Losing Control (2012)

How sad is this?

best movie i've ever seen.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

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!

Knew nothing about this movie but was enticed into the theater by the offer of a Q&A with the writer/director after the movie. Wife and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. Strong, smart female lead (when was the last time you saw a female scientist doing real science not dressed in a wet T-shirt or other inappropriate garb?) with a strong, sensitive, supportive male who is not a wimp, jerk or axe-murderer. This managed to be romantic and funny, in a real-life way, not slap-stick. There is the usual dynamic tension in relationships, with an undercurrent of something sinister going on too. The reveal is satisfying and doesn't overpower the story. I love little surprise movies like this-no hype, no big studio promoting their $250 million dud, no big star hawking it on late-night talk shows. This is a heart-felt, true-to-life-experience story that is fun to watch and talk about long after the lights come back on. Reid Scott is a young George Clooney-he has the looks and can act. If this comes to a theater near you, run to see it.

'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.

Losing Control gets high marks from me. It is a smart romantic comedy. Funny, real characters, marvelous actors and music and it is well written and directed. The director knows romance, she has a rare comedic sense and she is funny.Scientists are often portrayed as cartoon figures. That is not the case here. The story drew me right in. I found myself fully invested in the characters and I completely enjoyed the ride. I will definitely see this film again. Miranda Kent balances the rigors of graduate school with her need to know about life, to evaluate her love life and the romantic question is Reid Scott "the one". As they say, laughter ensues.The director has accomplished a small miracle with Losing Control. She got me (!) actually interested in the science aspects of the movie. Having done that this film may well pull many women toward a field not generally considered by them. For this alone the director deserves honors, ribbons and medals.