Contagion (2011)

Scary! This bio-thriller about a killer virus gone world-wide epidemic is packed with stars and kept us on the edge of our seats, thinking about all the doors and hands we had touched. Director Steven Soderbergh (I wrote about him in The Informant!) is working again with writer Scott Z. Burns (I forgot to mention that Burns adapted the novel for the Informant! and co-adapted The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)), and this time takes credit in his own name as cinematographer (in all his previous work, Soderbergh uses the pseudonym Peter Andrews as cinematographer).

When Valentine's Day came out, Jack said, "Just tell us who isn't in it," and this bears some resemblance to that, with Gwyneth Paltrow (last mentioned in these pages in Country Strong), Matt Damon (Adjustment Bureau), Laurence Fishburne (Oscar-nominated for playing Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It (1993), also good in Apocalypse Now (1979), Rumble Fish (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), The Color Purple (1985), Higher Learning (1995), Bobby (2006), 21 (2008), and many more), John Hawkes (Higher Ground) playing someone non-creepy for a change, Jude Law (Sherlock Holmes), Marion Cotillard (Midnight in Paris), Kate Winslet (my favorites: Sense and Sensibility (1995), the love story part of Titanic (1997), Hideous Kinky (1998), Holy Smoke (1999), Iris (2001), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Little Children (2006), her scenes in Romance & Cigarettes, the mini-series Mildred Pierce (2011), and her Oscar-winning performance in The Reader, which was predicted by Ricky Gervais in the episode of Extras where Winslet played a foul-mouthed version of herself who said the Holocaust wins Oscars), Jennifer Ehle (The Ides of March), Demetri Martin (Taking Woodstock), Elliott Gould (my personal faves are the TV movie Once Upon a Mattress (1964), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) for which he was Oscar-nominated, M*A*S*H (1970), California Split (1974), Bugsy (1991), and Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven (2001), Twelve (2004), and Thirteen (2007), among his 162 acting credits), Bryan Cranston (Drive), Sanaa Lathan (Love & Basketball (2000), Something New (2006), a series arc on Nip/Tuck), and Dr. Sanjay Gupta as himself among the 68 actors credited with 78 more uncredited, which may be a precedent.

Shooting locations are listed as Atlanta, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and various places in Illinois, but it looks like we travel around the world with very high production values. Master composer Cliff Martinez (also covered in Drive) keeps up the tension with his high energy score, of which all twenty tracks are posted on youtube and is available from iTunes, amazon, etc.

My favorite line apparently is someone else's, as it's been posted on imdb: Gould's scientist says to Law's blogger, "Blogging is not writing. It's just graffiti with punctuation."

Playing in only one house here, this has a predicted DVD release date of January. Don't watch the movie right before you go to sleep if you're prone to nightmares. But it's good.