• Review: “The Great Gatsby”
  • Review: “Mud”
  • Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines”
  • Review: “Ginger & Rosa”
  • Review: “Stoker”
  • Review: “Side Effects”
  • Review: “Mama”
  • Review: “Zero Dark Thirty”
  • Review: “Gangster Squad”
  • Review: “Les Misérables”
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  • Review: “Any Day Now”
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  • Review: “Skyfall”
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  • Review: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
  • Review: “Looper”
  • Reviews: “Arbitrage” and “The Master”
  • Review: “The Words”
  • Review: “Celeste and Jesse Forever”
  • Review: “Lawless”
  • Review: “The Campaign”
  • Review: “Total Recall”
  • Review: “To Rome with Love”
  • Review: “The Dark Knight Rises”
  • Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”
  • Review: “Magic Mike”
  • Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man”
  • Review: “Brave”
  • Review: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”
  • Review: “Prometheus”
  • Review: “Snow White and the Huntsman”
  • Review: “Bernie”
  • Review: “The Dictator”
  • Review: “The Raven”
  • Reviews: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”
  • Review: “Chimpanzee”
  • Review: “The Cabin in the Woods”
  • Review: “American Reunion”
  • Review: “Detachment”
  • Review: “The Hunger Games”
  • Review: “Casablanca” (In Re-Release; 1 Night Only)
  • Review: “Silent House”
  • Review: “Wanderlust”
  • Review: “This Means War”
  • Review: “Safe House”
  • Review: “The Woman In Black”
  • Review: “The Grey”
  • Review: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”
  • Review: “Contraband”
  • Review: “Shame” and “Young Adult”
  • Review: “War Horse”
  • Review: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
  • Review: “Like Crazy”
  • Review: “Hugo”
  • Review: “The Descendants”
  • Review: “My Week with Marilyn”
  • Review: “J. Edgar”
  • Review: “In Time”
  • Review: “Take Shelter”
  • Review: “The Thing”
  • Review: “The Ides of March”
  • Review: “Dream House”
  • Review: “50/50”
  • Review: “Moneyball”
  • Review: “Abduction”
  • Review: “Drive”
  • Review: “Contagion”
  • Review: “The Debt”
  • Review: “Our Idiot Brother”
  • Review: “The Help”
  • Review: “Fright Night”
  • Review: “Beginners”
  • Review: “Crazy Stupid Love”
  • Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Monthly Archives: February 2013

Review: “Side Effects”

17 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

catherine zeta jones, channing tatum, drama, jude law, psychology, scott z. burns, side effects, steven soderbergh

side-effects-film

“Happy Pills”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

IF INDEED STEVEN Soderbergh is retiring from filmmaking with “Side Effects,” his last film will be as perverse a spectacle as his first, 1989’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.”  (The 50-year-old Atlanta native says he wants to pursue painting full-time.)  At 26,Side-Effects-Viral-Site-Jude-Law Soderbergh became the youngest director to win the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes.  He has made more than twenty-five feature films since then, and “Side Effects” is a devious doozie of a psycho-drama to go out on.  It’s also the first good film of 2013.

“Side Effects” centers around a depressed twentysomething named Emily (Rooney Mara) whose husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has just been released from prison after a four-year sentence for insider trading.  “I can get us back to where we were,” _MG_6630.CR2the jailbird pledges, “I promise.” Mara, in a Linda Blair haircut, mopes around their Manhattan apartment, unable to put on a happy face.  When she deliberately crashes her car into a wall, she invites the scrutiny of a British psychiatrist named Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) who offers her a veritable pharmacopeia of anti-depressants.  Halfway through “Side Effects,” Mara finally smiles and it’s the result of a powerful pill called Ablixa. Its side effects include somnambulism, crying jags, and suicidal ideation. Dr. Banks is earning 50 thousand annually as a pharmaceutical consultant for Ablixa, and when he bumps into Emily’s previous doctor (played by Catherine Zeta Jones) at a conference on ADHD, the two swap stories and a few happy pills Jones’ character has at the bottom of her purse.

