When the rabid AIDS promoters hit the media channels and the Internet gloating over the death of leading HIV "rethinker" Christine Maggiore, it will be in the sadistic manner of which only AIDS-lovers are capable, and they will twist the truth into a scary fable meant to coax you into taking your meds.

Yet, it would be prudent to resist any temptation to believe their false assumption that Christine Maggiore succumbed to an "AIDS-related" illness, specifically, HIV-related pneumonia. If she tested negative, after testing positive, and her son tests negative, how is that HIV-related? Even if she was HIV positive, on what basis is her death attributed to HIV?

In an international study of bacterial pneumonia outcomes, conducted in part by the University of Alberta, researchers conculded that pneumonia doesn't appear to harm HIV-positive patients any more than those who are HIV-negative.

There was also negligible difference in the mortality rate; total deaths among the HIV patients was 3.5 per cent (two of 58 patients), and 4.8 per cent (seven of 174) among the HIV-negative patients.

Mourners and revelers alike, consider the following, as noted on Medicine.net.

Currently, over 3 million people develop pneumonia each year in the United States. Over a half a million of these people are admitted to a hospital for treatment. Although most of these people recover, approximately 5% will die from pneumonia. Pneumonia is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.

The latest numbers from the CDC put pneumonia as the 8th leading cause of death in the United States as of the last offficially available government numbers from 2005.

It is disrespect of the lowest form; not giving time to honor a departed soul. Christine Maggiore was a tireless fighter, for what she believed in wholeheartedly. To hear the evil cackling on some blogs, such as Aetiology, is to hear the desperate rantings of those trying to convince themselves of their stories in the midst of so many questions of their position.

One blogger mocked Maggiore's death from pneumonia as an event extraordinarily rare and remotest of possiblity, that a person unaffected by AIDS, HIV positive or not would endure.

It's not very difficult to consult the CDC website to find the top 15 causes of death in the USA, and to find pneumonia at numbers 6 and 8 for the two most receent national population studies.

Their wild, baseless accusations of how many deaths AIDS-dissenters directly cause, based upon UN numbers that are faulty to begin with, bear no relation to reality, as if Duesberg, or any dissenter is running public health policy on a continent thousands of miles away.

Defending against this libelous accusation gives these bloggers unwarranted credit. Remember these are the same poeple who villify those who advocate good nutrition, food and sanitation technology transfer, and parasite remediation, as "quacks".

One week they condemned the then South African public health minsiter and demanded her exit because she advised people to eat garlic and some local pomme de terre. The next week there was a prominent feature in an academic health journal discussing a study's newest findings about the far-reaching circulatory and immune function health benefits of garlic.

To say that the bloggers to whom I refer have a credibility problem is an understatement. To respect their arguments and character is impossible, although this writer would never consider saying they should be silenced, through any means.

Using a tragic and untimely death to advance the causes of unsubstantiated psudo-science through fascist style censorshipis, and to acheive the unstated goal of market penetration and profits is abominable, and creates a karma problem.

One nimrod even suggested putting Duesberg in prison for espousing his scientific opinion. Ah, Duesberg. I disagree with some of Duesbergs theories, to which he clings maddeningly and stubbornly. But Duesberg is an important scientific explorer and much of the field of biological scienee owes him a greta debt, and a measure of respoect. I'm quite certain, the sad excuse for a citizen who suggested that he be decommissioned is anything but a scientific explorer.

Of all the disciplines, the science people have and should continue to encourage dissent in the journey to uncover knowledge.

Voltaire, the French philosopher said in a letter to a contemporary, "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write."¹ Those at Aetiology should study this quote and put it to memory.

Is it clear that what was referred to as PCP - an acronym for pneumocystis carinii pneumonia even related to AIDS? Kaposi's sarcoma, another early AIDS-defining illness, is now known to be entireley unrelated to HIV.

PCS, a fungal infection of the lungs, started as a small cluster of contagious infections under the tutelage of Los Angeles-based Dr. Gottlieb, who was in close touch with the Feds at CDC.

