BEFORE: OK, I'm pulling a short work week, but it's intentional - I need to get away for a couple of days, between two major film festivals at the theater, both with long shifts. At the same time, I said I would go visit my parents in May, but we didn't want to deal with all the Memorial Day traffic, so we're doing a mid-week road trip to Massachusetts. I'm really only losing one day of work, but with a day of driving on each side, it's a 3-day trip. I'll watch this movie and one more, then I'll have to pack. I think I can just bring 1 DVD with me, and watch another on my phone, so I won't fall behind. And I can afford this because I have been pulling long shifts and made some larger paychecks, but I was going to save that money to get me through July and August. Now I really will have to find that summer job after the theater closes in mid-June, or else I'll have to go back on partial unemployment. Something to think about tomorrow during that long car ride...
Channing Tatum carries over from "Bullet Train".
THE PLOT: A young woman's world unravels when a drug prescribed by her psychiatrist has unexpected side effects.
AFTER: Well, this one started as a quirky little film about a woman trying to overcome her depression with various medications, and then it ended like a super-serious and complicated "Law & Order" episode. Even from reading the description, I thought maybe this might have been a comedy, but it's just not. Not to give anything away here, but I thought for quite a while that this was just going to be social commentary about our country's dependence on mood-altering medications, and the fallout from that. Remember a few years ago, when people were sleep-eating and sleep-cooking while on Ambien? Yeah, something like that, only a bit more deadly....
Jude Law is back, this is a film that (it turns out) could have been included a few weeks ago in the main Jude Law chain, but then I would have been one over, and I wouldn't have hit Memorial Day's "Top Gun" film on time. So now it's here, between two Channing Tatum films, and I guess that's a better place for it, because now it's part of the chain that's going to get me to Father's Day and July 4, and I'm still right on track for both of those.
Jude Law plays a psychiatrist here, and bonus, his character is a father, but he get so obsessed with his patient's case that he drives his wife and son away. But then later on he gets them back, so that's OK. But getting there takes a lot of doing, because he's got to prove something very unlikely, that his patient conspired with her previous psychiatrist to murder her husband, and make it look like she was unconscious and under the influence of her medication at the time. Hey, if you can cook a meal or eat a cake while you're essentially sleep-walking, what else can you do, without being held accountable for your actions?
This was directed by Steven Soderbergh, and reviewers at the time described it as "Hitchcockian", but I don't think Hitchcock would have dabbled with a storyline that invoved taking various drugs and displaying side effects, or pretending to. That all seems a bit too "internal" for Alfred to deal with, I think he preferred simple shootings and stabbings over pharmaceuticals and depression. The husband had been in prison for insider trading, another plot point Hitchcock wouldn't have touched, and then when he got released it seemed like he was going to right back to his old tricks, also he was going to take a job in another city, and I guess maybe his wife just didn't want to move? Jeez, he didn't even ASK her first, he just decided for both of them that they were going to move to St. Louis or something. What a dick.
What's weird is that there are probably much, much easier ways to kill someone and not get charged with murder. But then, people don't always take the easiest path when they do things. Still, I bet if you really wanted to kill somebody, and you took some time to come up with the best way or most efficient way to do that and not get caught, this method would probably not be at the top of the list. It's a lot of work for the payoff, so I question whether anybody in real life would go to all this trouble. Just saying. What's probably the greater sin, however, is the fact that depression is a very real condition for many people, and using it as a motive in a murder-mystery relationship thriller kind of sells that whole condition just a bit short, I think. So there's probably a good film to be made about depression and the actions taken by depressed people, only this ain't it, it's kind of a bait-and-switch.
Still, some good twists here, better than the usual ones seen on "Law & Order" classic. I'm not even going to get into the possible connection to Pride Month, because it's possibly not a positive one...
My wife and I had an argument last month that was pharmaceutical-based, and it was over this drug, Skyrizi - maybe you've seen the commercials for it, but that was part of the problem. I knew this medication was for plaque psoriasis, because I listen to this parody lounge singer, Richard Cheese, and on one of his albums he sang the Skyrizi jingle ("Things are getting clearer...now...") but my wife was convinced that the drug treated Crohn's disease, and I felt I had to correct her - she sang the Skyrizi jingle SHE knew, and it was totally different. So we got involved in a dispute similar to the old "Tastes great...Less filling" battle from the old Miller Lite beer commercials. Because it turns out the medication has TWO functions, it simultaneously fights TWO conditions, and they've got TWO completely different commercials and jingles for this medication, and we had been watching different TV shows with different target audiences. I don't know how this is possible - maybe it's like how Viagra was created to treat male pattern baldness, then they found it had another, more popular use - so we were somehow BOTH right? There's probably a relationship-based life lesson in there somewhere.
Also starring Jude Law (last seen in "The Rhythm Section"), Rooney Mara (last seen in "Nightmare Alley"), Catherine Zeta-Jones (last seen in "Broken City"), Vinessa Shaw (last seen in "The Weight of Water"), Ann Dowd (last seen in "Green Card"), Polly Draper (last seen in "Obvious Child"), David Costabile (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Mamie Gummer (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Vladimir Versailles, Michelle Vergara Moore, Victor Cruz (last seen in "West Side Story" (2021)), Elizabeth Rodriguez, Marin Ireland (last seen in "The Phenom"), Carmin Pelaez, Andrea Bogart, Mitchell Michaliszyn, Timothy Klein, Sheila Tapia (last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Russell G. Jones (last seen in "Touched with Fire"), Susan Gross, J. Claude Deering.
RATING: 5 out of 10 clinical trials
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