Love and Other Drugs

Posted on February 28, 2011 at 8:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, pervasive language, and some drug material
Profanity:	Extremely strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking (including drinking to deal with stress, drunkenness), drugs, marijuana
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense confrontations, illness, brief violence
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 24, 2010
Date Released to DVD:	March 1, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004L3AR0K

“Love and Other Drugs” is the cure for the common movie, a smart, sexy, touching romance and a thoughtful exploration of a remarkable time that illuminates some of our most vital contemporary concerns.
“Ask your doctor about…” ads began appearing in magazines in the 1990’s. Before that, medication was a highly technical product requiring extensive medical expertise. But then pharmaceutical companies were allowed to advertise directly to consumers. This not coincidentally coincided with a flood of new drugs to make you not just get better but feel better, as in experience less anxiety and have a brighter outlook. Who wouldn’t want to ask their doctor about that?
And all of this not coincidentally coincided with the go-go years of pharmaceutical sales jobs. As the movie points out, this was the only entry level position in the world where you could begin by making six figures. It was like the California Gold Rush; an all’s fair era of claim-jumping and anything goes marketing tactics that included pens and opera tickets, lavish “medical conferences” at exotic beach and golf course resorts, generous “consulting fees” for doctors, beauty queen sale reps, and goodies for the medical staff. Anything to entice the people with the prescription pads to order up lots of Brand X instead of Brand Y.
Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is his family’s embarrassing failure. Co-writer/director Edward Zwick (“thirtysomething,” “Now and Again,” “Glory”) brings in 70’s stars the late Jill Clayburgh and George Segal as his parents, a nice touch. His father and sister are doctors. His brother is a dot.com millionaire. He was fired from selling electronic equipment (a boombox playing “Two Princes” nails the era in a nanosecond) for having sex with his manager’s girlfriend. So he takes a job in drug sales at Pfizer, goes through training, and gets a job selling mood elevators in the Ohio River valley. He has a lot of competition from the Prozac guys, and then comes Viagra. Maggie (Anne Hathaway) is a free-spirited artist with early onset Parkinson’s who takes buses of elderly people to Canada to get affordable prescription drugs. She sizes him up immediately as someone who is constantly looking for meaningless sex “for an hour or two of relief from the pain of being you” because she feels the same way.
Meaningless sex works out fine for a while, but then of course it gets complicated as Maggie has to cope with Parkinson’s and Jamie learns more about the consequences of the drug marketing. We see less and less of their bodies and their sexual encounters as we see more about what is going on with them emotionally.
Both the relationship at the heart of the story and the environment around them are absorbing and insightful. Almost as an aside, we see the benefits of this category of drugs as a homeless man who dumpster dives for the rival Prozac Jamie throws away literally cleans up his act and applies for a job. In a very moving scene Maggie happens on a Parkinson’s support group. She is overjoyed with the connection she feels to the other patients (played by real people coping with Parkinson’s) while Jamie is daunted by a glimpse of the future from a caregiver.
On one level, it works as a story about the real leap of faith each of us goes through in entering into a long-term relationship — faith not just in the other person but in our own capacity for “in sickness and in health,” the terror of not being known, the greater terror of being known and being rejected. The health care issues are presented in an even-handed but very personal way, not just through Maggie’s experience but through the doctor character superbly played by the immeasurably gifted Hank Azaria. He shows us a man who has his own lapses but is terribly frustrated with a system that squeezes him on every side, compromising treatment. Gylenhaal and Hathaway (getting along much better then they did as unhappy spouses in “Brokeback Mountain”) give performances of wit, courage, grace, and generosity. RX prn.

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It’s Kind of a Funny Story

Posted on February 23, 2011 at 3:57 pm

A stressed-out teenager impetuously checks himself into a mental hospital in this semi-autobiographical tale based on It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini. It is brought to screen by the talented writer-directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who have demonstrated their understanding of teenagers struggling with difficult situations in the understated “Sugar” and “Half Nelson.” Here, they show a more playful side, with witty and imaginative fantasy sequences that make the unabashed decency and kindness at its heart even more touching.

Keir Gilchrist plays Craig, a 16-year-old student at a Manhattan high school for high-achievers. He is feeling a great deal of pressure to succeed and frightened by thoughts of suicide. He visits the emergency room and when the doctor tells him he can go home, he pleads to be admitted, not understanding that it will mean he must be kept under observation for five days. “I thought you guys could do something quick,” he says. “I have school tomorrow.” Craig also does not realize that the area where the teenagers are treated is being renovated, so he will be staying on the adult ward.

Immediately dubbed “Cool Craig” by a friendly patient named Bobby (Zach Galifanakis of “The Hangover”), Craig discovers a through-the-looking-glass world that challenges the connections and assumptions of his “normal” life. The kind psychiatrist (Viola Davis) immediately recognizes that all Craig needs is some breathing room and reassurance. That gives Craig a chance to look around. He develops confidence when he sees many people far worse off than he is, and when he sees that he can give and accept help. Art and music therapy help him think of what he can express instead of how he will be evaluated. And a pretty fellow patient (Emma Roberts, with her aunt Julia’s lovely smile) is the best medicine of all.

