Contagion

Contagion
Review by Courtney Baker

Contagion starts with day two of an epidemic. You're left sitting there wondering what happened to day one. The film focuses on a small group of people operating during an epidemic of an unknown virus. A woman named Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) is the source of the epidemic. She spreads the disease to a few people, who spread it to a few more people, who spread it to a few more people, and so on and so forth. She spreads it to her son, and both die shortly after her return to the states from Hong Kong. Her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) seems immune somehow, and with the rest of his family dead, he’s left with only his daughter, who we follow as he tries his damndest to protect her at all costs as we follow him.

We then meet Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), a doctor who is investigating and trying to solve the mystery of the unknown illness. We are introduced to Allen (Jude Law), a blogger who makes it his mission to get to the bottom of the strange sickness that is plaguing the world. Dr. Lenoara Orantes (Marion Cotillard) investigates in Hong Kong when her trip takes an unexpected turn. Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) investigates and prepares people for what’s to come before she gets a surprise too. Dr. Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould) receives samples in his lab, and even when he was ordered to stopworking with the samples, he continues research.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Scott Z. Burns, this movie starred a great cast. This included among others Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Elliott Gould, John Hawkes, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kate Winslet, all of which have been nominated or have won Academy Awards. The acting wasn’t the problem with this movie.

So many characters were hard to follow. This movie could have been better executed with less. This wasn’t the film’s only problem. Contagion was tedious. It took effort to watch it, even though one doesn’t really have to think about it. We’ve seen the story a thousand times on the news and television. Countless movies have been made about epidemics (no, don’t worry, this isn’t the zombie apocalypse like many epidemic disaster movies… okay, zombies would have been way better). We knew what would happen. The epidemic would spread. People would be afraid, and fear drives men mad. People would be trampled for necessities, any place that could be looted would be, and people would die. It happens in every disaster- alien, zombie, flu, hurricane, you name it. But one could guess that everything would eventually turn out fine. It was predictable.

I saw this movie in an empty theater with only one companion viewing it with me. The movie bored me to the point that I took the liberty of lifting the cup holders and making myself a couch to at least be comfortable as I suffered. I lost count of how many times I asked what time it was. I think it was somewhere around five or six, if I had to guess. Contagion seemed to last for an eternity- at least three hours long it seemed. The run time is 106 minutes. It got to the point where one wished the epidemic would win and everyone would die so you could go home. Just when you think it would end, they slap on another fifteen minutes with a prom scene that was totally out of place and finally the interesting aspect of the film: the movie ends with day one.

The camera work was fine, the acting was good, and the story would have been okay if it
had been done a little differently. There were interesting scientific facts and little historical bits to be learned from it. It was just boring and predictable. The credits roll and you run from the theater, happy to go home and take a nap after that tiresome movie. So just skip Contagion.

Get the Yams Out! A review of Sucker Punch

So how do you take Sucker Punch? The problem anyone faces with a movie like this is that it's all very pretty to look at, there's a great amount of wizardry when it comes to the effects and visuals. But is it the movie we were promised? Looking at the trailers for it, we could have expected many different things with this movie: action superhit, feminist action film, or at the very least t & a. What played was none of that—it was parts of those things, but never a commitment to any one of them. That was the cause of it's downfall.

Let's be clear: I enjoy seeing nudity, as much as possible, in films I watch. While it's far, far from a requirement for my liking a film, when it's there it is a nice touch. And especially when the trailer for the film markets that nudity to me, I expect it. What was promised with Sucker Punch were many women, kicking ass, and possibly losing their clothes in the process. That's pretty much the entire idea the film is founded upon, actually. And don’t mistake me for your standard thick browed cro-magnon, who just wants to see breasts and doesn’t go for all of that 'story' or 'development' bull. You know me better than this—I'm a thick browed cro-magnon who has read many important books. But the lack of nudity is only one aspect of the cinematic switcheroo that we are being given.

So there's no nudity. That's fine, because we can move beyond that( and are practically forced to by the pace ), and enjoy some good old fashioned violence. The framing device to achieve this is strange: Baby Doll( Emily Browning ) is basically delving into a series of fantastical dreamscapes, ostensibly to gain the tools of her escape from the mental institution her stepfather put her in. Is this her mind slowly rotting, or is she a dream warrior? Director Zack Snyder would have you believe the latter, with all the fighting she does. Steampunk Nazis, Italian gangsters, and even towering mechanical Samurai are all victims to the awesome power that Baby Doll possesses in her world. And honestly, with a list like that, how can the film fail to give us awesome tapestries of pure murder and wanton destruction, especially with the director of 300 at the helm? Somehow, it does! It doesn’t matter that hordes of bad guys are blasted into nothingness, because everything shown on the screen is so proper. Part of this is the fault of the visual effects, which while well-created are very sterile in their bearing. All of this action happens, but these Nazis are too identical, these Samurai mecha too light. Another fault is the soundtrack, which comes from a very music video place—all of these fights take place with a backdrop of such booming techno music that on the rare occasions where it's lacking, we feel like something has gone wrong in the film. But because of this musical overload, none of it at all has any weight.

But all of this pales in comparison to the biggest crime perpetrated by Sucker Punch, which is the lack of it's promised feminist bonafides. See, a movie like this can oftentimes get away with it's sexiness or it's disappointing carnage, so long as it makes it's central point. But Sucker Punch worked on the idea that it would be a feminist story, even if it never outright said it—all of these images of women laying the proverbial smack down on male authority figures is no accident, and the inspiration of such acts is almost assumed based on the simple fact that they are in front of us. The problem is, in order to achieve that sort of pro-female action film, you need to do more then just show the women winning fights. There has to be unification of this message, from the costuming to the cinematography to the soundtrack. But their outfits are just a tad to slinky, the music too club-ready, and most importantly, the camera far too obsessed with the bodies of these women. No matter what happens, from a samurai sword cleaving through a Gatling gun to bare fists crippling zombie Nazis, we are always given a hearty feast of thighs, cleavage, and butt shots. It's almost as if the director wants something, but the cinematographer wants something entirely different, and this distinctively male gaze that the movie is saddled with does nothing to help it.

Saying nothing of the acting, which is actually not bad, or the ending, in which women once again are made to submit under the heel of men in an extreme fashion, the movie is still a failure on every level. Zack Snyder wanted to give us the ultimate girl-power fairytale—what we got was a long misogynistic commercial. One feels that Snyder and his writing partners could use a supervising presence in their office, not to keep them from dreaming the dreams, but to make sure they keep their eye on the prize. As is, we are left with a cake that looks okay but not great, that tastes terrible, and after the fact, turns out to not even be cake.