Diagnosis: A Little Cold

Today was the inaugural Friday Noon Movie Club event. You hadn't heard? Well. For the immediate future, I plan to attend a movie every Friday afternoon, around noon, in an attempt to keep up with what's in the theater for vocational purposes. Anyone available and interested can let me know, and I'll put you on the email list. Each week I will send an email on Wed or Thur giving the time, location and title of the movie I'll be attending that week, and I'd be happy to have joiners! Today there were four of us, and we are all a little more icked out by germs than before. Icked out being a technical term, of course.

We went to see Contagion. Originally we intended to see Margin Call, but after they posted the movie times, they changed them again, and there was no early showing of that one. The theater assures me that this is a very rare occurence. So we switched to Contagion. It is about, you guessed it, contagion. A more deadly H1N1-style virus is multiplying rapidly, taking lives around the globe. This movie hypothesizes what that would look like, what politics would emerge between the CDC, Homeland Security, different coutnries, drug companies and the media.

There are things to appreciate about this movie, namely the cast. It includes, but is not remotely limited to, Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, and two of my dark horse favorites, Jennifer Ehle John Hawkes. A lot of good performances by great actors. Not a lot of great performances.

The storyline mostly seemed believable, but somehow, in portraying a pandemic, it lacked drama. We didn't really get to see inside the heads of the people trying to get it under control, so it was hard to care too much. I wonder if director Steven Soderbergh was trying to avoid sentimental manipulation and went too far the other way instead. There was one scene that you will want to be warned about, which gave us an uber-CSI autopsy moment that I, personally, could have happily lived the rest of my life without seeing.

An interesting thread at the beginning was a shout-out to journalists--the ill health of print media means it is hard to pay for journalists to look deeper into what government agencies are doing, leaving the public in the hands of conspiracy theorists, charlatans and, worst of all, bloggers.

Mitch (Matt Damon) and his daughter are the only characters I really cared about at all, with the possible exception of Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet). Mitch's wife, Beth, is the first victim, and in an almost judgment-by-plague kind of way, she is coming down with it as she speaks on the phone to the man with whom she is having an affair.

There were also a couple of things that got in the way of taking the movie seriously. Some scenes with the killer combo of bad dialogue and acting, hazmat suits that made the wearers look almost exactly like Oompa-Loompas from Willy Wonka, and a Homeland Security official played by Bryan Cranston. He played the dad in "Malcolm in the Middle," and no matter how hard I try to take him seriously, I just want to laugh when I watch him.


Soderbergh also directed the film Traffic, which told the story of drugs, from growers to dealers to politicians to law enforcement to users of all kinds. This is like a spinoff of Law and Order; call it Traffic: Flu Unit. The movie tries to follow the trail, but there are too many characters to care about. If we had enough face time with each of them, we would be sitting there for 3 hours, and, truly, 106 minutes was enough.

But you'll never look at doorknobs, or the poles you hold onto in subways, or even people who cough in the same way again.

Next week's Friday Noon Movie Club will not be meeting in the cheap seats. I intend to take my kids to see Hugo, the movie adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Everything I've seen about it points to a wonderful film (possibly a bit scary for the youngest viewers). It was shot in 3D, and it's getting rave reviews for that aspect of it, so I might even fork over the big bucks. We are generally a 2D family. But what the heck, it's a holiday weekend. So let me know if you are interested, either for this coming week or for the short-term future, in receiving notice of when and where the movies will be. I'll attempt to pick movies I really want to see, but it will have to fit the time frame, and I'll choose the cheap theater most of the time. Maybe I'll see you there!