Cheat To Win

I finally saw this and loved it (as I love almost everything Soderbergh touches).  It was calloused and cynical and shallow and I worshipped every second of it.

Did you guys know there was a movie coming out in June about male strippers?

Just in case you didn’t, Vulture is breathlessly sharing every new tidbit that Warner Bros. releases.

In Contagion, Steven Soderbergh gets brusquely to the point: the sound of a cough before there’s even an image, then the sight of poor, doomed Gwyneth Paltrow — Patient Zero — showing signs (red eyes, dark circles, phlegm) of the virus that will quickly finish her off. An onscreen title reads, “Day 2,” which is a good, sick joke announcing there’ll be none of the clunky expository foreplay you’d get in something by Roland Emmerich, who has a gift for juxtaposing two-bit soap-opera mawkishness and million-dollar CGI. Soderbergh is the anti-Emmerich: He won’t even let Gwynny show off her long stems. Contagion, which was written by Scott Z. Burns, bumps along as if it had been pared down from an eight-hour mini-series to a lean, unusually mean 90 minutes. There are fast montages of contact: people in airports brushing past, coughing on, or handing money (another kind of virus) to one another, Hong Kong infecting Chicago infecting Tokyo in seconds. New settings are introduced with the name of the city and the number of residents — i.e., the number of corpses that might soon line the streets, the candidates for contagion.

I saw this last night, and cannot wait to see it again.  I liked the clinical feel that David Edelstein references, as it emphasizes the passions stirred by the panic the virus creates.  I love that Soderbergh doesn’t back down from the intellectual strength of this story and understands there are those of us out there craving an astute and perspicacious disaster film.

Contagion, the Stephen Soderbergh–directed film that debuted at the Venice Film Festival last week and hits theaters on Friday, tracks a deadly bird-flu-like virus as it plagues (or kills) a number of very famous people. From the looks of the trailer, the mysterious virus eventually infects most of the globe, but none (as far as we can tell) suffer a pasty, seizure-y death quite like that of Gwyneth Paltrow. Not only does Gwyneth die right there in the trailer, she dies ugly: We’re talking bug-eyes, visible sweat, and maybe a hint of a floppy tongue. (Watch closely, or maybe in slow-mo; You can see it start to wag.) Even more humiliating, her gross Death Face is being used on the movie’s posters to up the “scare factor.” The rest of the all-star cast get Terrified Glamour Shots, and Paltrow is stuck on the bottom left, gasping her last, unpretty breath. It’s all extremely unflattering. But it might also be very smart, yet another stop on the briskly moving “Gwyneth Paltrow has a sense of humor about herself” train.

First of all, I still don’t understand why people have a problem with her.  It doesn’t change the fact that this movie is going to be awesome.

(Not to mention that photo deserves an automatic reblog)