Saturday, September 17, 2011

Jason watches CONTAGION

Which is kinda fun to do when you have a bit of a cough, you can at least scare the rest of the audience.

It's a pretty good movie, a serious, thoughtful take on the subject. What I was most impressed by was the ensemble cast. I couldn't tell you who the "hero" of this movie is, although there are plenty of a big name actors and actresses. Like the nature of real epidemics, fighting it isn't one brave man or woman's job, there are a lot of players, some doing good, some just getting in the way (Jude Law's conspiracy-minded citizen blogger/journalist was interesting, and I loved the line "Blogging is not writing. It's just graffiti with punctuation.") Likewise, Matt Damon was good as the husband who loses his wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) and son in quick order, and is paranoid about losing his daughter. And Kate Winslet as a the epidemiologist investigating the outbreak in Minnesota. And Marion Cotillard as the W.H.O. official travelling to China. And that's not even getting into the CDC and DHS officials (including Laurence Fishburne and Bryan Cranston). Yeah, great cast, and everyone is given his/her moment but not enough to overshadow everyone else. Compelling argument for why the Oscars should have a "Best Cast" award instead of just Best Actor/Actress and Best Supporting Actor/Actress.

Running Time: 106 minutes
My Total Minutes: 247,855

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