Summary:

Fifty-something Canadian professor of history and lifelong womanizer Rémy (Rémy Girard) lies in an overcrowded hospital with a fatal illness. Family and friends gather, including Rémy’s estranged son Sébastian (a wealthy financier played by Stéphane Rousseau) from overseas, and Rémy’s ex-wife (Dorothée Berryman) and several previous romantic partners. Rémy and Sébastian fight painfully about Rémy’s philandering, but after a plea from his mother Sébastian decides to make things better for his father, even if they have not been reconciled.

This he does in many ways, most of which involve spending lots of money and many of which are highly irregular or illegal. For example, he arranges to have his father taken into the U.S. for an expensive PET scan that would have required six months’ wait to have free in Canada. And he arranges through Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), a childhood friend who is now a heroin addict, to provide a regular supply of heroin to control his father’s pain, which the hospital apparently is not able to do with morphine.

These and other extraordinary measures work for Rémy, and the process of caregiving brings Sébastian and his father closer. (Rémy’s only problem seems to be the feeling that his life has been wasted because he has not left his mark--and he gets help with that, paradoxically, through several conversations with Nathalie.) For his last few days, Rémy and ensemble move to a friend’s lakeside cabin, where the conversation is witty, intellectual, and sexually frank, and the mood upbeat and conciliatory.

In the face of Rémy’s imminent demise, all is forgiven, and others seem to gain insight about their lives. Rémy’s last act is peacefully nodding to a sorrowful Nathalie to begin the series of heroin injections that will end his life. In a final dig at the establishment, the heroin is administered through an IV provided on the sly by a hospital nurse.

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In a future society in which biological reproduction is restricted and humanoid robots ("Mechas") are routinely manufactured to supplement the economic and social needs of humans ("Orgas"), Dr. Hobby (William Hurt) creates a prototype child Mecha, David (Haley Joel Osment), who has "neuronal feedback," the ability to love, and "an inner world of metaphor, self-motivated reasoning," imagination, and dreams. David is given to Henry and Monica, a couple whose biological child Martin is incurably ill and cryopreserved, awaiting a future cure.

More specifically, David is created out of Hobby's own loss and given to aid Monica's mourning for Martin, whom she has been unable to "let go" of as dead. It is thus Monica (Frances O'Connor) who must make the decision to perform the "imprint protocol" that will make David love her. After she stops resisting the desire to love a child (of any kind) again and implements the protocol, Martin is unexpectedly cured and comes home.

The ensuing turmoil sends David, accompanied by a robot Teddy bear, out into a nightmare world of adult Mechas, comprised of both Rouge City, where functioning Mechas like Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) do their sex worker jobs and also the fugitive realm where unregistered, discarded Mechas try to find the spare parts they need to rebuild themselves and elude trappers who take them to reactionary "Flesh Fairs" where they are publicly destroyed as an expression of rage against artificial technologies.

Joe and David, both set up and betrayed by humans jealous of their superiority at performing human functions, join together on a quest to make David "real" and return him to Monica. The quest takes them to a partly submerged Manhattan and sends David and Teddy two thousand years into the future to resolve the dystopic narrative.

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Three childhood friends, now adult neighbors who have drifted apart, are brought together through the brutal murder of Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter. Sean Penn plays the grieving father; Kevin Bacon plays Sean, the plainclothes cop on the case; and Tim Robbins is Dave, a man deeply troubled following his childhood abduction and sexual abuse by two strange men. It's an important part of this film that the action takes place in a tough white working-class neighborhood north of Boston in a culture that seems to have no place for emotional problems like Dave's.

This leaves Dave alone with his agonies, feeling alienated from himself and living a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde existence driven by a love-hate relationship with pederasty. One night he kills a child abuser, and then tells contradictory stories to explain the bloodstains he returns home with. Through a tragic misunderstanding, these things are connected with the death of Jimmy's daughter, and Jimmy turns violent and takes justice into his own hands. Shortly after, Sean finds the true killers, who confess.

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Set in Sweden in the late 1950’s, around the time of Ingemar Johansson’s world heavyweight boxing championship, "My Life as a Dog" tells the involving story of a precocious boy, Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius), who gets into trouble, entertains his mother (Anki Lidén) with his antics and plays with his dog, Sickan. As his mother becomes increasingly sick with a terminal illness (almost certainly tuberculosis), he is sent to live with relations for the summer in a small rural community. After an eventful vacation, he returns to his mother but she soon dies. He stays with family friends who, unable to cope with him or his behavior, send him back to his relations, where he is again welcomed, but somewhat less enthusiastically.

Throughout this, Ingemar maintains his sense of perspective by comparing his own situation to the tragedies he reads in the newspaper. In particular, he returns to the story of Laika, the Russian dog launched into space. Laika was sent into orbit in a capsule with no expectation that she would return, and it was believed that she eventually starved to death or ran out of oxygen (although recent reports, decades after Laika’s death and several years after the film was made, have acknowledged that she probably died within a few hours of launching from overheating and stress).

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In this film based on a true story, Ramón Sampedro (Javier Barden), a young fisherman from the northwest coast of Spain, is injured in a diving accident that leaves him paralyzed from the neck down and completely dependent for his care on his older brother and his sister-in-law, who make numerous sacrifices in order to care for him. Twenty-seven years later, in his 50's, Ramón is weary of his life, which he feels is without dignity, and he tries to get legal permission to end it.

His brother is adamantly opposed to euthanasia, but Ramón is comforted and aided in his quest by two women who are drawn into his circle. Julia (Bélen Rueda), a lawyer suffering from a degenerative disease, begins to design a legal case for Ramón but soon falls in love with him (although she seems happily married), and he with her. In a particularly moving scene, Ramón-who of course cannot move--tells Julia that her smell is the beginning of his erotic fantasies about her.

Julia helps him edit and publish a book of his poetry, but then, having agreed to a joint suicide, she mysteriously backs out. Rosa (Lola Dueñas), a young single mother who works in a fish-packing factory and who has had a hard life, also falls in love with Ramón. For some time she tries to change his mind, arguing that his example has inspired her and saved her from a life of despair. Ramón challenges her: "The person who truly loves me will be the one who helps me [commit suicide]."

When Ramón's legal appeal (for the same rights the nondisabled have to end their lives) is lost on a technicality, he seems to have nowhere to turn, but Rosa, converted by her love for Ramón, finally agrees to help him die. He achieves his goal in a videotaped end in which he argues that what he is doing is his right and that no others should be blamed or prosecuted for it, sips poison through a straw, and dies.

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The exquisite young artist, Angélique (Tautou) sends a rose to her lover, the cardiologist Loic Le Garrec (Le Bihan). She is planning a future with him; the only problem is that he is married. But he has promised to leave his wife. Angélique is little troubled that the couple are expecting a baby and when the pregnancy is lost following an accident, she believes the day will be soon.

Her medical student friend, David, worries that she is being used and is appalled by the accumulation of disappointments and slights that Angélique must endure. She falls apart, neglects herself and the home and exotic plants that she has been watching for friends, but when she hears that Loic has been accused of assault by a female patient, she is utterly disbelieving. The patient is found dead and the doctor falls under suspicion.

Rapid rewind, and the movie begins again with the rose, and by repeating a handful of earlier scenes, retells the same events from the perspective of the doctor. He has no idea who is the sender of the rose, and as the flowers, notes, and gifts accumulate he grows more distracted, even angry, and his wife is suspicious.

It emerges that Angélique and Loic have barely ever spoken to each other and that she actually volunteered for house-sitting next door, in order to be close to him. The accident that caused the miscarriage was Angélique’s attempt to kill his wife by running her down with a motor scooter. The patient who charged the doctor with assault was wrongly mistaken by him for the secret admirer; he struck her out of anger and fear. She presses charges against him and pursues him through the courts until she is murdered by Angélique.

