Memorial Day Weekend Cultural Offerings

Nurse Jackie (ShowTime).  Two comments I saw posted somewhere were spot on.  Edie Falco is so good as Jackie it has eclipsed her work in the Sopranos. And Nurse Jackie has become so wretched, such a liar and such a bad mother, we want her character killed off (or in a coma for a year?) while the show continues led by another character,  Nurse Zoey.

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The new X-Men movie really is only a B movie.  It wraps things up too neatly, resurrecting dead characters as it heals all wounds via time travel and its giving of mulligans.  Saccharin.  The CGI is cheesy.  There is one great action sequence where Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, rescues Magneto from a maximum security cell.  Poor Hugh Jackman, who is looking older in close ups with the Wolverine make up, was forced to work out inhumanly to produce a truly gigantic set of back and shoulder muscles, just so they could have a gratuitous scene where he walks across a bedroom and shows his ass.

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The Normal Heart (HBO).  Julia Roberts gets to play not a hooker or a secretary with a brave heart of gold, but a polio crippled doctor with one.  She has one chew up the scene monologue where she gets to tell off NIH bureaucrats who centrally plan medical research, delaying studies for over 3 years and creating a national medical policy of refusing to cooperate with scientists in France and other countries.  Matt Bomer and Mark Ruffalo play a couple, who are respectively a New York Times reporter and AIDS activist, at the center of the response to the AIDS crisis.  Jim Parsons plays a social service nun.

It’s funny how still no one has looked at how FDA sclerotization of medical markets prevented new HIV  drugs from coming on line for so long, even today when we have the VA committing fraud to cover up its letting patients die and new reports that every other country in the world had much better sunscreens than the USA, while ours haven’t changed for years because the FDA says it can’t get around to approving new ingredients because of a back log of work.

I’m watching it as I write this.  It’s not bad, and the production values are high, but it has a little feel of the typical “progressive” stations of the cross, where the participants self-congratulate as they relive their glory days (usually it’s civil rights) as a way of clearing their mind of any recognition of their destructive and murderous policies, from drones to failed schools.