The Cure forWellness

The Cure for wellness

I recently watched "The Cure for Wellness" and found it quite entertaining though  a bit weird even sinister. It promoted the underlying cleche of "longivity" associated with wellness, yet begins like all modern day Wall Street movies,  portraying highly motivated, foul mouthed stock brokers plying their underhanded and minipulative trade. In the meanwhile their senior  upper-management is intent on suckering some young rookie into taking the fall for insider trading, before a merger can take place. 

But then the movie takes a drastic turn from the modern to the old and mundane, which is set on the estate of a wealthy Baron that doubles-up as a sanatorium at the foothills of the Alps in Switzerland. 

The occurrences at the sanatorium is basically a pretext to wellness, practiced on people who have achieved "great things" in their lives, who has no-one who cares for them nor have any reason to leave the sanatorium, especially considering the moto of the sanatorium is "nobody leaves". The movie has that German Dr. Hitler human experimental theme to it, where ignorance is the enemy of science, the results of which would be exclusively enjoyed by the elite.

SEX TAPE

SEX TAPE

MOVIE SYNOPSIS

Just last night I watched the movie "SEX TAPE" starring Cameron Diaz as Annie Hargrove the "Blogger" and Jason Segel as Jay the Radio announcer. When they initially teamed-up, they were very much in love. Their relationship was intense, neither capable of keeping their hands off each other.    Two busy schedules, two kids and ten years later ten years later passion was almost dead and buried. This was their impetus to cart the kids off to their grandparents in order to spend some quality time together, reinventing one another. 

Annie (Cameron Diaz) was intent on trying every position described in  a book - The Joy of Sex - they previously read, while Jay (Jason Segel) was intent on making a video of this most auspicious three hour rendezvous. Thereafter,  things went pear shaped for both of  them. Frankensync subsequently uploaded their private lives to the iCloud and shared it with every iPad  previously owned by Jay (Jason Segel) which he distributed as gifts to family and friends, including the postman. Annie (Cameron Diaz) is a popular blogger in the process  of selling her online voice to an advertising company with high moral values. So for fear of being exposed  and  jeopardizing her reputation, they spend the rest of the movie tracking down those illusive iPads only to find out from a blackmailer that they could have remotely deleted the shared movie.

UNDERLYING MESSAGE

The movie contains too many themes awkwardly blended together, it is somewhat intermittently amusing and at times quite boring. A one word description - Letdown (with a capital L).  It deserves nothing more than a 1 star, if that,  for ruining expectations and for parading both leading actors explicitly naked; thereby  totally diminishing their celebrity and role model value.  If it wasn't  for its technology angle, I suppose I would have thrown in the towel when the unnecessary cruelty to the dog theme surfaced. 

In essence SEX TAPE is nothing more than an extended ninety minutes advert for Apple iPad with its remote configurable utility. But the surprising thing is that it's promoted by a rival technology company Sony.  SEX TAPE also doubles-up as a placard for the porn industry, making know the names of numerous pornographic sites to an audience, most of whom may never have heard of these pornographic sites but will go look them up, now that they know about them. It also quite subtly nudges all iPad owners,  reminding them that they are in possession of the key piece of equipment with which to do the same. Perhaps it's a ploy by  Segel, Stoller, Kasdan and  Angelo to further grow the porn industry in order to get recognition for their attempt at boosting porn sales.

MOVIE CRITIC

As a "comedy" SEX TAPE lacks the ability to engender laughter yet its smutty premise begets recollections of an old Benny Hill Show, peppered  with strong sexual content, nudity, profanity and some drug use.

SEX TAPE is as predictable as romantic comedies come but  portray sex as a desperate mechanical imperative devoid of passion. It more than qualifies as a haphazardly directed laugh-less cinematic farce that missed its mark to attain the raunchy-titillating and sexually outrageous effect it was aiming for.

Sadly  SEX TAPE is  just another exhausted movie idea, riding  the coattails-of-fame of its stars, crying for audience acceptance; much like "Gravity" did, starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney.  Also like "All Is Lost" that cries loudly for audience acceptance, riding on the coattails-of-fame of its star Robert Redford.

SEX TAPE is a Jason Segel movie by Columbia Pictures. An  American sex comedy film  released in 2014 directed by Jake Kasdan and written by Kate Angelo,  Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel.