Formula Jr
01-26-2006, 12:32 AM
I was VERY disappointed with this movie. I rented the DVD.
It tries to be far too many movies and lost sight of itself. I lost count at at least five movies here.
You have a love story, you have national and racial overtones, you have spies, diplomatic intrigue, nasty corporations, desperate poverty, a strange and inexplicable music video of a man with possible AIDS riding a bicycle, characters that come out of nowhere, and a documentary on Kenya. The movie doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Is it about TB or AIDS or how multi-nationals use people as guinea pigs for drug trials? They do clinical drug trials in Eugene, OR also. And how do the bad guys always know exactly where the good guys are? Is this the matrix?
Even the premises do not hold up, depending on which of the premises each of these five or six subplots of this movie are dealing with.
There is only one overall theme to the movie and that has nothing to do with all these subplots. Nature is the constant gardener of very bad bugs. And we should know about that and be informed about that. The main plot being that someday there might be a TB pandemic and the First World will stop at nothing to protect it self from it and even governments will look the other way in the search for a preventative medicine. The movie doesn't even address that question head on. But the movie is sort of about how mean and nasty and callous white people are to black people in Africa to find an answer to this threat. I just wish the movie had done that in a direct way. That would have been a more interesting movie. There is no evidence that anything like this has ever happened with drug trials in Africa.
The writer was even fuzzy about this since he originally wanted to do a movie about Geopolitics and oil and the subjugation of the third world set as a love story. Then he decided on Big Pharma just because it was a different theme.
There is too much oversight for anyone to get away with what the movie portrays. Any oxfam/peace corp. /red cross volunteer would have that on the internet in 15 minutes. Its the new channel that the film never really deals with except in e-mails. So in a sense the movie is counter productive to the real TB threat, and if there are clinical trials dealing with TB that are ongoing they may be affected by all this irresponsible fiction. This movie missed every mark if it wanted to deal with a serious subject, and just wanted to pull strings. And it went out of its way to pull strings.
I hate directors that do that. This director, I think is a little retarded if he thought his audience was going to fall for some of his clumsy slight of hand and mis-direction. If I was teaching a class on contemporary cinema, I'd pick this one to dissect as badly constructed.
I really hate this film. And not due to its subject matter - big pharma should be called to the mat for some of the real things it has done, I just hate the sneaky way the director is working his private themes.
It tries to be far too many movies and lost sight of itself. I lost count at at least five movies here.
You have a love story, you have national and racial overtones, you have spies, diplomatic intrigue, nasty corporations, desperate poverty, a strange and inexplicable music video of a man with possible AIDS riding a bicycle, characters that come out of nowhere, and a documentary on Kenya. The movie doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Is it about TB or AIDS or how multi-nationals use people as guinea pigs for drug trials? They do clinical drug trials in Eugene, OR also. And how do the bad guys always know exactly where the good guys are? Is this the matrix?
Even the premises do not hold up, depending on which of the premises each of these five or six subplots of this movie are dealing with.
There is only one overall theme to the movie and that has nothing to do with all these subplots. Nature is the constant gardener of very bad bugs. And we should know about that and be informed about that. The main plot being that someday there might be a TB pandemic and the First World will stop at nothing to protect it self from it and even governments will look the other way in the search for a preventative medicine. The movie doesn't even address that question head on. But the movie is sort of about how mean and nasty and callous white people are to black people in Africa to find an answer to this threat. I just wish the movie had done that in a direct way. That would have been a more interesting movie. There is no evidence that anything like this has ever happened with drug trials in Africa.
The writer was even fuzzy about this since he originally wanted to do a movie about Geopolitics and oil and the subjugation of the third world set as a love story. Then he decided on Big Pharma just because it was a different theme.
There is too much oversight for anyone to get away with what the movie portrays. Any oxfam/peace corp. /red cross volunteer would have that on the internet in 15 minutes. Its the new channel that the film never really deals with except in e-mails. So in a sense the movie is counter productive to the real TB threat, and if there are clinical trials dealing with TB that are ongoing they may be affected by all this irresponsible fiction. This movie missed every mark if it wanted to deal with a serious subject, and just wanted to pull strings. And it went out of its way to pull strings.
I hate directors that do that. This director, I think is a little retarded if he thought his audience was going to fall for some of his clumsy slight of hand and mis-direction. If I was teaching a class on contemporary cinema, I'd pick this one to dissect as badly constructed.
I really hate this film. And not due to its subject matter - big pharma should be called to the mat for some of the real things it has done, I just hate the sneaky way the director is working his private themes.