If a movie is advertised all summer long on Diamondvision at Dodger Stadium, I should skip it.
The over-hyped film this baseball summer was "Contagion." I went to see it. And, unlike a lot of the characters in the movie, I lived to talk about it. Barely.
Literally and figuratively, "Contagion" is one that you should avoid like the plague.
Yeah, that's the first play on words in this review. Bet your boots there will be more.
As Steven Soderbergh's movie started to unspool and you already knew this was all about a deadly germ attacking the masses, I suddenly became aware of sounds around me. A cough two rows back. A hack on the other side of the theater. Someone who keeps sniffing behind me. You suddenly realize how vulnerable we all are. One of the characters makes a reference that a person touches their face countless times in a single hour. I immediately feel an itch start up on my right cheek. Oh, my God, this film is going to scare the Goobers out of me.
Er, not so much. Ten minutes into "Contagion" and you realize this is just another gust of inflated air blowing from Hollywood. And maybe the guy sniffing behind me is detecting the odor from the screen.
In reality, "Contagion" is a disaster movie pretending to be a MSNBC documentary, which is a funny concept in itself. There are loads of big-name, socially-conscious actors cavorting and then writhing on the screen, but, at the same time, Soderbergh tries to get the audience to believe they are doing "Masterpiece Theater" without Alistair Cooke. That mix never works.
Irwin Allen is a movie director who really knew how to make this genre work with C-list laden, but delicious concoctions like "The Towering Inferno" and "The Poseidon Adventure." Lots of back numbers from SAG reading, not acting dialogue that could have come from a sketch on "The Carol Burnett Show." The result was always fun to watch because you knew the filmmakers got the same joke they were letting you in on.
At the end of his career, Allen went one calamity too far and put together a movie that was all about some deadly bees called "The Swarm." The cast of this mess read like the New Year's Eve invite list for a party at Ruta Lee's house. Check it out.
Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia DeHavilland, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant, Jose Ferrer, Patty Duke, Henry Fonda, Cameron Mitchell, Slim Pickens, Bradford Dillman, Fred MacMurray.
A Hollywood Who's Who that wound up in a celluloid What's That. When I saw "The Swarm," I remember thinking that Irwin Allen had lost touch with his own invention as there was nothing even remotely campy about this film. It may have been the worst movie I ever saw.
Why bring it up again now? Because I would like to revisit it again, side-by-side with "Contagion" and see which one was worse. Was it "The Swarm" for failing to deliver a funny movie? Or "Contagion" for failing to deliver anything at all?
So, this deadly germ is mutating all over the place and people are dropping like bobbysoxers at a Frank Sinatra concert in 1946. We meet all sorts of uninteresting characters who are played by the latest slate of Hollywood do-gooders led by Matt Damon and Kate Winslet. Havoc is being wrought all over the world and, as we learn at the end of the movie, it's all because an infected bat was eating a banana and dropped it in a pig sty where it was eaten also by a pig who wound up being slaughtered to be spare ribs in a Chinese restaurant shepherded by a chef who doesn't wash his hands and then greets his patrons.
Got that? Who lives? Who dies? Who cares?
Kate Winslet hangs around long enough to discover that Nyquil isn't going to be the cure for what ails her. Jude Law is some environmental kook who writes a blog and I was ashamed to be included in that same sub-category. Lawrence Fishburne, a graduate from the "look-at-me-I'm-acting" academy, hams his way through another one and now everything he plays comes off like Thurgood Marshall with a peptic ulcer. There are others in the cast, too numerous to mention, and all of them should be in serious litigation with their agents before long.
Now recast this with the likes of Charlie Sheen, Snooki, anybody Kardashian, and Nancy Pelosi and then you have my attention. But, in Soderbergh's efforts to be overly important, the only victim is his audience. Whereas a film like "Jaws" singlehandedly got people to stay out of the ocean water, all "Contagion" manages to do is a slight uptick in sales for Purell Hand Sanitizer. Meanwhile, we are coached to avoid any future contact with the following: bats, bananas, pulled pork, and Gwyneth Paltrow, in that order.
"Contagion" is yet another perfect example of how Hollywood has completely forgotten how to have fun with its own craft. A misguided swill that gets off the floor for ten seconds only to collapse on the floor with a resounding thud. Hopefully, it didn't disrupt the sleep of the neighbors downstairs. It certainly didn't keep me up.
So, does anybody know if "The Swarm" is out on DVD?
Dinner last night: Turkey burger and potato salad.
1 comment:
The movie had me for the first thirty minutes or so, drilling down on my germ phobia. But the story really goes flat after that. They do not deliver on their own premise: what would happen if millions died from a fast-spreading virus and there was no vaccine. The social chaos of that scenario is never fully explored, which is a letdown and lets all the air out of the movie.
I expected rioting, looting, neighbor killing neighbor. No dice. Matt Damon gets a gun but doesn't have to kill anybody as the apocalypse inches ever closer.
He just refuses to let his daughter's boyfriend in the house. Yeah, that's dramatic.
They blew it. They didn't even kill off the film's most annoying character, a bigmouth blogger played by Jude Law whose accent meanders from Cockney to Aussie and back again.
Too bad. I wanted to be scared.
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