Losing Control (2011) Reviews

• Losing my patience, actually

  The_Film_Cricket2012-03-21

  'Losing Control' is one of those worn-out, cutesy-poo romantic comedies that comes off the assembly line of television sitcoms. It doesn't generate realistic characters, natural dialogue nor believable subject matter. It becomes so desperate for laughs that it provides its heroine with the task of going into a singles bar to find a man for the night while wearing a stupid-looking hat. The hat, I'll get to in a moment. The heroine is a neurotic research scientist named Samantha (Miranda Kent) who is about to graduate from college but only needs to finish her work on a formula called "Y-Kill" which will kill the Y chromosomes in sperm. The theory is that doing this will prevent the transfer of diseases like muscular dystrophy in parents that contain that gene. Not long ago, she got the formula right but can't seem to duplicate it. The movie never really gets to the holes in her formula which is that killing the Y chromosome would produce only little girls. What about parents wanting a little boy? Tough luck, I suppose The movie alas, never gets to the theoretical nuts and bolts of her experiments. Instead it a lot of time on Samantha's lame-brained experiments to see if she can find her perfect romantic match. The hole in THAT logic is that she already has the perfect guy, a good-looking chap named Ben who has been faithfully by her side for the past five years. It is only at the moment the has is proposing marriage that Samantha gets the idea that she needs to conduct her experiment to find the perfect guy. This involves seeing other men as controls, to prove to herself that her seemingly perfect boyfriend is the one. The obvious question is: Why hasn't she figured this out in the five years that they have been together? This is a movie that operates on theory but never works its way down to logic. Samantha spends a great deal of time talking to very odd men as part of her experiment, then records the results on a mating qualifications scorecard the resembles the one you use to get at the mini-golf course. The men don't seem like anything out of real life, but out of some bizarre netherworld of funny accents and curious lifestyles. One guy seems nice but turns out to be a married polygamist. Another guy is a tantric sex instructor who's theory of ejaculation leads to a sight gag that I could have done without. And yet another guy is of a foreign origin that I couldn't place who has theories about relationships that wouldn't pass muster in a bad porn flick. The supporting characters in Losing Control are all out of central casting. There's Samantha's slutty best friend Leslie; her panicky Jewish parents; her cold-blooded professor; none of which generate even the slightest bit of credibility or interest. They are set-ups for pratfalls, most of which fall of Samantha especially in a nauseating moment when she is leaning over the vat of her formula, drops her notebook into it and then falls in after it. The dialogue in the movie never feels like anything out of real life. It is one of those movies where you feel as if the actors have been provided a joke book of cute little one-liners. Now for the funny hat. It is provided by Samantha's mother Dolores (Linn Shay), a panicky Jewish stereotype who insists that her daughter wear it for no real reason that I can recall other than the fact that she spent time making it. It is a white knit cap embossed with a very large Star of David made out of bright flashing lights. Samantha hates it. Why would her mother make something like that? Why make the Star of David flash? Why would Samantha wear it to a night club? Why would it not raise questions from the men she is trying to take home for the night? Perhaps it could have been part of Samantha's experiment to see if she could pick up a man who would be willing to look past it. Perhaps she could have dumped it in the garbage can before going into the club. Perhaps the movie could have ditched the hat, the experiments, and the clichés and just dealt with well-written characters getting to know each other.

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• horrible, lame, full of every stereotype there is

  anonreview22013-11-29

  This is supposed to be a romantic comedy about a female scientist who wants proof that her boyfriend is "the one". Alas, this movie is full of every stereotype there is... and the portraits of scientific culture are implausible too. To start with the heroine: she's shown as having a complete "life plan" written out on an oversized piece of paper, from age 6 up to her 30s. Her boyfriend seems quite nice, her purported reasons for dumping him to "play the field" make little sense. As to her academic life, it's about as plausible as a Wiley E. Coyote cartoon: the description of her research project is very silly, she treats an important academic presentation like a school bake sale, her presentation to (supposedly) other scientific colleagues is at the elementary-school level, and her adviser seems to think that if a biotech experiment doesn't work, "scaling it up" is the magic ingredient for improvement. Oh, and the dialog is really boring, too. My husband and I gave up on this after about 15 minutes. For once, we agree completely on the rating: 1/10.

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• Not worth time or money

  jrhlcs2013-01-05

  I am reviewing this movie primarily in response to gushing reviews of the movie and endorsements of the director that I believe are disingenuous and may mislead the innocent film-goer into seeing a movie that is awful. A previous review of this movie that I wrote has been deleted based on a user complaint. I'm not sure why, and no explanation was offered. Taken together with the non-credible reviews of this movie, I'm wondering if the fix is in here. Is it? Losing Control is a bad movie, as 3 others and myself uniformly agreed after we saw it at a promotional screening in Cambridge, MA. We're all scientists, and are generally nice people who would like to encourage new film talent. We went to see this after all, right? In my now-deleted review I covered in more detail the problems with this movie. Now, I will be more brief. Highlights of the problems with the movie include: -- The plot is absurd, unbelievable and not particularly interesting. -- The humor in this comedy is typically not funny, and at best it's not very funny. -- The movie is constructed principally from clichés: women, men, scientists, Jews, marriage -- There are innumerable stereotypes deployed throughout, many of which are really quite offensive. Just to mention a few, the movie insults gays, men, scientists and Chinese, and many others. -- The scientific premises of the movie are outrageous and unrealistic. This is especially and unpleasantly surprising considering that the director has a PhD in a scientific field. As essentially a crowd-sourced venture, IMDb is vulnerable to manipulation. It's regrettable, and it provokes some wonder about the role of this film's writer/producer/director in this. I suppose it's naive of me to be surprised about such things. In any case, I write to warn those who are simply looking for a good movie. Good luck!

