E a Vida Continua

Unbelievable, wrenching film. This movie is told so thoughtfully and well; the sequences are laid out thoughtfully, and this is one of those rare movies literally told from the heart. The cast is just remarkable. What a huge story to tell; this could easily have become garbled due to the overwhelming subject matter. However, it is sequenced well, and acted so well, that you sit there in astonishment that this could happen in a world full of otherwise brilliant people.

I don't know what it will take to remove political considerations from life-and-death struggles...How about we work at saving lives, and worry about who gets credit later? If someone becomes injured due to gang warfare, we don't deny them care or drag our feet because we don't agree with the gangster "lifestyle".

Absorbing, heartbreaking and touching. A fantastic and, obviously, loving job by the entire cast.

And The Band Played On is an extremely powerful movie. This movie should be required viewing in any high school. The fact that it took so incredibly long for the then higher powers to admit to the existence of AIDS is stunning and sad. The performances throughout the movie were moving and effective. I thought that Sir Ian McKellan and Richard Gere represented respectfully the signs of strength and fear.

I was also disheartened to learn that throughout this tragedy, there were individuals who might have been more concerned with helping and protecting their own reputation and agenda as well as accepting the credit for their work in breaking down point by point the disease known as AIDS. Alan Alda as Dr. Gallo was fascinating. In fact all of the performances from Matthew Modine and Richard Gere to Steve Martin and BD Wong were great. The most important thing here though is the history of this disease and the hope that we can learn from it.

American doctors from the underfunded Center for Disease Control scramble to figure out the origin of--and the causes behind--the alarming rate of homosexual male deaths in the early 1980s. As the fatal strain of pneumonia and hepatitis B cases begin appearing, politicos in Reagan-era D. C. veto the mysterious disease as non-newsworthy; meanwhile, members of the gay community are not shown to be radically adept at helping their own cause, labeling the early cases as products of the Gay Cancer. Adaptation of Randy Shilts' frightening, groundbreaking book has an all-star cast but impresses mainly with its handling of the packed narrative, particularly when detailing the CDC's battles in coming up with an inexpensive way of filtering out contaminated blood from the National Blood Supply. Making a movie from the source material was seemingly an impossible undertaking, and yet HBO Films and co-producer Aaron Spelling manage to lay all Shilts' information out adroitly and adeptly. Some of the character interaction is awkwardly interjected, but most of the principal players do very good work with their technical roles. Alan Alda positively revels in the opportunity to play sniveling medical scientist Dr. Robert Gallo, who felt usurped when French scientists initially gained prestige for isolating the virus; as Dr. Mary Guinan, Glenne Headly does some of the best work of her career (while interviewing a sexually promiscuous airline steward, one of the earliest men to fall prey to the disease, Headly is remarkably natural and charming); and Saul Rubinek as Dr. Curran, who initiates the investigation and helps sort out all the jargon, is in masterful form. Some of the high-profile cameos stick out as artifices--such as Richard Gere's bit as a stricken choreographer--though it is commendable to see these marquee names taking part in the project. "Band" isn't compact--it isn't a quick-fix wallow or a time-filler--instead, it's a serious, frustrating, angry movie with no easy answers...and that's as it should be.

HBO was beginning to choose projects other networks were afraid to touch. And the Band Played On is one of their all time top ten. The actors who participated in this film were only paid scale, and not a lot of money was used, but the message is the strongest. I viewed this on its premiere and couldn't sleep afterward. I view it more these days since I've had many friends die of "red tape" of AIDS.

According to this film based in Randy's book, what bothers me the most was the opportunities that existed by several people to catch this disease at various stages and it just wasn't done. Sure the government played its part, but so did commerce, so did vanity and so did the need for humans to be sexual beings.

Since the film I've read about the deaths of many as well as experienced deaths myself. One thing that stands out is "Patient Zero". The family of this gentleman has fought long and hard for that stigma to be erased. As the character says in the film: "If I got it, then someone gave it to me". I do understand terms that mark things as "the beginning" of the identified problem but with this film you will know there was a beginning BEFORE THAT beginning. Where it lies is still a mystery.

On the other hand if America could have shared information with other countries and paid closer attention we could have fought this is a world problem before it got to the point of where it did. But America was too busy allocating more money to military defense than to the medical defense.

America had discoverable AIDS cases as far back as the 1950's, but it didn't reach total epidemic status until the late 1970's early 1980's. This film brings that information out. It also brings out the information that this disease, although concentrated in the gay community, had no specific target, anyone could/would get it. The people in my life were not all homosexual who contracted the disease but a few were just receivers of blood transfusions. At the time they received the blood, the test was not developed for screening. Just like the film points out, they too (family, friends, associates) suffered.

There is so much to grab in this film, one or two viewings isn't enough. One or two pointed fingers is not the answer. It is equally as sad that almost 10 years later, I am writing this review and the band is still playing. It was my prayer that this would not be so.

"This didn't have to happen. We could've stopped it."

"And the Band Played On" is a decent history of the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in the United States (and a bit of it in France) from a medical research perspective and the related political, professional and scientific obstacles to addressing, let alone containing, the disease in the 1980s. I didn't quite expect, however, although it's the reason I viewed this now, for how much this history of the pandemic reflects the current events of the novel one the world is facing in 2020. As the movie depicts, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is underfunded and, thus, largely ineffective and sidelined as the outbreak expands out of control. In some ways, they're also slow to respond and confused, if not plain wrong, in their public messaging, including advising how the virus is transmitted. Meanwhile, some of the populace remain ill-informed. Personal prophylactic measures aren't heeded. Protesters argue their rights against calls to close public spaces where it has spread (in this case, the bathhouses of the Castro District in San Francisco). The president ignores the problem. And, all the while, many dismiss the epidemic as belonging to a discriminated-against group (here, gay men). Sound familiar?

This HBO movie is an interesting precursor in a cinematic sense as well, being a star-studded ensemble about the spread of a pandemic and with a focus on contact tracing and identification of the virus two decades before Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion" (2011). Being based on a book by journalist Randy Shifts, however, "And the Band Played On" didn't have the same dramatic license to play with facts as did the later movie. Consequently, one of the main dramatic conflicts here, involving the race for the discovery of HIV between researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, two of whom would be awarded Nobel Prizes, and Robert Gallo, who is depicted as an antagonist here, may come across as somewhat muddled and uncompelling to laymen. I, for one, sympathized with the reporter at one press conference shown when he had to ask someone what the French were accusing of Gallo (as it turns out, that he stole their work, basically). On the other hand, the movie's criticism of the big business of blood banks and their obstruction of testing donated blood for HIV--because it would cost a lot of money--is more effective.

The movie has its share of tropes, too. There are those teachable moments where characters blatantly explain things to other characters--but meant for the spectator--in the simplest terms imaginable (Lily Tomlin explaining to Charles Martin Smith at a bathhouse how all peoples like sex is the most egregious to my mind). A character watches TV where each channel he flips to happens to show a program relevant to the narrative, and he has a eureka moment observing a game of Pac-Man (Aha! Pac-Man is the virus, and he's eating T-cells--now I get it!). (Granted, this Pac-Man metaphor still works better than the one in "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" (2018), but I digress.) But, these are minor objections to what, overall, is a very watchable history lesson, and one that to its credit largely focuses on the issue from the perspective of medical research.