And just as “Side Effects” begins to look like a critique of our chemical culture, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (who wrote Soderbergh’s “Contagion” as well) twists the plot into something else entirely.  It reshapes itself, in the Hitchcockian mode ofside_effects_still18_catherine_zeta_jones murder and double-crossers, and forces us to shift our attention, and our sympathies, from Emily to Dr. Banks in a maze of deceit and trickery. There is something old-timey about the film’s representation of lesbian women, as duplicitous man-haters, and it’s difficult to discuss further without spoiling the film’s secrets, but the payoff is appreciable.  We can only hope that Soderbergh puts down his paintbrushes and returns to the directing chair before too long.

2012 Best Actress: Will it be Riva?

07 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

alexandre tharaud, amour, best actress, emmanuelle riva, euthanasia, jean louis trintignant, michael haneke, oscar 2012, romance

amour_t614

“Hospice Pair”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

“AMOUR” IS THE provocative title to Michael Haneke’s latest and most funereal film to date.  Anyone familiar with either “The White Ribbon” or “Funny Games” will look skeptically on such a director delivering any kind of love-story in the traditional mold.  Yet, like its nakedly romantic title,” “Amour” is indeed a romance – Haneke-style.  It centers around the agonizing last days of Anne Laurent, a lifelong music teacher and Parisian esthete who inhabits a quiet apartment alongside her husband Georges.  The9 Laurent home is sparsely decorated – a few fine rugs, a grand piano, a ceramic lamp in Hermès orange – and it reflects their quiet, introverted lifestyle. They are visited by their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) on occasion, but they prefer their record collection and nightly glass of wine (alone).  Still, they foster nothing but intimacy between each other and with Eva who confesses to her father that her husband is having an affair and that her marriage is in crisis.  Sitting at a distance, Georges listens with the impassive stare of an analyst.

Anne looks a bit livelier when their former student Alexandre Tharaud (as himself) comes to call; when the man inquires about his maestro’s recent illness, Anne changes the subject and asks him to play the piano for them.  It was Tharaud whom the couple had gone to see at the film’s start.  Haneke gives us the wide shot of the music hall – Alexandre Tharaud480a shot reminiscent of the puzzling last scene in his “Caché” – and we must find the Laurents politely waiting for the recital to begin. The shot lasts longer than one expects and it demands that we look harder at Anne and Georges, and, it would seem, ourselves as another audience, another mirror.  Less ingenious is the symbolism of the pigeon which keeps trapping itself in the Laurents’ apartment; at first, it’s set free and later, it’s wrapped in a blanket and held closely to Georges’ chest.  Such catch-and-release can be found at the end to James Ivory’s “The Remains of the Day” (1993) where the bird is an obvious stand-in for a character whose wings have been clipped.

Anne is played with the deepest pathos by Emmanuelle Riva, who is 85-years-old and now the oldest nominee for Best Actress in Oscar history.   She will likely lose to a 22-Amour_love_liebe_poster_jean_louis_trintignantyear-old named Jennifer Lawrence for “Silver Linings Playbook.”  But don’t overlook, as Georges, Jean-Louis Trintignant.  He and Anne carry on like any ordinary elderly couple:  morning, noon and night, they occupy a cozy corner of their kitchen where they share tea and nostalgia. All that changes when Anne experiences a lapse in consciousness, the first tremor of her impending illness.  Georges panics as Anne stares into space, and even more so after she appears to have no recollection of her seizure-like absence.   Anne’s health deteriorates quickly and after a series of strokes, she finds herself confined to bed and reliant on Georges to feed, dress, and wash her paralyzed body.

“Amour” is about one woman’s dignity in the face of certain death, but it’s also about a husband and the burden of devotion.  Georges has a slight limp and we watch as he labors about the apartment, as if under house-arrest, in his new role as Anne’s nurse.  We are almost certain, given the opening shot of Anne in her funeral bier, that Georges will become Anne’s mercy-killer. Which is to say that Haneke’s idea of true love is that it is always a commitment and only sometimes a crime.

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