Opening today in New York and Los Angeles and next Friday in fourteen other markets is the feelgood aids drama Dallas Buyers Club guaranteed to get Matthew McConaughey his first Oscar nomination. With twenty-five reviews posted, Metacritic rates it an 84, meaning "universal acclaim." The trusty Andrew O'Hehir made it Salon's pick of the week, writing, "Despite its clichéd elements, Dallas Buyers Club is a fierce celebration of the unpredictable power that belongs to the outcast, the despised, the pariah. That’s not a story of the ‘80s, it’s a story of always."
Two days ago at Deadspin, Will Leitch posted a worthwhile essay called Dallas Buyers Club Is Gay History for Straight People, which concludes:
"This is all well-intentioned, but it's still obnoxious hokum, an important story so distilled and stripped of its essence that by the end, it's not about AIDS and the fight for new drugs at all. It could be about any disease, and any community: It becomes a story about a sick guy fighting The Man, man, to get well. And one point, McConaughey, while grocery shopping with Leto, runs into one of his old pals who can't believe he's hanging out with one of them crossdressing gays. McConaughey turns on his tough-guy face: "He's a person, just like you and me." This is a movie about the AIDS crisis that feels obliged to remind us that gays are people, "just like you and me." Ron Woodruff learns in the course of Dallas Buyers Club that gays are good people, thanks to the illness he now shares with many of them. You will forgive the audience for finding his conversion small solace and, well, pretty beside the fucking point."
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