As I write I'm fighting a cold that I blame on Gwyneth Paltrow, even though I'm pretty sure I haven't come in contact with the woman.
Contagion is a very well executed medical thriller. I'm more often than not bored by medical thrillers, like Outbreak or The Andromeda Strain. Anyone want to change my mind?
I appreciated Contagion's lack of single scenery-chewing hystrionic heroics, as well as the clever timeline and origins of the epidemic.
I do find Gwyneth Paltrow's role here interesting. First of all, and ...SPOILERS!.... there is something quite intensely psychotronic about seeing the top of Gwyneth Paltrow's skull sawed off and her skin peeled all over her face. It's almost as if someone had read Camille Paglia's repeated criticisms of her and decided to support the hate or smash the view that she's an insipid android...or something.
Secondly, I've written before about horror movies as social control - i.e., who lives and dies as a reflection of societal mores, etc. etc. It's an old story, but Paltrow's storyline gives one pause. The storyline is by no means obvious or moralistic, though, and she doesn't wear her virus like a red A.
A note about the venue. Salt Lake City has a wonderful theater called Brewvies. A definite new for me; a pub and a movie theater. A perfectly legal beer while you watch a movie. In Salt Lake, no less. Now Brewvies was recently subject to an unfortunate fine because of a law. A law that states that booze and bare boobs, butts, together are not permissible. Never mind that these are celluloid boobs and butts and whatnot. Read about it here.
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Comments
In my teens and 20s, there was a great rep cinema in my city, the New Yorker, and particularly in its early days, each moviegoing experience there was marked by waiting to hear the first knocked-over empty beer bottle roll down to the front of the theatre ... that's when you could actually see the screen through the near impenetrable cloud of pot smoke for something like "Eraserhead."