Side Effects

DRAMA, SUSPENSE/THRILLER

One Pill Can Change Your Life

★ ★ ★ 1/2 out of 5 | Rental

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Rated: R Sexuality, nudity, violence and language.
Release Date: February 8, 2013
Runtime: 1 hour 45 minutes

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Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: Scott Z. Burns
Cast: Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Jude Law, Catherine Zeta-Jones

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SYNOPSIS:  Emily and Martin are a successful New York couple whose world unravels when a new drug prescribed by Emily's psychiatrist - intended to treat anxiety - has unexpected side effects.

REVIEW: Steven Soderbergh has been been busy lately. He directed Contagion and Haywire in 2011, Magic Mike in 2012, and now Side Effects to start the new year. Contagion writer Steve Z. Burns reteams with Soderbergh, looking to recreate the tension they created two years ago. 

Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law, Rise of the Guardians) works long hours at the hospital, sees numerous patients at his own practice, and participates in pharmaceutical studies - all in an effort to keep his wife and stepson living a comfortable lifestyle. Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara, Prometheus) waits for her husband Martin Taylor (Channing Tatum, Magic Mike) to be release from prison where he was incarcerated for four years for insider trading. Upon his release, Emily keeps a brave face but finds herself struggling to keep her emotions in check and her mental health balanced. After she runs her car into a parking garage concrete wall, Emily is visited by Dr. Banks as a psych consult. Released from the hospital, Emily starts to see Dr. Banks as a patient. After consulting Emily's previous psychiatrist Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones, Broken City), Dr. Banks prescribes Abrixa as a medication to fight her depression. After continued treatment, Emily is worse off than before, causing a sleepwalking incident that puts her in the psych ward again. As Dr. Banks reputation and personal life come into question, and his life starts to unravel, Dr. Banks takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of Emily and her strange surreal life.

Steven Soderberg brings another one of his stylize and cinematic films, akin to Contagion and Traffic, to screen. He uses his signature lighting, and alternating warm and cool tones to tell the story just as engaging as any of the plot points. Scott Z. Burns' story is slow and steady, setting up for a more interesting third act. The slow pace of the film allows director Soderberg to use his visual craft to build the story. With a movie of this type, it is important to build a proper foundation. Law, Mara, Zeta-Jones, and Tatum help to build those blocks, but the story suffers due to unnecessary waiting. Jude Law shows why he is such an exceptional actor. Rooney Mara, fresh off the Prometheus and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also shows her ability as an acting chameleon. The character of Emily is the most crucial to the success of the story, and Mara does a superb job getting the job done.

The halfway point of the film is where the pace picks up and when the film become worthwhile. As Dr. Banks life unravels, his practice folds, and his marriage suffers, Jonathan finds himself on the wrong end of life's diagnosis. Not all the pieces fit and not all the results seem likely, but yet he finds that he is on the declining slope of a downward spiral. The thought of losing control of one's faculties brings uncertainty to where both Emily and Dr. Banks may end up, and keeps up the intrigue.

Dr. Jonathan Banks answers a question from an inquiring party as to why he practices psychiatry in United States versus the UK. He replies that citizens of the United Kingdom feel that psychiatry and psychiatric medicines is for people who are sick and that Americans believe psychiatry and psychiatric medicine is for people looking to get better. That statement reveals much of the practice of pharmaceutical trials, patients going to numerous doctors, and the combination of old and new marketed drugs assisting in mental recovery. All points to a mental health industry that isn't looking to make anybody better but instead wanting to line pockets. So is it any wonder that Rooney Mara's Emily may or may not succeed in beating the charges against her even with her history of mental instability.

With a long set up and careful crafting of the necessary pieces of the puzzle, Side Effects is a movie that is well-done and well-crafted, but needed to get the audience engaged with a faster pace. The direction is good, the acting is top notch, and the overall story is solid. With any mystery of this type the success or failure of the film based on quick set up and an intriguing investigation. The cat and mouse game between the major characters is the best part of the film.

Side Effects could have been a great thriller. Soderberg is a respected and talented director. The cast is exceptional. But slow pacing and some obvious outcomes affects just how many side effects were not listed on the bottle.

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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Unlikey Alliances

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Rated: R Graphic Nudity, Brutal Violent Content, Torture, Language, Rape and Strong Sexuality
Release Date: December 21, 2011
Runtime: 2 hrs 38 min

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Director: David Fincher
Writers: Steven Zaillian, novel by Stieg Larsson
Cast: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Wright, Steven Berkoff

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SYNOPSIS: After a lawsuit leaves a journalist at the wrong end of a career he takes an assignment to investigate a 40-year-old murder. Making some headway, he requests a brilliant but troubled research assistant to help him.

