What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[bluesoul]

really a great film but you need a good theater like system (large screen and great sound system) to appreciate it completely

so i take it the story is a piece of shit if you need all those things to distract you

[Stavros]

I saw the Dallas Buyer's Club the other day. My feeling is that the story of the AIDS crisis in the late 80's and early 90's needed to be told. I'm just not sure Woodroof's story was the best source material. The acting was good and it covered a lot of the important political issues of the time period, from the FDA's failure to respond to the emergency, to the rampant homophobia that tainted people's perceptions of the disease.

Here are a couple of things that I was unsure about. First, there's the fact that Woodroof and Leto's character were suffering from the disease but were mercenary enough to run a for profit business selling HIV drugs. This was addressed a little bit when Woodroof becomes more charitable towards the end of the movie, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I thought this aspect of their business was not dealt with honestly enough. I also thought the bond that formed between Woodruff and Leto was difficult to understand...even if the film dealt with this as well as it could have. How exactly did their friendship develop? I suppose one can say that about any friendship, but it seemed a bit strained here.

Finally, I am also not sure I'm comfortable with the film's portrayal of HIV treatment. It is true that taking care of your body and taking vitamins is preferable to taking toxic doses of an anti-viral. These may have seemed like the only two choices at the time, but this view has been taken to new heights by quacks who believe anti-retrovirals are harmful at any dose. The little post-script at the end of the movie seemed to address this phenomenon by discussing the fact that lower doses of AZT are therapeutic. For those who have followed the debate about the right to choose one's own medical treatment, the choices made by Woodroof are ominous in what they foreshadow, even if they were reasonable given the context they took place in.

I realize a story does not have to address head-on all of the political ramifications of its source material. But I thought the strongest thing this movie had going for it was the extraordinary time period the events took place in. The AIDS crisis in the 80's and early 90's literally felt like an apocalypse and neither health care providers nor regulators were ready to deal with it.

On the treatment of AIDS, as it was mostly known at that time, Randy Shilts in his brilliant survey And the Band Played On (1987) does not mention buyer's clubs, but does at various points in the book refer to -mostly gay men- buying drugs in Mexico and other places or in some cases experimenting with drugs in their own kitchens. The demand for anything that would help even if only in the short term was tremendous, but was also part of a political landscape in which, as Shilts quotes someone working in DC said, that as long as it was gay men who were dying the Government didn't reallly care. Moreover, he points out (in Ch 52) in 1985 the Office of Management and Budget actually reduced the money allocated for AIDS research for the fiscal year 1986 from $96m to $85.5m, the film doesn't really relate much about the Federal govt -Reagan himself said nothing about AIDS until 1987 and it was Rock Hudson's death (and possibly Ellizabeth Taylor's lobbying, as she was as early activist in this area) which prompted him to speak about it.

As for the transexual angle, in the link I provided a few days ago Woodroof's wife claims he was bi-sexual, and the character Rayon is a composite of various Dallas transexuals Woodroof worked with in the Club, that is one of the historical inaccuracies in the film, but may have been there as drama to suggest that Woodroof needed a lot of convincing in the early stages about his own illness, and because the gay community Rayon was part of had access to latest information on drugs. I think also the Club used most of its profit to buy more drugs from Mexico and other countries, I didn't get the impression he was pocketing the proceeds.

In the end it is a film, and as themes go in Hollywood, you can see it as a 'little man against the machine' story; there are other inaccuracies in the film that are probably an inevitable part of making any film from the past.
This is a link to a short survey of Buyer's Clubs-
http://newroots.drizzlehosting.com/buyclub.html

[broncofan]

I didn't get the impression he was pocketing the proceeds.

Yeah I guess I didn't consider that, just because I get caught up in themes and I figured they were trying to sell us on the story of a homophobic cowboy who starts out as this odious guy and has a transformation. So I thought he started out as a profiteer and turned into an advocate for the cause.

One thing about the choice to make him a rugged straight guy in this story is that it's a deus ex machina (particularly in view of the biographical material you've posted). By viewing the story through the prism of this guy's experience we now see how unjust it was to write HIV off as a gay disease. Except it sends the message that this view is not wrong because it reflects a lack of humanity towards gay men, but because some people who get the disease are not gay.