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• Really wanted to like this, but...

  mrbofus2012-10-10

  I really wanted to like this movie. But there are just way too many problems with the movie. First off, the main character, Samantha, is working on a way to only have girl babies because she wants to get rid of Y-chromosome linked diseases. By virtue of the fact that roughly half of the world's population is female, vital genes could not exist on the Y chromosome. What's the only common Y-chromosome linked disease? Defective testicular development. The movie makes it sound like she's working on something that will save the world. The movie basically gets its premise from her declining a marriage proposal from her boyfriend, Ben, because she decides that she needs to date around to make sure Ben is the right one. She didn't think about this in the FIVE years that they had been dating and had to wait until the marriage proposal? But fine. Let's say that's the case. Ben declines a fellowship to stay with Samantha. She's in the coat room lamenting how her life didn't pan out the way she planned. He proposes, she says no. So he says, fine, I can't wait around forever, I'm going to go to China. One of Samantha's fellow grad students, Dr. Chen Wa Chow, gets arrested on suspicion of stealing research and giving it to China. Samantha's response? Take all her research from the lab and sneak it into her apartment to continue her research. How does she explain it when her mom asks why she brought it all home? "Because there are a billion Chinese people at Harvard Medical School and Chen Wa knew each and every one of them." The next scene we see is them cooking and doing her experiments on the same cutting board, mixing ingredients together, etc...Really? I'm not a scientist, but even I know there's no way that's good science. Or good cooking for that matter. As another reviewer mentioned, she starts dating extremely quirky men and that somehow validates her ex-boyfriend as a good choice. She gets upset when they can't accept her quirks (like having to test out six different sleeping positions before settling down for the night) but she won't accept any of theirs. She eventually decides that Ben was the right one and goes to China to try to get him to take her back. She surprises him in China, and he tells her no because she broke his heart to run an experiment and date around, and because he wants someone who knows they love him and doesn't need to test him all the time. So then she's crying on the plane back home. Really? She's shocked that the guy says no to taking her back after saying no to a marriage proposal and telling him the reason for saying no is because she doesn't know if she loves him and wants to date other guys?!? How are we supposed to feel any sympathy for her? So fine, she comes back. Her professor tells her she needs to sign a form and admit herself to a mental institution or he'll have to call the police because she's under suspicion of selling information to China. And she just goes ahead and signs the form?!? Without reading the form, thinking about it, talking to a lawyer, anything? And what's the first thing she does when she gets to the mental institution? Complain about why she's there! Let's see...she's there because she signed the form earlier that day without questioning it. And this is where the movie got REALLY crazy. She happens to run into her friend Leslie at the mental hospital where Leslie happened to be getting electroconvulsive therapy to fix a plastic surgery procedure gone awry. (Is that even a legitimate way to reverse plastic surgery to the face?!) Then Samantha says, "I think there might be enough electricity left in your face to disable the alarm." So Samantha takes Leslie's earphones, connects one end (somehow) to the window sensor, and touches the other ends to her friend's face AND IT DISABLES THE ALARM. WTF?! Then Samantha runs all the way back to her lab at Harvard where her professor confronts her and confesses how he was the one to sell her research to China so that China could increase their female population. Samantha surreptitiously turns on voice dictation software on the computer she's standing in front of her to record him saying this. Except that earlier in the movie, we saw that same software record dictation and show it on the screen. And not work half the time. But this time, even though that same computer monitor is facing her professor, the man who is confessing his crimes, nothing shows up on the screen. And later, when they retrieve it, it has recorded everything perfectly. But fine, let's say that was working fine. When the FBI busts in to the lab, they are after her. But she and her friends have managed to put her professor in the cold room. The FBI comes running in and she just points to the cold room and says, "He's in there," and they don't even ask her any questions and just go arrest him. What? I'm pretty sure if the FBI was coming to arrest you, just pointing to someone else doesn't get you off the hook. And she ends up with Ben. For some unknown reason, he chooses her.

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• Not funny, not clever, really not much of anything.

  VidsGoer2011-04-10

  When I go to see a comedy, I'm usually satisfied if I get a good two or three hearty laughs. This one gave me one or two chuckles, no full laughs, and an awful lot of groans. The actors did a decent job with what they were given. The plot started out well enough, but soon devolved in a series of tenuously connected scenes, many completely absurd. However, not absurd enough to be a good farce. I'm not one to shy away from expletives, particularly in a good action movie, but the gratuitous expletives in this movie were really distracting, inappropriate, and out of character. I'm not sure if that was due to the script or direction or both. Either way, not good. So basically, bad writing, bad direction, okay acting. May or may not be a waste of time, depending on your mindset.

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