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REVIEW: Director David Fincher has helmed such unique fare as Flght Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and intense mysteries like Zodiac. Based on the first of a trilogy of international best selling novels known as the "Millennium Trilogy" published posthumously by the Swedish author Steig Larsson, Fincher takes on Americanized version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (from the book translated to "Men Who Hate Women" and the 2009 Swedish produced film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Does Fincher's version live up to the hype worthy of the international best-selling books and the original film trilogy?

Millennium Magazine journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig, Quantum of Solace) emerges on the losing end of a libel lawsuit against a billionaire financier named Wennerström. As his savings disappears for damages and his magazine starts to flounder financially, Mikael is vetted then approached by Frode (Steven Berkoff, The Tourist) on behalf of Hendrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, Priest), a retired businessman who has obsessed over the disappearance of his granddaughter Harriet (Moa Garpendal) over 40 years ago and has feared that she was murdered. As Mikael digs into the family's background and past under the guise of Hendrick's researcher for his own memoirs Mikael struggles to find the connections to the clues he has access to. Eventually, with a thin shred of proof and an gut feeling, Mikael requests the assistance of the genius troubled antisocial computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara, The Social Network) the researcher who originally vetted him for the project to begin with.

Clocking in at 158 minutes, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would seem to be too large a commitment to be worth while. On the contrary, Fincher's experience and style lends perfectly to the slow building mystery set before Craig's Mikael and Mara's Lisbeth. The anticipation of following the detectives using their own methods hooks you from the start. In fact, Mikael and Lisbeth do not actually meet face to face until the second half of the film. But while Mikael starts his investigation as a retreat from his own personal and professional problems, Lisbeth endures her own internal and external demons as she tries to make it on her own as a ward of the state with the albatross of being labeled as criminally incompetent.

Starting with the abstract introduction of the Karen O and Trent Reznor's amped up rendition of Led Zepplin's "The Immigrant Song", Reznor's scores soon recede to buzzing and pops that prod at the back of the brain like an itch that can't be scratched. Minimalistic in nature from an impressionist point of view, Reznor and Atticus Ross's work focuses the audience's attention into the fabric of Fincher's dark story and gray settings.   

If unfamiliar with the novels or the original films, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful, graphic film. Showing nudity and violence, Fincher never puts anything on display in a gratuitous manner. Some of the acts of brutality borders on the obscene and may offend some movie-goers' threshold tolerances, but rest assured that there is meaning in everything. Rooney Mara is the standout performance as Lisbeth Salander, her brilliant character both off-putting and sympathetic.

A fresh eye for this first entry of the Americanized "Millennium" trilogy, having read any of the novels or watched any of the original films, Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a serious slow building take at the brutality that man can inflict on man, or on women. Since I did not have previous works to rely on to spoil the ending of this version, I came away entertained and in awe of what good story, great characters, and fine direction can accomplish.

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WORTH: Matinee and DVD

The Social Network

65 Billion Reasons

[Justin Timberlake, Jesse Eisenberg, Armie Hammer, Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara]

image from digitaljournal.com

RANT: There are so many movies to see that I do not have any time between films to even come up with a rant. Sorry, maybe next time.

SYNOPSIS: Mark Zuckerberg develops the coding for Facebook during his under graduate studies at Harvard. Along the way to becoming the youngest billionaire in the world, he alienates his friends and schoolmates, facing multiple lawsuits.

Aaron Sorkin writes and David Fincher directs “The Social Network” based on the book, “The Accidental Billionaires”. The movie deals with the development, launch and success of the social network, Facebook.com, as well as the betrayals, backstabbing, and litigation that occurred along the way.

After his girlfriend Erica breaks up with him, a drunken Mark blogs about the experience and decides to take his mind off of her by creating a face match site where all of the Harvard girls with Harvard house photos are displayed two at a time side-by-side in a “Who Is Hotter?” poll. Writing the code in a few hours, and taking down the Harvard servers a couple hours after the site’s launch, Mark is put in front of the academic board and put on 6-month probation. He draws the attention of the Winklevoss twins with the idea to create a Harvard community site that touts exclusivity to its members. Realizing that he can create a site far superior, Mark goes to his friend Eduardo for money to get his own site running, all the while alleged that he never intended to build the Harvard Community site. TheFacebook.com becomes a hit and launches to colleges around the country, and eventually internationally.

