Name: Losing Control (2012)
Genres: Comedy. Country of origin: USA.
Cast: John Billingsley as Professor Straub, Ben Weber as Dr. Rudy Mann, Miranda Kent as Samantha, Reid Scott as Ben, Jamison Yang as Dr Chen Wa Chow, Lin Shaye as Dolores, Kathleen Robertson as Leslie.
Written and directed by: Valerie Weiss.
The initial tableaux: Samantha is pursuing her PhD at Harvard. Her experimental results fail to support the central hypothesis of her thesis. Her major professor enables her experimentation to continue, but lets her know that it should be converging, not going sideways.
Delineation of conflicts:
Early in her research, Samantha made a perfect sample of 'Y-kill' but since then, she cannot reproduce the result. Ouch. Straub encourages her to continue, but with larger volume. So a bigger amount changes quality of results?
Her fellow in the research environment, Dr. Chen Wa Chow, gets arrested on suspicion of stealing research and giving it to China. Sam's surroundings are under surveillance, and something is going wrong. Will she be the next target?
Sam is engaged to Ben, but she decides to test whether he is her best match. She's in conflict with herself, clearly.
The stint in the mental hospital was the second or third 'jump the shark' moment. On the other hand, perhaps that was the correct place for the lead character.
Resolution: It did end like a romantic comedy, but not in a convincing manner.
One line summary: Clueless Harvard PhD student.
Statistics:
Cinematography: 9/10 A bit dark, but adequately framed and focused.
Sound: 9/10 Adequate, but occasionally dips too low.
Acting: 2/10 The acting was not a plus. I liked John Billingsley somewhat.
Screenplay: 0/10 The writer seems not to like Harvard professors, PhD students, and post-doctoral fellows, or, for that matter, performance art and artists. At least they are the ones made to appear the most stupid, ignorant, indecisive, disloyal, thoughtless, disgusting, or downright traitorous. I had zero belly laughs, zero chuckles, zero wry smiles. Why did it take Samantha so long to figure out that her major professor was betraying her? That was clear in the first 10 or 15 minutes. Then there is the hardcore bigotry of the piece: anti-male, anti-Jew, anti-Chinese, anti-science.
Final Rating: 2/10 Two black holes for acting and screenplay.
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