Side Effects

I am so happy to say I was not disappointed in "Side Effects" at all. You never know with these small-budget thrillers. Sometimes they slip by and no one sees them, and there's no way to know if it's because they were awful or because they just didn't have a promotional budget.

Rooney Mara, looking nothing like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, (I wouldn't have recognized her, had it not been for her unusual name) plays a depressed woman whose doctor prescribes experimental drugs. She has tried several traditional anti-depressants, and none of them work anymore. However, once she is on the new drugs, she commits a bloody crime while sleepwalking, and has no memory of the event in the morning. It's up to the viewer to decide who's to blame.

Scene by scene we become more and more uneasy. Could her doctor have prevented this? What made her become so violent? Was there something in her history that we don't know about? What was in those drugs, anyway? Is there any precedent for sleepwalkers to be acquitted of their crimes? (It turns out, there is.)

Her doctor, played by Jude Law, seems like a very nice guy at first (sympathetic to a non-English speaker who finds himself in a psychiatrist's office because of language barriers). After a while though, we learn that he's on the take of Big Pharma. This theme is so pervasive these days, we feel right at home with it. Of course, we say: this is what doctors do. The guy is pushing new experimental drugs right and left. It seems risky and uncertain -- but does it mean he's a bad guy? Hard to be sure. But he's going to suffer from the publicity of this patient's case, either way. He'll lose his reputation and be attacked by his business partners and his wife before this is over.

Meanwhile Rooney Mara does amazing things with her eyes -- they can be zombie-like, empty of all humanity; or droop downward like a heroin addict's; or shine with manic tears and anger. It's very hard to tell what's in her head, indeed.

I can't really say more than this. If you like psychological thrillers, which are frightening not because of their shock value, but because of their familiarity -- the eerie similarity to the anxious uncertainty of real life -- you will love this movie, too.

So Leo Can Fail, After All! (not really)

I'm just kidding. Leo didn't fail. But after thinking for many years "anything with this actor's gonna be good..." Well, I finally saw the first Leonardo DiCaprio film that I didn't like. Shutter Island, what a let-down. Actually, Leo did the best he could. The problems with the film had nothing to do with him, really. His acting was its usual clever/didn't-see-this-coming mixed with suave. The film however! Yikes! First of all, haven't we seen this one before? A movie about a mental institution with a "missing" patient? Unless this is your Very First Movie, (and how old would you have to be? 5? in which case it would probably scare you), you know how this is going to end.

But I was willing to accept that, as a matter of fact, and go with the flow. I had already heard that the movie was dull and predictable and squishy. I was ready to know the ending from the beginning. I figured there would still be drama to enjoy along the way. There wasn't! An hour into it, I'm sitting there wondering, So when are we going to get to the point? It was the equivalent of a chase scene where the main character is not chasing anyone. You will never know how painful it was for me to watch Leo running around, acting it up, making squinty eyes and hot demands from everyone around him, essentially purposeless. I mean by that: What drove this character? If the story were to be believed, he was a U.S. Marshal trying to solve a missing persons case. Yet he knew from the very start that this person was not really missing. So then, his puzzle to solve became.....? His interest in the place was.....? Right. You kinda had to know the ending, in order to understand what was going on.

Essentially, the reason this film was so terrible was: knowing the ending became a requirement for following the basic plot, and yet, the ending was supposed to be a surprise twist. Hmmmmmmm.....

Eyes of Laura Mars

What a hoot! Watch this and tell me how long it takes *you* to recognize Tommy Lee Jones. Seriously. This is a classic 1970s thriller which puts all the fun back into thrillers - for those of us who have grown weary of seeing Jodie Foster or anyone else trapped on an airplane.

Faye Dunaway, once again. I'm becoming a fan of hers. In this movie she's so convincing as a photographer whose vision is interrupted constantly - even when she's behind the camera! - by the vision of murder, seen through the eyes of the murderer! Hold on models, stop posing! Stop the shoot! It's also great when Laura's fumbling around in her apartment, trying to feel her way to the telephone, as if blind! Meanwhile, with her eyes open, she's actually watching her friends be killed - one by one, and she can do nothing about it!

Mostly, this was just pure fun to watch. Fun to play "who's that actor" with some recognizable but much-younger faces. (It's like a reverse version of "where are they now?") Fun to get swept away by the pounding, overly melodramatic music score. Fun to watch Tommy Lee Jones running down the street in a typical 1970s chase scene. Really fun to laugh your head off at the close-up shots of Faye Dunaway's eyes. Yep. Get this one from Netflix. It's a joy.