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| Hanging
on the telephone: Hathaway in Love and Other Drugs. |
Prescription
for Romance
By
Ann Morrow
Love
and Other Drugs
Directed
by Edward Zwick
Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is living the high life as a drug
rep, and doing so advantageously: His flamboyant womanizing
is good for business since receptionists enjoy his come-ons
and doctors get a vicarious thrill out of his hedonism. Some
of his techniques are so believably outrageous that it’s no
surprise that Love and Other Drugs is based on a memoir,
the comic revelations of Hard Sell: The Evolution of a
Viagra Salesman by Jamie Reidy. But Love has another
character that is not from the memoir: Maggie (Anne Hathaway),
a beautiful bohemian who has early-onset Parkinson’s. Jamie
and Maggie meet not-so-cute in the office of Dr. Stan Knight
(Hank Azaria) when Jamie poses as an intern to watch Maggie
take her shirt off. The combination of a slick comedy on pharmaceutical
profiteering with a beautiful-dying-girl-in-love plot may
sound reprehensible, and at times, it is—but these times are
either very funny or touchingly honest. Directed by Edward
Zwick (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond), with
a lighter, defter touch than usual, Love manages to
mine the absurdity of an ambitious, ridiculously attractive
con man running heedlessly into (and hopelessly falling for)
a rebellious, ridiculously attractive activist. There’s not
a single cloying moment.
After her anger subsides, Maggie agrees to a date with Jamie
because a man who is incapable of commitment seems just right
for someone like her, who lives with the fear of becoming
disabled. Aside from wanting to score with a gorgeous girl,
Jamie wants to date Maggie for her long list of doctor contacts.
In an incisive, first-date conversation, Maggie explains to
Jake that what he really wants are a couple of hours of escapism
from “you being you”—and so does she. After ripping each other’s
clothes off (their intimacy is a little more explicit than
expected, but considering the personalities—and physiques—of
the characters, it works), they both agree that Jamie is a
shithead.
It may be the first time in rom-com history that a description
of “shithead” actually propels a romance. For a romance does
kindle between them, as the film successfully navigates the
difficult realties of a couple contending with very different
and seemingly intractable problems. Even if Jamie wasn’t a
womanizer, the temptations presented by his job—he’s required
to show medical professionals a really good time—would be
problematic. The film does not shy away from this, showing
Jamie at a conference getting hit on by two beauties, and
being suddenly reluctant to take Maggie’s phone call. Maggie
is at a conference, too, a support group for people with Parkinson’s.
The film also recalls the recent greed decade—specifically,
those years when prescription drugs were the hottest commodity—without
feeling dated. The sharp script is aided and abetted by the
excellent acting, including Azaria’s small gem of an appearance,
Josh Gad’s mewling as Jamie’s newly divorced brother, and
Hathaway’s best performance yet.
Cowboys
and Ninjas
The
Warrior’s Way
Directed
by Sngmoo Lee
Asian superstar Jang Dong-gun is the warrior who finds his
way to a new life in The Warrior’s Way, an East-meets-(the
Wild) West fantasy in which a phalanx of phantom Ninjas rise
out of the sea, a rogue cavalry rides the high plains to rape,
pillage, and plunder, and circus clowns learn to defend their
big top. With its balletic, inventive action sequences, lusciously
airbrushed visuals, and unlikely but absurdly likeable characters—plus
an eminently hissable villain—the action-adventure delights
of The Warrior’s Way can be viewed as the season’s
cinematic sugarplum. Correction, make that the season’s cherry
blossom, since a flower petal plays a symbolic role in the
warrior’s change of direction.
Yang (Dong-gun) has been trained since childhood to be an
assassin, and in the film’s opening, he destroys an entire
clan, on the orders of his cruelly regimental mentor (Lung
Ti). Almost the entire clan, that is, because when their infant
princess smiles at him, Yang finds he cannot execute her,
and instead, escapes aboard a frigate bound for America. Matinee-idol
handsome, Korean Dong-gun (The Promise) learned martial
arts relatively late, and in most of his fighting sequences,
he appears more like a dancer, albeit one whose favorite partner
is a katana. Combined with strategically slowed choreography,
the fight scenes take on a mystical ambience that will later
cross the Pacific as Yang’s clan follows in pursuit of the
princess.
Yang travels to the western frontier, where he finds his only
contact, the operator of a Chinese laundry, has died. Indeed,
the town, Lode (the “Mother” part apparently having been dropped
when its gold rush turned into a trickle), has gone from boom
to bust, and only its most eccentric residents remain, mostly
the circus workers whose circus lost its audience before the
Ferris wheel was finished. But in this ghost town (where the
ghosts are mostly murder victims), Yang finds happiness. He
learns to do laundry from Lynne (Kate Bosworth), an Annie
Oakley-type tomboy who aspires to be a knife thrower rather
than a gunslinger. Needless to say, she finds the perfect
dagger instructor in Yang. The comical contrast between strong,
silent Yang and colloquially loquacious Lynne later becomes
more poignant when her tragic past at the hands of America’s
version of trained assassins is revealed.
Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Sngmoo Lee, a
Korean film professor, The Warrior’s Way manages to
make its mashup of classic westerns and arty Kung Fu films
seem fresh and relevant. A cavalry colonel-gone-bad (a delectably
versatile Danny Huston) calls Lynne “little girl,” underscoring
the vulnerability of women in both cultures. Though The
Warrior’s Way earns a solemn bow of the head for its gently
gender-bending subtext, along with its tastefully gory revenge
theme, its real currency lies in its marvelously entertaining
set pieces. These include a showdown with the aforementioned
Ninjas, who float through the air like a Kabuki nightmare;
the sudden intrusion of a Gatlin gun orchestrated like a drum
solo in a symphony of swordplay; or the increasingly less-sodden
appearances of Ron (Geoffrey Rush), the town drunk, who insouciantly
retrieves a shot of whiskey off the head of a clown who is
being used for target practice by the sadistic cavalry officers,
and then precedes to steal every scene he’s in. Adding to
the stylishness of the film’s mythical culture clash is the
costume design from three-time Oscar winner James Acheson,
who can now include a chop-sockie romance on his impressive
resume.
—Ann
Morrow
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