CONTAGION (2011)

It's common knowledge that EBOLA SYNDROME is the greatest disease/virus outbreak movie of all time, but yet filmmakers still feel the need to try and defeat it...when will they ever learn?! [walks off shaking his handsome head]

CONTAGION opens with Gwyneth Paltrow looking more haggard than usual as she leaves China and returns to her family in Minnesota. Before long she collapses and dies. Her young son also dies. MEV-1 has made it to America. You would expect what follows to be a very exciting story of the vrus spreading and humankind's efforts to stop it. That actually is the story, but it's methodical and dull. I wanted so much to like this movie because I love outbreak films, but CONTAGION is a lifeless disaster. There's absolutely zero build-up so you never even have a chance to identify or like the characters and there's so many characters all running around different parts of the world doing different things it's difficult to even figure out what the movie is even going for...if anything! Because it certainly wasn't "To entertain audience."

The trailer did look exciting, but what's implied is not what happens. Instead of an exciting race-against-the-clock thriller with a roller coaster pace, we get a slow moving clunker with the pace of an 96-year-old man masturbating to an IKEA catalog. If the transmission rate of MEV-1 was as slow as this movie, then nobody would have died...ever! Plenty of talent on the screen, but it's all wasted by the slow as molasses script and weak direction. Skip it.

Sounds like that old South Park episode.

TRUE GRIT (2010)

Fourteen year-old Mattie Ross' pa was shot and killed in cold-blood by a low-down, snake in the grass motherhumper by the name of Tom Chaney. The cops ain't worth a shit, so Mattie is forced to hire a Marshall to bring her pa's killer to justice. Shit happens, they wander around riding horses and eventually a few people get shot. The End.

I liked the film alright and there was some beautifully scenery, but I was kinda surprised at how I didn't feel any emotional attachment to any of the characters. From the very start Mattie is a cold and calculating character with more in common with a Terminator robot than a little girl and it never lets up. Right up until the very end she has the personality of an ice cube. It's like the brain of a Terminator was installed into the robot from "Small Wonder". Jeff Bridges is entertaining, but he could have reeled it in and been less hammy.  Also, he uses such an heavy mush-mouthed voice that you need the subtitles to understand everything he's saying! Matt Damon, well, he's actually pretty funny and the closest thing resembling a human of the main characters. I liked him.

I just wanted more depth to the characters. A short 10 minute build up at the beginning showing the father as a good man and Mattie as a human being would have helped a lot. One of the most impressive things about Ripley in ALIENS turning into a complete badass at the end was she was genuinely a nice person who was just pushed too goddamn far by the aliens and that's what needed to be shown here. We never got to see Mattie as a sweet innocent girl. There's also a lot of wasted time in the middle section that could have been fleshed out better.

Worth a watch, it's a good film.

Original - True Grit (1969)