November 15, 2013, - 3:17 pm
Wknd Box Office: “Brokeback Mountain 2.0” a/k/a Dallas Buyers Club, Best Man Holiday
**** CORRECTION: As many readers, including a very astute friend, noted, I got the name of the singer of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” wrong. It was, in fact, as you’ve pointed out, Nat King Cole, NOT Bing Crosby as I had noted (the soundtrack for the movie doesn’t include the song, so I couldn’t fact check it that way). It’s been corrected, and I apologize for the error. ****
Yet another weekend with nothing to recommend among the new offerings at movie theaters.
* “Dallas Buyers Club“: Matthew McConaughey is a great actor. And I’m told by some Hollywood conservatives that he is even a Republican with conservative leanings. But I doubt it. Nobody with even a modicum of traditional American views would appear in this leftist wet dream of a movie. At once, it’s an attack on big business, “Big Pharma,” Texas cowboys, and middle America. On top of that, this highly overrated, excessively hyped propaganda movie is long, slow, and boring. And it’s the natural progression of a previous cinematic hit of its kind, which is why I dub this movie, “Brokeback Mountain 2.0”
“Based on a true story,” McConaughey is Ron Woodroof, a Texas cowboy, complete with boots, a Stetson hat, and a deep Southern accent. It is 1985, and he is an electrician, working mostly near oil wells and rigs, and he’s also a rodeo bull rider. You can’t get more Texas-y than that. Oh, and he also hates Blacks (he and his friends call them by the N-word), Muslims (he and his friends call them the Sand-N-word), and gays (he calls ’em “queers” and is disgusted by Rock Hudson, who had at the time come down with AIDS). In short, he’s the perfect caricature of how leftists see the Republican voter and every last soul in flyover country between Los Angeles and New York.
But Woodroof, who is an extremely nasty, sordid, ugly, and unlikable character (at least, in this movie), is forced to become newly accepting of all the gays, including transvestites, and fight the pharmaceutical industry, after he learns he has AIDS. And this, predictably, makes him a better, nicer person.
He has AIDS because he’s had a ton of unprotected sex with various slutty women, including inside the bullpen at the rodeo. And he’s been told to get his affairs in order, as the doctor tells him he has 30 days to live. After paying off hospital workers to get on the then-experimental AZT drug, his health quickly degenerates, and he nearly dies. He learns from an expat American doctor, who lost his license and now works in Mexico, that AZT will kill him and that he needs to go on an alternative blend of vitamins, minerals, and other homeopathic concoctions.
Soon, Woodroof has set up his own club for those with AIDS–the “Dallas Buyers Club.” For an annual membership of several hundred dollars, the buyer can obtain the alternative medicine treatment. His partner is a transvestite (Jared Leto), who looks more feminine and far less transvestitish than that female impersonator, Savannah Guthrie, who hosts NBC’s “Today Show.” But the doctors and Big Pharma want to shut him down. And McConaughey spends the rest of the movie fighting them in court and seeking new avenues to obtain the “meds” (including from Japan). Jennifer Garner plays a mopey, very concerned doctor who befriends Woodroof, and adds nothing to the mix, other than a chick co-star role.
I’m all for the free market and the freedom to kill yourself with alternative medicine, so I mildly liked the fact that the character in this movie fights big government and Big Brother. But that’s really not the main point of this movie. It’s that the capitalist, big pharmaceutical companies (whose AIDS cocktails today have made the virus virtually non-fatal) and doctors are the ones killing da gays. That– along with, “see, you intolerant right wingers are gonna be forced to make nice with the trannies!”–are this movie’s main messages. And I’m just not interested in fiction that ridiculous.
Yup, it’s not very interesting. Not very exciting. Not very happy. Just a depressing annoyance unfortunately occupying far too many movie screens in America. And not something you should spend a penny or a second on.
The rule continues to ring true: if the mainstream media movie critics love it, chances are, you’ll hate it. That’s the case here. Or, at least, it was with me.
FOUR MARXES PLUS THREE OBAMAS PLUS TWO BIN LADENS
Watch the trailer . . .
