Dallas Buyers Club

3.5 Stars (out of four)

Okay, mark your calendars.  You heard it here first (or maybe not, but it's the first time you'll here it from me), I have my first early pick for Oscar. Chiwetel Ejiofor from 12 Years A Slave seems to be the media darling this year for Best Actor, but I am going to go out on a limb and predict that it will be Matthew McConaughey's stunning portrayal of Ron Woodruff in Dallas Buyers Club.  It already has reaped a lot of film festival awards for McConaughey and it is easy to see why.  In order to play the homophobic rodeo performer in the advanced stages of AIDS when we meet him, McConaughey famously lost 50 pounds, putting him in great company with other method actors like Robert DeNiro (Raging Bull), Tom Hanks (Cast Away) and Christian Bale (The Fighter AND The Machinist) who dropped or put on the pounds for a role.  It has been a great year of McConaughey performances as he has put out not one, but TWO Oscar-worthy performances, the other being Mud, which I reviewed earlier this year.  But that is not all Dallas Buyers Club offers in the way of amazing performances.  I also think Jared Leto, who showed so much potential as Nic Cage's coked-up, suicidal brother in Lord Of War, should not only be nominated, but win Best Supporting Actor as the transvestite Rayon, who not only gets Woodruff his first customers, but also helps Woodruff find his humanity again by showing that not all gay people fall into convenient stereotypes.  Rather, they are people just as deserving of love and respect as everyone else.  It also features one of the most superfluous performances by Jennifer Gardner, who appears to sleepwalk through the whole film in an utterly forgettable and probably unnecessary role outside of being the caring doctor in the story.

Dallas Buyers Club, as the name suggests, takes place in early 1980s Dallas, just as the so-called "gay flu" began to spread like wildfire.  This was before it was well-known that HIV could be passed through heterosexual contact.  McConaughey plays Ron Woodruff, a hard partying, homophobic rodeo bullrider in the advanced stages of AIDS from unprotected sex with an intravenous drug user.  When diagnosed and given a prognosis of 30 days to live, he predictably reacts angrily at the implication he is gay.  He is then shunned by all his friends and evicted from his house.  He learns there is a new, experimental drug being tested to alleviate the HIV symptoms, and bribes his way to get medication.  What Woodruff doesn't know is the medication is like chemotherapy, in that the medication destroys everything, making him worse than before.  In desperation, he goes to Mexico and finds an exiled, unlicensed doctor who is doing experiments with another drug and a regimen of vitamins and proteins, all of which are legal, but unregulated and unapproved for use by the FDA.  To Woodruff's surprise, he gets better with the drug and hatches a plan to smuggle them into the US and set up a buyers club.  These were membership clubs where people would buy these unlicensed drugs located in several cities throughout the US.  He meets Rayon, a transvestite who wants to be a transsexual, one night in the hospital.  Rayon provides Woodruff his first clients and gradually, the two become friends.  Woodruff is constantly harassed by the medical field as well as regulators and law enforcement.  He finally unsuccessfully sues the FDA for keeping the drug cocktails off the street and eventually dies at the end, several thousand days after his initial 30-day prognosis.

What I loved so much about this movie is its humanity.  It takes characters who would never under any other circumstances be inclined to like or even talk to one another.  Yet, even if the person is repugnant to us, the movie says, if you get past the superficials and get to know the person underneath, the rest seems so silly.  I can't help but be moved by the tenderness and care the people had for each other in the end.  If only the world was more like them.  So why not four stars?  Obviously, this is an issues movie told "based on a true story."  It obviously has a point of view and bias that is a little too transparent.  There is no doubt the conservative backlash in Reagan's America slowed the research on HIV/AIDS.  After all, it only affected gays and drug users, so no one who really matters is hurt, and the sinners were suffering God's judgement on them, the prevailing wisdom seemed to say.  I can't help but wonder if more was done to combat this disease in its early stages, it may not have become the Black Death of the end of the 20th century.  While all this is speculative, the movie falls back on the trite villain of the new millennium, big corporations.  This movie more than hints that it was big drug corporations that kept research at a minimum.  I have to say, this is getting old.  The faceless corporation has replaced our fears of the faceless Red Menace and Yelliw Menace and provided us with a new boogieman watchword.  We now no longer need to prove something with facts, we just refer to our pedantic bad guy, the corporation.  This transference is childish and distressingly ubiquitous in the national debate.  Because of this, the movie dragged in places for me, sacrificing good storytelling whose implications any intelligent adult could understand.  Instead, the movie whines like a child and is ultimately a tad insulting in its dramatic simplification of the problem.  But otherwise, a really good film that is worth a watch.

Catching Fire

3 Stars (out of four)

Okay, so I started this blog after seeing the original Hunger Games, and my position on the story has drastically changed now that I read the three books (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay).  In the interest of fair and unbiased reporting, when I saw the first Hunger Games, I had just started reading the books and was forming a mostly uninformed and negative opinion toward them.  I thought the concept was horrible and bought into the whole outraged hullabaloo.  After reading them, I came to realize the story is a good, albeit somewhat predictable yarn.  The first movie was fine and I thought a fairly good representation of the source material.

