Early last May I ran a complaint piece about Paramount Home Video’s failure to punch out a Shane Bluray. It’s my responsibility, I feel, to bitch about this until they finally give in and agree to fund the proper restoring and remastering of George Stevens‘ 1953 classic. An off-the-lot source says it’ll be a moderately expensive project, which is mainly why Paramount has been stalling for so long. Except Shane is one of the respected jewels in the studio crown, and what monarch would allow one of its legacy symbols to lose its shine?
Shane is one of the most beautiful color films shot during the big-studio era, but if you pop the current DVD version into a Bluray player and watch it on a 50″ plasma, it just looks okay…and it should make your eyes pop out of their sockets.
The Shane elements need to be upgraded, but Paramount doesn’t want to spring for this. The applicable term is “bad parenting.” A father doesn’t refuse to send a talented child with great potential to college because tuition is too costly, or because there’s not enough of a back-end profit motive. A person who’s doing well in life doesn’t allow a member of his/her family to live in declining circumstances if he/she is able to help. A son or daughter doesn’t keep an aging parent in a musty, second-rate assisted living facility when a first-rate one is affordable.
Other DVD/Bluray sites should make an annual rite of shaming Paramount into doing the right thing, but most of them won’t, I’m guessing, because they don’t want to risk alienating a big advertiser.
Last year’s posting: It feels mildly irksome that Paramount Home Video has never to my knowledge stated an intention to issue a Bluray of George Stevens‘ Shane. Wouldn’t this fit almost anyone’s definition of a no-brainer? It’s all but de rigueur for major studios to give their classic titles Bluray upgrades, so it seems odd that one as beautiful-looking as Shane would be sitting on the sidelines.
It’s been almost seven years since Paramount Home Video’s Shane DVD, which was fine for what it was. But it’s time to step up and do this film proud and give a nice angel erection to George Stevens, who no doubt has been wondering from whatever realm or region why Paramount hasn’t yet bit the bullet on this thing.
The Bluray format (coupled with an exacting, first-rate remastering, of course) would dramatically enhance if not do wonders for Loyal Griggs‘ legendary capturings of this iconic 1953 western. To my eyes Griggs’ richly-hued color lensings — he shot The Buccaneer, The Ten Commandments, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, White Christmas — were on the level of Jack Cardiff‘s.
This morning I asked Paramount restoration/remastering guy Ron Smith (who supervised the superb work on Paramount’s recently-released African Queen Bluray) if a Shane Bluray was at least in the planning stages. Guys like Smith are told to never say “boo” to guys like me without corporate publicity’s approval, but I wanted to at least put this on the table.
The cost of the just-announced N.Y. Times digital subscription plan, which kicks in as of 3.28, seems a wee bit high. We’re looking at three different kinds of flat-fee buys. Access to NYTimes.com on smartphones will cost $15 per four-week month, access to the same on phones and the iPad2 and other tablets will cost $20 every four weeks, and an “all device” access will cost $35 bills per month. In other words, if I want full access on my laptop I’ll be getting the $35 plan…right? I don’t know, man. I’d go $25 to $30 bucks a month, or roughly a dollar per daily issue, but $35 leaves a bad taste.
Every week there are movies I need to see that I know (forget “strongly suspect”) will be deflating to sit through. Especially during the March-April doldrums. Because this is a time in which films seem to take things from you rather than give. They sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Which is why it’s a good time for Blurays and DVDs of oldies and obscura and films like…say, Roger Vadim‘s Pretty Maids All In A Row or Blurays of Buster Keaton‘s The General or Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Battle: LA represents one kind of ordeal (i.e., unrelenting shakycam + CG assault) and Carey Fukanaga‘s Jane Eyre surely represents the other end of the spectrum. (One glance at Mia Wasikowska in costume and I feel instantly weakened.) And then there’s the brownish-bleachy color in Dana Adam Shapiro‘s Monogamy, that sense of slowly bleeding to death while watching Abbas Kiarostami‘s Certified Copy and the casting issue (yet to be discussed) that gets in the way of Jonathan Hensleigh‘s Kill The Irishman. I don’t even want to think about even glancing atRed Riding Hood or Mars Needs Moms or Electra Luxx…forget it.
