Love and Other Drugs

You may say that this is just another romantic drama with Anne Hathaway batting her big brown eyes at the camera and putting every male with a sex-drive into a sinful trance. Well, you'd be partially correct. However, in this romantic drama, we get to see a lot of her personal real estate, so to speak.

Love and Other Drugs, a movie based on the non-fiction book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, stars Anne Hathaway as Maggie Murdock, a Parkinson's patient. She crosses paths with drug salesman Jamie Reidy (Jake Gyllenhaal). Mr. Reidy is a bit of an underachiever in his family, but an aggressive overachieving drug salesman shark.

After their initial encounter, Jamie pursues Maggie, despite her outrage at his behavior and abuse of his position. However, they eventually come to like each other, despite her long-term prognosis and expected fate. Jamie, however, meets someone at a convention for people with Parkinson's who is a spouse of a patient, who gave him the advise to run and leave her now. Now Jamie begins to have doubts about their relationship.

Despite the grim circumstances of the movie, Jamie and Maggie have quite an interesting relationship. And their relationship is graphically depicted with lots of nudity. Who knew that Anne Hathaway like to be so naked? Full backal-nudity. (is that a word? Is it the opposite of full-frontal nudity???). I'd say only about 5% of her was not shown on camera in this movie. And I'm not ashamed to say it was fantastic.

For the ladies, or the guys who enjoyed Broke Back Mountain, Jamie shows a bit of butt.

Directed by renowned director Edward Zwick (Glory, Legends of the Fall, Courage Under Fire, The Last Samurai, and Blood Diamond), Love and Other Drugs is Rated R for nudity, strong sexual situations, nudity, language, nudity, drug use, and nudity.

Also staring in Love and Other Drugs was Oliver Platt, Hank Azaria, and some others I don't know.

Overall, this movie is just average, perhaps about a 3.3 on a 5 scale. But if you're looking for "cinematography", this one is a solid 4.3.

Rendition

Another movie compliments of Netflix (and without delays in shipping or recognizing that they received my last movie at a reasonable time!), Rendition is about a man that was basically kidnapped by the United States government because they suspected that he was a terrorist. His wife, Reese Witherspoon, sets out to find out where he is and climbs the political ladder to get answers.

The movie is intense and has some disturbing scenes of torture, but I guess that's why my mother always told me not to be a terrorist, because torture is no fun. Jake Gyllenhaal, the Viking-sounding actor from Los Angeles, is the government operative that is helping to conduct the "examination and questioning" sessions. Also in the movie, Meryl Streep plays a high level government official who's a total bitch (if you can believe that) and Alan Arkin is the jerk-head politician (again - a jerk-head politician, who knew?)

A subplot of the movie is a bomb that detonates in an Egyptian market square at the beginning of the movie. The local police chief (Yigal Naor, one of several people from Munich to star in this movie), is investigating this bombing, in addition to trying to find his daughter. There is a great plot twist that if I say too much I will give it away. I totally fell into it and didn't see it coming.

The only thing that disappointed me was the ending. It was all too easy. Things don't really happen this way, especially in real life, but as we know, Hollywood and real life are two totally mutually exclusive things.

The movie did not receive high reviews, though I give it 4 stars. If it hadn't been for the pooper ending, I would have given it 5 stars. Reese's character wasn't all that strong, though it did not need to be. If you are going to watch this movie because she's in it, you may be disappointed. However, the good plot and action should keep you in this movie.