Category: Mystery

SIDE EFFECTS (2013)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta Jones, Channing Tatum
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 83% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A young woman’s world unravels when an anti-depressant prescribed by her psychiatrist has unexpected side effects.


Side Effects is a rare creature indeed: a movie released during the first two months of the calendar year that is not only good, it’s stunningly good.  It’s too bad almost no one even remembers this movie exists.

Steven Soderbergh’s film tells the story of a young woman, Emily (Rooney Mara), who suffers from depression after her husband returns home from serving a prison term for insider trading.  After a series of events where she apparently tries to harm herself, she sees a psychiatrist, Dr. Banks (Jude Law) who prescribes a brand new anti-depressant called Ablixa.  While it is effective, it also comes with some side effects, including sleepwalking.

One day, Dr. Banks gets a call: Emily has stabbed someone to death, and she did it while sleepwalking, which was caused by the Ablixa.  Banks interviews her; she remembers nothing of the incident.  But now the doctor’s professional and personal life is in turmoil as well.

What we have here is a classic Hitchcockian story…actually, two stories for the price of one.  You’ve got Emily, the wrong woman in the wrong place at the wrong time.  She didn’t ask for any of this.  She just wanted to feel better, be a better wife, be a better person.  And the drugs were working: she was feeling better, doing better at work, doing better with her husband…but now, thanks to this drug and its unintended side effects, people think she’s crazy.

And you’ve got Dr. Banks, the wrong man also in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He was doing his job, prescribing medication that he felt would help…and it WAS helping.  But thanks to this unforeseeable tragedy, his practice dries up.  Who wants to see a psychiatrist whose patient killed someone due to medicine he prescribed?  This creates problems in his personal life: he just bought a new apartment, but now his income is severely diminished.  He and his wife fight more than they used to.  And so on.

…and that’s where I’ll leave it because, like all the best films, it’s better if you watch Side Effects cold, not knowing what to expect.  No doubt there are people out there who saw the various twists and turns coming, but I am not one of them.  I was utterly hoodwinked, and I loved it.

We are a culture of pills and quick fixes, the quicker the better.  Side Effects is remarkably even-handed in presenting us with both sides of the worst-case scenario involving this culture.  (Or I guess one of the worst-case scenarios, but I don’t want to get sidetracked.)  Not only is this strategy effective in providing mental fodder while watching, but it’s also a great storytelling device.  Whose side should we be on?  Historically, “Big Pharma” has been one of the handiest movie villains since the Nazis.  The public perception of mega-corporations with billions of dollars at their disposal, dollars that are used to cover up embarrassing media stories and pay off corporate whistle-blowers, is just too perfect not to use in movies.  But Side Effects gives us the other side of that coin, the dedicated physicians and psychiatrists who are committed to helping people using the best available methods.  If a pill can help people, who would blame a doctor for wanting to prescribe it?  …unless the side effects turned out to be a little extreme?

That conundrum is at the heart of the movie.  But on the surface, it’s just a fantastic mystery/thriller.  Soderbergh directs with restraint, using very few camera moves.  Everything we see is presented with a minimum of flash and maximum impact, so when you’re watching the third act of the movie, you can remember everything you saw in the first two acts with great clarity.

It’s a little bit like a Gene Kelly dance routine.  You know he must have worked for hours to get those moves down, but when you see him in action, he barely looks like he’s working at all.  That’s what Side Effects feels like.  The film is telling a complicated story, but it doesn’t feel like it’s working hard.  It’s just gliding along, showing you this scene, showing you that scene, ho-hum, pay attention now, all leading to the fantastic payoff at the end.

I don’t know if Side Effects is available to stream or not, but I heartily recommend it regardless.

KISS KISS BANG BANG (2005)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Shane Black
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 85% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A murder mystery brings together a private eye (Kilmer), a struggling actress (Monaghan), and a thief masquerading as an actor (Downey Jr.).


Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is so good, it’s a total freaking mystery how this same director, Shane Black, wrote and directed one of the worst movies I’ve seen in the past 20 years: 2018’s The Predator.  Just had to get that out of the way.

I envy you if you haven’t seen this movie yet, because one day it’ll be on Netflix or something, and your curiosity will get the better of you, and you’ll experience for the first time one of the great comedy mysteries ever written.  The dialogue flies faster than an episode of Gilmore Girls, so prick up your ears and stay on your toes, cause this train waits for no one.  The laughs are big and genuine.  The surprises are legion.  The mystery itself is a bit of a head-scratcher the first time around, so maybe watch it again, and you’ll get it.  Trust me…you’ll want to watch it again.

Downey Jr. and Kilmer exhibit the kind of unforced chemistry that deserves comparison to Newman and Redford.  If they decided to stage a two-person show consisting of nothing but the two of them interrupting each other, I’d pay to see it.  The actor in me gets a rush watching them play off each other, with Kilmer tossing off some of the great movie insults of all time.  Example:

Harry (Downey Jr.): “Do you think I’m stupid?”
Gay Perry (Kilmer): “I don’t think you’d know where to put food at, if you didn’t flap your mouth so much. Yes, I think you’re stupid.”

