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+

Sherlock Holmes: More brawn than brains

Another day, another reboot. This time around it's the erstwhile detective from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novels that gets the Hollywood retreatment.

The game's afoot as the brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes and his faithful sidekick Dr. John Watson tackle another mystery. The nefarious Lord Blackwood has apparently risen from the grave after he was hung. He intends to create a new world order in which he and his evil group will rule. Can Holmes and Watson stop their seemingly supernatural adversary?

While this reimaging of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson might be missing the usual verbal hyperboles such as "elementary my dear Watson," the fashionable deerstalker hat that became a costume trademark of Holmes during the Basil Rathbone films of the 1940's and a plausible mystery which an audience had a chance in hell of figuring out, it did feature a number of good things. Robert Downey Jr. excelled in the title role, creating his own unique take on the classic detective. He was a scatter-brained sleuth who could cleverly deduce the evil plans of a villain before thoroughly kicking his butt and describing how he was going to do so in detailed fashion via internal monologue and oh so cool looking slo-mo shots (the boxing match in the middle of the film is a prime example of this). His interaction and chemistry with Jude Law (as a tougher than nails Watson) gave the film a much needed emotional backbone. Director Guy Ritchie infused Sherlock Holmes with his signature visual style of quick cuts, slick editing and fight sequences which were extremely intense. For all of its imagistic bluster however, it felt as though he sacrificed too much of the story and Holmes' intellectual persona, a persona that audiences are accustomed to seeing from the Holmes character, in favor of more brawls, scraps and explosios. Lord Blackwood's evil plan for world domination seemed to have gotten lost between the fisticuffs and the subplot of Watson's plans to walk away from the mystery solving gig in order to wed his lady in waiting Mary (and Holmes many attempts to stop Watson from leaving). There was so much going on and so many holes in the plot that when the audience got to the climax of the film, they might not have been entirely sure just what Blackwood was trying to do or how Holmes was going to be able to stop him.

Sherlock Holmes might have been more brutish than brainy, but it was still a lot of fun to watch.

Grade: B-