Dallas Buyers Club

The Dallas Buyers Club is based on a true story.

Dallas is rodeo country and winding back to 1985 we meet Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaugnhey). A bit of a cowboy, a homophobic drug addicted alcoholic chain smoking womanising cowboy that is.

After getting accidentally electrocuted at his job, Woodruff awakes up in hospital to be told bluntly that he is HIV+. Oh and that he’ll be dead in around thirty days.

At first he doesn't believe the doctors because after all HIV is a virus that only homosexuals get and he certainly isn’t one of them. He's outraged that they seem to be branding him as one. That homophobia gets played back at him when his equally unenlightened friends find out he has the disease.

When he calms down a tad he learns more about the disease and manages to illegally procure the drug AZT which is currently on trial. Then when his supply dries up he travels to Mexico in an attempt to get more. Once there a local physician Dr. Vass (Griffin Dunne) warns against AZT and instead tells him to stay healthy, take vitamins and recommends alternative drugs which are unapproved in the United States by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration).

Once his own quality of life improves, he starts importing the drugs and sets up a business supplying them to other victims of the virus. He is assisted by a fellow HIV suffer he meets in hospital, Rayon (Jared Leto), a transgender male. Rayon initially disgusts Woodruff but through his disease he learns to have an open mind and they become good friends. 

The FDA is not impressed by their antics and tries to stop them. They only want to foist AZT on the world. So Woodruff ends up fighting the system and the big pharmaceutical companies. He quickly moves from being a man simply trying to survive, through realising he can make money from the situation to finally ending up on a moral crusade against the system. He even learns to sympathize with gay men, at least in regards to healthcare.

It’s all rather excellent. McConaugnhey is great, sporting one of the scariest body transformations you’ll ever see. Leto is good too as is Jennifer Garner as Woodruff's Doctor.

As for barely having a month to live, Woodruff ends up surviving nearly eight years.

Twelve Years A Slave

It’s 1841 and Solomon Northop (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a free black man living with his family in Saratoga, New York. He is portrayed as the model of upmarket respectability, so it’s quite baffling that he suddenly accepts an offer to do a short our as fiddler with two white men he’s just met, without even seeming to tell his wife where he's going.

This takes him to Washington, where one night whilst socialising with his new colleagues, he is suddenly taken ill and wakes up in chains.

He has been sold to slave traders, renamed as Platt and is on his way to Louisiana where he will spend the next twelve years working for different owners. All of this happens pretty much within the first fifteen minutes which is a shame. The director seems over keen to get us to the beatings and whippings that are to come, of which there are many.

Once in Louisiana you only need to know one thing. That all black slaves are good folk and all the white owners are evil people, end of story. This goes for the woman as well, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) is a nasty chap but his missus (Sarah Paulson) is arguably worse.

Solomon’s first owner Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) does show compassion for a while but even this doesn’t last. 

Of course there has to be one token good white guy and Brad Pitt (naturally) saves the day by getting word back to Solomon's family and subsequently in 1853, Solomon is rescued. The mechanics of this are also glossed over.

The long bit in the middle, the slavery bit, goes on forever and is nothing we haven’t seen before. We all know that slavery was a horrible dark chapter in American history but all this has been done to death before. The uniqueness of Solomon's situation, his kidnapping and later release are mostly absent here.

At least he got out and got to write a book about his ‘experience’, most of the rest of the slaves were in it for keeps. Perhaps this is why I don’t feel anything much for him throughout the film.

I was hoping for more from the film.