Catching Fire takes up just after where The Hunger Games left off.  Our hero, Katniss Everdeen, played by last year's Best Actress Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence, is dealing with the guilt of having had to kill several people as the co-winner of the previous Hunger Games, as well as her conflicting emotions between her co-winner Peeta and her true love Gale.  Katniss gets an unexpected visit by the President, Donald Sutherland, exuding menace from every pore, who tells her that she has become a distraction for the oppressed masses with her on-screen romance.  He tells her to keep it up and be convincing.  At the same time, revolt is beginning to brew throughout the Districts, and Katniss has become a symbol of hope for them.  The President is trying to co-opt her as a symbol for the government as she and Peeta take a victory tour through the 12 Districts.  As the tour progresses, they see more and more examples of the government's brutal crackdown.  With each atrocity, more and more signs of open rebellion begin to surface.  The President realizes his strategy is not working, so a new Hunger Games is called.  Every 25 years there is a special twist in the games called the Quarter Quell.  This year being the 75th anniversary, the twist is all the participants will be chosen from previous winners.  Of course, Katniss and Peeta get chosen to represent District 12.  I won't say much more lest I spoil some twists for those of you who haven't read the story.  Needless to say, it's going to be a long year until Mockingjay is released.

So, let's start with the good.  The direction of the film is MUCH improved.  The last director, for some unknown reason, was fond of the hand-held, shaky vomit-com, so popular with subpar directors today who are edgy wannabes.  I was a little worried going in that I would be literally sick from the constant camera motion the last movie had.  Thank goodness we have a much more competent director at the helm.  The production design is fantastic.  The costumes, the pageantry of the capital.  This is a movie that screams Oscars all around for makeup, costuming and cinematography.  A quick note on Stanley Tucci, the emcee and color commentator for the Games.  Like Richard Dawson in The Running Man, he steals every scene he is in with his smarmy, Showbiz artifice.  He is obviously having fun mugging for the camera at every step, and it is a lot of fun to watch.  For an actor who is generally very subtle in his performances, he is a joy to see as the face of the bad guys.  Plus, I marveled at just how white his teeth were, almost like a predator ready to eat whomever he is interviewing.  Jennifer Lawrence has gotten much more confident with her acting.  This movie is all her, and it's success in touching us rests on her shoulders, and she carries it off beautifully.

However, since I didn't give Catching Fire four stars, I obviously don't think it's perfect.  I broke my own rule again and read the books before I saw this movie.  The books are fairly good, but not particularly unique.  They come from a great line of stories that question the role of entertainment and its tranquilizing effect on people, as every dictator knows.  From The Lottery, to Stepheb King's The Long Walk and subsequent movie The Running Man, to the very twisted manga and movie Battle Royale from which The Hunger Games bears the most resemblance, there have been several exposés on this matter.  Unfortunately, even with 2.5 hours, the movie doesn't capture the subtle nuances that happen in the book.  This is an unfortunate casualty to the necessary condensation to movie adaptation.  That said, the movie spends way too much time on the buildup to rebellion, and reveals the plan at the end, almost as an anticlimactic afterthought.  There is a lot going on in this new Game that will have great impact on the next chapter, Mockingjay, and it left that setup a little flat. Motivations are unknown, twists are not revealed.  It could be because they want to show the movie from Katniss' point of view as much as possible, but I don't think so as the script doesn't seem all that clever.  I found it disappointing because this is a very good story.  But in the end, I really liked it and am anxiously awaiting the next film with bated breath.

Street Smart

3 Stars (out of four)

One of the things movies can provide an invaluable service, more than any other medium, is to give us a glimpse into the past.  Movies, like all art, are created by what is around them, and reflect the atmosphere from whence they came.  Because of the interactive "feel" they have, they put us in that world and make it more real than we ever could imagine, transporting us back to our youth or giving those who were not there a taste of what was and now isn't.  Street Smart, starring Christopher Reeve and a very early role for Morgan Freeman that we aren't used to seeing, is a bit like that.  But the funny thing is, Street Smart, for all of its posturing grandiosity, is actually relevant today, more than ever.  More on that later.

In Street Smart, Christopher Reeve takes off the big red S and plays Jonathan Fisher, an ambitious reporter in New York, looking for that big story that will give him his break.  He is in a professional rut, until one day in a fit of desperation, he pitches a story to his editor focusing on a Times Square pimp and his life after Rudolph Guiliani's cleanup of that notorious area.  When he finds that no one will speak to him and deadlines looming, he creates a fictional piece about "Tyrone," a fast-living pimp that becomes an instant hit, making Fisher the toast of the town.  The problem is, a real pimp, Fast Black, thinks it's about him.  Fast Black is on trial for murder, and it becomes evident that everyone thinks Fisher's story is about Fast Black.  When confronted about it, Fisher first stonewalls about the story, but when he finally admits it was a lie, nobody believes him.  Fisher is subpoenaed for his notes on the story and Fast Black sees this as an opportunity to give him an alibi by having Fisher say in those notes that he and Fast Black were somewhere else at the time the crime took place.  Fisher finds himself increasingly caught between having to do real time and professional disgrace on the one hand, and Fast Black killing him and everyone he knows on the other.

