Dallas Buyers Club - another great McConaughey performance

I don't want to use the tern 'Oscar-bait' to describe Dallas Buyers Club, since it's a term loaded with a negative connotation, but this is precisely the kind of film that it's no surprise to discover easily courted the Academy when it came to awards season this year.  With its HIV positive lead character struggling through illness, then living the American dream and then learning something about not being such a homophobe while exposing the evils of big pharma - it ticks a lot of boxes.  But fear not - Dallas Buyers Club is still a very good film.

The plot gets going pretty quickly and uses clever storytelling to paint a picture of the life of our lead character Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey).  He is a boozing, whoring redneck from Texas who works casually on that state's many oil fields.  One day a minor accident lands him in hospital, and a routine blood test reveals he has AIDS.  His doctor (Jennifer Garner) gives him 30 days to live.  This is the 1980s, and so the reaction of all his 'friends' is to disown him and treat him as an outcast - a gay outcast no less.  He reacts with rage, doing everything he can to get his hands on the drugs he thinks he needs to survive and lashing out at any hint he might be labelled a homosexual.  A brush with death lands him in a Mexican clinic though, where he learns about a series of drugs that control symptoms of AIDS but are illegal in the US.  He resolves to set up his own club to import the drugs into the US.  It's a club that people can pay a membership fee to be in, and then they get all the drugs they need.  This technically bypasses US law since he isn't actually selling the drugs on.  It's the Dallas Buyers Club.

It's an excellent film that just about rides the line between being overly mawkish and actually having a heart.  McConaughey is outstanding as seems to be standard for him these days - his recent performance in the TV drama series True Detective underlining that.  Here he plays a character who is superficially simple, but has many layers that only emerge when he finds his true calling - to help the HIV positive community of Texas get the drugs that Big Pharma doesn't want them to have.  Jared Leto won an Oscar for his portrayal of the HIV positive transvestite Rayon, who becomes Ron's friend and helps him to realise that gay men aren't as one-dimensional as he thinks.  Again this sounds pretty simplistic and sentimental, but the film just about has enough heart and realism to make it work.

Overall, another very impressive performance by Matthew McConaughey.  It's steeped in the traditions of the liberal Holywood elite, and so is probably a film that Bill O'Reilly would hate.  For these reasons alone, Dallas Buyers' Club is definitely worthy of your time.

Crimson Tide - Mutiny

Not posted anything for a few weeks, I've been away on holiday but the blog is still alive.  Here is the central scene from Crimson Tide in which Denzel Washington's XO conflicts with his captain (Gene Hackman) over the meaning of a message they've been sent to launch nuclear missiles:



There's a lot of testosterone in that scene, and a lot more in the film as a whole when a struggle plays out on the nuclear submarine between various factions each intent on doing what they see as right.  Crimson Tide is one of those films that will probably be forgotten about as the years of cinema roll by, but it's really very good, with a simple premise, interesting characters and a good cast (throw James Gandolfini and Viggo Mortensen in for good measure - each before they were famous for the roles we best know them).  The film is a political and psychological drama that asks questions about the nature of war in the modern age and questions the legitimacy of nuclear weapons in the post cold-war era.

Remember - Denzel Washington doesn't do bad films.

Lucy - Pseudo-Philosophical Bullshit

Why did I decide it was a good idea to go and see Lucy on Saturday evening?  I'm not sure I can come up with a reason that makes sense, other than the fact that one of my friends had already seen the film I wanted to see and that I guess the advertising campaign had done enough to make me go 'hmmm'.  The film is based on the pseudo-scientific premise that humans only use 10% of their brain capacity, and we are asked to imagine what would be possible if we used more.  Apparently we would turn into Neo from The Matrix (but with a much less interesting outcome).  Btw, this contains spoilers as it's so shit I don't care.

The 'plot' is that Scarlett Johansson is the down-and-out Lucy in Taiwan who is convinced by her shitty boyfriend into delivering a shady package to some Korean gangsters.  Everything goes wrong and she ends up being used as an unwilling drug mule, the drugs sewn into her abdomen.  When the drugs leak, they start to make her able to use more than 10% of her brain.  She immediately turns into a detached super-heroine, able to escape from her captors with ease and hunt down the people who did this to her.  As the portion of her brain she's able to use increases, she becomes less human and more powerful - capable of manipulating others and the world around her.

Morgan Freeman plays the sort of oracle character in Lucy that he has become type-cast as in recent years.  At the start he literally delivers a deeply unscientific lecture on his theories about humanity using > 10% of their brains, he the continues as the film's narrator, explaining plot points as they come along.  The Morgan Freeman parts feel like filler, which is true of a surprising amount of a film that's only 90 minutes long.  There's an awful cgi-heavy car chase through Paris and a gun fight that exist I think only to convince people who aren't into pop-philosophy that this is an action film.  Then there are the constant cuts to nature footage (do we really need to cut to a montage of nature documentary stuff to understand what Morgan Freeman means when he talks about animal reproduction?) and the insanely dragged-out opening scene, all filler.  This film could have been an episode of The Outer Limits if they cut all that out.

The opening scene is particularly terrible.  It spends several minutes in a close-up back-and-forth conversation between Lucy and her boyfriend, doing no character development and failing to set the scene in any way while he whines at her to deliver the package.  Then when she does she's obviously scared of the gangsters she's delivering it to, do we really need to cut to footage of a scared deer running from cheetahs to demonstrate her fear?  I think we got it already!  Though I will admit a possible visual foreshadowing of the rest of the movie here that was quite nice; when we cut to the deer being stalked by cheetahs, we naturally assume that Lucy is the deer in the metaphor.  However, Lucy is wearing a leopard-skin top at the time - perhaps foreshadowing that she's really the hunter here?

Regardless of that.  This is a film that's obsessed with a pop pseudo-philosophy that thinks if only humans could just use more of their brains we would all be superheroes / better off / have more knowledge / all get along man / whatever.  When Lucy finally achieves 100% brain usage she seems to go off travelling through time and space, all the time Morgan Freeman explaining what's going on as she transforms into some sort of black organic computer oracle.  She then produces a USB stick on which Morgan Freeman insists "all her knowledge" is stored.  What knowledge?  For who?  For what purpose?  Why am I still watching this?

Lucy is a film that's trying far too hard to 'mean' something.  It's an interesting premise that could either have been an action film where she has to find and fight the gangsters, or a science fiction film based on Flowers for Algernon.  We could have joined Lucy on a journey in which she slowly loses her humanity and how by striving to enhance herself to become 'better', but forgets what it was like to be the person she once was.  None of this happens though.  In the end Lucy is a loose collection of philosophical babble and half-conceived action scenes.  Please, for the love of all that is good in cinema, do not watch this film.

At least I had a free burrito before the film, so Saturday evening wasn't a total waste of time.