I'm going to skip the rant about how hard it was being a WASP in the nineties. If you get it, you get it; if you don't, you never will.
The writing is terrible. Oh, my God, the writing is anvilicious. "Don't have sex! But if you do, please misuse condoms!" Because no, I'm sorry, you don't double-bag it; condoms are not grocery sacks. They are more likely to break if you do that. The real Ms. Gertz was direly mistaken in this respect, as her People interview shows.
"Positive thinking makes it better! Don't give up!" I swear if I'd been down a long, painful road like Nancy the cancer patient and some pipsqueak rich kid tried to tell me to hang on, I'd slap her stupid. Sometimes the pain is too great and death is legitimately a release.
What this film does address, what it could not have escaped addressing, was the hit-or-miss nature of early AIDS treatment. Pretty much every drug available had hideous side effects; Gertz's reaction to AZT in 1989 would've hit directly after ddI was made available by the FDA to patients with just that problem -- just patients with just that problem.
The film also does a decent job of portraying AIDS as a horror show, not a mild inconvenience, thus rendering it unfashionable for its target audience. No, you certainly don't want to wind up in the ICU with your mother microwaving towels just to keep you warm. Mr. and Mrs. Gertz redeem the film somewhat with their boundless love for Alison. He walks her purse dog when she's sick; she... well, she microwaved freaking sweated-through towels in an ICU too scared to bother with proper care.
All the same, thank goodness we no longer classify our AIDS stories according who's more deserving of the disease (!) -- no transmission method is better than another, given the result. It doesn't matter how AIDS happens. If you have it, then you live with it and will die with it. Who are any of us to judge how you got it?
The writing is terrible. Oh, my God, the writing is anvilicious. "Don't have sex! But if you do, please misuse condoms!" Because no, I'm sorry, you don't double-bag it; condoms are not grocery sacks. They are more likely to break if you do that. The real Ms. Gertz was direly mistaken in this respect, as her People interview shows.
"Positive thinking makes it better! Don't give up!" I swear if I'd been down a long, painful road like Nancy the cancer patient and some pipsqueak rich kid tried to tell me to hang on, I'd slap her stupid. Sometimes the pain is too great and death is legitimately a release.
What this film does address, what it could not have escaped addressing, was the hit-or-miss nature of early AIDS treatment. Pretty much every drug available had hideous side effects; Gertz's reaction to AZT in 1989 would've hit directly after ddI was made available by the FDA to patients with just that problem -- just patients with just that problem.
The film also does a decent job of portraying AIDS as a horror show, not a mild inconvenience, thus rendering it unfashionable for its target audience. No, you certainly don't want to wind up in the ICU with your mother microwaving towels just to keep you warm. Mr. and Mrs. Gertz redeem the film somewhat with their boundless love for Alison. He walks her purse dog when she's sick; she... well, she microwaved freaking sweated-through towels in an ICU too scared to bother with proper care.
All the same, thank goodness we no longer classify our AIDS stories according who's more deserving of the disease (!) -- no transmission method is better than another, given the result. It doesn't matter how AIDS happens. If you have it, then you live with it and will die with it. Who are any of us to judge how you got it?