Saturday, December 14, 2013

DALLAS' HOTTEST CLUB IS...


DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

**
For many Thanksgiving Time means possibly-overcooked turkey and forced small talk with your aunt’s sketchy new “friend” Maurice; for me, the few days respite the holiday provides allows me to engage in something I love but have barely had the time for since starting at Stern: going to the movies.

Besides a late-night foray to see GRAVITY 3D (which was more a theme park ride than a film; and a B minus at that), I’ve seen just about bupkiss since September—so last night, leftovers in my belly, I headed to the theater to get me some good ‘ol fashioned culture.

But the box office was…lackluster.  I’m trying to go as long as I can in this review without massive offense to HUNGER GAMES fans.  Suffice it to say there wasn’t many options, and though I sort of vaguely wanted to see DALLAS BUYERS CLUB in the way I vaguely want to see most  “important” films (read: not really much at all, because I’m too lazy to feel things), I sort of approached it as a “this will do” option, a movie for lack of anything less terrible.

I will say that I was pleasantly surprised and entertained during the next 117 minutes of my life.  DALLAS BUYERS CLUB follows the life and livelihood of real-life Ron Woodroof—AIDS-afflicted , heterosexual good ‘ol boy in 1980s Texas.  Matthew McConaughey portrays Woodroof as he finds out he has HIV, and then negotiates his transition from cocky rodeo cowboy to humble freedom-fighter who protests for the human rights of the very same “fairies” and “fruits” that he had previously scorned.
As far as Hollywood bildungsroman, it’s by-the-numbers stuff.  We get it, Matthew McConaughey. You’re super-homophobic, but you’re also the good guy, and you’re going to learn things, and we are going to tear up when you do.  What saves this film from cookie-cutter tropism is the rigorous physical performances that allow McConaughey to be as physically repulsive as he’s ever appeared on camera, and puts Jared Leto in drag as a transgendered adult with a heart of gold (yawn).  Not entirely novel stuff, but at least novelistic—the detail and depth of these characterizations lets you latch on for the ride.
 
Maybe I’ve been in Stern mode a bit too long, but the one strand of the movie I found absolutely fascinating was the portrait it painted of business opportunities in the early wake of the AIDS crisis.  Hear me out. 

As society faced this completely bizarre, redoubtable, horrific disease for the first time, there was a stutter-step in our response to curing it.  Early trials of AZT testing—the greatest hope the FDA saw for treating it—were slow and cumbersome.  The “gay” connotations associated with HIV, coupled with the bigotry and myopic of the 1980s, was a major hindrance to recognition of the severity of the plague and the suffering of those afflicted.  Unable to wait for the fat-headed bureaucrats of the FDA to get their act together to approve and produce affordable treatment, many who tested HIV+ had to turn to a different kind of cowboy to address their health concerns—drug-runners who scoured the planet for unapproved (but not illegal!) medicines that could indeed slow the disease’s progress and mute the symptoms that AZT didn’t address at all.

This is a real thing.  These “buyers clubs” did pop up worldwide (customers would, for sometimes quite-lofty membership fees, be given all the supplements they needed to address their health concerns—but, of course, survival was never guaranteed).  The movie only tangentially considers the intriguing business opportunity component of these novel business models, which of course some see as predatory, and some see as salvation.  Regardless of your take, it’s clear enough that Woodroof created value for people who needed help, and did so profitably—he’s able to travel the world and improve his lot by helping to improve the lot of others.  While certainly Woodroof’s methods were unconventional and lacked the scientific rigor that the FDA applies to its approved drugs, the hundreds of people he helped would never accuse him of being some sort of charlatan.  For them, it was money well spent.

In the process (and ultimately what DALLAS BUYERS CLUB is really about) we are given a window into the very-real disconnect between the molasses-crawl of healthcare reform and the outstripping pace of medical crisis.  We see a businessman, an unlikely one at that, rise in this gap and provide a revolutionary service to customers in need.  In a way, it’s nothing more or less than the great American corporate fairy tale.

I offer these insights not to be flippant but rather the opposite of that.  In its best moments, DALLAS BUYERS CLUB, like the unforgettable recent doc HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE, offers the true-life, unromanticized realities of the early HIV crisis, rather than the AIDS-quilt wrapped feelgooderies of Hollywood past.  Only a film as straight forward and simple as DALLAS BUYERS CLUB, which fetishizes little in its sturdy narrative path, could achieve so much.

I will say, however, that Jennifer Garner was awful.