Boden and Fleck, whose previous films had an understated naturalism, make the most of the heightened sensibility of the mental ward setting with sequences that take us inside Craig’s fantasies and memories. In one, we see Craig remembering an incident when he was five, drawing inside a tent in his parents’ living room. The present-day Craig is shown as a five year old, and then in his teen-age persona in the five-year-old’s pajamas. When pushed into being the vocalist in music therapy, Craig swings into a deliriously Bowie-fied version of “Under Pressure.” Boden and Fleck continue to show skill in casting and directing. Gilchrist, Roberts, and Zoe Kravitz as the classmate Craig wishes he could date are all first-rate, and Galifanakis leaves every bit of his stand-up persona behind to give a real performance with subtlety and grace.

It is a relief to see a movie about mental illness that recognizes the real pain but focuses on the real humanity of everyone involved, patients, staff, and Craig’s family. Craig first comes into the emergency room and tells the intake nurse that he wants to kill himself. When she hands him a clipboard and tells him to fill out a form it comes across not as callous but as reassuring. Treating his fear as routine is part of what makes him feel safe there. Boden and Fleck are now among the most reliable and promising film-makers around.

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Unstoppable

Posted on February 15, 2011 at 8:00 am

Don’t think of it as a train. Think of it as “a missile the size of the Chrysler building.” That is what the station supervisor, Connie (Rosario Dawson) says when she finds out that the driverless train is carrying toxic and highly flammable cargo and heading toward a city with a lot of people and a sharp curve that the train cannot stay on at its speed. Or, you can think of it the way director Tony Scott does — as a delivery system for adrenaline.

A speeding train. Bureaucrats who don’t understand the problem and would not know how to solve it if they did. Real working people who do both. And a couple of guys who have to get to know one another at breakneck speed as they try to find a way to stop a missile the size of the Chrysler building.

Fortunately, one of those guys is Denzel Washington who singlehandedly anchors the eye of the storm, steadying the story and adding focus and even a little bit of depth. He is, as they used to say about Superman, more powerful than a locomotive.

Sanctum

Posted on February 3, 2011 at 4:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language, some violence and disturbing images
Profanity:	Constant very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drug reference
Violence/ Scariness:	Characters in peril with many injured and killed, disturbing graphic violence, mercy killing
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	February 4, 2011

The stunningly beautiful cave scenes are breathtakingly realistic in this James Cameron-produced 3D “inspired by a true story” saga of a cave-diving expedition gone wrong.

The plot and characters, not so much.

It’s the basic “and then there were none” plotline. Foolish humans take big risks, get into trouble, and have to find their way out — literally. At first the group is hard to tell apart, but soon those who are least differentiated either escape or get killed and we are left with the core group. And it isn’t enough that they have to escape from a whole series of life-threatening perils (too wet, too high, too cold, too deep, too far); the experience also has to serve as family and couples therapy as a reluctant young cave-diver has to confront his tough old boot of a father (the expedition leader) and the arrogant, impulsive adrenaline junkie of a funder has to deal with his date on her first-ever cave experience.

Cameron’s use of 3D is splendid on this real-world Pandora. The film conveys the cathedral-like spaciousness, the claustrophobic passageways, and the vertiginous drops of the cave very well. But the structure of the film is so predictable and the characters so thin and unengaging that it feels more like watching people at a theme park than anything with any sense of peril or involvement. The best thing about the dialogue is that the actors’ Australian accents sometimes make it unintelligible. And a painful series of complicated moral choices are deployed for sensation, rather than depth — just like the hubristic expedition itself.

The Rite

Posted on January 27, 2011 at 6:00 pm

Actors! They just can’t help themselves when a juicy part comes along. And that is why Oscar-winner Sir Anthony Hopkins finds himself in “The Rite,” an “inspired by a true story” thriller about an exorcist who struggles with his own demons.

Actors who go over the top are often described as “chewing the scenery.” Sir Anthony here doesn’t just chew the scenery; he grinds it into dust.

The movie begins with Michael (“The Tudors'” Colin O’Donoghue), preparing a body for burial, the artifice of stuffing the inside of the mouth and sewing it shut to make it look comfortingly “real.” Michael and his father are undertakers, working out of their home. “We serve the dead but we don’t talk about them,” Michael’s taciturn father (Rutger Hauer) responds when Michael asks about her. Michael is not at all sure he is a believer, but in his family the only options are mortician and priest, so he enters seminary.

Four years later, he plans to leave. He is still not sure of his faith. One of his teachers persuades him (in part by threatening to turn his scholarship into a six-figure loan) to take a class at the Vatican in exorcism.

In Rome, he meets a Welsh priest named Father Lucas Trevant (Hopkins) who lets him watch as he tries to exorcise a demon from a pregnant teenager. Michael acts as the representative of the audience by expressing his skepticism — how do the priests know that it is not just mental illness? Can we believe, in an era of science and empiricism, in demonic possession?

Director Mikael HÃ¥fstrÃ¶m has a good eye and a deft touch. He films the settings beautifully. And he knows when to lighten the mood with a little comic relief, though it is a bit much when someone comes to the door and Trevant says, archly, “Speak of the devil!” O’Donoghue has an appealing screen presence and holds his own on screen with Hopkins.

But the movie falls about the same time Hopkins’ character does. Up to that point, it does a pretty good job of balancing the spooky-horror gotcha schocks with some sincerity about the validity of demonic possession. But once Hopkins starts unraveling, the movie — and the interest of the audience — does, too. (more…)