If you’ve ever wondered “what exactly is Parkinson’s Disease?” and “where can I stare at Anne Hathaway’s breasts for 45 minutes consecutively?”, park those chariot’s, brothers and sisters. My irrevocable girl crush on Anne Hathaway aside, Edward Zwick’s Love and other Drugs without question is the most wonderful combination of casual sex and business philosophy I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of ’em.
The bad news: every time I wiggled my way into the wormhole of a genuine moment, there was Jake Gyllenhal’s penis to push me back out of it. I love him, I do. But after Prince of Persia, I fear a sexually charged Rom. Com. isn’t going to cut it.
The good news: Anne Hathaway’s performance is breathtaking. One particularly rapturing scene sees Hathaway’s character Maggie (I’ll save you the comment on how weird it is that Gyllenhal had to repeatedly have sex with someone who shares his sister’s name) is having an especially trying time with her Parkinson’s one afternoon. She looks like a fish thrown in the boat looking for the ocean as she searches through her line of medications to find the one that will calm her trembling hands. After minutes of struggling just to open the bottle, she finds that she’s out of pills.
It’s a fantastically suspenseful scene. My grandfather died of Parkinson’s several years ago, but it shocked me at how paralyzed in grief I was when I watched her try to catch her breath. While this film is in no way best picture, Hathaway’s performance beckons an Oscar above so many other performances this year.
Could Zwick just remake the film and charge Hathaway with playing herself and Gyllenhal? That’d be fantastic.
kchauspresents 
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