Steven Soderbergh’s thriller begins with the shot of blood on a kitchen floor, then flashes back three months. This lets the viewer know that the depression saga that follows will turn into more of a thriller eventually. Wait out the beginning, with Rooney Mara as the morose spouse of a Wall Street trader (Channing Tatum, star of Soderbergh’s previous movie, Magic Mike) whose four-year insider-trading sentence is about to end and Jude Law as her pharma-peddling therapist. The first 20 minutes might outdo Silver Linings Playbook for the number of references to pyschotropic drugs, real and fake. Some other time, Soderbergh might have made an exposé of the ways in which the pharmaceutical industry encourages psychiatrists to medicate their patients. (The good doctor is being paid $50,000 as a “consultant” for enrolling patients in one study.) But this is a thriller, even if it looks like a docudrama for awhile, especially the courtroom scene, which seems dully realistic.
Written by Scott Z Burns, also credited with Soderbergh’s Contagion and The Informant, Side Effects comes to seem undeniably contrived, but increasingly watchable if you don’t mind none of the characters being especially ingratiating. Catherine Zeta-Jones seems oddly flat as another therapist, but Law’s is the primary character. He watches his life unravel after what seems to be a small error in judgment, and fights back. Thorny ethical questions, lying at the junction of medicine and law, are suggested, but not explored. Quiet suspense will have to suffice. And remember, ordinary criminals will stab you in the back, but professionals use more subtle weapons.
IMDb link
viewed 1/23/13 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/23/13
Showing posts with label pharmaceutical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pharmaceutical. Show all posts
Friday, February 8, 2013
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Love & Other Drugs (**)
This is about as disjointed as you might expect from a romantic comedy-drama adapted from a non-fiction book about a pharmaceutical rep. (This explains why the movie is set in 1996.) Jake Gyllenhaal plays the rep, Jamie. Jamie is very desirable to women, as we can tell from a series of overdone scenes of women yelling phone numbers, offering up casual threesomes, and swooning at the most obvious pick-up lines he offers. But even a young stud must make a living, and so Jamie gets a job in the glamorous world of pharmaceutical sales. After just six weeks of training, he’s a “fully qualified health care professional” assigned to convince, cajole, and sometimes bribe doctors into prescribing one depression drug versus the other. This early section of the movie is clearly the one from the book. Sleeping with the staff, as (fictional) Jamie does, or even tossing out the competitors samples, as he also does, might not be in every rep’s bag of tricks, but the sweet-talking of the receptionist, the free sports tickets, the invitations to medical conferences in Hawaii, and the parking-lot approaches to recalcitrant doctors were certainly standard practices in the 1990s. (Some of the more obvious bribery has been curtailed since then.)
But then Jamie meets Maggie (Anne Hathaway), a patient with early-onset Parkinson’s and a fear of commitment, and the movie enters romantic-comedy territory before again transitioning into a “poignant” third act. Watching this, in which the raunchiness merely seems crass, the sex scenes redundant, and the transition from comic to serious anything but fluid, makes you appreciate the gifts of Judd Apatow (Knocked Up), who juggles the same elements in a way that seems more natural and much cleverer.
The pharmaceutical industry exposé, such as it is, is oddly done. For anyone paying the slightest bit of attention, the influence of salesmanship and other non-medical considerations on doctors’ prescribing habits should be obvious, and Zwick even has Maggie taking old folks on drug-buying runs to Canada, yet at no point does anyone actually say anything bad (or good, for that matter) about the pharmaceutical industry or the health-care system of which it is a part, or suggest that any ethical issues might be raised by elevating the profit motive so high. I have the suspicion that the real-life drug company’s approval was sought in the making of the movie. (The real Jamie got fired after his book was published.)
As much as I enjoyed Hathaway’s multiple nude scenes, they put me in mind of the Deana Carter album title Did I Shave My Legs for This? I think Anne might one day write something called Did I Show My Tits for This?
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz East [PFS screening] 9/29/10 and reviewed 9/29/10 (revised 11/17/10)
But then Jamie meets Maggie (Anne Hathaway), a patient with early-onset Parkinson’s and a fear of commitment, and the movie enters romantic-comedy territory before again transitioning into a “poignant” third act. Watching this, in which the raunchiness merely seems crass, the sex scenes redundant, and the transition from comic to serious anything but fluid, makes you appreciate the gifts of Judd Apatow (Knocked Up), who juggles the same elements in a way that seems more natural and much cleverer.
The pharmaceutical industry exposé, such as it is, is oddly done. For anyone paying the slightest bit of attention, the influence of salesmanship and other non-medical considerations on doctors’ prescribing habits should be obvious, and Zwick even has Maggie taking old folks on drug-buying runs to Canada, yet at no point does anyone actually say anything bad (or good, for that matter) about the pharmaceutical industry or the health-care system of which it is a part, or suggest that any ethical issues might be raised by elevating the profit motive so high. I have the suspicion that the real-life drug company’s approval was sought in the making of the movie. (The real Jamie got fired after his book was published.)
As much as I enjoyed Hathaway’s multiple nude scenes, they put me in mind of the Deana Carter album title Did I Shave My Legs for This? I think Anne might one day write something called Did I Show My Tits for This?
