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+

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:Yeah, love is that complicated.

Let's be honest, everyone has had one of "those" relationships where you're never quite sure where you stand with your significant other. When the times are good, they are good, but when they're bad, it's like something your wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. But would you want to get rid of all the memories even after the good times stopped?

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a guy named Joel falls in love with a girl named Clementine. Eventually though they split up and when Joel learns that Clementine has undergone a memory erasing procedure, so she doesn’t remember him or their relationship, he decides to do the same. But during the process, he realizes that he wants to keep his memories of Clementine and attempts to stop the procedure.

Jim Carrey’s performance as Joel, a self-doubting introvert, was human and terrific. It is such a switch from the way he usually acts that it elevated the entire film. He had great chemistry with Kate Winslet (who gave a good performance as the free spirited Clementine), and the rest of the cast was solid. The originality of the story along with the dialogue was another strong aspect of the film and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (who scripted Adaptation and Being John Malkovich) deserves all the accolades he gets for this screenplay. Michel Gondry’s direction was top notch as he takes us into Joel’s mind and then proceeded to literally rip away at his memories using a myriad of special effects and photographic tricks. The best aspect of the film however had to be that it was a compelling love story. Not ripe with the sickly sweetness you would see in a Meg Ryan romantic comedy, this film gave you a picture of love, the good and bad parts, and made you realize that all those experiences you’ve had in dealing with it, makes you the person you are and to take them away would turn you into something less than a human being.

Grade: A