Yeah, aint it great? ;^D

Hey, so I just got to see this at the theatre, and it's pretty good. Not super stellar, no zombies, but well done.

*Spoilers* Paltrow's character does indeed die at the beginning. The movie starts at "Day 2", when she's already clearly infected, but thinks it's just jet lag. She gets home, dies the next day. Then her kid dies. Her husband is immune. Poor Matt Damon spends the rest of the film being the good, wronged guy stuck in the middle, immune, but trying to keep his remaining daughter safe. There is a charming scene where he sets up a "Prom Night" celebration for her at home in the living room, with a newly bought pink dress, an ipod docked at speakers, stocked with romantic young songs, crepe streamers and foil stars and christmas lights decorating the room. Her boyfriend arrives in a tux, with a bracelet that identifies him as a recent recipient of the new vaccine, so they can finally be together for a night.

*Spoilers* There are a number of really great actors in this film, Fishburne (Cowboy Curtis!) CDC doctor, Jude Law - a blog hack who fakes his own illness and cure to garner 12 million followers, Kate Winslet - a dedicated doctor who contracts the illness and dies, still trying to help others as she offers another dying man her coat,. Sadly Winslets beauty is masked by bulky sweaters and no glamourous makeup, hair or jewelry, but it suits the role. And suprise! Demitri Martin, a standup comedian who is somehow cast as a CDC lab technician and has barely any lines or purose in the film. Maybe he just wanted to look funny in a germ-free suit.

*Spoilers* What's really great about the movie is, after cycling through several days, months, and you see the breakdown of society, the discovery of a vaccine thru the self-sacrifice of one brave doctor who plays roulette and injects herself with a vaccine that happens to work, and then everybody scrambling for their first dose, they return to "Day 1" which we haven't seen, how the virus was developed accidentally by a bat bring infected meat into a pig pen, the pig eats the meat, a chef chooses that pig to serve one night, Paltrow eats that particular pig, and so on until everybody she met gets ill, and everybody else spreads it across the world.

It's a little gory at times, but an enjoyable film. I was reminded of "And the Band Played On", a movie abou the desperate attempts to contain and cure AIDS where so many govertment bureaucracies muddles things up, and the egos of doctors in research also stultified real research. If you haven't seen that movie, I suggest you rent it right away if you have an interest in that tine in our history and how epidemics are addressed in this modern age, and how we very nearly continued to have an infected blood pool for transfusions.

There was a guy at the back of the theatre who was ill and coughing loudly. I'm afraid some of us in the theatre were a little wicked, and when ever he would start coughing, so would we. Childish, I know, but at the time, it seemed hilarious. *cough*