Contagion: Soderbergh, Winslet/Damon/Fishburne/Cotaillard/Paltrow/Law/etc/etc/etc

Early, early anticipation for this fall 2011 release, because I was an extra in it for two days this week and it sounds pretty exciting. See you in nine months.

Summary:

Well, if you took the breadth and scope of "Traffic" or "Syriana," tidied up the writing, and found a subject matter that terrified you relentlessly for two hours, you'd have something close to "Contagion." Burns, who wrote the script for the previous Soderbergh/Damon collaboration "The Informant," as well as "The Bourne Ultimatum," has clearly done an enormous amount of research, and it's thoroughly, horrifyingly conceivable throughout, but it's also as much about the way that information can spread virally in the Web 2.0 age, as it is about the spread of the virus.

Another day of extra work for me tomorrow. They've filmed everywhere from the murkier parts of the South Side to the poshest suburbs.

Hmmm. This is the first I've heard of this and only from that blurb upthread but sounds sorta promising! My best friend did extra work for years and loved doing it. I always thought it would be pretty interesting.

I made it through Philip Roth's The Humbling between makeup and shooting two weeks ago. I'm bringing Indignation tomorrow. Went in with low expectations, will probably be out of focus, but was near Winslet and Soderbergh while they were discussing a shot, so that was something.

Are you into acting in general? She had studied film and I remember her once telling me that although it could get really boring, she plowed through a lot of books too, she couldn't think of another job at that point where she'd get to see how movies were actually made. She was in AI and I remember her being pretty in awe of being able to watch SS at work. Good food too, right?

Really good food on the first day of shooting. I was one of only about 20 extras, so we ate with the crew and cast -- mahi mahi, jerk chicken, all kinds of good stuff. (Signed some paperwork, so can't talk about the shoot.) Next day had 300 extras, and the food was closer to school lunch.

But, yeah, definitely been fun seeing the moviemaking. Not many cameras used for what seem like major scenes.

I do a lot of stage directing and some playwriting, only act when folks think of me for stuff or when something fun like this comes up. This makes up for not being on the ball when every other Irish-looking actor in Chicago ended up in Public Enemies.

My previous extra work (I'm in the yellow coat at 0:05):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ct3Co-ghEc

nice

ha! awesome.

Was reminded of this last Friday when I happened to be looking at Twitter when the first photos came through from Japan--like, literally seconds after the quake: photos of kitchen plates on the floor, and the like. This movie is very much about information spreading in similar ways.

First footage screened: described as Outbreak meets Children of Men

Hopefully rather more of the latter than the former

http://cdn.screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/Steven-Soderbergh.jpg

Moved up to be released Sept. 9.

OI MATES ERE'S JUDE LAW

http://gawker.com/5821104/contagion-watch-gwyneth-paltrow-get-sick-and-die

wow, i can't wait to not see this

"Someone doesn't have to weaponize the bird flu...the birds are doing it."

That's a difficult line to say convincingly and I think Larry very nearly nails it.

i hope this is about matt damon trying to kill all the birds in the world, like a cranky old guy in his yard

fuckin no good dirty birds

Really Angry Birds

Also:
Bryan Cranston
Elliott Gould
John Hawkes
Demetri Martin

this movie is begging for a Mad Magazine treatment, preferably by Mort Drucker

In the fall of 1956, shortly after the departure of Mad's founding editor Harvey Kurtzman, Drucker found his way to Mad. His debut there coincided with a World Series broadcast, and publisher Bill Gaines told Drucker that if the Brooklyn Dodgers won the game, he would be hired. The Dodgers did win.

i love this anecdote because i want to believe it was how the mad offices worked all the time.

that looks weird and not like i expected

also didnt realize that this was a participant media thing. wonder what their angle is

http://www.comingsoon.net/gallery/63121/hr_Contagion_1.jpg

I want to see this but maybe on DVD so I can mute Jude Law's bits.

this reminds me of exodus or something--this big, sort of self-serious movie with like everybody in the world in it.

larry fishburne is such a pro.

My fiancee has a special interest in topics relating to global health and disease, and she's stupidly excited about this movie. We watched the trailer the other day, and she was clapping to herself at various points.

(Actually, we both let out a gasp of excitement when Veronica Mars's dad showed up.)

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/08/13/scenes-from-steven-soderberghs-contagion-big-screen-report/

http://www.bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/08/gwyneth-paltrow-contagion-poster.jpg

The unglamorousness of this poster makes me weirdly happy

The trailer made the thing looked like a crisper Outbreak.

GWYNNETH PALTROW CONTAGION

my god this looks bad. plus isn't soderbergh always going on about how much he hates movies and wants to retire? just do it and spare us. even matt damon acts like a fanny in the trailer.

gwyneth dies a horrible death is one hell of a hook for audiences

seriously though hot zone meets traffic sounds fun to me

that looks weird and not like i expected

the trailer, the trailer...

i kinda like that i cant really tell who or even what this movie is abt but man do i wanna see it

Heard an interview with the author of ... "The Coming Plague?" Anyway, she was a technical adviser, and while she is biased, she said this movie nails it. She says she had been working on the script off and on for 3.5 years, so maybe Soderbergh is just clearing out his backlog before he (doesn't) retire?

