House of Gucci
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Lady Gaga demonstrated that in addition to her well-known singing talent, she had great acting chops. She played the girlfriend, then wife, and a lot more of one of the Gucci heirs magnificently portrayed by Adam Driver. This is a biographical crime drama. The film is directed by Ridley Scott and is based on the 2001 book by Sara Gay Forden titled “House of Gucci: A Sensational Story Of Murder, Madness, Glamor, And Greed,” which tells it all. At times, you may lose a beat of the story line or the role of a specific character, but the overall cinematic experience is quite engrossing. The supporting cast is great and features Jared Leto, Jeremy Irons, Salma Hayek, and Al Pacino.

We found it interesting to learn that Lady Gaga took into account how her longtime friend Tony Bennett felt about Italians being represented in films in terms of crime and that she aspired to “make a real person out of her character and not a caricature.” To achieve this she studied the voice and vocal cadence as well as the attitude of the real person she was portraying and tried to be “authentic from the perspective of a woman, not an Italian American woman.” She studied for 18 months speaking in accent for nine months of this period. She also ad libbed many of her lines including the film’s iconic quote “father, son, and House of Gucci”, which went viral after the release of the film. (The above information is from Wikipedia).

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 Dallas Buyers Club- rm– In order to join the Dallas Buyers Club, you had to pay $400 per month. In return you get all the medicines that can be obtained by the Club available from all over the world to treat your condition of HIV/AIDS.  Needless to say, most of these medications were not yet approved by the FDA. Also it should be recognized that the gathering process is mostly illegal but the medications seem to be working and prolonging the lives of the participants in the Club. The man who is the chief person in charge of obtaining the merchandise is Ronald Woodroff (Mathew McConaughey), an electrician and sometimes rodeo bull rider. We meet him as a tough guy, who snorts cocaine and has lots of causal sex. He certainly knows how to deal in drugs. McConaughey carries the film with his riveting performance of this character. It appears that he must have lost about 50 pounds to prepare for this role as he comes across as quite thin and emaciated (although in a shirtless scene he did seem to show a little too much muscles for a man dying of AIDS no matter how thin) There is also a great acting by Jared Leto who plays Rayon, a thin young man with AIDS who is trying to be an attractive woman . There is also a fine performance by beautiful Jenifer Garner who we see as a conflicted doctor torn between wanting to conduct AIDS research the FDA way but seeing that there might be a better approach to help people. . The film was set in the 1980s at the time that this deadly disease was killing so many people without an effective treatment in sight. It is based on a true story and captures the desperation of so many people and their families with AIDS at this time . It also highlights the dilemma of the FDA to fund pharmaceutical company  double blind careful research which takes time and mandates that some patients in studies must get placebo even though that means they will stand no chance of improvement. It reflected the reality that effective forms of treatment sometimes surfaced in Mexico and other countries throughout the world that were not approved for treatment in the US . This all added up to an absorbing enlightening film with a screen play by  Craig  Borten and Melissa Wallack  which was directed by Jean-Marc Valiee. Twenty years ago Tom Hanks won an Academy Award for Best actor for his role in the motion picture Philadelphia which was one of the first mainstream Hollywood pictures to deal with HIV/AIDS. McConaughey has a   chance to be similarly recognized for this role and this film certainly will live on as an important  piece of history of the AIDS epidemic.(2013)