Movie Review: Extraordinary Measures

I went into this moving knowing I would come down with a case of the warm fuzzies. The cheesetastic tagline alone was a neon sign of "uplifting family drama". Being looked upon as such a movie, CBS Films did a good job of entertaining and educating the audience. You're mom will love it.

The "based on a true story" film, directed by Tom Vaughan (Super Grass, What Happens in Vegas) is about John Crowley's (Brendan Fraser) and his wife Aileen's (Keri Russell) quest to find a cure to a rare genetic disorder, which two of their three children have, called Pompe disease. Fraser turns to Dr. Robert Stonehill (Executive Producer, Harrison Ford) who is working on an advanced form of an enzyme to counteract the effects of the disease.

Stylistically the movie was CBS doing Disney design. A clean, well lighted world where every room, office, and park is perfectly manicured and noticeably a set; not a place where people live, work and risk. A PG world without grit or sharp edges helping to enfold the audience in the safety of order and structure to offset any discomfort felt seeing children with tracheostomy tubes in motorized wheelchairs (a Hollywood way of showing illness akin to an oxygen tube while sitting in a bed). All accompanied by a soundtrack of orchestral swelling, queuing the audience to the proper emotional response.

Fraser's Ivy-League-Caring-Every-Dad who gambles the limited time he has with his kids to try and save them is well within Fraser's abilities and he is a good fit for the role, evoking a version of his Ben Sullivan from Scrubs. The characters business prowess makes him the straight man to Ford, who the audience is told is "brilliant", "eccentric", and "a loose cannon". He also listens to the rock music loudly while working! But is he a big softy deep down? Only time can tell.

The duo start a research team but soon needs to sell out to Big Pharm to get the funding required to accomplish their goals. Enter potential devils - Derek Webster, Jared Harris, & Patrick Bauchau. Seeing them all sitting at the table together was all that was required to accomplish the idea of soul selling. Watching Ford, and particularly Fraser deal with the consequences and pay offs of the deal compose the last act of the film.

While overdone in style and having a conclusion you knew going into the theater, the fact it was based off actual events, the shortened time, and appropriate casting made for an enjoyable, albeit forgettable, time. 3 out of 5 stars.

Other observations:

• Sometimes it was necessary to put up what part of the country the characters were in as they traveled around. Other times, like when I can see the exit sign that says "Chicago" it wasn't necessary to tell me they were in Chicago.

• Keri Russell was a hot mom.

• Pompe disease has an incident rate of 1:40,000 - more info
  

Obvious Product Placement:

• Ford vehicles: old & new, car & actor
• Budweiser
• Lowe's
• Genzyme Corp.
• Not so obvious: Nike (parts filmed at HQ in Oregon)

Movie Review: The Lovely Bones

Of this much we can be sure: It was the 1970s. A movie with an advertised synopsis telling us, "...a young girl who has been murdered...", spends most of the first act (half an hour or more?) establishing the time period with various, attentive details with the should-be-dead-girl walking around alive. How a movie based on a book can get so lost in itself in confounding.

The movie, directed by Peter Jackson, hits some plot points in common with the novel, but grinds off all the sharp edges, leaving us in a PG-13 mess. Jackson left the audience to imagine what was done to wide-eyed, whispering Susie (Saoirse Ronan), reducing the found evidence from body parts to just blood. Yet it was necessary to have us watch Susie's father (Wahlberg) get beat savagely by a high school jock & watch the killer's death blow for CGI blow. An affair between the detective and the mother is ever so slightly hinted upon, but never actually occurs, and we learn nothing of the detective or serial killer George Harvey's (Stanley Tucci giving a nice, creepster showing) background, leaving them as both stock characters. There was time for an extended montage of funny with Gramma Sarandon, though!

The glimpses we catch of life after Susie's death are like ripples from a skipping stone on a still lake. No depth at each point, only the faintest disturbance. The film fails to decide just what sort of movie it wants to be, drawing themes of loss & obsession, as well as gimmicks, from various supernatural movies and shows (What Dreams May Come, 6th Sense, hell I half expected Beetlejuice) and turning them into a wet-noodle by which the audience is repeatedly thrashed.

Other observations:

So heaven is spending eternity with other victims of your murderer, in a place that looks like where you were murdered? I thought Hell was other people.

What's the difference between Heaven & the in-between place? More people, less surrealist backgrounds.

How many years did it take for Susie to move on, exactly? Their were 24 rolls of film, so 1 a month to develop would make it two years, yet more time than that seemed to have passed for little sister Lindsey.

The forced sense of cosmic justice when Harvey dies. Some people in the audience cheered (ugh) because the universe finally gave him his comeuppance - after killing 9 people over 13 years.

Story does provide a sinkhole business model for Tampa Bay area to consider given recent events.