Carnage Movie Review

Carnage is an interesting choice for director Roman Polanski. It’s been 25 years since his last comedy, Pirates, and that was a complete flop. He tends toward dramatic thrillers more than anything. Perhaps after the recent troubles he’s had with his arrest in Switzerland and near extradition back to the United States he needed some light-hearted fare to ease the stress. In the French stage farce God of Carnage by playwright Yasmina Reza, who co-wrote the screenplay with Polanski, he found material for his next movie. Among the themes that tie his movies together is an often nihilistic view of a Godless world. The personal tragedies of his life may or may not have contributed to his being drawn to such subject matter, but being stripped of his parents in the Holocaust and losing his wife and unborn child to the murderous Manson family are events that can hardly be ignored when evaluating his work. Though Carnage is a comedic farce, it retains some of the motifs we find in his other work.

Contagion Movie Review: Sanitize Your Hands, Cover Your Mouth

How disease can spread without your knowing it.

Leave it to director Steven Soderbergh to take a worn out movie premise and zap us with a unique take. How many iterations of the global pandemic film can we take? That’s what I thought when I saw the ads for Contagion, which rather unfortunately make the film look much more like an action thriller than it really is. Soderbergh, working from an original screenplay by Scott Z. Burns, guts the genre of just about everything we expect. There are no chases. There’s no government cover up, though one particularly repugnant character hints at one. There’s no thumping and pounding musical score. There’s no child in danger (actually, a young child is dispatched early on with very little fanfare and no time for reflection) and no last minute rescue or rush to manufacture a vaccine to save the world.

Revolutionary Road Movie Review: Portrait of a Decaying Marriage

First published on American Madness on 23 January 2009.

Republished here with a typo correction.

Emotional abuse and marital discord have not been this explicitly depicted on screen since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton devastated each other and another young couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The barbs slung in that older film were exchanged between a husband and wife, long-married and bitter. Edward Albee’s play on which it is based poked holes in the mythology of the American dream, part of which necessitates being a happily married couple.