Movie Reviews: How to Murder Your Wife and Contagion

Looks like death is on the docket today. Two very different movies, one excellent but likely lesser-known, one pretty solid and more recent. Let’s do the excellent one first, shall we? I thoroughly enjoyed How to Murder Your Wife. (No. I was not taking pointers. Shame on you for thinking that. And of course, now that I’ve searched IMDB and Amazon for “how to murder your wife,” I suppose I’d better hope Denisa is super healthy and free from accidents for the next few years. Stupid Google search history. (Knock on wood.))

The film stars Jack Lemmon as a staunch bachelor who gets drunk one evening at a bachelor party and ends up marrying the girl in the cake. Oh yeah–and she only speaks Italian. If that doesn’t sound like an awesome premise to you–if you’re not almost compelled to go to Netflix Instantwatch and start checking it out this instant, then . . . you must be either really busy, or no fun whatsoever. The movie is very black comedy, while managing to me fun and light at the same time. Lemmon grows to both love his wife and loathe her for the changes she’s wrecking on his life. His butler (hilariously portrayed by Terry-Thomas) really wants her out of the picture. Hilarity ensues. This is a movie that hasn’t gotten super reviews on IMDB, but I really adored, especially taking into account the movie as a whole. I ended up giving it 5/5 stars on Netflix, though in reality it might be more on the 3.5 out of 4 star range for me. I would love to talk to some other people who have watched it.

The other movie is Contagion, a disease disaster movie from last year. Denisa and I watched this one last night, and . . . it was sufficiently creepy. It didn’t follow all the disaster movie tropes–real stars in big parts actually died in the film, for one thing, as opposed to being constantly immune while lesser actors dropped like flies. But in the end, it’s a disaster movie starring a disease. It makes you want to wash your hands a lot and stop touching your face so much, and maybe start stockpiling food and guns. It’s well-handled, but there wasn’t much to set it apart from other disease movies. Three stars, for all of that.

The scary thing about disease movies is that I can’t help thinking it won’t be too long before they hit far too close to home. All it takes is one mutation the wrong way, and the world as we know it could be massively affected. Contagion did a good job portraying this. Truly frightening. On the plus side, I kept watching throughout the movie as they traced the path of the disease, and western Maine never got hit hard, probably because of how few people are out here. So maybe I don’t need to stockpile food out here, after all. You suckers in New York, DC, Boston and the like, though . . .

Watch out.