Contagion. 3ish/5 Gold Stars and a bottle of Purell.

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I went to the movie, Contagion last night; all by myself; IN a theatre. I swear to God, the things I do for you people. (I mean READERS. I didn’t mean anything by that remark you guys. I swear. Some of my best friends are Readers.)

I do not like killer virus movies. They are just too plausible. Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak was just *bites back of fist* too real. And Rene Russo? The part where her biodoctorsuit got a tear in it and we all knew she was as good as toast in the ocean of gut liquifying germs? I wept inside. Hard.

I would just like to quickly mention a rule that I forgot to add in my movie-etiquette post. The rule is this: When watching a killer virus movie in a theatre, you may not cough, sneeze, wheeze, bleed from your eyes/ears, burp, sweat, look tired or display any other sign that your immune system has been compromised. Sure enough, Readers, just as the lights went down in the theatre and I was mentally psyching myself up to watch this shit, 3 people coughed behind me. Maybe even on purpose. One sneezed. I took a tally in my handy dandy notebook.

The final tally in my professional Field Journal: Eleven coughs and one sneeze during the movie. Unacceptable.

The movie began with what would prove to be its signature CNN news style background music: very serious beeping sounds mixed in with an orchestra of urgency. There was even a solumn-but-urgent world health-worker getting down to business meeting-montage where all the dialogue was stripped out in place of said newsy music.

Thank God too, because who wants to hear what the world leaders are DOING about the virus? We can clearly see that they are working hard to the tune of 30ish seconds of montage music.  Like when Rocky got in shape!   I was ready to give them an extra star if there was either a house-painting or car wash-montage as well. Spoiler alert: There wasn’t, so I had to settle for just the one montage that likely took care of the writers having to look up sciencey medical words and make them fit into all the plot holes. Montages are great for that kind of thing. Don’t want to confuse your dumb audience with big words or research? Let’s take a chapter from the Movie, “Weird Science” and just distract them with a montage! WIN! Montage even rhymes with bandage if you say it with a french accent.

Weird Science: arguably one of the definitive science movies of the century.

The montage continues until they find out that the virus is (more spoilers) brain-eating pigbat disease. That is not the technical name for it *cue montage of me writing this article to the tune of Dolly Parton’s 9-5*.

Whew. *wipes brow* That was hard work. I hope that montage helped you forget that I was going to tell you the real name of the virus and how it mutates and how it came to be the brain eating pigbat disease and what they did about it. (Phew, Self, you dodged a bullet there.) *throws glitter*

It’s actually not a bad movie. Especially if you want to see Gwyneth Paltrow get a lobotomy. So all in all, Lobotomies, montages, Laurence Fishburn morpheusing into Uncle Carl from Family Matters (what a big heart), Jude Law weirding things up, Rogue doctors, a mass grave in a Minnesota parking lot,  Matt Damon being in movies but you’re not sure what his role is, people driving around weeks after they said there was no gas (quick! cover it with another montage!), news music and unusually attractive female government workers getting into all kinds of hijinks, blaming things on China, watery conspiracies plus much much more…  Okay, it’s kind of a bad movie.  If you like those things, then you should go.  I’ll probably buy it.

What I took away from it is that I am never going to a Casino again and that Robert Downey would make a  pretty damned good Dr Frank-n-Furter, even though Robert Downey wasn’t in this movie.  Neither was Dr Frank-n-Furter.  My brain goes places.

*Workin’ Nahn to FAHV…”