Review by Green Giant
By: Green Giant
although it was made for HBO and not
for theaters it is still one of the best gay
themed films ***EVER***..
the cast of Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer,
Taylor Kitsch,Julia Roberts, Joe Montello
Jim Parsons and Alfred Molina ...
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although it was made for HBO and not
for theaters it is still one of the best gay
themed films ***EVER***..
the cast of Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer,
Taylor Kitsch,Julia Roberts, Joe Montello
Jim Parsons and Alfred Molina are
uniformly first rate.
Review by Amos Lassen
By: Amos Lassen
I have been asked many times why I have not yet reviewed the film of "The Normal Heart" and my answer is quite simple. For those of us who lived through the years in which the film takes place, we were reminded of how it was and it was awful. It has ...
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I have been asked many times why I have not yet reviewed the film of "The Normal Heart" and my answer is quite simple. For those of us who lived through the years in which the film takes place, we were reminded of how it was and it was awful. It has taken me quite a long time to be able to sit down and put into words how I felt watching the film-the memories of those I loved and lost were still too raw. The fact that we lost almost an entire generation of wonderful gay men still hurts everyday. You have to know how it felt to read the obituaries and recognize the names and you must understand how those of us who made it through still deal with survivors' guilt.
Quite basically, "The Normal Heart" is "the story of the onset of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York City in the early 1980s, taking an unflinching look at the nation's sexual politics as gay activists and their allies in the medical community fight to expose the truth about the burgeoning epidemic to a city and nation in denial".
We immediately notice right away the bodies of men. They are rippled, defined, sculpted, hairless bodies. They are naked bodies coming together and caressing, kissing, having oral and anal sex. The next we notice are also bodies but this time they are bruised, pallid, terrified, lesion-covered, self-sabotaging bodies. These bodies are , crying, disappearing, dying, dead. What the movie \actually is a corporeal expression of gay political consciousness. Ryan Murphy has taken Larry Kramer's autobiographical play with its polemics and its eulogies, speeches, editorials and activism and hands it to us to see and to remember. This is a film that pays homage to the history of grassroots organizing by which HIV/AIDS arrived on the national agenda while paying heed to the subsequent reverberations of that radical gay presence in American life. Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), a writer and an activist (Mark Ruffalo) urges New York's gay community to demand that the media, the medical profession, and the government respond to the emerging health crisis but the film also gives us an unanswerable question-what does being gay mean?
Weeks is modeled on Kramer himself and we see him as he disembarks the ferry in those sun-spotted opening minutes to discover that his isn't the desired body that day. His defense is to shrink and gird his body as if with armor. He seems to be displaced here, even marginal and he hangs back from the garish colors and pounding rhythms of a beach party, watching the speedos ands and sweat with a certain faraway longing. When he comes upon an orgy on the garden path, we see the image in illicit, fading light. Weeks, whose most recent book argued that promiscuity holds love at arm's length, approaches sex as fantasy fear. He knows that the "gay cancer" is taking his friends. When he is examined by Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts) she asks him about his big mouth. Weeks can totally verbalize fury and his controversial tactics threaten to alienate not only bigwigs and the body politic, but also friends, family, and allies. Ruffalo and Roberts are outsiders shouting into the abyss, and the latter's climactic rage against the National Institutes of Health machine achieves frustrated emotional intensity. Director Murphy uses cacophonous style, "which reflects and refracts the varied personal and political stances on display as surely as the chaotic early meeting in which Brookner states her case for a moratorium on sex and Weeks proposes the formation of Gay Men's Health Crisis over the shouts of those for whom sexual freedom is a moral imperative". As activist Tommy Boatwright ( Jim Parsons) observes, "Half these people just showed up to get laid." Lurid and hot shades of orange, indigo, and purple-the colors of disco, of flame-suggest a long night's journey into day; the camerawork is antsy throughout. The film is also the story of mawkishness and rude distraction.
