are, in conversation, legitimately scary. Sometimes it’s nice to laugh off fear. Sometimes it’s better to be scared. Given the continuing radicalization of American discourse, often upon religious lines, I think the latter would have been more effective. For now, that seems like a road Kevin Smith is averse to traveling on.

    Rating:

    Red State. Directed by Kevin Smith. With Michael Parks (Abin Cooper), John Goodman (Special Agent Keenan), Melissa Leo (Sarah Cooper), Stephen Root (Sheriff Wynan), and Kerry Bishé (Cheyenne). Released September 23, 2011, by Lionsgate.

  • Movie Review: Restless (2011)

    Movie Review: Restless (2011)

    It isn’t until the end of Gus Van Sant’s Restless that I feel anything for its protagonist, who begins the film as a petulant funeral crasher, a stranger in a land reserved for those with an intimate knowledge of the dead. He has his reasons for dressing in black and sitting in on services, but I suspect most of us have our reasons for most of the things we do, known only to us. For everybody else, our intent is hidden behind a brick wall.

    Enoch Brae (Harry Hopper) is said funeral crasher, and it is at one of these funerals that he meets Annabel Cotton (Mia Wasikowska), who recognizes him as an outsider immediately. She doesn’t seem to mind his presence at the funeral. Matter of fact, she seems interested in Enoch, who is by no means a normal boy. He walks around like the disheveled, moribund hero of a 90s arthouse film. Why? That’s a mystery to her and everybody else who comes into contact with Enoch, but it’s one she sets out to solve.

    The caveat is that Annabel has cancer, an inoperable brain tumor that gives her, at best, three months to live. Her friendship with Enoch blossoms into a young romance, but it is obviously doomed. She’s determined not to let it get her down. He’s ambivalent, at times joking, at times not wanting to talk about her impending death, the march of time. They tiptoe through graveyards, childlike, trying to ignore the encroaching darkness.

    But Enoch, as I said, is moribund. Depressed. He’s got issues that he’s yet to deal with, and a dying girlfriend isn’t going to help.  His aunt (Jane Adams) suffers caring for him after the death of his parents, and he’s apparently haunted by a ghost named Hiroshi (Ryo Kase), a World War II Kamikaze with a passion for Battleship. Enoch blames his aunt for the fact that his parents are dead, and, as his relationship with Annabel deepens, he begins pushing away Hiroshi, who doubts that dating a girl on the verge of death is healthy.

    There’s a lot on the fringes of Restless. It is implied that Enoch may have tried to commit suicide. Hiroshi may be a figment of his imagination. He doesn’t go to school. He’s prone to outbursts. All of this is quite overwhelming, an avalanche of emotional detail not usually contained by a single movie. Annabel is his center, but that, as they say, cannot hold. She’s a girl interested in ornithology and Darwin, not ready to die but aware that she can’t go on. She’s told by the staff at the cancer ward that she’s brave for going through her ordeal and wonders what the cancer patients who aren’t brave must be like.

    It’s a fair question, and a somewhat tacit incitement of film characters with terminal illnesses, who are almost always flawless paragons of virtue, waiting for death to canonize them. Annabel Cotton, too, is one of these flawless sufferers—she certainly doesn’t look like cancer’s ravaging her, doesn’t often appear to be in pain—but she’s optimistic and steadfast where other films would paint her as the cloying stereotype. Given three months to live, she lives them quietly, with resolve. She doesn’t climb a mountain. She doesn’t abandon ship. She isn’t enshrined by those around her. She’s selfish, sometimes, and always human. Sad as it is to say, that’s a pretty big accomplishment for a movie with terminal illness at its center.

    Wasikowska is the most compelling aspect of the film, as she finds a way to navigate the shark-filled waters of her role without being mauled. She’s a waif and a manic pixie girlfriend in equal measure, and she’s good in that role, but the moments where she’s determined to not be Enoch’s coping mechanism are surprising in their weight and authenticity. Unfortunately, she’s destined to be just that, like the equally-interesting Hiroshi—a compelling character in the corners of another, less compelling life. Enoch’s circumstances are unfortunate, true, but even tugging at the heartstrings with all his might, he fails to earn any sympathy.

