Anyone who found Babel's why-don't-we-try-to-understand-each-other? hand-wringing too subtle might prefer Thom Fitzgerald's 3 Needles, a triptych film about the global AIDS crisis that practically drips with earnest concern. In the first segment, Lucy Liu plays a pregnant entrepreneur who buys blood from Chinese villagers and sells it on the black market, inadvertently spreading disease to an entire farming community. In the second, Shawn Ashmore plays a porn star who fakes his blood tests until his blood source—his father—dies, inadvertently revealing Ashmore's secret life to mom Stockard Channing. And in the third, Chloë Sevigny, Sandra Oh, and Olympia Dukakis play missionary nuns taking action against the African tribesmen who rape children in their orphanage because they believe that will cure them of AIDS.
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