In looking at the question of what does it mean to be gay and what it mean to be defined by who you have sex with means that you are identified by your sexual orientation. We then ask what it means to have a label whose radical history is so rooted in using, proclaiming, presenting, and possessing a body, and what are the consequences when that body's sexual subjectivity becomes the cause of its disintegration.
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We viewed it all from an era in which the dominant gay political issue, marriage, centers on an understanding that each gay body contains a normal heart and this makes Murphy's kinesthetic style and Kramer's verbal ferocity seem messy, imperfect, unromantic. And maybe, at some level, that's exactly the point. Kramer gives us a strong message and we are reminded of a period in American history where the great unknown mercilessly tore through the gay community, causing panic and isolation and while the powers that be, the government of this great country, refused to participate in the fight. This is a story of courage, anger, and confusion and it is told with brutal honesty, realism, and theatrics with extensive monologues exploring the bitter feelings of social and medical quarantine as the particulars of the disease were being researched.
In 1981, Weeks came into his own as a gay man, experiencing a freedom that was previously unthinkable, mingling with the likes of Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch), Tommy Boatwright, and Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), a reporter Weeks eventually accepts as his long-term lover. However, the joy was disrupted by what was initially identified as the "gay cancer," a disease growing at an alarming rate, medical officials to step carefully when treating a plague without vital research to defined its parameters. While Dr. Emma Brookner is determined to confront HIV/AIDS head-on, few others are willing to join the fight, inspiring Weeks to co-found the Gay Men's Health Crisis organization, making it his duty to bring the cause to the nation's attention, hoping to his way to the White House. As the years pass, Weeks watches with horror as Felix battles the disease, while his rabble-rousing antics cause dissent in the group, threatening to further ostracize the gay community.
"The Normal Heart" gives the small screen a very sad topic to explore with fiery tempers, allowing the cast to dig into meaty roles of persecution and dissatisfaction with abandon. Kramer has preserved the intensity and sadness of the original text while transforming it into a fluid narrative that's manageable and visually varied. It's heartfelt work, tracking the rise of HIV/AIDS in a community that was only beginning to enjoy itself in a more public fashion, having battled throughout the years for equality. And now here was this disease that seemingly only targeted gay men, returning segregation to the fold, driving leaders, including Weeks, insane with frustration, leaving them with a war they had to fight on their own. Kramer has isolated a sustained note of sadness that clouds everything in the effort, watching the characters struggle with the gut-wrenching loss of loved ones and mass rejection from the government and medical officials.
Each member of the ensemble cast has his moment to purge his emotions through fits of rage. The mood of a creeping disaster is translated to the screen, both causing and allowing the viewer to grasp the grief and inhumanity that divided community efforts, while ideas such as sex becoming a gay man's identity are thought-provoking and meaningful.
The play opened Off Broadway in 1985 when the AIDS Epidemic had really started to take a tight grip in New York (and many other major cities) and it became the seminal play of the period. It would be another 6 years before Kushner's classic "Angels in America" was to be seen.
Now nearly some three decades later the play finally makes it to the silver screen after many false starts and broken promises, but along the way it has not lost a single iota of its potency with its powerful story that never fails to stun its audience into sheer silence.
Murphy deserves credit for many things, not least the fact that he took the almost unheard of decision of casting many openly gay actors to play gay men. Murphy refused to shy away from any of Kramer's rhetoric or the scary visuals of the violent and cruel deaths these young men suffered, this is the story of how it really happened.
For those of us who were around at any of these times from the early 1980?s on, this heart-wrenching piece causes a lot of unpleasant memories to return. It is shockingly disturbing and serves to remind one that the nightmares that we lived through were not imagined in the slightest and were very real indeed. If it hadn't been for Larry Kramer, it would been a whole lot worse. If on the other hand you are approaching this drama having been born after these events then I can only assume that this near apocalyptical scenario may even appear like an historical event that is nothing to do with you. Trust me it does. AIDS may longer be considered a gay plague, but as the closing credits of this movie remind us all too clearly, even now 6000 people are diagnosed with HIV every single day to increase the present world total of 35 million infected. It still affects as us.