Monday, October 17, 2011

Nurse Jackie and Contagion

Laid up for a final weekend I acquired a "Nurse Jackie" addiction. It has a few too many contrived moments but the actors are just great. One thing I really like are the surprises and how intelligent the characters are. There is a scene at the end of the second season where you see an intervention set up and you are lead along just to the edge of a standard come to Jesus moment where the addict breaks down and admits she is an addict but instead she turns it around and goes on the attack, battling back through overwhelming evidence to make it all their fault. People are never so intelligent and resourceful as when they are in the wrong and know it.

Also saw Contagion. It seems to be a story about a virus that attacks really good looking people. I felt safe myself. Still it was very good. I really liked how it departed from the usual storyline. Not only was virus created by some nefarious corporation or the result of some terrible defense department experiment gone wrong I the character that usually turns out to be the hero, the crusading outcast blogger (blogging described as graffiti with punctuation but I don't that is necessarily true because I have seen so many blogger that they don't know about how to use punctuation at least in my opinion) turns out to be the bad guy. Or not even that. Just a bad guy. There is no one overall plot. It is one of those films where a bunch of story lines go through intersecting on surprising occasions. The main purpose seems to be to imagine what would really happen with a new virus and to imagine the consequences as realistically as possible. I personally think they did an unusually good job of it, even down to the overly-cautious and profoundly conscientious military officers.

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