MVFF33: 'Cut Poison Burn'

According to Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of DNA Dr. James Watson "the National Cancer Program is a bunch of shit", and this important film tells why. Wayne Chesler's Cut Poison Burn documents the ways in which pharmaceutical companies, and their creature, the American Cancer Society, in league with the American Medical Association and the FDA, govern the state of cancer treatment and research in this country by absolute decree, rewarding political candidates and CEOs and failing, to a staggering extent, the actual victims of this dread disease, their families, and the many brilliant independent research associates who struggle in vain to advance a real cure. Audiences will be interested to learn that a patient's life expectancy in 2010 has not, except in the case of 4 known cancers, increased at all since the 1920s when cancer research began in earnest; that patients today experience far greater suffering and diminishment in quality of life; that apparently benign fronts in the 'battle' such as Breat Cancer Awareness Month are PR fronts for purveyors of lethal drugs like Tamoxifin, known to cause uterine cancer in women; that research teams in universities across the country are routinely denied development grants for promising breakthroughs in non- or less toxic treatment options and are effectively squeezed out of the field anyway by FDA stipulations that new treatments be subjected to a staggering $1.6 billion of industry testing in order to qualify for approval. Since pharmaceutical companies (which constitute, incidentally, the largest lobbying sector in Washington bar none) are the only organizations capable of supplying such sums they have the entire industry of cancer research and treatment in a state of lockdown.

To make matters worse, parents of children with cancer are required by law to subject their kids to the entire battery of 'conventional treatment options' before they are allowed to seek alternative paths, and then only when the medical establishment has declared their child unable to withstand further treatment, a situation which usually involves the child being reduced to a virtual vegetable, bloated, hairless, riddled with secondary cancers, liver disease, and a whole host of other horrifying conditions including bone malformation and brain damage. The film follows the story of the Navarro family, who fight to the point of congressional hearings for the right to treat their 4-year old son at an alternative treatment facility in Texas. This facility, established by Polish Doctor Stanislaw Burzynski, has been treating patients with a non-toxic, non-patented amino-acid drip with enormous success, but the FDA had already barred the way to his door for the Navarros by reducing his clinic access to end-case patients only. The fate of this clinic is an interesting sub-plot in itself. In its determination to defend pharmaceutical companies' rights to dominate treatment options, the FDA waged a 13-year, $8 million legal battle to indict Burzynski on any and all charges available to the legal imagination, 75 counts in all, but were forced to merely sideline his clinic after prosecution failed on all counts to eliminate him from the game entirely. The fate of Dr. Burzynski, of other alternative-treatment practitioners, and of innovative scientists and research teams who have for decades now been thwarted and smeared as quacks by the ACS, not to mention the fate of patients like Tommy Navarro and tens of thousands like him, makes for a very sobering, sometimes infuriating, sinister and heartbreaking film, but it is an object lesson in how our country works and how, moreover, our own possible health trajectories might play out. I should add that the film is expertly produced, narrated, and formally balanced, not at all in the manner of some of Michael Moore's more strident if admirable efforts. It is an example of what great documentary filmmaking is all about. See this film. Playing 10/8 and 10/10 at the Smith Rafael Theatre in San Rafael. Jim Navarro's ongoing struggle for our right to alternative treatment options can be explored at http://www.cancerbusters.us/

MVFF33: 'The King's Speech'

As winner of the People's Choice Award at this year's Toronto Film Festival, Tom Cooper's The King's Speech is set to become a hit with mainstream audiences in the States, as previous winners Precious and Slumdog Millionaire were before it, and owing to the performance of middle-aged heartthrob Colin Firth and of supporting actor Geoffrey Rush it will more than likely be a major presence in next year's Oscars as well. Yawn! At least with its nods to Bollywood Slumdog was fairly honest about its sugar content, but The King's Speech just pulls unremittingly on audience heartstrings without any irony whatsoever, sawing away at our pathetic fascination with well-dressed, well-meaning British gentlemen who are afflicted with an endearing touch of social anxiety but whose morals and conduct are above reproach. It's a caricature of Englishness that Colin Firth has built an entire career on. Here we find him one rung further up the ladder than usual - he is King George VI no less - but the character is essentially the same as the one he always plays, with some minor variations.
Bertie, as he is known to his friends, has a fairly debilitating speech impediment which interferes with his royal duties as Duke of York but which threatens to become overwhelming when he is suddenly catapulted to the throne in the wake of his brother Edward's abdication in 1936 (to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson). Fortunately for Bertie, his enterprising wife Elizabeth (played with predictable charm by Helena Bonham Carter) has already secured the services of unorthodox Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush), and the film is a study of their developing friendship, essentially of the ways in which Lionel manages to thaw out his heavily armored aristocratic client in time for him to embrace his royal destiny and deliver the speech of his life over national radio as Britain enters the war with Germany in 1939. You know you are in for some pretty high-calorie low-nutritional fare by the time Bertie makes his first breakthrough speech in Lionel's office, and the film continues in this vein as Bertie opens and snaps shut and opens again in the course of his treatment. It is a cleverly written and staged production, with enough humor and appropriate (superficial) questioning of privilege and class division to make us feel cosily acknowledged, but the story is chockful of that cloying sentiment which is symptomatic of emotional ill-health and is the unfortunate state of quite a few British films these days, another anodyne and intellectually-retarded exercise in winning the hearts, minds, and dollars of American audiences who don't know any better and don't want to. I enjoyed it - but not with the part of my brain that thinks.