Dallas Buyers Club
Film 2 for 2014 with Stuart Reekie, Superstar photographer and cinema expert was Dallas Buyers Club.
This blog post will go on a bit and go off on a couple of tangents but if you're reading it, and before you read anymore, please be aware that this is the most important film I have seen for a very long time or perhaps ever.
It was released in 2013 and you need to make arrangements to see this, either on DVD or at the cinema.
The film is a little bit art house, it took Stuart's expert in film making to point out to me, as the credits rolled at the end, that there was no music during the film which is entirely unusual but something you never notice because you are lost completely in the story.
I could have cried at the end but I didn't and I could cry as I write this thinking back to the film because it is so powerful.
Ron Woodroof is a very dislikable, hedonistic, drug taking, prostitute using rodeo cowboy electrician in Dallas, Texas in 1985 when he is diagnosed with HIV. This is a biographical tale, a story about someone who is horrible, bigoted, homophobic and generally of little use to society, who changes. It's the type of tale that gives hope to everybody who wants to make a difference to themselves or others. It's a tale about a modern hero.
I believe a hero is somebody who has a choice in their actions, not somebody who is forced into brave deeds with no other opportunity. Woodroof had the opportunity to die, to fade away or to go to Mexico and find his medication and live himself. In the end he didn't (and it took a while)
He circumvented all the regulations in the US at that time, he fought the federal drug administration (FDA), he set up one of the many 'buyers clubs' which existed in the US to allow distribution of unlicensed medicine to people who were dying of aids and he saved peoples lives and prolonged their lives and he made their lives better. But even more than that. He let people into his life who he had hated and despised, peoples whose beliefs and lifestyles he couldn't understand and in the end he learned to understand them and live together with those people and he gave everything he had to help them.
You might never like Ron Woodroof at the end of this film but he is a thoroughly disagreeable character. Much the same as Jay Freireich from Malcolm Gladwell's 'David and Goliath' who effectively created a cure for childhood leukaemia in a throughly horrible disagreeable and distasteful way. We need people like this to make a difference, we need people like this to make a change. Each of my children will watch this film when they are old enough and we will talk about the importance of a social conscience and why that is far more important than chasing a lot of the crap that we chase in our lives.
Watch the Dallas Buyers Club as soon as you can.
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