Saturday, April 19, 2014

Dallas Buyer's Club : Not What It Claims to Be

Despite Matthew McConaughey's excellent acting in this film, and his gratitude towards God in his Oscar acceptance speech, watching Dallas Buyer's Club still left me with a sullied, almost violated feeling from all of the egregiously voyueristic close ups of female butt cheeks, breasts, and girl on girl stripper sex. I was grateful only for Netflix so that I could constantly fast forward, especially when a stripper's naked butt filled the entire screen. Seeing women filmed so callously this way deeply offended me as a woman. Undoubtedly, the audience did not need all those gratuitiously sleazy visuals---whose only  effect was of making prostitutes out of unknown actresses whom no one will remember---in order to get the idea that the main character of Ron Woodruff led a white trash life. His constant use of the "f " word and the fa#g#t word was enough to tell us that.

It is ironic also how transvestites like Jared Leto's character were portrayed as being classier than the average straight female in the film, with the exception of the Madonna- like stock character of the doctor with whom Woodruff is in love. So straight women are either madonnas or whores, this movie says, while gay men and transvestites are fully fledged, complex people.

Essentially, McConaughey won the Oscar for this movie because of its political sympathy for AIDS and all the titillating sex and nudity, not because his acting was any better than his excellent acting in 2012's Mud, a drama that I loved.  In my opinion, Dallas Buyer's Club is not much to be proud of, for its negative treatment of women as degrading sex objects outweighs its expose value concerning AZT and big pharm manipulation. It's nice that McConaughey is grateful to God, and he seems like a decent person, but making movies full of such egregiously graphic nudity and degradation of women  is not consistant with being a Christian, something he was raised to be.

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