* “The Best Man Holiday“: Shoulda been called, “Yet Another Dopey Black Minstrel Show Served Up By Spike Lee’s Cousin.” If I were Black, I’d be offended at the choices that Hollywood–and Black Hollywood–give me. There are basically only two kinds of movies aimed at Black audiences: dopey comedies that remind me of “The Love Boat” or “Three’s Company” on steroids, or slavery/racism movies. Is that all there is? Sadly, yes. And this one goes in the latter category. It’s a stupid, predictable, unnecessarily melodramatic, racist minstrel show. And it’s brought to you courtesy of Malcolm D. Lee, Jew-hatin’, racist Spike’s cousin. It’s also chock full of Black women fighting each other and talking trash. Oh,and Black men fighting each other and talking trash.
The movie is a sequel to 1999’s “The Best Man,” which I (thankfully) did not see. Not sure why a sequel needed to be made, especially if the first one was as bad as this one is. Apparently, in the first one, a football player (Morris Chestnut) is marrying a woman, but his best man (Taye Diggs) sleeps with her just before the wedding, and now they hate each other. They and the other cast of characters from the first movie re-unite 15 years later (yes, I know the movie is only 14 years after the first, but don’t ask me to explain Hollywood math–they supported Obama, remember?).
It’s Christmastime, and Morris Chestnut is now an NFL football player, living in a giant mansion. He and his wife invite all of their college friends to the house for the holidays, where fights and stupid attempts at comedy ensue. Almost every man in this movie (except the token White guy) cries. In fact, the men cry more than the women. I was more than a little annoyed that “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” is the background song while the characters in the movie are all having sex. I think Nat King Cole just turned over in his grave, especially since it’s his rendition that’s played. Did his estate and descendants really need the royalties that badly? Apparently.
The movie has such scintillating dialogue as the arguments over which of the women is best at “rocking the mic,” a disgusting sexual reference. I’ll never look at a microphone the same way again. Thanks, Spike Lee’s cousin.
Here are some of the other “fabulous” lines in the movie:
* “I know my way around a vagina.”
* To the White boyfriend (Eddie Cibrian) of one of the women, “Do you have a Django Candyland fantasy, or this is the first time you’ve gone to the exotic jungle?”
* One of the other women referring to the White boyfriend, “If I had my way, that’s what I’d get: a tall vanilla swag of latte.”
* “Hell, I don’t know why White people pay me to tell them what Black people like. I’m light skinned.”
* “You hardly hear of Brothers with low sperm count issues, especially with baby mamas and baby mama drama.”
There was one good, funny line in the movie–when Terrence Howard says, “If they can get the word, ‘homo,’ banned, we can get the word, ‘N—er,’ banned,” and then immediately turns to a friend and greets him with, “Hey, my N—er!” (Also funny: when the Black guys call the White boyfriend, “Robin Thicke.”) But it wasn’t worth sitting through this painful disaster for that. Not even close.
There was only one bright point in the movie: the stressing of faith in G-d and Christianity, which is embodied by the only decent, likable couple in the movie (the football player and his wife). But despite that, they utter a ton of F-words, along with the rest of the cast.
It’s always amazing to me that Black America gets exercised over perceived racism by White America, but, yet, has no problem whatsoever in rushing to the theaters to pay ten bucks-plus for these self-hating kinds of displays.
ONE MARX PLUS FOUR OBAMAS
Watch the trailer . . .
Tags: AIDS, Best Man Holiday, Best Man Holiday movie, Best Man Holiday movie review, Best Man Holiday review, Black movies, Brokeback Mountain, Brokeback Mountain 2.0, Dallas Buyers Club, Dallas Buyers Club movie, Dallas Buyers Club movie review, Dallas Buyers Club review, Django Candyland, Eddie Cibrian, Jared Leto, Jennifer Garner, Malcolm D. Lee, Matthew McConaughey, Morris Chestnut, movie, movie review, Movie Reviews, Ron Woodroof, Savannah Guthrie, Spike Lee, Spike Lee's cousin, Taye Diggs, Terence Howard, Terrence Howard
Victim gays and oversexed blacks – Hollywood’s modern idea of oppressed minorities – and authentic Americans to boot.
No one else apparently lives in America.
This weekend’s movies are completely skip-worthy. One wonders why they weren’t screened back in August. There’s no accounting for taste in Hollywood these days.
NormanF on November 15, 2013 at 8:11 pm