3 Needles (2006)
Runtime: 2 hrs 7 mins
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Shawn Ashmore, Lucy Liu, Stockard Channing, Olympia Dukakis, Chloe Sevigny
DVD Info
Release:
Apr 3, 2007
DVD Features:
- Region 1
- Keep Case
- Widescreen
Audio:
- (unspecified) - English
Additional Release Material:
- Deleted Scenes
- Documentary - 1. CHINA AIDS INITIATIVE With Magic Johnson and Yao Ming
- 2. HOUSE ON FIRE - AIDS in America
- Interviews - Cast
- Trailer - Theatrical Trailer
Interactive Features:
- Scene Selection
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
As a movie with an important message, 3 Needles is an idiotic waste of time.
A marginally involving dramatization of how peopledeal with AIDS in 3 separate cultures
Making serious points about serious issues, the film underscores repeatedly the need for personal and official vigilance concerning "the virus,"
3 Needles is a case of diminishing returns with the first story of blood running in China the best and the last, set in Africa, the least compelling.
Three riveting dramas about the AIDS crisis set in South Africa, China, and Canada that open our eyes and our hearts to victims of this dread disease.
The situations are contrived, the ironies are cheap, and the dialogue is overly blunt.
Demonstrates that the transmission of HIV has become an uncontrollable global pandemic that feeds on poverty and recognizes no sexual, national or religious borders.
If nothing else, [director Thom] Fitzgerald has demonstrated how huge a challenge the AIDS epidemic is on a worldwide scale, and how it will take a concerted, intelligent effort to solve it. It'll take a lot more than throwing money around.
3 Needles is difficult to take at times, but it ultimately rewards those viewers willing to meet its challenges.
Only the African story feels complete, while the Chinese story is gloomily hopeless and the Montreal story is just a bad idea. 3 Needles is not about AIDS; it's about the exploitation of it.
3 Needles, Thom Fitzgerald's globe-spanning investigation of the effects of AIDS, may ultimately be a call to unity, but there's an extreme amount of despair and misery before we get to hear that trumpet blare.
Broad in scope and at times visually stunning, [director Thom] Fitzgerald's project is ambitious but lacks cohesion.
It's hard to know what exactly the movie means with a lot of the choices it makes, even if, ultimately, it means well.
Nothing is as irritating as watching a film which is little more than an exercise of ego; worse is watching one that is about as discrete in its purpose as a missionary in Africa.
It's gorgeously filmed, but its character logic very rarely makes any sense.
I'd love a peek at the keyboard Fitzgerald uses to conjure his screeds: I've never seen one sledgehammered into dust and splinters before.
Though not as coherent as it might be, 3 Needles, with its stunning cinematography by Thomas M. Harting, is never less than engaging and suggests powerfully the myriad reasons why AIDS, after a quarter of a century, remains so difficult to combat.
Had it taken a more hard-headed approach, 3 Needles might have been to the AIDS epidemic what Traffic was to the drug trade.
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