I feel ambivalent about Dallas Buyers Club. I’ll start with the positives. Matthew McConaughey gets the Christian Bale award for commitment to his craft (Bale still wins for losing 63 pounds whereas McConaughey only lost 50). It is good to finally have a main character with AIDS who isn’t a modern day saint, a victim of abuse or a medical expert. In Dallas Buyers Club, Ron Woodruff is the Schindler of AIDS-an oversexed lout who accidentally then later intentionally and self-sacrificially uses his hustler powers for good. Jared Leto was unrecognizable and perfect. Now I’ll move on to the negatives. Not one transgender actor could have played Rayon, who wasn’t based on a real life character, but a composite? Dallas Buyers Club is substantively mainstream-the women are secretaries who get no lines other than as sex objects or as supportive assistants either emotionally or literally to the men doing important life-saving work in their apartment. It vaguely reminds me of The Help-it decries the stereotype that only homosexuals or drug users gets AIDS while enforcing them by mostly showing homosexuals and/or drug users as having AIDS. There is one heterosexual woman with AIDS. No brief scenes or even allusions to the main character attempting to contact past sexual partners to warn them of his affliction. There is no casual line that even when having sex with another person carrying HIV, there can be different strains so should still be careful. Maybe I’m too close to it. I grew up in NYC during the 80s. My mom was a nurse on the frontlines. There was a time that you could spot someone suffering from AIDS a mile away even if you weren’t a medical expert-the emaciated look, lesions, thrush. Dallas Buyers Club successfully portrayed the sense of urgency and desperation of that time, but I did resent that the underlying sense of urgency is sparked by-gasp, and now good ‘ol boys are getting it. Yes, we need good ‘ol boys to be allies, and they should be praised for their support, but it is frustrating that it is the only way to make progress. Think Black-ish when the father brings in store-bought cupcakes versus the mother slaving over a hot stove to make organic baked goods from scratch. Not a must see, but if you watch it, you’ll enjoy it.