You know what isn’t half bad, even though it’s opening this Friday only in New York? Crayton Robey‘s Making The Boys, about the writing, performing and filming of Mart Crowley‘s The Boys In The Band. It seems to overemphasize here and there and could stand a little tightening, but it’s a very decent, above-average capturing of early to late ’60s gay culture and showbiz culture in New York and Los Angeles. It conveys what an enormous struggle it was for Crowley to write the play, and what a huge strike it was for everyone involved in the play and the film (or both), and how quickly it all evaporated after the Stonewall rebellion of ’69, and yet how Boys lives today in a historical sense and also a tragic one, given the fate of most of the original cast members.
Jacob Aron Estes‘ The Details, which I saw this morning, is about things going badly for a Seattle-residing doctor and family man (Tobey Maguire), in part due to his own poor decisions but also because of horrible pre-ordained luck — fate or God or some overpowering force simply being against him. A similar theme drove the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man — God doesn’t care, and He might even be messing with you because He’s a perverse mofo possessed of a sick sense of humor.
Cosmic disfavor is clearly indicated in The Details in the very first scene. Maguire is shown sitting alone in front of an office building during the day when all of a sudden a large piano falls from above, flattening him. We all know what it means when anything falls from the sky in a movie (like the frogs in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Magnolia) — i.e., someone up there is displeased. So this morning I asked Estes if he could express what his film is saying theologically, in 25 words or less. He said that God isn’t really in his film and that we all create our fate or destiny with our choices and our character. That struck me as blatantly dishonest given his use of the falling piano, but maybe I’m being too strict about this.
Today the constantly agitating “CitizenKaned4Life” asked “what do you make of this whole Red State thing, Jeff? The internet’s abuzz — partially about the film, but mainly about Kevin Smith’s self-financed distribution roadshow trek. I understand you’re undoubtedly busy seeing films, but this all went down last night, and — at least compared to other sites right now — your web silence regarding your former employer is starting to become slightly deafening.”
Anyone with the vision, cojones and marketing savvy to self-distribute their reportedly not-great film and make a decent profit has my respect. If Smith succeeds financially, good for him — maybe he’ll inspire others to follow. Saying that he “could not think of anything worse than creating a film and turning it over to a studio to market” is more than understandable.
As for the film itself, there’s been a general “eff the press” policy re viewings. A few days ago I asked Kevin for help in getting a ticket to last night’s screening. He was too busy to respond or whatever, and he was testy with me when I wrote to ask a question a week or two ago. But he’s always been straight and decent with me so I’m figuring he was stressed. I also asked a publicist with ties to the film for help — zip.
I could have worked it some more and landed a ticket, sure, but before last night I’d been persuaded that Red State wasn’t a very good film (a trade reporter told me he’d heard it was close to unwatchable, or words to that effect) and that it frankly wasn’t worth the trouble. So I said “screw it — there are too many better-sounding films to see.”
The post-screening reaction hasn’t been as bad as all that, although Justin Chang‘s Variety review was a decisive thumbs-down. Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn has written that “despite admirably intense performances, the movie can’t seem to settle on a specific tone..[it] movie runs the gamut from suspense to camp and back again.”
Ricky Gervais “will not be invited back to host the show next year, for sure,” a member of the HFPA has toldPopeater‘s Rob Shuter. “[And] for sure any movie he makes he can forget about getting nominated. He humiliated the organization last night and went too far with several celebrities whose representatives have already called to complain.”
Ricky Gervais during last night’s Golden Globes awards telecast.
That’s the HFPA for you — all about image and politics and scumbaggery. “Any” movie that Gervais makes “can forget about being nominated”? In other words, this person is saying it’s about more than just not hiring Gervais again. If he/she can be believed the HFPA is going to do what it can to blacklist Gervais by indirectly scaring producers into not hiring him or funding his projects for fear of any Gervais film being shunned by the Globes. This, at least, is the import of the quote that Shuter has ran.
I’m putting this down to heat-of-the-moment emotion. A cooler perspective will no doubt prevail. But if any sort of anti-Gervais prejudice or blackballing is ever detected, wouldn’t it be lovely to somehow make life equally problematic for HFPA chief Philip Berk ?
From Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci: “It seems like the only person in the room last night who knew that a grotesque farce was happening was Ricky Gervais, and he was shiningly spectacular in his attacks on the smug self-satisfaction rampant among the shallow guests who had just answered, with a straight face, questions like ‘Who are you wearing?’ on the red carpet. And honestly, he didn’t go far enough. How can you take this shit seriously? The fact that the HFPA is being sued for breach of contract in what amounts to a bribery situation is enough to make anybody throw up their hands and wonder what the point is.”
From Marshall Fine: “I’m ready to start a Facebook campaign to dump Anne Hathaway and James Franco as hosts of this year’s Oscars to give the job to Ricky Gervais. Snarly responses from his targets aside, Gervais was the only thing that made the patently bogus Golden Globe Awards broadcast bearable Sunday night. Obviously, Hollywood stars don’t like to have their praise parade rained on by a comedian calling, ‘bullshit!’ from the opening minutes of the whole proceedings. But really — what other sane response was there?”
I have my Lesley Manville obsession, and TheWrap’s Steve Pond has a thing about Javier Bardem‘s performance in Biutiful. I feel the same way, actually, as does Ben Affleck and Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger and Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Guillermo del Toro, et.al. Here’s how Pond puts it:
“Every awards season is rife with injustices, but one in particular stands out so far this year. Javier Bardem’s performance in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s haunted, crushing tone poem Biutiful is a towering achievement, a magnificent performance that should comfortably sit on every list of the great acting accomplishments of the year.
“Without saying much – Jesse Eisenberg likely spouts more words in the opening three minutes of The Social Network than Bardem does in the whole of Biutiful — Bardem subtly evokes and embodies a world-weary Everyman living with a ticking clock and the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“Guillermo del Toro has called Bardem’s performance ‘monumental’; Sean Penn said it’s the best thing he’s seen since Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris.
“When I saw King’s Speech, I thought Colin Firth gave the best performance I’d seen in a couple of years,” Ben Affleck told me at a party for The Town a couple of weeks ago. “Then I saw Biutiful.” He shook his head. “Javier is on another level from the rest of us.”
“Memo to Academy members: SAG and Globe voters blew it, badly. Don’t you do the same.”
All these admirers plus the jury at last May’s Cannes Film Festival had no problem seeing Biutiful and recognizing what they’d seen in Bardem’s performance. But this kind of thing, let’s face it, doesn’t play as well with Average Joes. Many if not most American moviegoers (including film industry types) are simply too grief-averse — too married to the idea of a movie lifting your spirits or acting like some kind of friendly quaalude — to summon the character to see Biutiful. Can we be honest? Can we call a spade a spade? “Grief averse” is a polite way of saying “too shallow.”
If Hollywood Reporter investigative hot-shot Kim Masters is reporting about the curiously high cost of making James L. Brooks‘ How Do You Know (i.e., $120 million not counting marketing), you can bet she’s not focusing on this 12.17 Sony release just to pass the time of day. She’s circling because she smells blood.
Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon in James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know.
It’s a Kim Masters “uh-oh” story, in other words, because this romantic dramedy has only just begun to be shown over the last few days (delaying press exposure is always a sign of concern), and because chattering naysayers are guessing that the probable box-office tally will be in the realm of Spanglish ($55 million worldwide) rather than that of Nancy Meyers‘ It’s Complicated ($220 million all in).
Why did this occasionally deft, not terrible, sometimes amusing but strangely artificial film cost $120 million? Talent. Reese Witherspoon got $15 million, Jack Nicholson pocketed $12 million, Brooks and Owen Wilson both earned $10 million (with Brooks expected to receive extra “backend” bucks for writing, producing and directing) and poor, bottom-of-the-totem-pole Paul Rudd took home a lousy $3 million.
Costs also mounted due to Brooks being a “slow and meticulous” worker, according to a production source, as well as a decision to reshoot the beginning and end of the film.
In short, it was apparently unwise of Sony honchos to have approved spending this much dough to make How Do You Know. The term that might best describe their reasoning might be “inexplicably detached.” As I watched the film, my feeling was that as charming as it sometimes is, How Do You Know is clearly not going to be an across-the-board hit and probably should have been brought in for under $50 million, and even then it might not have broken even.
