Contagion: You will want to wash your hands after this one!

As  a deadly outbreak of an infectious disease threatens to annihilate mankind a global team of doctors and scientists struggle to not only discover where the disease came from, but also how to stop it.

The first half of Contagion leaves one absolutely petrified. Director Steven Soderbergh essentially dropped the audience right into the action as they are introduced to Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), barely given the chance to know who she is or anything about her before she experiences a seizure and dies from the mysterious disease which subsequently starts taking lives all over the world. It was the cold, almost documentary-like style in which Soderbergh shot this, and the realistic reactions taken by the men and women of the various health organizations (a cadre of mega movie stars including Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet and others), that could not help but send shivers down the audience member's spines (and have them reaching for a bottle of Purell, as they remembered all the things they touched the last time they were in public). Soderbergh was able to leverage the audience's own fears of a virus like the one in the film possibly appearing in real life and utilized it to  make that first half of the film more horrifying than any slasher film Hollywood has put out in a long time.

It was in the last half of the film when Contagion seemed to loose steam as the plots and sub-plots wore the narrative too thin, pulling the audience in too many different directions. There was no way that the suspense and terror so readily available in the first part of the film could have been sustained for the entire running time but it almost felt like, after a certain point, Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns decided to stop pressing on driving the important parts of the story such as the cure being administered to the survivors as well as the how and whys as to the origin of the virus (the origin was explained/shown but almost as an afterthought near the conclusion of the film) and tried to tie up all of the uninteresting/unimportant threads of the story.

For a good hour or so Contagion gave one an all too realistic look at the world should it ever face a viral epidemic, it's just a shame it could not provide a worthy conclusion to that terrifying start.

Grade: C+

Inception: A Must See!

From the mind of Christopher Nolan, the man who helped make Batman a legitimate film superhero again, Inception was a caper film of a different breed for the objects that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his crew are usually looking to steal are not diamonds or cash, but thoughts and ideas. But instead of stealing ideas this time around, he is hired by mysterious billionaire Saito (Ken Watanabe) to perform (surprise) inception on a rival businessman Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). The concept of inception is that Cobb and his crew will go deep into the subconscious of Fischer and plant the idea of breaking up his father’s business, thereby giving Saito the largest energy company in the world. Their task is made all the more dangerous by the constant threat of Cobb’s dead wife Mal (who is now a projection in his mind) plaguing their attempts to complete the task.

Now before I loose you amongst an attempted explanation of the multiple dream layers, host of symbolic visuals that riddled the various conscious and subconscious arenas involved in planting an idea into someone’s mind or even the ending, which could make a person’s head hurt trying to decipher just what was real, the main point you should take away from this review is that Inception was an amazingly complex, audacious, thought-provoking and original film that is leaps and bounds above any and all movies you will rent from Redbox or Netflix for quite some time. It deserves such high praise because it challenged the audience to think and try to comprehend its labyrinthine story, quite a heady thing to ask in this era of Michael Bay-ish one dimensional Hollywood action film story structures. Add to that the dazzling visual brilliance of the picture as well as some career defining performances by the cast and the audience cannot help but be sucked into the multi-layered dream world.

It doesn’t matter how many times you watch Inception, upon each viewing you are bound to catch something different than the last time, perhaps in the way a certain shot was composed or the way a character said a certain bit of dialogue but that’s the beauty of the film. The fact that you can view the same movie over and over and still find new things, still be thoroughly engulfed in the story of a dream within a dream within a dream is incredible

Grade: A

The 5 Levels of Inception Chart: A Cliffs Notes for those who have and have not seen the film

Inception has become such a worldwide phenomenon and sparked a good deal of debate as to what exactly happens during the film. The below chart cleverly summarizes just what (we think) is happening at each level  and can be used as a handy guide to try and understand the where, why and how of the movie.