Soderbergh isn't even 50 yet btw. The odds of him retiring any time soon are nil.

That's the part that keeps this from being "oh, we saw this in Outbreak already." The movie is as much about how information passes as it is about disease. Add in how big pharm companies would interact with government orgs in this type of situation, and it's a whole new story.

this movie is fucking boring.

It's a scientific fact that a viral outbreak would, contrary to Hollywood convention, actually be very boring, so job well done.

its like world war z with all the cool shit sucked out of it.

By cool shit you mean zombies, right?

(SPOILER ALERT) If you ever wanted to see Gwyneth Paltrow make a cameo appearance in The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, buy your tickets now.

No way this is as boring as Traffic, either. I'm a sucker for disaster movies, no matter how po-faced.

yeah, the act of watching and loving the dreadful 2012 made me realize that im completely powerless in the face of any kind of disaster movie schlock - just ladle that shit into my gaping maw please

Contagion: NO RETURNS

im just inordinately attracted to any movie that features the destruction of the human race

I'm always a little crestfallen when humankind rallies in the third act.

everyone dying and shit all grim

also when they kidnapped marion cotillard i was like DONT U TOUCH HER

fuckin u2 at the prom though

haha

i mean lets be clear here soderbergh is an intensely uncool dude

marion cotillard looks like zooey deschanel but real

the thinking mans deschanel

actually what's the slice-of-life-in-the-depression one from really early in his career? IIRC that one isn't bad.

<3 King of the Hill.

the thinking 911 truther mans deschanel

fixed

sorry for bumping this thread out of nowhere but it just fuckin hit me that the one thing I wanted to post on the internet about this movie was the fucking font for all the transitions and shit in the movie, it was so horrible, what a font

I was less annoyed by the font than by the fact that the population figures weren't clearly designated as metro areas.

Yeah, some were some weren't.

By the movie's definition, Minneapolis is nearly as large as Hong Kong.

San Francisco pop. figures were crazeeeee

cliff martinez must not deserves to get bat pig disease.
steven soderbergh must deserves to get bat pig disease.
i say science words really serious and frown now.
oh no you actors who do good performing will die of bat pig disease.
even janitor man we forgot about but i shake your hand.
i have no difference if any theses people has bat pig disease or don't.
in the panda's den was better.
he should had will smith an jeff globloom.
then i have become happy.

Thought this fell somewhere between effective and just okay. I'm sure all the problems I had with it are voiced somewhere above. Two things I liked: a good Laurence Fishburne performance (an actor I really liked a long time ago, before he got progressively sillier in the Matrix movies), and Marion Cotillard, who belongs with Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage and Jennifer Lopez in The Cell in the "Yes, of course, she's a scientist" department. (Sorry, I'm immaturely stereotyping scientists.) I thought for sure that Jennifer Ehle was Jerry's lawyer love-interest on an early Seinfeld, but no.

why hasn't Jude Law been cast as Simon Le Bon in the Duran biopic yet

Love how they basically blame the whole thing on Chinese food.

I thought they blamed the whole thing on Gwyneth's gambling addiction.

Toxic goop.

marion cotillard looks like zooey deschanel but real

― max, Wednesday, September 28, 2011 9:14 PM (10 months ago) Bookmark

what the hell is this post

what's french for adorkable

you know, like if zooey deschanel were a real person, in life

adorquable

you know, like if zooey deschanel were a real person, in life

― max, Wednesday, August 8, 2012 4:46 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what the hell is this post

sushi that is not even real zooey that is not even real

finally saw this, my main takeaway was "it's not a good thing to be a big name actress in this movie unless you are Marion Cotillard"

also Gwyneth acts involuntary seizures very, very well

voluntary ones need some work

my takeaway was "if you've played a Jane Austen heroine, Steven Soderbergh wants you in this movie" (Winslet, Paltrow, Ehle...maybe Keira Knightley was busy)

this movie is kind of remarkable in that the subtext seems to be about the basic competence of the government/experts and even bureaucracy against a kind of "wild west" of individualism represented not only by the breakdown of order caused by the virus but the blogger's spread of disinformation.

Yeah--I liked that the scientists had human failings but were skilled and smart and sorted shit out.

