Sandra Oh.________
3 Needles, which recently premiered in Chicago at the Reeling gay film festival, returns for a theatrical engagement beginning this Friday, Dec. 1, which is World AIDS Day. Nothing could be more fitting to mark the occasion than this major work from queer filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald. The movie tells three separate and refreshingly original, though decidedly downbeat, stories of the devastation that the AIDS pandemic continues to wreak worldwide. But in 3 Needles, the virus that knows no boundaries is effectively confronted at the human level, where its victims, their caretakers and activists are trying to combat the plague. The memorable stories, set in China, Canada and South Africa, are each narrated by Olympia Dukakis, who also appears in the final section of the movie. The end result is nothing short of a triumph for writer-director-producer Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald has rounded up a name-brand cast ( including Lucy Liu, Sandra Oh, Stockard Channing, X-Men's Shawn Ashmore and Chloe Sevigny ) to enact his sprawling yet intimate film. In the first, Liu operates a roving blood bank that pays its donors—but only the healthy ones—and this has terrible consequences for a poor farmer, desperate for the money to cultivate his crops, who substitutes his small daughter in his place when Liu rejects him, suspecting he is ill. Ashmore co-stars with Channing in the second tale, the oddball of the lot, in which he supports his ailing father and hardworking mother by working in ( straight ) porn. To remain employed, he must keep testing negative—no problem as long as he keeps submitting samples he's been drawing from his nearly comatose father. But when his father dies, the jig is up and Channing steps to the forefront of the story; then, things take a really strange turn.
Finally, Sevigny, Oh and Dukakis appear as three nuns on a mission to convert souls in the Congo before their inevitable deaths from AIDS, due to the lack of medical care and desperately needed protease inhibitors. But Sevigny senses an ally in her quest to at least save some of the afflicted children in a powerful landowner who takes a fancy to her; deeply committed to her cause, the novice makes some eye-opening decisions.
Fitzgerald's movie is gorgeously photographed, but the stunning vistas are often cut short by the urgent realities of the characters wrapped up in their individual struggles. Music also plays a huge role in setting the tone of each of the stories ( ominous in the first, oddly jaunty in the second, repetitive yet soothing in the third ) and helps the director capture the different cultures persuasively. 3 Needles is compelling and unusual, a complex film of rare depth of feeling—a strangely lyrical ode to a deadly pandemic that has silently overtaken the world.
Proceeds from special screenings the opening weekend will go to community partners of the film's producers across the country. In Chicago, the film will play at AMC Piper's Alley 4 ( 1608 N. Wells ) , with proceeds going to BEHIV ( Better Existence with HIV; www.BeHIV.org ) . The filmmakers are also sponsoring a fund-raising effort at the film's MySpace profile ( see the Web site www.MySpace.com/3Needles ) . For every 'friend' in their network, the filmmakers and their sponsors will donate money to an AIDS charity doing work in the war-ravaged Sierra Leone region of Africa.
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I have used the phrase 'Altmanesque' many times in the 2-1/2 years that I've been writing this column ( most recently in my review of Shortbus ) . Since I fell in love with the work of the movie director Robert Altman over 30 years ago, I've probably said it a thousand times more and a quick Google search brings up more than 17,000 instances of the term being used by others. Simply put, 'Altmanesque' is the shorthand term for a film in which a large assortment of characters—sometimes connected, sometimes not—swirl about a shared commonality. In Nashville, it was country-and-western music; in Health, a health food convention; in The Player, the movie business; in Gosford Park, a wry murder mystery set amidst the upper class and their servants on a posh English estate in the 1920s; and so on. Altman created so many films using this method of working that this style, named in his honor, quickly entered the movie reviewers' ( and by default, the moviegoers' ) lexicon.
Sadly, the man for whom the term was coined passed away on Nov. 20 at the age of 81. The cause of death was due to complications from cancer and had nothing to do with the director's heart transplant of 10 years ago, as had been speculated. Altman revealed upon receiving an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar earlier this year the startling fact that he had this surgery and added that he'd kept it quiet so that he could keep working.
Work—on yet another of his complex, character-driven movies in which people talked over one another, murmured and nattered on as they walked out of frame, as in real life—was the driving force of his life. As each new film project got underway, Altman drew together many actors and technicians, who became part of his extended family, in order to begin the creative process. He was a daring director whose movies dove into a variety of fresh topics and subcultures. Some of the movies, mostly created in his justly famed improvisational style, worked better than others, but even the bad ones had moments of the director's unmistakable verve and his effect on filmmaking cannot be overstated.
Altman will also be sorely missed as a friend of the GLBT community. Long before it was fashionable, the independent director featured many gay and lesbian characters in his movies. They were not always sympathetic or free from cliché, but they were visible nevertheless. The director's long association with Lily Tomlin is also noteworthy, as Altman was the director who presented Tomlin with the most complex roles of her career. It all began, of course, with Tomlin's brilliant Oscar-nominated part in Altman's masterwork, 1975's Nashville, and concluded with his final film, this year's A Prairie Home Companion ( which in many ways seemed a gentle sequel to the former ) . It's a lovely coincidence, I think, that a 'For Your Consideration' screener of the latter movie arrived in the mail the same day that word of his death was announced. Watching the film again served as a poignant and bittersweet eulogy to this original director's work.
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