NRS goes to the movies

Despite our busy blogging schedule, every once in awhile NRS needs a break too. Last night, NRS sent an investigator to check out Losing Control the new film by Harvard alumna Valerie Weiss. Billed as a science rom com that takes place right here in Longwood, it seemed right up NRS's alley. And it didn't disappoint.

SPOILER ALERT. We will be divulging important plot elements in the following review.

At the beginning of the film I was a little afraid it would turn into a tear-jerker as the protagonist's stuggles hit a little close to home. We meet Sam on the evening before her DAC as she makes one desperate attempt to repeat an experiment that worked for her once four years before and then never again, in the hopes of graduating. When Sam's PI and her DAC agree once again that she is not ready to graduate, it sets her life into an all too familiar downward spiral. Later that night, when her boyfriend of five years proposes she tells him she thinks they should see other people instead so that she can gather a large enough sample size to be sure that he is "the one." As her friend wisely puts it, "One woman's slutty is another woman's thorough." Her boyfriend moves to China in protest. Typical.

And Sam sets out to collect dating data in a very thorough manner complete with a detailed checklist that puts NRS's attempts to gather data on this subject to shame. When science and love collide though, it isn't a pretty picture. Sam ends up falling into a vat of some kind of protein concoction forcing Sam to make use of the emergency shower, and of course her PI walks in on her. Due to this incident she is forced to show up at a party dressed only in her belted lab coat, a look I hope many of us will be styling at Rlee21's next party.

Later Sam sees on the news that the Chinese post-doc from her lab has been arrested in China for stealing lab secrets, and Sam realizes that her experiments were working all along they were just being sabotaged, probably by the post-doc. So she smuggles lab equipment home and repeats the experiment in her kitchen (who knew a salad spinner could substitute for a centrifuge?) and it works. Perhaps we should all be doing more kitchen based science. Meanwhile, her disastrous dates have her convinced that her boyfriend actually was "the one" but when she flies to China to tell him that he turns her down.

When she returns, we learn that it was not the post-doc but her PI who was selling her data to China, and he has her admitted to McLean mental hospital to protect himself. She breaks out of the mental hospital and runs back to lab to find her data, but her PI has other plans.

Meanwhile, back in China, Sam's boyfriend tours a Chinese biotech company and realizes they have stolen her work. He rushes back to save her, and shows up just in time, as Sam's PI is about to shoot Sam with sodium azide (too soon?) using a pipet to fake her suicide.

Sam gets his taped confession and the FBI shows up just in time to arrest her PI, and all is well that ends well because Sam will graduate and her boyfriend proposes a second time with much happier results.

So... how true to life is this? In typical fashion NRS decided to make a table to compare Sam's PhD experience with Topshelf's.

*ok fine, maybe Topshelf's marriage proposals weren't as serious....

So, what do you guys think? Is the movie accurate? Does Sam's life sound like yours?