Swine flu. Bird flu. Runaway viruses. Another very up-to-date medical crisis arrives in the week’s biggest movie. In other films there’s mixed martial arts, a French entertainer fixated on sex, some folks fighting gang violence and a silent film masterpiece.
Here’s the list:
Contagion: 3 stars
Warrior: 3
Gainsbourg: 3 1/2
The Interrupters: 4
Battleship Potemkin
Creature
Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star:
CONTAGION: You’ll probably find this film has more effect on you after you’ve seen it and think about what it’s saying. While you’re watching it, as a virus spreads and kills, you’ll be looking for gripping suspense. That hardly ever materializes although there are short spells of it when people start looting the supermarkets. What you do get is almost documentary realism showing what happens when nasties like SARS or H1N1 come around. It generates a feeling of unease, more than tension.
Laurence Fishburne (interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta in one sequence), Kate Winslet, Marion Cottillard and Elliott Gould portray health officials who try to find where a new bug came from, how to grow more and develop a vaccine. That’s all scientifically accurate and quite detailed, especially the steps to trace it back to its origins. All they know is that one woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) died of it after flying back from Hong Kong through Chicago. Everything and everyone she touched has to be traced. Her son also dies but her husband (Matt Damon) seems to be immune. Not much is made of that, but it does keep him alive.
Director Stephen Soderbergh takes us through the days as the infection spreads, people clamor for protection and public order breaks down. All the while, a blogger (Jude Law) charges the medical establishment and the drug companies are hiding the truth. There’s a simple and cheap homeopathic solution, he tells the media who are perfectly willing to quote him. There are too many characters to get much involved with their personal stories, and a plodding pace at times. But the view inside the disease control efforts and the account of how fragile society really is delivers enough information to scare people. (The Ridge, Oakridge, Scotiabank and many suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
WARRIOR: The plot feels like you’ve seen it before. In a dozen boxing movies maybe. But, as you know, you can hang a lot of different ideas into one of those. Gavin O'Connor has switched the sport to the more vicious mixed martial arts and envisioned an epic, practically operatic in intensity, with allusions to Moby Dick and Ode to Joy playing to pump up the grand spectacle. Come back down though. It’s still just a boxing movie, dressed up differently.
Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton play brothers in the hard-scrabble steel town Philadelphia. Tom is an Iraq vet with a painful secret. His bother is a physics teacher strapped for money. An MMA tournament is coming to town, bringing top fighters like Koba, the Russian and an attractive purse. What a surprise. Both brothers enter and after much squabbling over incidents in their family history face each other in a big momentous final. The hammer and sickle-wearing Russian was dispatched pretty easily.
Nick Nolte is the real centre in this rousing film. He’s the boys’ father and trainer to one. Both hate him for the alcohol-driven abuse he used to inflict on their mother. Nolte gives a poignant and subtle performance as a man who has to be talked into trying for another chance. He also gives a perfect précis of Moby Dick when, in a delirious rage he yells out “Ahab, you godless son of a bitch.” The whole film has that kind of fist-pumping fervor. (Scotiabank and suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
GAINSBOURG: I hadn’t realized how big a star Serge Gainsbourg was in France. I was only aware of the one hit record that got over this far, the heavy-breathing bit of erotica called "Je t'aime… moi non plus." This bio-pic fills in more of the picture. Not all. Although it includes many songs, the film is sketchy on his career and is hardly ever clear on who he’s married to. It prefers to concentrate on his sex-drive and the many other women he bedded. Well, why not, when the list includes Juliette Greco, Françoise Hardy and Brigitte Bardot, played here perfectly by model-turned-actress Laetitia Casta.
Eric Elmosnino grabs you with a sly performance as the chain-smoking, high-living but also self-destructive composer and musician. Periodically we also get to see his alter ego, a large puppet that looks like a wildly exaggerated caricature of his own appearance and offers encouragement when he needs it. The director wrote the same gimmick in a graphic novel, where it probably looked and worked better. Still, it’s an enjoyable film that gives you a good introduction to a provocative personality, although it’s not as clear what it’s saying about his Jewish background. As a boy he openly mocked the German occupiers. As an adult, he may have been into self-loathing, but ever distracted by all those good times. (5th Avenue Cinemas) 3 ½ out of 5
THE INTERRUPTERS: Steve James has another strong documentary and it’s at least as good as his acclaimed Hoop Dreams. In this one, he watches a group in Chicago confront the problem of youth and gang violence. It got so bad at one point, TV news termed parts of the city a “war zone” and the state governor suggested calling out the national guard. A local doctor, coming back after years overseas, had a better idea. Don’t judge, he said. Treat violence like a disease; stop it from spreading and infecting others.
We get to watch three volunteers in action. Ameena, Cobe and Eddie, two blacks and an Hispanic, all have gang or violent backgrounds so they know how to talk to these people. In an early scene, Ameena steps in between two guys shouting in the street just as they’re starting to fight; heads off the sister of one of them who comes charging with a butcher knife but misses another intruder who attacks with a piece of concrete. “All of it is stupid,” she says in another incident. We get a succession of them, up close, sometimes emotional, sometimes, as with a particularly volatile motormouth named Flamo, verging on comic. The camera captures many telling moments, including a scene in a car that demonstrates how easily a small disagreement can escalate into something much bigger and a meeting where two enemies listen to the caution and shame talk but still can’t bring themselves to make peace. The film is realistic and shows the misses too. (VanCity Theatre) 4 out of 5
Also now playing …
BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN: One of the undisputed masterpieces of cinema, this silent film by Sergei Eisenstein is back, restored and showing in a new 35mm print. Even though it’s studied in pretty well every film course, it’s no mouldy fig. It moves vigorously to tell the story of a 1905 mutiny on the Black Sea that helped spark the Russian Revolution. It was made 20 years later to mark the anniversary and is most famous for a sequence that is pure propaganda.
The massacre by the Tsar’s forces on the Odessa steps is fiction but it lives on as one of the most celebrated few minutes in film, chiefly for the furious editing. Note the baby carriage in the midst of the carnage. You’ve seen it referenced, parodied or outright copied in films by Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Woody Allen and Hitchcock. There’s a montage of those clips and more here.
The original plays six times over four days (Sept. 12, 15, 17 and 18) at the Pacific Cinematheque. Check their website for times.
CREATURE: This first film by TV production designer Fred Andrews, working here as writer and director, sounds pretty ludicrous. Not that that is always a detriment with a horror picture. A group of friends are told a scary legend and then proceed to inadvertently stir up the real thing: a half-man, half-alligator in a Louisiana swamp. The locals call him Lockjaw and revere him as a god. No previews but the usual gore and nudity is promised. Note there's another group of friends in theatres right now, also in Louisiana, fighting off hungry sharks. Wonder what the tourist people think. (International Village and a few suburban theatres)
BUCKY LARSON: BORN TO BE A STAR: The ad tells you all you need to know. Bucky is standing in a spotlight, his pants have fallen down to his ankles. Typical humor from Adam Sandler’s company, starring Nick Swardson as a Hollywood hopeful, in this case in porn films which he learns his parents used to perform in. The studio didn’t bother, or is that dare, preview this for the media. (International Village and suburban theatres)
NOTE: The images are movie stills supplied by the studios and are therefore the exclusive property of their copyright owners.