This was fucking terrifying.

what a terrible film this was. slickly paced so as entertainment it was functional and kept me watching but i don't think there was a single genuinely satisfying element. composed of way too many subplots, hardly any of which seemed adequate. the WHO kidnapping one was ludicrous and barely explained (the cut to cotillard happily teaching kids made me and my bf burst out laughing). matt damon's bland whitebread family (complete with most boring slow dance in the history of the world) made me wish they weren't immune (did he do ANYTHING with his immunity?). potential emotional resonance of the scientist who tested the vaccination on herself botched by terrible dialogue in the scene with her dad. janitor subplot served no purpose apart from clunky, cheesy atonement for lawrence fishburne's character.

characterisation was cardboard even by hollywood standards - so many big names, so few meaty roles. jude law and his hilarious cockney/australian accent obv the biggest dud but self-vaccinator was fleshed out neither before nor after her saintly act and seeing matt damon play the nice middle-class dad is so boring these days. kate winslet did about the best job, you really got a sense of her commitment/need to prove herself.

lots of vaguely ~topical themes, all explored with such shallowness. blogging vs new media, govt bureaucracy, big pharma corruption, all nodded at, none dug into. also there were so many stupid scenes that should've been cut but no explanation of what that forsythia drug was apart from a vague, too-late "something something homeopathic".

thought it did a decent job of conveying the rapidity of social disintegration but there was a HUGE missed opportunity in terms of conveying physical/body horror - if what makes this disease stand out is that it can be passed on by the merest touch, you'd think more characters would become panicky/paranoid about touching things, touching each other - none of this was shown. you'd think that angle would be ripe for exploitation b/c touching public surfaces that millions of people have touched already with their gross unwashed hands is one of those things you have to ignore thinking about to actually live a normal life.

also chronological development was yawn, left it nowhere to go - would've been better if it had descended into total breakdown instead of the better-than-best-case-scenario save OR if we'd been dropped into characters' lives at the height of the panic, then worked simultaneously backwards and forwards.

unbelievable that it didn't get utterly panned by critics.

Coronavirus Outbreak Triggers Surge in Pirated Downloads of the Film ‘Contagion’

When the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak started to hit the mainstream news, some people started to link it to the fictional “MEV-1” pandemic depicted in “Contagion.” Although the two can hardly be compared, besides being virus outbreaks, interest in the 2011 movie suddenly spiked.

Google Trends reveals that searches for the phrase “contagion movie” started to rise in January, reaching a peak around the end of that month. Later in February, as the Coronavirus started to spread globally, searches flared up again.

Rewatched this last night with someone who hadn't seen it before. Her comment after a hour was "this is the news right now"

I put a library hold on a DVD copy of this yesterday.

Didn't realize there was a separate thread. I posted about it in the other contagion thread the other day--yeah, it feels like a documentary at times. Extremely unsettling--especially the ending--and a much better film than I thought at the time. I think there may be a positive message, though, in the moment when Matt Damon looks at his daughter dancing in the living room and basically says "Okay."

Also spiked in legal rentals: it's at #7 on the iTunes chart, alongside nineteen 2019 releases, and went from being Warner Bros' 270th most-rented film to their second.

Her comment after a hour was "this is the news right now"

rewatching last weekend after the ninth diagnosis / fourth death at one facility nearby, I thought how much more measured and factual than the news it was. (and also that it felt like a missing scene from an episode-opening montage in Years & Years.)

the initial paltrow seizure in the hospital, something about the thrashing & the way her eyes roll back, gave me nightmares for weeks the first time i saw this. scarier than the exorcist, somehow.

I don't really know what I'm talking about up there 8 years ago but this movie has long been a "rewatchable" favorite for me, if not exactly a "comfort movie."

Something about it has always even moved me a little bit--the idea that our greatest vulnerability and greatest source of protection meet in the same place .

our greatest vulnerability and greatest source of protection meet in the same place .

our face?

i didnt want to be corny and say "each other," but "face" works just as well!

Sanjay Gupta has a scene. It feels like he's putting in 16 hours a day on CNN right now.

big piece in NYT by Wesley Morris on rewatching

have forgotten most of this film judging by his highlights

i think this was the movie where i finally gave up on soderbergh. so many scenes shot in the most by-the-numbers way possible.

Screening in Seattle tonight, at a repertory cinema that Soderbergh was at last week for an unrelated event:

https://i.imgur.com/YJ8PeRb.jpg

i sometimes wonder if this movie and others like it created a "CSI effect" for pandemics. the mortality rate of the disease in this movie is an absurd 25-30%, so like 2.5 million Americans and 26 million die worldwide before a vaccine is created. so people think of serious pandemics being like the type of diseases where you get it, regardless of how old or healthy you are, boom, you might die painfully. and then they see real pandemics like this one which could actually kill millions if not mitigated, but because it's predominate victims are the old and immunocompromised, and it doesn't kill the majority of people who get it, people think it's a 'nothingburger'.

I did enjoy this movie when I didn't know we'd be facing one of our own!

Scott Z. Burns interviewed about our current pandemic: https://www.vulture.com/2020/03/contagion-writer-scott-z-burns-reassures-us-about-covid-19.html

Spencer Chow at 6:28 3 Mar 12
Love how they basically blame the whole thing on Chinese food.

I'm watching House of Cards for the fourth or fifth time--we don't need to get into that right now--and, towards the end of S3, there's something that wouldn't have meant anything to me the time before, a couple of years ago: Doug Stamper (in the midst of a 60-day recovery) and his brother watch Contagion one night instead of the first Democratic debate.