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50 / 50 (CP)

50/50

Originally titled I'm With Cancer, this film from director Jonathan Levine (The Wackness) gives us Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, below left) a meek NPR-type radio producer who gets the bad news about a rare and peculiar cancerous tumour growing along his spine.

His research on the condition leaves him facing the titular 50-50 odds of survival. That leaves Adam to fall back on his dubiously faithful artist girlfriend Rachael (Dallas Bryce Howard), his smothering mom (Anjelica Huston), and his supportive yet sarcastic best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen, below, right) to help him get through treatment.

Kyle is the stand-up guy and his peculiar take on Adam's crisis is that he should use his cancer to get sympathy -- and sympathy sex -- from the ladies. Adam ultimately finds himself leaning on his designated therapist, a tentative young doctor (the adorable Anna Kendrick) who compensates for her lack of experience by putting her heart into Adam's case.

Call 50/50 the cinematic equivalent of medical marijuana. It inserts a streak of stoner levity in a premise that is typically handled as straight-up, hand-wringing drama. Indeed, dramatic and comic elements slow dance together here, especially in a sequence when Adam is compelled by two older cancer sufferers (Phillip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer) to indulge in some marijuana cookies, resulting in Adam's tripping his way through a grim oncology ward with an unseemly case of the giggles.

The scene is an apt summation of the whole movie's balance of comedy and tragedy rendered, as it sometimes is in life, fuzzily indistinguishable

Call it: Brian's Bong.

3 1/2 stars out of five

Real Steel

The film is directed by Shawn Levy, but executive producer Steven Spielberg's fingerprints are all over this shiny machine. Spielberg jump-started the project, adapting it loosely upon the '50s short story Steel by the great sci-fi writer Richard Matheson.

The only thing that really survives of Matheson's story is the premise: Boxing between humans is illegal, so a few years into the future, fights are staged between specialized warrior robots.

Charlie (Hugh Jackman) is an ex-boxer who has parlayed his skills into acting as a promoter-trainer for a series of mechanized Palookas. Needing money to finance his next fighter, Charlie sees a silver cloud in the sudden demise of his ex-girlfriend. She has left behind their son. Charlie, the absentee father, visits the angry young Max (Dakota Goyo) and negotiates a deal with the boy's rich uncle Marvin (James Rebhorn): uncontested custody for $50,000. The catch is that Charlie actually has to spend the summer with the boy.

During an illicit midnight forage in a robot junkyard, it is Max who discovers a discarded sparring 'bot named Atom. It is love at first sight. And before long, the cynical Charlie realizes that getting on Atom's team may help repair the rift that exists between himself and his son.

The visual effects are excellent, with the computer-generated fighting robots given the gleam and weighty presence of real machines. And where early Spielberg movies often refer to an absent or remote father, this movie puts the absent father front and centre.

Indicative of Spielberg's more calculated side, the movie also constitutes a response to the Transformers movies Spielberg exec-produced for director Michael Bay. Where all the Transformers movies are all impressive, empty spectacles about giant fighting robots, Real Steel offers both the spectacle and the emotional human core the Transformers movies so sorely lack.

Blu-ray DVD extras include Sugar Ray Leonard: Cornerman Champ, a doc on how Leonard lent his real boxing expertise to the movie's battling 'bots.

Three stars out of five

randall.king@ freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 26, 2012 E5