It eventually morphed first into GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) and then into "AIDS" in this concerted effort to see it not as any other cluster but as a homosexual cluster of immune dysfunction, as if therein lived the aetiology of the great and powerful mystery of gay men who fell ill.

No matter that almost every parasite harmful to humans causes immune dysfunction, and they are usually contagious.

As titillating as gay sex may have been at the time, and feasible may it be that PCP was a proximity-related fraternally infectious bubble, it still has never been proven that PCP, or KS, for another matter, was related to someone's testing positive for HIV.

The tests of course came later, after the initial PCP/ KS clusters had run their course when Gallo monetized the whole mess with the erstwhile "HIV test" marketed for gay men. Erstwhile, because if you've read the labels of any such test, they don't actually test for HIV.

History speaks volumes and it is instructional in this quote from interviews conducted in 1993 and 1994 by Sally Smith Hughes, Ph.D with Dr. John Ziegler from The AIDS Epidemic in San Francisco: The Medical Response, 1981-1984, Volume IV, an oral history conducted in 1993 and 1994," at the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1997.

Hughes
In the early days, when it was pretty much you alone seeing AIDS patients at the VA, how did you deal with opportunistic infections? You presumably are not an expert on infectious disease. How did you handle patients with problems that really weren't in your territory?

Ziegler
Well, they were partly in my territory, insofar as a chemotherapist renders people immunodepressed with cytotoxins. So as a profession, we have to deal with opportunistic infections. In fact, a lot of the early cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia were seen in leukemia patients who were treated with prednisone. So I was pretty familiar with the opportunistic infections, and we just treated them as part of our daily oncologic experience.

I read of an NCI [National Cancer Institute] program called SEER [Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results] which found that the incidence of KS prior to 1980 in various participating cities, San Francisco being one of them, was several times higher than in cities such as Atlanta and Denver where AIDS is relatively rare.46 What does that mean?

Ziegler
There's a long story around KS and its epidemiology. But the short version is that most people think that KS is caused by an infectious agent, not HIV, but an agent that is passed along with it, and that these were really two independent epidemics, both following pretty much the pattern of advanced promiscuity in the homosexual community in the seventies. And in point of fact, the dermatologists, when they looked back and began to see that there were a fair number of patients in their gay practices who had Kaposi's sarcoma but who ended up not having HIV.

Q. Who is The Editor? A. Kirk Cordell

November 30, 2008

"Coming of age"

by The Editor

This year's aptly themed World AIDS Day, for those in the AIDS industry, a high holiday, certainly has different meanings among different people.

A headline grabbed me this week and it is telling of the ludicrous corner these people have backed themselves into. 

With the red ribbons of World AIDS Day observance everywhere, the newsflash reminded me that my entire adult life has been in the shadow of AIDS and promised death, and 3 decades of AIDS research have come full circle. 

It is obvious they don't know what they're doing.

The headline stated backwards that viral load has no statistically significant impact on CD4 counts, according to the research.

The backdoor actual headline described the researchers' inabilty to detect a link between what they term "virolgic failure" and CD4 T-cell counts.

Over 1600 antiretroviral newbies were monitored over intervals across a six month span.  What they found is obvious to those with real life experience outside the lab.

Suppression of what is improperly dubbed "viral load" - a misappropriated lab DNA count exxaggerated by laboratory magnification - is pointless.

Success of suppression means no DNA count. But this count does not measure virus particles, only DNA litter, remnants from unknown acttivty that has never been proven to be HIV activity.

The PCR DNA test as it is usually called, is not even authorizd by the US Food and Drug Adminsitration to diagnose HIV, so to base life-eroding and life-taking medication decisions on a rationale so tenuous is and was always wrong.

Now that it has been proven in the field, more than once, at more than one lab, how can the world bodies and national governments endorse, even force medicines on people if they can't even tell you the benefits of such treatment.

