No real sense in going into details, as this is a compelling TV movie, which is a not a dig. Mr. Matthew McConaughey as with the case of Reign of Fire and Larger Than Life, is in a different movie, and it’s to his credit.

For the purposes of furthering my various film theories, it bears mentioning that poor Mr. Denis O’Hare is saddled with the bland villain part (just as poor Ms. Jennifer Garner with the Good Girl), and I thought of The Matrix and Die Hard and the importance of non-stock villains. There’s a real missed opportunity to bring the rest of the film into the weird actorly masterpiece that Mr. McConaughey is in. The point which our evil doctor could have made is that there’s an uneasy alliance between the greed of big pharma and the scientific method. I know that you take a tincture of goji to cure you of smarmy film pontifications, and it totally works, and everyone who doesn’t believe it is lying, especially those people who take their goji with cranberries. That’s crazy.

Slightly more crazy, though, is believing that a diatribe about the theory of demarcation will change your mind about goji berries. So here goes! Causality is kind of a free for all, but at the very least you need to have some kind of guidelines. This is why Sir Karl Popper created the concept of falsifiability. Like me, and with the help of time travel, because of me, Sir Popper hated Marxists and Freudians, largely because they were idiots. They were idiots largely because everything proved them right. The latter has made its way into popular thinking through the following reasoning: oh, your father drank? That’s why you’re an alcoholic. Oh, your father drank, that’s why you’re a teetotaler. The fact that both these conclusions make sense to you is why Dallas Buyers Club wasn’t a better movie.

Okay, so Cineworld has switched to Baskin Robbins because Ben & Jerry’s is unreliable. There is nowhere else in the UK to get Baskin Robbins, possibly because it is the most disgusting ice cream in the entire world. Though the idea of making ice cream that I wouldn’t eat is appealing from a philosophical level, from a practical level, well actually, I just buy the tubs of Ben & Jerry’s which are still available from the concession stand. When it comes to logic, see Sir Karl Popper, left.

What? Well, the concept of falsifiability is that you have to have an event or conclusion that absolutely disproves your theory, like the black swan they found in Australia one day, or me coming across a film where a director actually has some influence. Like that. In the case of the early days of HiV, they didn’t know fuck all, which the movie almost portrays. At this point, you’re just kind of throwing shit up against the wall to see what makes the face of Jesus. In order to do this, you need placebos, for real, not in a cheap Bond villain way, but simply to figure out if something like AZT works (it does, by the way, as the film points out…at the end). When people get placebos, they’re going to die. Unless the drug is poisonous, in which case, they’re going to live. Which is kind of the point of using the scientific method.

Whether or not you believe in Popper’s ideas, and please don’t answer that or I’ll get more depressed, this has a lot of dramatic potential, especially against the wild eyed rantings of Mr. McConaughey. The question of doing something ‘everything you can right now’ versus letting some people die as placebo controls to save even more in the future is an interesting one, one which Mr. O’Hare, who I haven’t forgotten from either Michael Clayton or his great turn as a schizophrenic twenty years ago on the original Law & Order would relish playing.

So you keep being allergic to a substance (gluten) that can’t actually generate a histamine response, and I’ll keep trying to convince you of stuff with preciously worded sentences. Whoever holds onto their ridiculous beliefs longer wins the award for Best Science. Because that’s the scientific method in actual practice: whatever we already believed.