The director maybe does not trust the audience to be independently sympathetic to Rayon, but to only feel sympathy for him by proxy; because we see how touched this homophobic cowboy is by his plight. Rayon is not someone the audience is supposed to connect with except through Woodroof.

I'm nitpicking..I enjoyed it mostly, but it is a serious subject.

[RallyCola]

a haunted house

this is a spoof of paranormal activity and other recent horror flicks by marlon wayans.

it is actually quite funny and i recommend you see if it you want 90 min of mindless fun.

[broncofan]

One thing about the choice to make him a rugged straight guy in this story is that it's a deus ex machina .

Not that it matters but I'm not sure deus ex machina is exactly right, but plot contrivance emphasized for storytelling purposes.

[Stavros]

Yeah I guess I didn't consider that, just because I get caught up in themes and I figured they were trying to sell us on the story of a homophobic cowboy who starts out as this odious guy and has a transformation. So I thought he started out as a profiteer and turned into an advocate for the cause.

One thing about the choice to make him a rugged straight guy in this story is that it's a deus ex machina (particularly in view of the biographical material you've posted). By viewing the story through the prism of this guy's experience we now see how unjust it was to write HIV off as a gay disease. Except it sends the message that this view is not wrong because it reflects a lack of humanity towards gay men, but because some people who get the disease are not gay.

The director maybe does not trust the audience to be independently sympathetic to Rayon, but to only feel sympathy for him by proxy; because we see how touched this homophobic cowboy is by his plight. Rayon is not someone the audience is supposed to connect with except through Woodroof.

I'm nitpicking..I enjoyed it mostly, but it is a serious subject.

If the transexual was the main character, would this film have even been made? Boys Don't Cry featured a transexual, but it was a 'female' -did anyone really think Brandon in the film was a boy?

[pantybulge69]

ROBOCOP (2014)
i thought it was above average and a solid movie overall,but i wasn't "WOWED"
over by it. Actually i still like the 1987 version over the remake.
i did like Samuel Jackson's Pat Novak character It was ok, not
disappointed but not impressed either.

[Stavros]

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
I haven't seen this films for years and saw it in the exchange shop for £1 so I bought it. It has a featurette on the dvd too which was interesting as it went into the details of how the film was made, the tricks, the music, the way Iris was, in a manner of speaking, handled -in some of the scenes her sister stood in for her as a body double. De Niro is compelling as Travis Bickle, but so too are Harvey Keitel, and Jodie Foster- a quite astonishingly mature performance from someone who was 12 at the time. I have met people who hate the film because of the use of violence as catharsis, as an unacceptable alternative to law and order, but the film does locate the sleazier aspects of Manhattan as it was at the time, and Bickle's remark to the Senator running for the Presidency -'somebody needs to clean up this town' could be latched onto Rudolph Giuliani who some think did just that.

The interesting stories that come out are mostly to do with Cybill Shepherd, whose career seems to have faded -apparently she and Scorsese did not get on well on the set; De Niro was so immersed in his character that she was genuinely scared of him in the scene when he berates her in the office. She also claims, on her imdb page, of Elvis Presley: "This man loved to eat. But there was one thing he wouldn't eat . . . 'til he met me." And she has an amusing quote about the execrable Monroe "She had curves in places most other women don't even have places".

In the featurette, Foster makes the interesting claim that the 1970s in the USA has been the best decade for films -not sure if she means ever, or since the 'Golden Age' of Hollywood -and I am inclined to agree. It is hard to realise now how controversial Taxi Driver was at the time -the underage Prostitute, the violence, but it would probably not get made at all these days. And it also shows how ordinary Scorese's later films have become. Small point I didn't know -Bernard Hermann's score has no strings.

[Prospero]

Great score isn't it Stavros. I saw this film about two days before I went to New York for the very first time. It certainly gave me a frisson to see the manhole covers in Manhattan with the steam coming out of them like the opening sequence of the film.

[Prospero]

"Howl" a 2010 movie that presents Allen Ginsburg's landmark poem, with animation, threaded through a narrative about the trial for obscenity of it's publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Cty Light Books. Its a curious but fascinating blend and much more interesting than the recent film about the early life of Ginsberg, "Kill Your Darlings". James Franco plays Ginsberg and gets the voice, reciting the poem, spot on.