The word to all the agents and managers should have been “we love Brooks and are committed to keeping his flame burning, but it’s not the ’80s or the ’90s any more and we have to face facts and work within the realistic financial realm that his movies now reside in — they’re now labors of love. James L. Brooks used to be a gold-seal brand, but he’s no longer the person he once was. None of us are. The fact is that Jim has, financially-speaking, become a kind of hand-to-mouth indie-level guy, in a sense. GenY and younger GenX audiences don’t know or care who he is, and Spanglish was a turd. So if you love and believe in Jim, as we do, accept back-end participation deals with next to nothing upfront, and then we can all hug each other and move forward and make this movie and hope for the best. Oh, and Jim? That goes for you too.”
I need to underline again that while much of How Do You Know feels oddly inert and sound-stage artificial, it does deliver here and there and is not, by my yardstick, calamitously bad. As I said yesterday, I can see a portion of the critical community being okay with it. But Brooks is clearly holding on to a compositional shooting aesthetic that used to be and no longer is. The world has moved on and he has not. Because of this older-filmmaker, shot-on-a-sound-stage, key-lighted-to-death quality, How Do You Know is going to be rejected, I’m presuming, by the under-40s and play only with the older GenX and boomer women and couples, if that.
I’m not saying the just-revealed True Grit one-sheet is on the level of that much-derided King’s Speech poster that appeared a couple of weeks back, but it does seem like a bit of a problem in a somewhat similar way.
Like the fake assembly of Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Wright in the King’s Speech poster, the Grit job is a digital grouping of the four leads (i.e., they didn’t pose together), and the only one who looks right is Matt Damon‘s greasy-buckskin gunslinger (i.e., the Glenn Campbell role).
Halle Steinfeld seems slightly stunned and glassy-eyed and just…I don’t know, giving off a certain vagueness of purpose. She looks flat. You look at her and you go “what?” And Josh Brolin, off on the right, looks like a 9 year-old with an adult face. I know he’s supposed to look smaller due to being in the background, but he looks like a midget. (Is that a bad term to use these days? If so I meant “height challenged.”) And Jeff Bridges is just doing the ornery old bear thing. The big-bellied Crazy Heart drunk with a rifle and an eye patch. Ahm gonna sluhr mah words and all….take a little nip now and then…shoot me a buffalo or a coyote…don’t you go a triflin’!…aah got me a home in old Montecito.
The individual posters are much better. They’re fine, in fact. Just lose or re-do the group thing.
Twice over the last two years I’ve felt it necessary to rid Hollywood Elsewhere of the loons — i.e., the intemperate thinkers and ignorance-spreading extremists. Honest debate is obviously vital and necessary, but people who deliberately spread gross untruths are being removed. Call it a reaction to the midterms and being enraged by mainstream media lies about what’s really happening in this country (a situation that was brilliantly explained by Bill Moyers a few days ago), but I’m feeling a primal urge to flush out the more obnoxious righties.
Two conservatives (Travis Crabtree and Thunderballs) got the boot within the last 12 hours. Moyers and the late Howard Zinn are two of my personal heroes, and the afore-mentioned commenters assaulted their reps with cheap, ludicrous rightwing mythology, and that’s why they’re gone.
Crabtree wrote that “you don’t get any pinker” — socialist, Communist-leaning, vaguely subversive — “than Bill Moyers or Howard Zinn.” Moyers’ reputation is beyond reproach. Zinn, who died last January, actually did believe in a form of socialist philosophy, but one based upon an understanding that the rich and powerful will always attempt to suppress and manipulate the less rich and less powerful, and that a good government will always strive to redress this imbalance. And I won’t allow rightwing hammers to push the totally discredited idea that free-market selfishness is the only acceptable U.S. theology.
Differing opinion is the lifeblood of any comment forum, but accusing this or that learned person of being “pink” is odious and belligerent, and I simply won’t tolerate that kind of poison. The 1950s philosophies of John Wayne are dead, or will certainly be smothered ’round these parts.
Thunderballs said that Zinn “is no different than Glenn Beck” and “the fact that Zinn is actually taught in schools is horrifying.” To equate Beck’s hysterical, ignorance-pandering ravings to Zinn, a left-wing professor and social historian who wrote one of the most influential and widely respected counter-history books in the history of this country is just sickening. It’s way beyond the pale.
For whatever reason HE house-cleanings tend to happen in the early fall. The first “Stalinist Purge” happened on 8.30.08, and the second one (directed more at snarky slapdash writing than the the Fox News brigade) happened on 9.6.09.
