50/50 really spoke to me on a personal level…
There is cancer in my house, the bad kind: brain cancer. It is incurable. This cancer just sits, ever growing, hiding in the recesses of the brain too far down for the surgeons to cut out, waiting for the chance to erupt once again. This one is one of the least-understood forms of cancer, so the doctors know little about it. My wife has struggled through radiation and is now struggling through aggressive chemotherapy to treat what we have been told is a very malignant form of cancer in her brain. We figure we could sit around and cry about our plight, but instead we choose to laugh, or, as Renton suggests in Trainspotting (1996), choose life. What alternative is there, really?
50/50 (***) hit home with me in a very powerful way. Admittedly, I was concerned about seeing the film. When you are living the experience portrayed in the film, one tends to judge it in comparison to their lives. That might be an unfair standard to place on the film, but that’s the way it is with such subject matter. Thankfully, director Jonathan Levine and screenwriter Will Reiser have made an excellent, powerful and deeply moving film that permeates with the one thing we feel each and every day when all seems lost…hope. Read more on John’s TIFF Diary: Day Six…
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Anna Kendrick,
Best Actor,
Best Actress,
Best Supporting Actor,
Elizabeth Olsen,
John H. Foote,
John Hawkes,
Jonathan Levine,
Joseph Gordon-Levitt,
Martha Marcy May Marlene,
Oscar contenders,
Sean Durkin,
Seth Rogen,
Toronto International Film Festival,
Will Reiser
