Downloading Nancy **

Director: Johan Renck
Cast: Maria Bello, Jason Patric, Rufus Sewell, Amy Brenneman

As if trying to give his movie a final chance for some redemptive-or even human-qualities, director Johan Renck shows us a title card that reads "inspired by true events", then the ending credits roll.
His intention was probably to elicit a collective gasp that would send moviegoers debating the controversial subject the film deals with. But it works instead as a troubling statement that contradicts the previous ninety six minutes or so, because absolutely nothing in "Downloading Nancy" feels alive.
That would make sense in a movie that has a lot to do with death, but its own sense of detachment makes it impossible for the audience to get interested in what's going on.
Bello plays Nancy, a depressed housewife with fetishist (self mutilation and violent sex) practices who wishes death more than anything else.
Her husband Albert (Sewell), busy with his airport golf business idea, barely notices her existence and her psychotherapist (Brenneman) has reached a dead end trying to help her.
Fortunately for Nancy, you can find anything on the internet and she meets Louis (Patric), a loner who is willing to have painful sex with her before he kills her.
The film uses fractured narration in which we see how Nancy interacts with the other characters, but if the intention was to make us understand her, Nancy always remains impenetrable.
Bello gives a conflictive performance and the movie's coldness might in fact be owed to her, because she makes Nancy someone impossible to empathize with.
Even when given stereotypical dialogues, mostly in her therapy scenes, she delivers them with a conviction that make us wonder how much of Nancy is actually a learned performance.
When Louis reminds her that after he kills her "it will be the end of everything" she gives him a warm, almost hopeful, smile and replies "that's the whole idea".
Patric-proving how underrated he's remained-is nothing short of brilliant, his Louis is a mysterious creation that gives the film its only hints of authenticity.
Even when the story tries to turn him into a serial killer-ish character, the actor stays true to who he made the character to be.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that Louis starts developing feelings for Nancy, it's almost a structural given, the surprise is how Patric channels those feelings.
The way he looks at her, the way he listens (while Bello has a good 'ole time chewing the scenery in fight scenes) all amount to making him someone who might've achieved a kind of love nobody, but him understands.
It's a shame for his performance that the rest of the movie isn't able to make him justice.
"Downloading Nancy" is made out of several parts that work independently (Christopher Doyle's sterile cinematography is fascinating if a bit too facile) but as a whole just make us feel like the movie is merely a contraption that never really answers the question: why doesn't Nancy just get it over and done with?

My Sister's Keeper *1/2

Director: Nick Cassavetes
Cast: Cameron Diaz, Abigail Breslin
Jason Patric, Sofia Vassilieva, Evan Ellingson
Joan Cusack, Alec Baldwin

How can anyone say or think something bad about a cancer-related film? That seems to be the idea around which director Nick Cassavetes worked to deliver this manipulative, lazy excuse of a movie.
During the opening credits we learn that Anna (Breslin) was conceived in vitro as a perfect genetic match for her sister Kate (Vassilieva) who suffers from leukemia.
Her "spare parts", as called by a doctor, have kept her sister alive for more than ten years, but when she has to donate one of her kidneys Anna decides it's been enough. She goes to lawyer Campbell Alexander (Baldwin) and sues her parents to obtain "medical emancipation" creating the ethical dilemma at the center of the film.
Is she the bad seed or does she have a point?
As played by Breslin, Anna is the only character in the whole movie we would like to know more of. Breslin who possesses amazing abilites to act like a kid (not like a creepy grownup trapped inside a kid's body) gives her character little traits that make her believable and touching.
When she's confronted by her parents Sara (Diaz) and Brian (Patric), Anna goes into her own little world; most of the movie Breslin makes us linger between the two possibilities, only to be let down by Cassavetes awful screenplay and direction.
The thing about the film is that it has already taken sides and we spend the whole movie watching all the pain Kate has gone through.
From vomiting blood, to losing her hair, to falling in love and then losing that too and we rarely get insight into why Anna's plead also has justifications.
If this bias wasn't enough, Cassavetes goes the extra mile to make the whole movie seem like a collection of Kodak moments and upbeat musical montages that pop out of nowhere and last for ages (as that famous online spoof goes "is this a movie or a CD?").
Shot beautifully by Caleb Deschanel, who even makes the chemotherapy room look dreamlike, the contrast between the visuals and the emotions the characters try to convey is distasteful.
The actors do their best with what they're given though, Baldwin is good (even if sometimes he narrates like a detective out of a film noir), Cusack is moving as a sensible judge (despite the burden of corniness she's given to carry) and it's refreshing to see Diaz stretch her acting muscle a bit, even if she doesn't always succeed.
But most of this gets lost in the amalgam of cliché Cassavetes concocts. Whenever the action is steering to make Anna seem sane he inserts a random flashback reminding us why Kate is more important.
Then there's a whole subplot full-o-holes with their brother Jesse (Ellingson) who lingers in the streets and sits atop building rooftops harboring what seems like something awful which we never fully understand.
Exploiting likeability to the ultimate factor, Cassavetes also becomes aware that while cancer patients are impossible to dislike, so is Abigail Breslin.
And he gives her character a final twist that should make us shed the waterworks, but only serves to expose the utter lack of respect the filmmaker has for both the sick and the healthy.
Please, don't give this movie its shot.