But the doctor knows none of that. When Angélique attempts suicide with gas, he saves her life and she is all the more smitten. Gradually the doctor realizes her real identity and the police link her to the murder. She is sent to a psychiatric hospital.

Years pass. Loic and his wife have two beautiful children. Angélique is finally discharged with reassurance that she will be well as long as she takes her medicine. In the final scene, the caretaker moves a large cupboard to find all the pills that she had been prescribed over four years pasted to the wall in a larger-than-life portrait of Loic.

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This video is the film of the staged one-woman play written and acted by white South African Pamela Gien. The play begins in 1963, in a white suburb of Johannesburg, in the fenced yard of the Grace family and their black servants. Gien starts as six-year-old Lizzie Grace. Gien then fluidly shifts roles to enact twenty-eight different characters from newborn to age eighty-two, black and white, male and female--who talk, gesture, sing and dance in this tour-de-force performance.

The set contains only a large, plain swing; even the berry-bearing syringa tree to which the swing is attached is left to the imagination. Gien’s costume is similarly muted--she is barefoot and wears a beige jumper over a simple tee shirt. A sound system provides music of ethnically diverse origins at appropriate moments.

The play opens with Gien swinging and talking in a girlish voice and using exaggerated childlike gestures. Lizzie exclaims that she is "a very lucky fish": she proceeds to explain to the audience the meaning of her favorable white nailbed spots. Lizzie is, by self-definition, a "hyperactive," outspoken child with great imagination and energy. She is cared for by Salamina, a loving nanny and servant.

Lizzie’s father is Dr. Isaac Grace, who delivers Salamina’s baby in the home. The child, Moliseng, "has no papers" and is harbored illegally by the Grace family--a constant source of worry for all, including Lizzie. Isaac is a Jewish atheist, and Lizzie’s mother, Eugenie, is Catholic and of English descent. Their neighbors, however, are bigoted Afrikaners and create great tension for the Grace household. "Don’t ever make this place your home," advises Dr. Gien to his daughter after dealing with racist clients who do not want to be in the same examining room after a black patient.

Lizzie’s liberal, generous grandfather is brutally murdered by a Rhodesian freedom fighter shortly after the resolution of another crisis: Moliseng, suffering from malnutrition, is missing from the overcrowded hospital. The play then fast forwards through Lizzie’s college years, when Moliseng, at age fourteen, is murdered in youth riots. Lizzie leaves for America, land of the (she pounds her chest) "free and brave." She returns years later, with her infant son named for her grandfather, to visit her father, her demented mother, and, above all, her beloved Salamina.

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This Japanese horror story is set in a hospital in financial crisis, short of supplies and staff. We see various nurses and doctors struggling with their working conditions. A patient is injured falling out of bed, a nurse practices her IV technique on an unconscious burn patient, a demented woman wanders the hallways talking to apparitions she sees in mirrors. Two events set the central plot in motion: the burn patient dies because of a medication error and those present—Dr Akiba (Koichi Sato) who was responsible and Dr Uozumi (Masanobu Takashima) who was supervising, as well as the nurse who gave the lethal dose and her supervisor—decide to cover up the mistake, and a patient is brought to the ER suffering from a mysterious infection that is liquefying his internal organs.

Dr Akai (Shirô Sano), a senior physician, demands that Drs Akiba and Uozumi begin a study of the infected patient, despite their terror. The patient is never shown directly, but we see green ooze running from his bed. Akai argues that that discovering the pathogen causing this illness will raise money for the hospital, but the real incentive he offers is blackmail: he knows about the mistake and the cover-up.