This movie is significant for two big reasons, Reeve and Freeman.  Both performances are excellent and both actors give a great turn at their respective roles.  It must be remembered that Reeve made this movie as his career was sliding, a year after the dreadful Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and he was actively trying to regain some of the lost luster from his previous superstardom.  This movie is actually very good, but flopped at the box office, providing a tantalizing look at what could have been a career resuscitation.  But the standout in the film is unquestionably Morgan Freeman.  While he had been acting for some time up to this point, and it was two years before 1989, his breakout year when he was in Lean On Me, Driving Miss Daisy, and his Oscar performance in Glory.  His portrayal as the alternatively charming and then menacing pimp Fast Black got him his first Oscar nod, giving us a taste of what would become one of the greatest careers in Hollywood.

The movie, while showing a rotten Montreal doubling as late 80's New York, is interesting and fun, it still has Hollywood's glamorous unglamorous portrayal of the world of prostitution.  Sometimes this is taken to ridiculous, even insulting extremes with hookers that look like Julia Roberts and Laura SanGiocomo in Pretty Woman.  White suburbia's idea of "the life," an exciting walk on the wild side with a little danger lurking on the fringes.  Just safe enough without getting too close to the world of junkies, whores and blood.  But this movie also allows a little realness to creep in occasionally.  While the hookers are a little too pretty and the lowlifes a tad too glamorous, the movie still has an odd touch of realism in it.  Mostly this is due to the two lead actors' superlative performances.

What is also interesting is that the story still has reverberations today, but not from where you'd think.  Recently, there has been the notorious case of the 60 Minutes story where sloppy journalism regarding George W. Bush's Vietnam record got the producer and Dan Rather fired from CBS.  There have been several cases of reporters in the last few years who have gone to jail for contempt of court for refusing to reveal their sources.  Journalistic rights and ethics have rarely been so attacked and yet so often manipulated.  A free press is the bulwark against tyranny, every dictator knows this and is the reason why many countries don't have a free press.  But in an age where the internet gives any yahoo an audience of potential millions (should I have just said that?), strong ethics in journalism have never been more important.  Movies like Street Smart, Network, Absence of Malice, Broadcast News, Good Night and Good Luck, and even Morning Glory and The Newsroom have never more been important on shining a light to induce discussions about these important issues.

Ender's Game

3.5 Stars (out of four)

I know there have been a bunch of 3.5 star ratings lately, but we have really hit a spate of good movies in the past few weeks.  Let's hope the trend continues.  A few months ago, I had no idea what this movie was about.  I had never read Orson Scott Card's seminal sci-fi novel yet.  However, a friend of mine mentioned around March that this was the film she was most anticipating this year.  When she heard I had not read the book, she chided me and told me I needed to read it immediately.  Now, while I usually make it a rule not to read a book before I see a movie because I am inevitably let down by the adaptation, I'm glad I did in this case.

Ender's Game starts way in the future, 50 years after a race of aliens called the Formics invaded Earth and nearly wiped out humanity in the process.  We were able to turn the tide of the battle with the heroic efforts bt the commander, Mazor arak jam, but just barely.  During the war, we lost tens of millions of people.  Since then, the International Fleet (a sort of global defense force), has been forcibly recruiting the best and brightest of Earth's children to become the next genius commander that will be able to finish the fight by taking it to the Formics home world.  They put these kids through various battle and command schools figuring that since children can process complex information more quickly than adults, this is a way we can breed the perfect commander.  I don't want to tell much more of the story in order not to give too much away, but needless to say, the main character, Ender Wiggen (played surprisingly well by Asa Butterfield) goes through the schools and we follow his training and evolution into a commander.

As I said, I'm glad I first read the book this time.  Normally, I am able to divorce myself from the experience of the book versus the movie because I understand the trade offs you have to make in adapting a 300+ page novel into a 120-minute movie.  You have to condense events, combine characters, etc, to tell a coherent story in a timeframe an audience can be expected to sit through.  But this is highly subjective depending on the audience.  With a hard-core fan base like The Lord Of The Rings, people will endure a butt-busting three or more hours at a clip, but most audiences won't, and thus you have to cut.  The problem is, with a book that is as dense as Ender's Game, where there is a big emphasis on psychology, this is very difficult to coherently portray on screen, especially for the non-initiated.  While this movie is good, it does rely a little too much on you having some familiarity with the source material.  Those who haven't read the book may get a little lost as there is not a lot of explanatory exposition.  But, the movie makes a good attempt, and succeeds for the most part, on exploring the morality of command and warfare.  It attempts to show a battlefield leader must have the right amounts of both ruthlessness and empathy in order to be effective.  It also looks at the morality of war.  Is it ever justified and how far is too far?  Do the ends outweigh the means?  Obviously, the book goes into much greater detail, but all of the important elements are in the movie.

On a final note, if you get a chance, I would recommend the IMAX version.  While it is not necessary to see it this way, there are some really good scenes where the IMAX size makes a difference in the experience of the film.  Overall, the movie is enjoyable and thought-provoking, and even a little fun.