The screenplay is just one of the many delights of this movie.  It’s full of “meta” scenes and dialogue.  A scene occurs, and the movie pauses while the narration tells us, “That is a terrible scene.  Why was it in the movie?”  Or the movie is clicking along and suddenly it pauses again and the narrator tells us, “Oh, s**t, I skipped something!  That’s bad narrating.”  Brilliance.  To paraphrase Bugs Bunny, they do that kind of thing all through the picture.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang utterly flopped in 2005, grossing a paltry $4.2 million domestically, against a $15 million budget.  What the heck happened?  You’ve got charismatic leads (especially Downey Jr., who was, even then, starting to resemble the Tony Stark we know and love), a beautiful femme fatale (Michelle Monaghan, hubba HUBBA), an intriguing mystery, lots of laughs, surprises galore, a snarky screenplay…this should have been a hit.  Did Warner Bros. refuse to advertise it?  Or did they advertise it incorrectly?  (20th Century Fox did that with Fight Club.)  Was it – gasp! – too smart for the general public?

Who can say?  Regardless of box office performance or name recognition, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang will always stand, for me, as one of the greatest comedy mystery meta-noirs of all time.  (Of course, with that many genre tags, it may BE the only one of its kind…)

QUICK TAKE: A History of Violence (2005)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Viggo Mortenson, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 87% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A mild-mannered husband and father (Mortenson) becomes a local hero through an act of violence, which sets off repercussions that will shake his family to its very core.


A History of Violence is an art film disguised as a Hollywood thriller.  It makes some statements about the nature of violence that would be at home in an Ingmar Bergman film, but cloaks them in a conventional plot that, unbelievably, is based on a graphic novel.  (I’ve read that graphic novel, which goes down some gruesome paths not explored by the movie.)

It’s riveting.  As a pure thriller, this movie is gangbusters.  (I thought the ending was a tad abrupt, so I take away a point.)  The central mystery, about an everyman who is mistaken for a ruthless killer, will keep you guessing.  It also has some troubling things to say about violence itself.  Through various events in the film, it’s almost like the moral of the story is the equivalent of Patrick Swayze’s famous line from Roadhouse: “Be nice, until it’s time to NOT be nice.”  Gandhi would not have approved.

I can’t recommend this movie enough.  Find it, watch it, do it.

KNIVES OUT

By Marc S. Sanders

Rian Johnson’s new film Knives Out is an attempt to reinvent the Agatha Christie blueprint of The Who Done It? Murder Mystery. It primarily succeeds even if it is a little cookie cutter in its screenplay.

Famed best selling mystery writer Harlan Thrombley (Christopher Plummer) is discovered by his maid in his reading room to have slit his throat. All evidence points to suicide. Police follow through with simple procedural questioning of his next of kin, and yet a private detective (Daniel Craig) with an outstanding puzzle solving reputation is hired with a delivered envelope of cash from an unknown source. If it’s suicide, then why a detective, and who had reason to hire him?

Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc (great name) adopts a hilarious Kentucky southern drawl to rattle the cages of possible suspects, assuming that perhaps this wasn’t suicide. Could it have been…MURDER?

The suspects consist of family members and each is well exaggerated in their physical descriptions. Johnson wrote these connivers with possible motives to set them apart from one another-first by casting well known actors and then giving most of them a garish appearance or unusual trait. Jamie Lee Curtis as Linda with a short white as snow haircut and black circled glasses looks like no one else I can recall. Michael Shannon as Walt with a cane and exaggerated limp, not too bright but also quite discomforting. Don Johnson as Richard only with a goatee, Toni Collette as Joni putting on a bug eyed expression with ditzy delivery. Chris Evans as Ransom, with clean shaven good looks and a toothy smile in preppy, yet snobbish looking sweaters. Finally, Ana de Armas as Marta, Harlan’s nurse, who seems to be the only one devastated by what has transpired, and somehow inadvertently ends up being more involved than she ever expected. She can’t lie. If she does, she can’t help but vomit. A disadvantage perhaps but maybe a convenient advantage at times as well.

Early on, interviews are shown and it appears everyone has reason to maintain a grudge against Harlan. So if Harlan was in fact murdered, well then it’s fair to presume one of these people might have reason to commit the crime. A will is eventually read and then even more twists present themselves. Someone definitely wanted Harlan out.

Rian Johnson spells it out easily for the viewer. Each suspect has his/her own place in the film to toy around with. While I didn’t find it too challenging to predict a likely suspect that has orchestrated what’s occurred, it was more fun for me to watch how it was all pieced together. I kept asking myself what’s so important about the dogs or the baseball or the silent “Great Nana” (K Callan) who sits around the house but surely must have something to contribute.

Agatha Christie or Dashiell Hammet still hold as the much more clever writers. Still, Daniel Craig is having a blast in his role, conceived by Johnson. I’d like to see another mystery with this character. He’s funny at appearing unconcerned with new developments that could be occurring while he’s really just waiting for the inevitable fact that reveals the absolute truth.

Following leaving the scene of an arson a potential suspect makes an unexpected stop. Craig as Detective Blanc opts to wait in the car and put his ear buds on to sing show tunes. Who would do that? Yet, that’s what’s hilariously fun about this picture. A man has died but the shallowness of his surviving family and the disconnect of the detective are the entertainment factor.

Rian Johnson knows how to keep Knives Out amusingly interesting with a curiosity that does not stop.