As the night proceeds, all those involved in the error are infected, taking on zombie-like characteristics, behaving abnormally (a nurse attempts to transfuse her own blood into a corpse; a doctor tries to strangle a patient who has asked to have his pain relieved) and oozing green fluid before dying. With Dr Akiba, however, we begin to realize that the pathogen is not purely somatic. Dr Akai may in fact be the dead burn patient, the “green” ooze is red blood seen through the distorted perception of those haunted by guilt, and the title’s infection is the contagious fear felt by health care professionals who, for various reasons, are incapable of the infallible work of healing that is expected of them.

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Thin, a documentary film produced, aired and distributed by HBO, is the centerpiece of a multi-faceted project that explores the complex issues of body images and eating disorders in young women. Photographer and journalist Lauren Greenfield began documenting eating disorders in 1997, eventually publishing an article for Time Magazine and a book entitled Girl Culture, as well as producing a traveling photographic exhibit. Returning to one of the facilities featured in the exhibit, Greenfield took up residence at the Renfrew Center, an in-patient facility for eating disorders in Florida, to film the day-to-day suffering of four young women struggling with anorexia over the course of six months.

The youngest is Brittany, a sad and troubled fifteen-year old, whose bulimia and anorexia began when she was only eight (her weight bounced from 185 to 95 pounds in one year) and whose mother has her own very unhealthy relationship to food. Brittany is eventually returned to her weight-obsessed mother because of the loss of insurance. Shelly, a twenty-five year-old, psychiatric nurse, has been anorexic for six years and enters Renfrew at 84 pounds with a surgically-implanted feeding tube. Her identical twin visits to plead with Shelly to refrain from slowly killing herself and ultimately destroying their family. Polly is a twenty-nine year old, charming troublemaker whose health is returning but whose defiance of rules eventually gets her kicked out of the facility. The oldest patient is Alisa, a thirty-year old, divorced mother of two whose eating disorder ostensibly developed at age seven when a pediatrician persuaded her mother to put her plump daughter on a severe diet. Alisa's graphic account of a single day of binging and purging is shocking, and her forced release from Renfrew because of problems with health insurance precipitates a return to this pattern after she tucks her children into bed.

 

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This film combines light-hearted scenarios of poor to absurd communications with patients on issues of death and dying, with measured advice from physicians expert in such communications. In addition, a scenario of a woman physician and her patient with advanced breast cancer models a positive example for doctor-patient communication on issues of planning for death and choosing life-sustaining options.

The film opens with a madcap grim reaper dancing and singing a message from Dr. Fletcher to a patient at home: you have six months to a year to live. These same actors morph through a series of roles sprinkled through the film: a physician using medical jargon with a non-comprehending patient, an ad for a phrase book to "speak like a patient," another doctor-patient scene with the physician now graphically describing cardiopulmonary resuscitation using wild gestures, and a waiter advising a patient/patron on item selection from the Terminal Cafée menu (no vegetables!).

The experts discussing death and dying are: Michael Clement, MD; Lisa Capaldini, MD; Doriane Miller, MD; Bernard Lo, MD and Kate Christensen, MD. They offer sage advice on communication, avoidance of medical terminology (even words like 'diagnosis' and 'procedure' can be misunderstood), pain management, informing patients of anticipated poor outcome with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, asking patients what is important to them, goals of treatment, who should make medical decisions, and the setting of such discussions. Cultural sensitivity is briefly discussed, with an emphasis on respecting the patient's individuality rather than assuming a fit within cultural expectations.

The exemplary scenario demonstrates positive qualities and key points: both physician and patient are seated and dressed; the physician asks the patient if she wants another person present for the ensuing discussion and also inquires as to the quality of discussions with the spouse, whom the patient designates as the one to potentially make medical decisions; the specific fears and desires of the patient are sought; and the physician recaps what the patient says and asks her if the summary is correct. In addition, resuscitation is explained in detail. The visit concludes with the doctor encouraging future discussions and allowing decision changes.

The film ends with the finale to the opening scene. The patient slams the door on the grim reaper, who, beset by dogs, returns to Dr. Fletcher and advises the doctor to talk to his patients himself.

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