dvd of the week
HBO’s stunningly good production of The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s iconic play about the early years of AIDS in New York and the founding of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, arrived more than 29 years after the play’s premiere. Kramer’s alter ego is Ned Weeks (a searing Mark Ruffalo), a neurotic gay writer unlucky in love and critical of gay men’s shallow promiscuity. It is 1981, and his friends start getting sick and then dying, and based on the expertise of a cranky, wheelchair bound doctor (Julia Roberts), he helps organize a group of gay men to do something. While attempting to get The New York Times to write more about the disease, he meets Felix Turner (Matt Bomer), a beautiful fashion writer, and they quickly fall in love. Ned is in a constant state of agony – and righteousness. The end of the story is pre-ordained by history and circumstance, and you will cry.
