Review of Dallas Buyers Club (2013) by Katie W — 06 Jun 2014

Watched this movie last night for the first time, as I wanted to see if Matthew McConaughey truly deserved the Academy Award for Best Actor and to be honest, even though he did a very good job on his performance, I'm sorry to say that out of all the Best Actor nominees, Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street) acted much better than McConaughey and deserved it better, and I truly thought that DiCaprio was robbed.

The film has fine direction, splendid performances by the supporting cast (Jennifer Garner and Jared Leto in particular) and successfully captures the feel of Texas. McConaughey, as I said before, does a fantastic performance as Ron Woodroof, and we can see that this role was his to nail as he gets to be as Texan as he can be. I commend him for being able to pull the Christian Bale move (when he did it in The Machinist) by losing a lot of pounds to be over-the-top skinny for the role. The critics are right that this performance is his career-best.

Now let me tell you something funny. I never saw this film before the Oscars and I was rooting for Jared Leto to win Best Supporting Actor because I felt he did a good job on playing a woman (sort of). And he did win, and I was glad he won. So I saw the film, and yes, he deserved it. I saw Bradley Cooper, Michael Fassbender and Jonah Hill's performances, but Jared Leto was the best that acted. And he totally deserved the Oscar. Jared Leto is that rarity: a man that can both sing and act. He nails the role of a transgender man who made himself behave and look exactly like a woman, but is a prostitute.

The film has no score but it is an impressive movie and given that it has themes of AIDS and has an intriguing true story of Ron Woodroof, they make the movie very worthy of its Best Picture nomination.

If you're a proud Texan, you'll love this movie, but the film is R-Rated and has parts that make it hard to watch like nudity, drug use, sexuality and harsh language. But it is a good movie and you'll love it if you're a Texan and especially if you're one of those Thirty Seconds to Mars fans called the Echelon.