Jeannette Catsoulis, resident pit bull, unleashed on Leung

Naive review compares HIV skepticism with questioning gravity

But can Times afford to open this can of worms?

AIDS Seen From a Different Angle, her brief dismissal of the film in tomorrow’s paper, combining a vindictive level of nastiness about the unfortunate director Brent Leung’s work with zero evidence that she has actually viewed with any real attention more than the film’s trailer:

AIDS Seen From a Different Angle
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: September 4, 2009

Couched as a “personal journey” through the history of H.I.V. and AIDS, “House of Numbers” is actually a weaselly support pamphlet for AIDS denialists. Trafficking in irresponsible inferences and unsupported conclusions, the filmmaker Brent Leung offers himself as suave docent through a globe-trotting pseudo-investigation that should raise the hackles of anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the basic rules of reasoning.

Assembled from interview fragments with doctors, scientists, journalists and others, the film cobbles together an insinuating argument against the existence of H.I.V. as a virus and AIDS as the resulting disease. Among the many inflammatory claims is that diagnosis is a pharmaceutical-industry ruse to sell complex drug therapies (which the film then presents as the real cause of the syndrome we identify as AIDS). Evidence to support this and other highly dangerous contentions is found not in verifiable statistics (house of numbers, my foot) but in the impassioned anecdotes of individuals who have outlived the expectations of an H.I.V.-positive diagnosis.

Rife with fuzzy logic (most people with AIDS live in poverty, therefore poverty causes AIDS) and a relentless fudging of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions, this willfully ignorant film portrays minor areas of scientific disagreement as “a research community in disarray” and diagnostic testing as a waste of time. A few months ago 18 angry doctors and scientists interviewed in the film issued a statement claiming that Mr. Leung “acted deceitfully and unethically” when recruiting them and that his film “perpetuates pseudoscience and myths.”

Mr. Leung said in a recent interview, “All we do is raise questions.” Perhaps his next film will question the existence of gravity.

HOUSE OF NUMBERS
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Produced, directed and edited by Brent Leung; written by Llewellyn Chapman. At the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. This film is not rated.

Luckily a more sober and responsible description of House of Numbers is carried in the Movie section on line (House of Numbers (2009), otherwise this childish diatribe would discourage too many people from seeing what is surely one of the most important documentaries this year, given the light it throws on evidence that billions of dollars have been misspent and and countless lives needlessly destroyed by the HIV/AIDS juggernaut:

Review Summary

What is HIV? What is AIDS? What is being done to cure it? These questions sent Canadian filmmaker Brent Leung on a worldwide journey, from the highest echelons of the medical research establishment to the slums of South Africa, where death and disease are the order of the day. In this up-to-the-minute documentary, he observes that although AIDS has been front-page news for over 28 years, it is barely understood. Despite the great effort, time, and money spent, no cure is in sight. ~ Baseline StudioSystems

We are familiar with Catsoulis’s unjustly scathing style, for example, in attacking America the Beautiful last year, as if she would like to have hung, drawn and quartered the director, Darryl Roberts, of that interesting and personal essay on the ways in which the obsession with good looks is distorting American lives, apparently because the film was not sophisticated enough in content and style to suit her.

America the Beautiful
August 1, 2008
What You See
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: August 1, 2008

Clueless, directionless and altogether pointless, “America the Beautiful” will outrage only those who have spent the last 50 years in suspended animation. Paddling in the shallow end of a very deep pool, the writer and director Darryl Roberts bumbles his way through a hodgepodge of impressions about our national quest for physical perfection before suggesting — wait for it — that real beauty is on the inside. I feel enlightened already.

Stuffed with empty sound bites from the likes of Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton, this fabulously inept documentary aims much of its ire at the beauty industry’s purported tyranny of impressionable young women. Ignoring writers who have spent their careers studying this issue (including Jean Kilbourne and her pioneering video series, “Killing Us Softly”), Mr. Roberts conducts embarrassingly naïve and occasionally creepy interviews with young girls concerned about their body image. Though what we can learn from a close-up of a 12-year-old model’s naked thigh is not precisely clear.

Displaying an astonishing degree of ignorance about his chosen subject (“What’s a six-pack?”), Mr. Roberts zigzags from eating disorders to music videos to Eve Ensler chatting about — what else? — designer vaginas, without drawing breath or conclusions. If he had, he might have noticed that the tragic story of that 12-year-old model offered all the material his movie needed.

“America the Beautiful” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Flesh, fantasy and four-letter words.

Minor critics have always found it easiest to make a name for themselves by showing they are cleverer and more literate than their hapless victims, but we always thought that one of the virtues of the Times was that, like the New Yorker, it employs people who are both skillful and mature enough to please without showing off at their subject’s expense.

You can judge for yourself whether to take Catsoulis’s reviews at face value at Metacritic’s listing of her reviews, which suggest that the Times editors have not, after 247 of them, yet seen fit to send her to major releases, and we can imagine why.

The shame of the Times

In this case, however, one imagines that the politics of the Times in this arena dictated that the editors unleash their pet movie pit bull for a guaranteed throat ripping lest the film gain any traction in New York.

For God forbid that this documentary should be in contention for an Oscar, let alone win one, when it threatens to expose the foolishly one sided Times coverage of HIV/AIDS and its supposed science since 1984.

Even their science reporters, in particular medical reporter Lawrence Altman, write about HIV/AIDS as if they were suddenly unaware that paradigms shift in science all the time as they are reviewed and displaced by better notions, and that the process is made doubly difficult when vast amounts of money and careers are invested in the standard wisdom.

That the Times should have taken sides against Peter Duesberg, the leading light of the field of retrovirus research, ever since he rejected the notion that HIV accounted for AIDS, is unforgivable. And it creates an almost insurmountable barrier to reversing course now that Duesberg’s view is more and more confirmed with every passing year of non-achievement in the field.

If House of Numbers and its message were to gain the audience and respect it deserves (see the LA Times in our previous post for an example of a rational reaction to the film) where would that leave the Times, now struggling financially while trying to leave behind the very serious embarrassments of fiction on the front page and other errors of the last few years?

The irony is that the great newspaper is turning its reporters attention more and more to investigative exposes of waste and venality. Could its tattered reputation survive the revelation that for 25 years its science reporters and editors have been hoodwinked by Anthony Fauci, Bob Gallo, David Baltimore, Max Essex and John Moore into writing pr for the WorldCom of science?