    Despite that, Restless manages to be a compelling, fresh movie. I wonder at what would have resulted had Annabel not been sick, or had her tumor factored into the plot as more than the film’s ticking time bomb, and I’m appreciative if a film manages to stir-up wonder. Though quiet, at the film’s core runs the intense machinery of desire. Like time, it never stops marching.

    Rating:

    Restless. Directed by Gus Van Sant. With Harry Hopper (Enoch Brae), Mia Wasikowska (Annabel Cotton), Ryo Kase (Hiroshi), Jane Adams (Mabel), and Schuyler Fisk (Elizabeth Cotton). Released September 16, 2001, by Sony Pictures Classics.

  • Movie Review: Abduction (2011)

    Movie Review: Abduction (2011)

    A quick spoiler for those of you considering putting down your hard earned money on Abduction: Nobody in it gets abducted. Guns are fired, people are murdered, others are beaten up, and spies from the CIA battle a rogue Russian black-ops agent looking to regain some stolen files, but the only people who get kidnapped here are Alfred Molina, Sigourney Weaver and Michael Nyqvist, who were apparently blindfolded and shoved into a van headed to Pittsburgh. There, they were forced, likely at gunpoint, to recite 20-years worth of teen action movie cliches as Taylor Lautner smiled or grimaced at them, depending on the scenario.

    There happen to be two scenarios. In the first, Nathan (Lautner), is a typical high school kid. He crushes on the girl next door (Lily Collins), gets wasted at a party, gets busted by his dad and, like your normal American high school kid, is beaten up by him in the backyard of their fantastic mansion. Lautner is all smiles here, other than when he’s about to deck his crush’s boyfriend or when he’s at therapy, where his shrink (Weaver) leads him by the hand through some angsty boilerplate. Despite the fun he has playing beer pong and riding his motorcycle, he feels weird, like he doesn’t belong at the school or with his family…a stranger in his own skin.

    If that’s not familiar enough, there’s scenario two, where Lautner discovers that his parents aren’t his parents, that he’s been trained by world-class martial artists, and that he has a Russian hit squad coming after him for unknown reasons. He finds this out because, conveniently, he was assigned a paper on missing persons, and a missing persons site had some software that aged an old baby photo of his into a shockingly accurate future-him. The girl he’s crushing on, Karen, immediately jumps to the most alarmist conclusion: “Like, ohmigod Nathan, your parent’s totally aren’t your parents! They, like, abducted you or something!”

    Only they didn’t abduct him, and they’re soon shot dead by the Russians. The CIA gets involved, and Nathan and Karen run from both groups, traveling in teen-friendly vehicles like 2011 BMWs and Amtrak trains as CIA man Burton (Molina) and the rogue Kozlow (Nyqvist) chase him down. The rest of the movie consists of standard chase scenes, punctuated briefly by bits of dialog so awkward, Sir Laurence Olivier would struggle in lending them gravitas.

    “I’m not dying here,” A man says, trying to fend off Lautner’s blows. “I’ll tell you everything you need to know. There’s a bomb in the oven.”

    And then Lautner goes to the oven, discovers that there is indeed a bomb in it (a decidedly old-school looking one that must have been placed and set magically), and manages to drag his panic-stricken future girlfriend to safety, even though the digital readout is at a comically short seven seconds. This, of course, means that the man who swore he wasn’t dying there dies, which would be sad were he not inept at his job. Later, in recounting the day’s tragedy, Lautner grimaces and deadpans “I just saw my parents get murdered in front of my eyes.”

    And that’s just it…his parents did get murdered, right in front of his eyes even, and his loss just flat does not register. Yes, I understand that he’s an “action hero” and I get that he’s got “rage issues.” But rage is an emotion, and it’s the one action heroes need. First Blood, for example, would be nothing without Stallone breaking down and crying into Richard Crenna’s arms at the end of the movie, and half of Schwarzenegger‘s best stuff would similarly be wasted were he not enraged that somebody killed/kidnapped/threatened his wife/child/Christmas cookies. Neither Schwarzenegger or Stallone were particularly known for pathos, but, bulletproof though they were, they reacted to danger as if it were dangerous. Here, in an empty PNC Park, Lautner puts his arm around his girl and cracks wise about how exciting their first date was, despite missing the Pirates game.