The story is told through a series of flashbacks as Zuckerberg sits in two separate depositions, one against his former best friend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, the other against the Winklevoss twins from Harvard who allege Zuckerberg stole their intellectual property for the Facebook concept. The flashback concept is a little disorienting at first, but it quickly works itself out as a slick way to tell the tale. Jesse Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg with genius level emotional detachment and, ironically, social ineptitude. Andrew Garfield plays Zuckerberg’s supportive friend and business partner, Eduardo Saverin, as if he was truly Zuckerberg’s only friend. Justin Timberlake gains even more acting cred after “Alpha Dog” as Napster founder and eventual Facebook.com partner, Sean Parker. Armie Hammer plays double duty as both Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, with help from Josh Pence from the chest down. Everyone delivers in this film, from Eisenberg’s speed monologues, stoic posture and biting sarcasm to Timberlake’s party pace and paranoia.

Who would have thought that a movie about the development of Facebook.com would be interesting? I certainly did not. But the pace and structure of the film, plus the acting by all involved kept me interested. Now, if I only had a Facebook account so I could tell all of my friends!

Worth: Matinee and DVD

I am also trying out a new rating system shown below based on reader reaction to my somewhat complex monetary rating scale. I will give both ratings and see what kind of reaction I muster. A movie can receive up to 5 popcorn buckets. Why popcorn buckets? Because I am a slave to the thousand + calorie delight! Enjoy!

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Not Your Father's Nightmare

[Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara]

I need to pose a question. Why is it a necessity to vocalize every obvious plot point at a horror film? Don't get me wrong, I love the hoots of appreciation when a teenager get killed in an especially enjoyable way. I just can't understand when someone behind me, all the while kicking my seat, has to point out that the mother is lying to her daughter and hiding a crucial bit of information. These actors are not going to get an Academy Award for powerful performances... come on!

SYNOPSIS: A group of teenagers realize that the death of their friend is far more than a suicide when they realize that they are all dreaming of the same bogeyman with a gloved hand of blades, Freddy Krueger.

The real point of discussion for the new "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is whether it can hold up to Wes Craven's original. There has been obvious comparisons between Robert Englund and Jackie Earle Haley, the differences in Krueger's practical make-up, and the similarities and differences in the script and execution. 25 years may have past between Craven's original film and Samuel Bayer's reboot, but only 7 years have past since the last "Nightmare" and Bayer has to work against a mythology of 8 previous Krueger films.

I watched the new film on Saturday, then followed it with the original that afternoon on DVD. Let get to the Tale of the Tape!

Freddy Krueger - Robert Englund brought a witchy hook nose and sarcasm to a horror villain and made Krueger an industry icon. Jackie Earle Haley brings a more realistic burned-up bogeyman with more malice. Englund's Krueger was a caricature from the beginning, Haley's Krueger more malevolence and focused.

Winner: Jackie Earle Haley

Execution (not that way!): Wes Craven wrote and directed a film that revitalized the genre in the early 80s. Bayer takes a script from Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer and gives the reboot a new millennium sensibility. The plot is a little darker than the original, the dream sequences slicker, the origin story better executed and tighter, the use of "micro naps" as a plot device more inspired. The cast selection for the 2010 version is more appropriate to the market, definitely not cheesy like the original. The new version does use a couple of ideas from its predecessor - Freddy through the wallpaper, the blades on the pipes, teen girl dragged through the school hall in a body bag - but shakes up the rest.

Winner: 2010

Execution (yes, that way!): Both have a glove of blades coming up in the bubble bath. Both have the girl flying up around the ceiling that ends with 4 slices through the belly. In the latter, Bayer amps up the ceiling crashing tenfold. The boiler dream scenes in the reboot are grittier and more decayed, especially with previous victims strung up like slabs of beef. The original has Freddy slicing off his own fingers, cutting open his belly to show he's made of maggots and goo, and coming up with great one-liners to go with his kills. The reboot has Freddy more driven and methodical, his one-liners simply a product of his twisted mentality. In terms of originality, you simply need to view the first kill in the diner and a steak knife (Clue!, anyone?) to find the clear "cut" winner.

Winner: 2010

Growing up with the "Elm Street" franchise, I loved Freddy Krueger and his antics. As the original series wore on though, it eventually became a perpetuating parody of itself. As much as I respect what the original brought back to the genre, the new "Nightmare..." breathes new life into a dying man, even though he lives only in our dreams.

Worth: Matinee and DVD