50/50 (2011)

You don't have a heart if you didn't like this movie.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt who has played very colorful quirky characters, now plays a rather dull Adam, a man who plays by the rules and still gets cancer at an early age because he has bad genes. Seth Rogen is his uncouth best friend who is far more likeable. The non-conformist in me was glad Adam got cancer as opposed to Kyle. The humor is low impact. It wasn't LOL funny. For instance Katherine (Anna Kendrick) is Adam's stress counselor. She is 24 and just a delight, thank you Anna. Adam makes a remark about Doogie Howser. She doesn't know who he is and asks, "Does he work here?" We discover that the more syllables a cancer name has, the worse it is.His GF Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) becomes less supportive as Adam is not her only interest. Like "Man in the Moon" (for those who like funny movies about cancer) the film gets sadder as it progresses. As a cancer patient you get to make friends with other cancer patients, bond with them, and go to their funeral.Anjelica Huston did an excellent job as Adam's mother for the short time she was on the screen. The acting was good. The script was up and down. Joseph Gordon-Levitt starts out as the weakest person in the film. It wasn't until he told Rachael to get off his porch does his character pick up and we start to develop respect for him. He is able to take us through a cornucopia of emotions from euphoria to despair. The film starts out as a 6 star comedy, but ends as a 10 star drama.F-bomb, sex talk, sex, brief shadowy nudity.

50/50It's tone and the environment of it seems a bit off track some time and it's not that because of some funny sequences, it's just the surrounding of it and the characters they just aren't palpable to it. 50/50 may come off a bit eerie and not easy to digest but it's advantage is that it floats on a light mode and delivers everything in appropriate amount. Jonathan Levine's execution seems like a TV dramatic episode along with the writer Will Reiser. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is doing some of the best work of his career in here and along with the help of a good supporting cast like Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard and Seth Rogen it pretty much gets it right on performance level. 50/50 even though being of around 100 minutes seems a bit long, slow and quite pretentious and one of the main thing it lacks is carrying out the emotional or intense sequences to the audience.

If you've paid attention to cinema for the past decade, you'll probably recognize Seth Rogen as the guy who wants to spend eternity smoking pot with his friends while they discuss bodily functions. But he gets a different role in Jonathan Levine's "50/50". He plays the friend of a cancer-stricken radio journalist (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). The movie manages to balance comedy and drama, as the friends have their usual fun while the neurofibrosarcoma-stricken Adam gets ready for chemotherapy. In the process, we meet Adam's overprotective mother, her Alzheimer's-afflicted husband, and some other people. Probably the most interesting character in the movie is Anna Kendrick's therapist-in-training. New to her job, she does what she has to.So, this is a movie that shows that even these guys who mostly star in silly movies can be versatile. Which is not to subtract from the performances of Kendrick, Anjelica Huston, Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer. A fine piece of work.