I am actively looking for others to remove. Those who object to guys like Travis Crabtree and Thunderballs being banned from this site are urged to consider leaving of their own volition — please. The knives are out and, as I put it two years ago, “the house is being tented and the bugs will be killed.
“Interesting, thoughtful, well-phrased opinions of any kind are eternally welcome here. But the uglies, mark my words, are getting the boot.
“I believe in beauty, redemption, catharsis and the daily cleansing of the soul. I live for the highs of the mind — for the next nervy retort, impertinent crack, witty turn of phrase, turnaround idea or wicked joke. And I know — we all know — that blunt-gruff reactions and persistent ideological ranting works against the flow of such things.
“I will not permit the infinite array of reflections about life, movies and politics that could and should appear on Hollywood Elsewhere to be suppressed or pushed aside by the relentless hammerhead barking of a small cadre of ideological Mussolinis, tough guys, hardballers and friends of Bill O’Reilly.”
“These things gotta happen every five years or so, ten years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten years since the last one.” — Clemenza to Michael Corleone in Francis Coppola‘s The Godfather (1972).
I’m two days late and two dollars short, but the MPAA’s decision to give Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech an R rating is nothing short of surreal. It’s all about a single scene in which Colin Firth‘s King George VI, during one of his speech-therapy sessions with Geoffery Rush‘s Lionel Logue, experiences an emotional breakthrough of sorts as he lets go with a string of vulgarities in a Tourette’s Syndrome way.
This is another example of that old, much-ridiculed MPAA tendency to give films with blue language the same R rating that they routinely hand out to blood-caked torture porn. Late Monday night Hooper toldL.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein that the decision means that “violence and torture are okay, but bad language isn’t. I can’t think of a single film I’ve ever seen where the swear words had haunted me forever, the way a scene of violence or torture has, yet the ratings board only worries about the bad language.”
This is the second ratings slapdown suffered by the Weinstein Co., which has justifiably railed against the MPAA’s having given Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine an NC-17 over a couple of no-big-deal sex scenes. The prime offender is reportedly a hotel-room sex scene between the married Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, although it isn’t the least bit titillating — it mainly conveys the resentment that has built up between them.
There’s really no logical reason to show respect for the MPAA. Their values are almost Tea Party loony. But there’s also no reason for the Academy to wave away Blue Valentine because of the NC-17. It deserves to be one of the ten Best Picture nominees, I feel, as a gesture of respect for its emotional honesty, high-quality acting and John Cassavetes stamp. You have to have at least one “little” movie in there to round out the pack.
Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs (20th Century Fox, 11.24), which I saw earlier this evening, is first and foremost a hit. It’s charming and affecting and likable in a “good Eloi” sort of way, or in the way that cultivated mainstream audiences tend to go for. It’s sharp and polished and beautifully shot and acted and cut, and just grooves right along with sass and wit and generous nudity and undercurrents that are Jerry Maguire-ish at times.
I’m not claiming that the overall tone matches the James L. Brooksian brand in the classic ’80s sense, but it certainly flirts with this and does in fact reach that pinnacle from time to time. For my money Love and Other Drugs is Zwick’s finest film yet — hell, it is his best. But how ironic that he’s hit the jackpot by putting aside his passion for heavy historical dramas.
It’s a very tight and assured romantic dramedy (or “emotional comedy,” as post-screening moderator Elvis Mitchell put it tonight) that delivers an intensely sexual, emotional hair-trigger relationship story about two avoider-dodgers (played with wonderful verve and assurance by Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, both delivering the most appealing performances of their careers).
I’d been told that Hathaway’s performance is the killer, and it is, I suppose, because you can read every emotional tick and tremor on her face, and because your heart goes out to any character coping with a debilitating disease (stage-one Parkinson’s) and who wants to keep herself aloof and in control. But Gyllenhaal gives his most winning performance ever — not the deepest or darkest or saddest, perhaps, but 100% likable with no audience-alienation issues except for emotional avoidance. They’re quite a pair, these two. All you want is to see them keep it together and somehow make it work.
Love and Other Drugs costars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway following tonight’s screening at the Regal E-Walk on 42nd Street.