Monday, September 30, 2013

NOT AS BAD AS WE THOUGHT





BREAKING BAD FINALE = B+

As I've not-famously argued, the SOPRANOS series ending was the most gratifying act of withholding in TV history.  A mouthpiece for creator David chase, it wasn’t so much a "thank you for watching" but a well-meaning "screw you, bitches--I'm out[drops mic]". By denying us closure on the moral argument that could only be solved by definitive life or death for Tony (i.e., is he a "good guy" or a "bad guy") Chase effectively chastises us for reducing his character--his art--to such base binaries, and for pontificating so fervently on how the series 'should' end.  It wasn't Tony who was whacked but us, the hungry audience, who suddenly is plunged into darkness and informed that that's all the story we get—there aint no more.  It hurt; it was brutal; it was genius.

BREAKING BAD goes for something different.  In a show that leaves little (and certainly decreasing) doubt that Walter is indeed a "bad guy" by the end, it's finale spends entirely too long lionizing him in what amounts to be a distractingly neat conclusion.

What's neat about a self-firing, oscillating machine gun taking out a room of neo-Nazis, freeing Jesse and catching Walt with shrapnel which will finally--finally--end the reign of Heisenberg?  It doesn't require CHOICES.

Choices are the engine of human mess, and BB turned out to have surprisingly few of them.
Skylar was painfully annoying, but her washing up on the "victim" side of aftermath beach is fascinating.  Arguably she's still perpetuating the deceptions Walt planted, yet we aren't given insight into her feelings (except, what, she's taken up smoking? I'd probably have taken up meth).  The show seems as uninterested with Skylar as it always has-- not as a real woman, but as the wife that will or will not catch her husband in "the act".  When she does catch him, Gilligan wisely makes her complicit, but only so our story can continue.  But he never bothers to explore what that complicity means, how it changes her, or how it was there all the time.   She's a cipher.

As is poor RJ Mitte who I hope goes on to meatier roles than Walt junior.  Poor little druglord's son.  His histrionics on the phone in the penultimate episode illustrate the problem I had with his character all along -- his moral puberty never comes; he never gets beyond "my dad’s the best" until he gets to "my dad’s the worst."  This  peculiar Oedipal dialectic may actually be quite interesting psychological fodder, but BREAKING BAD doesn't give a shit about Walt Jr's psychology.  This is why we don't get scenes with him alone, or with his friends, or really doing ANYTHING besides reacting to his parents deceptions/truths/postures.  It's actually a patently odd omission in hindsight -- we don't know jackshit about who Walt Jr really is, and it's a missed opportunity six seasons later.
One that BB’s finale eschews in favor of its perseverant focus on Walt Sr.  Sure he's the antihero and center of this story, and Bryan Cranston does great work here (though he's always Malcolm in The Middle-dad to me).  But we are so aligned with Walt's POV through BREAKING BAD's endgame that we don't experience the genuine abjection the other characters have come to know so deeply.  And spending so much time getting Walt's rationale through Walt's eyes (if not literally than certainly story-wise) we can't quite fully chastise him for his choices.  Sure he's a bit of a dick, but wasn't he doing it for the family?  Why else does his final “confession” somehow SEEM so false-- "I did it for me.  I liked it."   That fact, which we know, which we always so strongly known, suddenly seems like the lie.  After all, he’s trying so hard to get that money to his family.  For his ego?  For a judging deity?  For Skylar?  That's the power of BREAKING BAD's myopic narration.  We don’t believe the most obvious thing of all—Walt’s quite simply, in Jesse’s words, “evil.”

I'd usually be the last one to suggest moralizing as a positive creative force, but in a show called BREAKING BAD its a bit disingenuous to imply that the particular brand of Bad that Walt has broken is anything as ambiguous and morally gray and even borderline meritorious as the finale implied.   He doesn’t/shouldn’t get the hero’s ending, even the antihero’s ending, with his final plan a success, Jesse free, his family guaranteed money, the pieces all just right before he can look over his meth lab equipment in satisfaction, and die in peace.  And as much as I’ve been horrified by the nihilism and bloodshed of these last six episodes I feel gipped in a way that it was in service of delivering what is—if surely not a traditional “happy” ending—as happy as an ending as BREAKING BAD could muster.

SOPRANOS denied us emotional catharsis through sleight of hand nonsense (Meadow parallel parking) and a brain-dead, hackneyed soundtrack (DON’T STOP BELIEVIN) rounding out its precious final moments.    BREAKING BAD forces emotional justice, forces closure, onto a story that demanded chaos.  With the refrain of the final Badfinger song “Guess I got what I deserved” over Walt’s death scene, Gilligan is almost embarrassingly juvenile in his foot-dragging affection for Cranston or for Walter White, or likely some amalgam of the two.   If you think DEATH is what Walter White deserved after these six seasons, you haven’t been watching. 

Walter White got off easy, and so did we.