Tag: Jean-Marc Vallee

Wild

Jean-Marc Vallee’s follow up to “Dallas Buyers Club” features a great performance by Reese Witherspoon and makes a strong feminist statement.

The beginning of Jean-Marc Vallee’s “Wild” shows Cheryl Strayed at the top of the world yet screaming at the top of her lungs. She’s made it an impressive, remarkable distance on her own and overcome pain so unbearable she can’t even remove her socks. And yet she’s knocked her boot off the edge of this cliff she’s conquered, and she may as well be stuck in a hole.

Vallee’s film grapples with the inspiring nature of Strayed’s mission and the more harrowing, cynical nature of her mental adventure. Reese Witherspoon plays Strayed as a negative, bitter and sharp-tongued woman ready to quit at any moment, but her sheer resolve and toughness on the trail make her feel real, not just some strong female movie character conquering impossible odds.

Based on Strayed’s own personal memoir and adapted by novelist Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity”), “Wild” tells the story of a woman who hiked 1,100 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail through California, Oregon and Washington. The journey itself is not spectacular or unusual for many who have tackled the trail before, but Strayed took it upon herself to make this journey after a series of personal hardships that left her far down the road in the wrong direction. This hike is a spiritual journey above all. Continue reading “Wild”

Dallas Buyers Club

Matthew McConaughey’s performances as Ron Woodroof marries the gristle and charm found in “Dallas Buyers Club.”

Dallas Buyers Club

Throughout Matthew McConaughey’s career, he’s exerted a certain level of charisma and charm in every role he’s played. Even in this reinvented hot streak of his career where he’s played sleazy, scary and strange characters who could not be more off type from his rom-com roots, there’s a certain mark of personality that has allowed him to settle into yet another comfort zone.

His performance in “Dallas Buyers Club” is different, one that drains him of any likability and finds him at this lowest point. Doing purely lived-in and physical work, McConaughey shows his abrasive, lewd, intense and vulgar dark side before winning us over again. This may not be the showiest performance of his recent run of movies, but it’s the one that demonstrates the most range, the most compassion and the most chance at winning him an Oscar.

“Dallas Buyers Club” is the true story of Ron Woodroof, a slimy electrician and rodeo jockey in Texas in the 1980s. Despite his lanky appearance (McConaughey lost nearly 40 pounds for the role), greasy hair and scummy potty mouth, he still finds himself having sex with women and “$100 hookers” in his trailer home and in dark corners of the rodeo arena.

After being brought to the hospital due to an accident at his job, the doctors inform him that he has tested positive for HIV, that it has already become AIDS and that he has roughly 30 days to live. Woodroof is staunchly heterosexual and shockingly bigoted and refuses to believe he has a disease like “that Rock Cocksucker Hudson” until he does his own research and pleads for help from Dallas Mercy’s Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner).

She gives Woodruff two options: a support group where he can “go get a hug from a bunch of faggots” or a double blind test of a drug called AZT, in which some patients will only receive “sugar pills,” better known as placebos. Continue reading “Dallas Buyers Club”