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz East [PFS screening] 9/29/10 and reviewed 9/29/10 (revised 11/17/10)
Friday, June 4, 2010
Splice (**1/2)
Coming barely a week after Craig Venter’s announcement that his team had created a synthetic bacteria from man-made DNA, this release is nothing if not timely. One day, its premise that a couple of pharmaceutical company researchers (Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley) could combine human and animal DNA into a new creature may become quite plausible. And yet, should that happen, it's certain not to be like this.
As sci-fi, Splice is weak. You would think with the wealth of new information on DNA that there would be more science in a movie like this. We never find out what got spliced with the human DNA, but apparently it’s whatever’s required by any given scene. The two scientists—named Clive and Elsa after the actors in Bride of Frankenstein—are supposed to be brilliant, but their scientific process seems akin to mixing up a witch’s potion. Even they’re surprised, several times, by their own creation, which grows into something, or someone, looking like a little girl with a tail and chicken legs. This actually looks better on screen than it sounds.
As for the human elements in the movie, I can imagine that real scientists will groan at the usual Hollywood portrait of arrogance, impulsiveness, and seeming disregard for moral implications. In fact, the film does try to grapple with ethical issues—the meaning of humanity, the responsibilities of scientists, even, indirectly, abortion—but does so clumsily. Elsa especially veers from cool rationality to overt emotionality and back again, but Clive also has some abrupt shifts in character. Brody and Polley, an actress and director who’s stayed under the American radar by sticking to Canadian productions (like this one, filmed in Ontario), do their best. But by the end, it’s hard to tell who's nuttier, Elsa, Clive, or cowriter-director Vincenzo Natali. Natali would have be better off not to compress the story into such a short time frame, or, alternately, not to have so much happen so quickly. Steven Spielberg’s A.I. takes a similarly kitchen-sink approach to a sort of similar theme (though it’s about robots), but by having the story happen over a long period makes it seem philosophical.
I have to admit, Splice is a lot of fun for a bad movie. It’s not a straight horror movie, and is rarely gory, but there are a number of very creepy scenes. So it may be that horror fans, particularly fans of old monster movies, will enjoy it. (The effects are a lot better than in many of those old horror films.) Frankenstein is one obvious inspiration. But James Whale’s original film has a poignancy to it, and Splice just seems silly. A key scene in the movie produced both gasps and laughs. Coming early in the second half of the movie, it signals the moment where the story goes off the rails. Like most train wrecks, it’s not dull. But in this case, less would have been more.
IMDB link
viewed 6/1/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/2–4/10
As sci-fi, Splice is weak. You would think with the wealth of new information on DNA that there would be more science in a movie like this. We never find out what got spliced with the human DNA, but apparently it’s whatever’s required by any given scene. The two scientists—named Clive and Elsa after the actors in Bride of Frankenstein—are supposed to be brilliant, but their scientific process seems akin to mixing up a witch’s potion. Even they’re surprised, several times, by their own creation, which grows into something, or someone, looking like a little girl with a tail and chicken legs. This actually looks better on screen than it sounds.
As for the human elements in the movie, I can imagine that real scientists will groan at the usual Hollywood portrait of arrogance, impulsiveness, and seeming disregard for moral implications. In fact, the film does try to grapple with ethical issues—the meaning of humanity, the responsibilities of scientists, even, indirectly, abortion—but does so clumsily. Elsa especially veers from cool rationality to overt emotionality and back again, but Clive also has some abrupt shifts in character. Brody and Polley, an actress and director who’s stayed under the American radar by sticking to Canadian productions (like this one, filmed in Ontario), do their best. But by the end, it’s hard to tell who's nuttier, Elsa, Clive, or cowriter-director Vincenzo Natali. Natali would have be better off not to compress the story into such a short time frame, or, alternately, not to have so much happen so quickly. Steven Spielberg’s A.I. takes a similarly kitchen-sink approach to a sort of similar theme (though it’s about robots), but by having the story happen over a long period makes it seem philosophical.
I have to admit, Splice is a lot of fun for a bad movie. It’s not a straight horror movie, and is rarely gory, but there are a number of very creepy scenes. So it may be that horror fans, particularly fans of old monster movies, will enjoy it. (The effects are a lot better than in many of those old horror films.) Frankenstein is one obvious inspiration. But James Whale’s original film has a poignancy to it, and Splice just seems silly. A key scene in the movie produced both gasps and laughs. Coming early in the second half of the movie, it signals the moment where the story goes off the rails. Like most train wrecks, it’s not dull. But in this case, less would have been more.
IMDB link
viewed 6/1/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/2–4/10
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
The Constant Gardener (***1/2)
Skillfully adapted from a John Le Carré novel and set mostly in Kenya, this politically themed suspense drama starts slowly but builds to a powerful conclusion. Ralph Fiennes plays a UK diplomat investigating the murder of his wife (Rachel Weisz), whose efforts to help the local population had put her in harm’s way. A dully nefarious drug company seems to be the villain here, and the film could easily have been turned into a trite Hollywood thriller. But director Fernando Meirelles (City of God), who’s shot his movie beautifully, keeps the focus properly on the figure of the obsessed husband who comes to understand the woman he married only after her death.
IMDB linkreviewed 8/29/05
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