LAOD is set in mid ’90s Pittsburgh and partly based on James Reidy‘s “Hard Sell: Evolution of a Viagra Salesman,” and has been co-written by Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz and Charles Randolph.
It’s about Jamie Randall (Gyllenhaal), a Phizer salesman on the make, and how he falls in with Maggie Murdock (Hathaway), an emotionally brittle and guarded (and yet openly sexual when so inclined) woman coping with the Big P, and how things brighten and then deepen for them and then get gnarly and strained and then fall apart, and…that’s all I’ll say. It’s set against the mid ’90s Viagra boom, which is introduced about 40 minutes into the narrative. Jamie has been selling Zoloft for Phizer with middling results, but when Viagra comes along it’s champagne-fizz time.
Oliver Platt plays Gyllenhaal’s mentor, and I wish he had more screen time because you can sense potential…but he isn’t quite allowed to bring anything home. Hank Azaria has a lightly layered, medium-sized role as a randy physician, and Judy Greer has a small part as Azaria’s sweet-tempered receptionist. George Segal and Jill Clayburgh play Gyllenhaal’s parents in one early scene and that’s all.
Josh Gad is Gyllenhaal’s Jonah Hill-ish younger brother — a boorish man-child fatso who reps the film’s only serious mistake. Gad is in another film entirely. His presence eventually got so bad that he turned me off just by being. He didn’t have to say a word.
Love and Other Drugs isn’t a deep-well soul film, but it plays its own game in a sharp and likable way, and sometimes quite movingly.
Or…whatever, it won’t qualify in that regard and will just please audiences and capture the admiration of most critics (apart from the Eric Kohn-Guy Lodge nitpick crowd) and make money hand over fist. And that’ll be enough. It’s not Alexander the Great. It just works, is all. LOAD has charm and pizazz and, okay, sometimes strained humor, and yet it never slows down or goes off the rails, or at least not to any worrisome degree.
So forget all that Bill McCuddy crap (passed along in this column on 9.7) about it being “a light romantic comedy” that is “mediocre” and “facing shaky prospects at the box-office.” The guy I spoke to last February about a Pasadena research screening was much closer to the mark.
And I’m not kidding about it having the potential to wangle its way into Best Picture contention. Unless, that is, certain people get pissy about it. A guy I talked to in the men’s room after the screening was going “eeew, it’s two different movies…eeew, it doesn’t blend…eeew, it veers too sharply between broad comedy and disease-anguish and hot sexuality and heartfelt love and heavy emotionalism.” So you can be Eric Kohn and go “no, no…I want something else! This doesn’t fit into my comfort-blanket idea of how movies like this are supposed to work.” And that’s fine, Eric. Go to town and send me a postcard,
LAOD isn’t any one thing, and that’s the fascination of it. It’s not dark enough to be The Apartment, it’s not easy and it’s not “farce” and it’s not just hah-hah funny, and it’s not dramedy as much as comedy with a thorny and guarded edge. The tone is farcical one minute, dry and glib the next, and then it devolves into Josh Gad-Jonah Hill-level humor, but thankfully not too often or for too long. And then it turns melancholy.
Love and Other Drugs director Ed Zwick, moderator Elvis Mitchell following tonight’s screening
Hathaway is so intense and hard-cased that she ups the movie’s overall game. We can spot her theme from the get-go. She doesn’t want a real love affair with anyone because she knows it’s not going to last because she’s doomed in the long run. We’re introduced to her as someone dealing with stage-one symptoms like intermittent jitters and losing the physical ability to use scissors and her taking drugs to control this, but her condition is never over-dramatized.
The film spends some time on the Parkinson’s effects. Maggie and Jamie go to a big drug fair in Chicago, and she discovers an alternative convention across the street focusing on organic Parkinson’s remedies, and goes over to this event. We see some real Parkinson’s people talking up their personal stuff the way the unemployed talked for Up In The Air, only on a stage with a mike. There are two or three scenes in which Maggie is shown taking senior citizens across the border to get cheaper drugs in Canada.
The core of the romance is Jake’s overcoming his shallow relationship history, and Anne overcoming her emotionally aloof thing. And both Hathaway and Gyllenhaal make their characters come vividly alive. It’s a pleasure to get to know them and share the time. I’m looking forward to catching this at least a couple more times.