The story of a lowlife who banged every woman he could find and then was shocked to discover he had AIDS. He starts out as your usual stereotypical redneck homophob, but once he gets AIDS, his view of the world shifts when everyone starts to call him names and runs away from him.
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He’s not the kind of man who wants to lay in a hospital and die, as one of the many heartless villains in the story wants him to when he is first diagnosed. He’s a proactive sort and looks for ways to get the drugs that will keep him alive for a few more days.
Dallas Buyers Club is a movie that puts to rest the idea that America is a free country as the US Government continually harasses our hero as he buys and distributes substances that are keeping him alive. Drug testing is for people who have time to kill, not those that have the ax falling for their necks.
I was glad to find a noticeable lack of bible thumpers telling them they deserved to die. Even the government flunkies were mostly shown to be people who were Just Following Orders.
AIDS is still a death sentence, just not an instantaneous one like it used to be. The only person I knew who got AIDS was dead within weeks of finding out. In the end, Dallas Buyers Club isn’t so much about AIDS as it is about THE MAN telling us what we can and can’t do.
The point of the film was that Big Pharma can buy approval for their poisons with endless lists of side effects and dangers, but the FDA won’t approve substances with fewer side effects and few potential profits.
It was an ok movie, but it was kind of one sided. There was no mention of the quality, or lack thereof, of drugs bought from back rooms in Mexico, China, or Isreal. The point was simple enough, if you’re going to die you’ll do anything to live a little longer.
This was a movie that did a great job of telling it’s story.
