Last night we took a chance and watched Side Effects, one of Steven Soderbergh's most recent movies. The cast was pretty good and the story was decent. The movie features Rooney Mara as damaged goods and Channing Tatum as her recently paroled white collar criminal hubby. Jude Law and Catherine Zeta Jones round out the cast as psychiatrists who both have worked on Rooney Mara's character. I really like Rooney Mara as an actress. She has a unique look about her. I really enjoyed her Lisbeth Salander in the American version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and cant wait to see the forthcoming Girl Who Played With Fire. Jude Law is always a reliable actor. The best thing I can say about Channing Tatum and Catherine Zeta Jones is they do not negatively impact the movies they star in. Steven Soderbergh directed this film and he is a very hit and miss director for me. He has the capacity to knock one out of the park like Traffic, but he can also strike out swinging with a movie like Haywire(if you haven't seen this don't bother). The cool thing about Soderbergh is when his movie is crap, no one trashes him in the media, its like people just overlook his short comings. Now if M. Night Shyamalan makes a crap movie, he gets destroyed in the media, not Steven Soderbergh though. Soderbergh however doesn't misstep much. Even the movies he makes that I don't care for like Magic Mike and the crappy Oceans movies (that I think everyone besides me loved) enjoy a level of success in the box office. So anyway Side Effects was a good effort, but fell a little short of being a great movie. Honestly though one of my favorite things about the movie was that it came in under the 2 hour mark at 109 minutes. I think that is just about the perfect running time for a movie. When you get into the 2+ hour movies, they require much more of a commitment than I can sometimes offer. On the other hand if a movie is only 109 minutes long, as long as I start it before 9:30pm, I can still watch it and have enough time left over to put the dogs out and set the coffee pot to be in bed by 11:00pm. It is sad that sometimes my love of a good night sleep limits the movies that I watch, but there are few things I love as much as restful sleep.
This weekend World War Z starts in theatres. I am greatly looking forward to this movie and hope to see it this weekend. I know there were a lot of liberties taken with the source material by Max Brooks but it still looks like it could be entertaining. The thing that scares me is the rumors of the re-shoots they executed just prior to the movies release. These reshoots could be good in that they fixed the crappy ending, or they could be bad with the people responsible not being able to figure out how to wrap it up. Time will tell.
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