    Yeah bro, but your parents are still dead. Maybe you ought to work through those issues before sliding into second base.

    Rating: 

    Abduction. Directed by John Singletary. With Taylor Lautner (Nathan), Lily Collins (Karen), Alfred Molina (Agt. Burton), Michael Nyqvist (Koslow), and Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Bennett). Released September 23, 2011, by Lionsgate.

  • Movie Review: Contagion (2011)

    Movie Review: Contagion (2011)

    The horror of Contagion isn’t the disease itself, the end result of the disease or the social unrest the disease causes. The film begins with the sound of a woman coughing. That woman dies, her son dies and the people who’ve come into contact with them start getting sick, too, but the film, which takes great pains to show simple human-to-human contact–hand shaking, money exchanging, drink serving, hand holding–has a larger point: We are living in the Lysol commercial from Hell. Germs are everywhere, and while we may eventually be able to isolate, reproduce and “cure” what ails us, we’re only really able to buy into placebos (Lysol, hand sanitizer) and hope for the best. The phrase “99% effective” is the world’s largest loophole: You can’t see these things coming, and you can’t see them die.

    We can, however, see the effects of a virus play out on the people around us. The woman coughing, for instance, is Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), whose husband Mitch (Matt Damon) follows her to the hospital. After her death, on his way home, Mitch receives a panicked call from the babysitter: his son has had a seizure. He finds his son dead. In the larger world beyond Minnesota, the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization  try to get a grip on the situation, sending out disease intelligence agents in the Midwest and China to track Beth’s movements, trying to figure out how a businesswoman could have gotten people sick in China, Chicago and Minneapolis. It’s not hard to figure out: she was in a crowded room. She was on an airplane. As we travel, so too do the germs we carry.

    The real joy (if you can call it that) of this movie is watching how director Steven Soderbergh juggles the large and small scale dramas contained by Contagion. There’s Damon’s arc, where, in riot-ravaged Minnesota, he tries to protect his daughter from the virus and from other people. There’s the CDC arc, where Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) tries to coordinate the investigation of Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) while protecting his future wife, providing for the research of Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle)  and fending off the vitriol of popular conspiracy blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), who may have found an over-the-counter cure. In China, Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) is kidnapped and held hostage until a village is given the vaccine.

    Not everything holds up. Once Dr. Orantes is kidnapped, she disappears. Mitch, who has done everything he can to avoid breaking down in front of his daughter, has to put up with her as she goes from understanding to typical, complaining of being locked in a prison while the outside world goes crazy. Perhaps most disappointing is Krumwiede, who begins the film as a small-time blogger unable to get traction with the San Francisco Chronicle to a massively popular individual with 12-million unique views and a four-million dollar profit coming his way thanks to the boom in sales to his homeopathic cure. He is Sarah Palin’s image of the blogosphere–unwashed, unsexed and unhinged–and he eventually disappears into the ether without the film giving us a sense if he believes what he’s selling, or if he’s just in it for the money. Jude Law plays Krumwiede as a firebrand, which is about right, but he’s a firebrand without focus.

    Beyond that, Soderbergh manages to keep everything aloft. I wondered, a little, how a world in crisis managed to keep the power and internet running, and I wish more was made of the film’s two or three governmental sub-plots, but by resisting the urge to sensationalize any given aspect of a global epidemic (when you think about it, 12 million worldwide visitors listening to a whackjob blogger is pretty marginal) Contagion manages to do what most films marketed as horror are unable to: scare its audience. A man in the theatre coughs. A woman sneezes. Everybody is touching their face with their hands that have touched the theatre seats, drink cups and popcorn bags that have, of course, touched other people who have touched other things. We all cringe, busy with the business of dying.

    Rating:

     

    Contagion. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. With Matt Damon (Mitch), Jude Law (Alan Krumwide), Laurence Fishburne (Dr. Cheever), Gwyneth Paltrow (Beth), Kate Winslet (Dr. Mears), Marion Cotillard (Dr. Orantes), Jennifer Ehle (Dr. Hextall) and Elliot Gould (Dr. Sussman). Released September 9, 2011, by Warner Bros.