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Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society |
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| David Crowe, President Phone: +1-403-289-6609 Fax: +1-403-289-6658 Email: David.Crowe@aras.ab.ca Kathleen Newell, Treasurer |
Box 61037, Kensington Postal Outlet
Calgary, Alberta T2N 4S6 Canada |
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The DVD of my first film, “The Last Lovers on Earth” is finally available on DVD at: customflix.com/208928 or at Amazon.
Read what some viewers have said about it.
On the cusp between humor and terror, The Last Lovers on Earth brings to fruition the techniques of underground films, Brechtian drama, and the Theater of the Ridiculous. There are three stories (or parables) told in rotation. Each makes an incisive point, and the film as a whole makes one huge point – a simple message, which few gay men have dared to apprehend. Every element of the film is first-rate: the words of poet Charles Ortleb, the acting, the direction, the original illustrations, the music, and the editing.
Satire in the hands of Charles Ortleb is a very dangerous weapon indeed. This digital production makes an important start in the use of theatre to deconstruct the evil edifice of AIDS orthodoxy.
Intensely cerebral. Intensely clever. Intensely funny. Intensely sad. Like a message in a bottle the story floats in and out of vision but ever onwards carrying its message. Finally, when it lands on the shore, it’s nothing like we think. Never has it been more truthful to say “Science advances funeral by funeral”.
The movie is a profound and funny look into the abyss that AIDS has become. Through light and dark deadpan humor, it begins to address the myths, fraud, and hype that have become the accepted AIDS paradigms: that gay men and sexual promiscuity are the “cause, that AIDS testing and drugs work, that demanding drugs and vaccines for everyone is going to save them. It challenges AIDS activists, AIDS researchers, and thinking people in general to have a critical look at this house of cards that is the AIDS Establishment.
If the AIDS establishment has a hit list, this film is at the top of the list.
In the mid-1980s, when I was writing AIDS INC., I came across something very, very rare. A newspaper that fit the mythical mold of the crusading enterprise that journalism was supposed to embody, but in practice almost never did. Charles Ortleb published and edited it. It was headquartered in New York. It was a weekly. Every week you could find it under one of those old iron weights at the public newsstands next to the Post and the Times. It was called New York Native.
Week after week, the front page blazed with stories about AIDS, about the phony and self-serving and corrupt research that was going on behind closed doors at various labs around the US. Ortleb was pushing his various reporters to break into that rarified sanctum and deliver the truth, and his mission was working. It was working to an amazing degree.
Ortleb had a sword, and he knew how to use it. He left all the highly decorated and respected medical reporters at major dailies in his dust, bleeding and ugly, their rugs askew on their precious parroting heads.
You knew the Native wouldn’t last forever. Ortleb and his paper were under constant attack from every vested interest that presumed to speak on the subject of AIDS. Medical bureaucrats, researchers, politicians, activists, fund-raising organizations – they all lined up to take their shots.
But during those years, Ortleb and his band of intrepid reporters landed their hard blows and stayed out ahead of the crowd. The money at their disposal was practically invisible. Still, they did it. They won the battle, for those who had a sufficient number of working brain cells to understand what was pouring out of the pages of the Native. In a half-sane world, Chuck would now be occupying a distinguished chair in journalism at a major university. He would be teaching a new generation of reporters what their job is really all about. He would be shaking the dust out of their minds and forcing them to go up against what we all know are the Big Lies of our time, from one end of the news spectrum to the other.
Face it, medical research science is the holiest of our holy gods. Few journalists have the intelligence or the courage to hose the money off the clay feet. Chuck Ortleb was and is a brilliant exception. He was one of the first to realize that the vaunted research on AIDS was built on fraud. He never wavered, once he saw what he saw. He attacked. He didn't simply write articles, although that would have been enough. He didn’t only edit the best AIDS journalism of the day. That would have been more than enough. He founded and ran a complete newspaper. He kept it afloat.Turn loose a celebrated reporter or editor on a job like that, and in two months he’d be dead in the water. Broke and starving. Ortleb probably knows more about the newspaper business and what it should be than any other person in America.
This movie, made on a shoestring, is the nightmare AIDS bureaucrats don’t want to have. It reveals their earnest attitude for what it is: a coat of polish over backroom scientific corruption of the lowest order.
If the medium of film can be said to have become numbing, in the Huxley sense – a medium of reassurance – Ortleb once again explodes our comfort zone. He did it with his radical newspaper, and now he is doing it with a low budget, strange, utterly different and stirring film, that is more like a series of surreal plays than a movie. It goes to the place that can only be called an ideological terra incognita. His dark vision of the psychic narrative of AIDS is played out here in the classical form of a futuristic nightmare that is by turns exasperating, shocking, poignant, and even gravely funny.