Tag Archives: steven soderbergh

Review: “Side Effects”

17 Sunday Feb 2013

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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.

Review: “Magic Mike”

03 Tuesday Jul 2012

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“Showguys”

Grade: A-/B+ (RENT IT)

CHANNING TATUM’S NIPPLES appear on screen a split-second before the rest of his body as he slides from a crumpled bed in which not one but two ladies lay felled from the night before.  These are the first indications that Steven Soderbergh’s new film “Magic Mike” is immersed in the body electric.  How could it not?  The narrative centers around an ambitious male stripper in Tampa, Florida who takes a college dropout named Adam (Alex Pettyfer) under his wing and onto the catwalk.  (Tatum was born to play this role, literally: penned by his production partner Reid Carolin, the dramedy is inspired by the actor’s own experience as a stripper in the Sunshine State.  Since that time, Tatum has been busy making tepid movies like “The Eagle” and “The Vow,” but here, he holds his own with newfound, leading-man likability.)

The real revelation of “Magic Mike” isn’t Tatum, however, nor is it Pettyfer, or even a repitilian Matthew McConaughey as club-owner Dallas, but newcomer Cody Horn as Adam’s sister, Brooke, who provides her brother with a sofa to sleep on while he learns the ropes at Club Xquisite.  “I don’t judge him, I love him,” she tells Mike.  Horn brings some much-needed sarcasm and gravitas to “Magic Mike,” which is skin-deep in terms of character and plotting.  Anyone familiar with the best (and worst) of hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tales like “Showgirls” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (not to mention “Klute,” “Boogie Nights,” and “Detachment”) will know that Adam will have to get knocked down before he gets up again.  There is a sweetness to Pettyfer’s naivete, especially when, wide-eyed, he remarks to Mike after a wild night out: “I think we should be best friends.”

The banal title notwithstanding, “Magic Mike” is elevated by Soderbergh’s Midas touch; in keeping with “Contagion,” the film is lit in tawny, almost sepia, colors except for when the dancers at Xquisite are gyrating in tear-away chaps and thongs.  Still, from the director of “Sex Lies and Videotape,” “Magic Mike” is surprisingly chaste; it could be the first unsexy movie about male dancers and the libidinal ladies they drive wild.  Amongst those admirers is adult movie star Sasha Grey (no link provided!).  If only “Magic Mike” had gone the full monty and thought of Dirk Diggler as its sleazy muse.

Regardless, audiences don’t seem to mind much.  Otherwise known as “the stripper movie,” “Magic Mike” raked in 39.2 million dollars during its opening weekend, a record for an R-rated film, and it cost just seven million to make.  That’s an awful lot of singles.

Review: “Contagion”

13 Tuesday Sep 2011

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“Cover Your Cough”

Film Review: “Contagion” (2011)

Grade: B (RENT IT)

“BLOGGING ISN’T WRITING. It’s graffiti with punctuation.”  This from Dr. Ian Sussman (played by Elliott Gould), an epidemiologist scrambling to find a vaccine for the pernicious pandemic known as MEV-1 in the new thriller, “Contagion.”

The blogosphere will certainly admire the fact that the object of Sussman’s invective – a San Francisco blogger named Alan (Jude Law) – is one of the lucky few completely immune to the plague.  Then again, Alan is a sleaze who capitalizes on the crisis by exploiting his readers’ panic  (Too bad I’d need a global epidemic to gain that kind of readership!)  In a Dickensian stroke, Alan’s last name is Krumwiede (pronounced “Crumb-Weedy”) and he’s as slimy as the infection himself.

Before Krumwiede comes on the scene, however, society as we know it quickly unravels after business exec Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from Hong Kong to her home in Minneapolis.  Husband Mitch (Matt Damon) is devastated when she and son Clark (Griffin Kane) quickly succumb to an illness as inexplicable as it is fatal.  It’s a cool and crestfallen performance from Damon, shot in the oceanic blues favored by director Steven Soderbergh (“Erin Brockovich,” “Oceans 11”).  Watch as his reaction hardens from disbelief to fury as an emergency room doc tells him both his wife and six-year-old son are dead.  The pathogen in “Contagion” doesn’t just infect; it ravages.  With its rapid incubation phase, and 2.5 million dead in just 26 days, MEV-1 makes SARS look like the sniffles.

To the rescue is a team of experts including Kate Winslet (as Dr. Erin Mears of the CDC), Laurence Fishburne (as Ellis Cheever), and the marvelous Marion Cotillard (as Leonora Orantes of the World Health Organization).  One of the numerous subplots involves Leonora’s abduction at the hands of an Asian family man who holds her hostage until his villagers are given the cure.  After a no-nonsense Winslet is shown an empty stadium for treating the sick, she replies: “Good.  Now give me three more just like it.”

Where “Contagion” succeeds in terms of pacing – composer Cliff Martinez provides an electronic score of blips and bleeps, which sounds like call-waiting on Mars – the film never transcends a purely base and biologic level.  The greatest explorations of contagion on page aren’t as modern as you might think.  Mary Shelley’s The Last Man may have been set in the future, but it was published back in 1826 while La Peste (or The Plague) of Albert Camus followed the Second World War in 1947.  What those two novels share is the alertness to contagion as something more than simple transmission.  Yes, a germy handshake can be a weapon, but it’s also a tie that binds.

However slick and satisfying, “Contagion” is more interested in building (then swiftly dissembling) the puzzle-like structure of a medical mystery than it is in the plague as some kind of meaningful metaphor for interconnectivity and a world flattened by travel and globalization.  “Contagion” will make you afraid, but it won’t make you think, and stripped of the idea that illness is always a metaphor, it metastasizes into some soulless installment of “Final Destination” where you end up waiting on the next character to die.