"The proportion with no increase in CD4 count from baseline did not differ between those with suppressed or unsuppressed VLs at 6, 18, and 24 months after ART (antiretroviral therapy) initiation."1

These are the exact words Moore et. al. published in their paper, CD4+ T-Cell Count Monitoring Does Not Accurately Identify HIV-Infected Adults With Virologic Failure Receiving Antiretroviral Therapy.

"The CD4 cell count monitoring does not accurately identify individuals with virologic failure among patients taking ART.

NotAIDS! has been saying for some time that many of the same immunosuppresive symptoms attributed to HIV can be a misdiagnosis of intestinal or other parasite infections.

Research has been published here that shows identical proteins and surface proteins are expressed by various parasites as by HIV, such as p24, gp160.

Not long ago, there was a splashy announcement in the mainstream press that "HIV lives in the gut" and hides out in the lymphatic tissue.  Interesting, since intestinal parasites hang out in the same neighborhood.

How coincidental that Irritable Bowel Syndrome affected a great many gay men in the 1970s, but this "syndrome" - a eupheism for intestinal parasites - disappeared suddenly around 1981, and was replaced with something called GRID - Gay Related Immune Deficiency -, ultimately becoming known as AIDS.

To fit the HIV/AIDS model, any disease occuring in the presence of a silly little antibody to an even sillier little retrovirus named unimaginitively,  Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is "coinfection." 

Keeping this in mind, divert for a moment and ask yourself, when you have the flu, or  a cold, is it said that you are "coinfected" with mononucleosis or meningitis - which you had when you were in college and for which you still have antibodies?

As far as the HIV/AIDS model is concerned, it is reported that "coinfection" with HIV and the  parasite, cryptospordium, is a leading cause of mortality from AIDS. 

What a surprise.   

Now read the following Author's Summary of just-completed research into the connection between intestinal parasites and, not just the progression to AIDS, but to the prevalence of AIDS in regions where parasitic infections are endemic due to an shameful lack of water purification and sanitation systems.

 Please note that the AIDS industry is busy sending millions of dollars to these regions for pharmaceutical products, rather than building much more cost-efficient solutions, like sewage systems and drinking water filtration facilities. 

The other question you need to ask, is whether there is even a remote possibility that without HIV, a long-term parasite infection will cause AIDS - meaning a syndrome of immune deficiency as indicated by a plethora of infections which normally the body would defeat.

If there is this possibility, then AIDS researchers all over the world may want to think about switching tracks, from the glamorous celebrity that is an insignficant retrovirus, to a field definitely with more ick-factor, and less star-appeal

- The Editor

Interestingly, symptoms once attributed to AIDS, like "wasting" or KS lesions (human herpes virus-8) or PCP [known as Pneumocystis (carinii) jiroveci Pneumonia] rarely occur or if they do rarely are fatal. Pneumonia is more often than not misdiagnosed as its symptoms are generalized and subacute, whether or not the person is HIV+.

Furthermore, "PCP has been documented recently in persons who are mildly immunocompromised, including those with chronic lung disease" (Contini C, Villa MP, Romani R, Merolla R, Delia S, Ronchetti R. Detection of Pneumocystis carinii among children with chronic respiratory disorders in the absence of HIV infection and immunodeficiency. J Med Microbiol 1998;47:329–33.} ]]> http://notaids.com/pt/commonsense 2008-03-22T15:41:12-05:00 2008-03-24T12:53:58-05:00 The Editor

Poor sanitation threatens public health

6 in 10 Africans remain without access to proper toilet

20 MARCH 2008 | GENEVA --

Sixty-two per cent of Africans do not have access to an improved sanitation facility -- a proper toilet -- which separates human waste from human contact, according to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation.

A global report will be published later this year, however, preliminary data on the situation in Africa was released today as part of World Water Day 2008.

The Day, built around the theme that “Sanitation matters," seeks to draw attention to the plight of some 2.6 billion people around the world who live without access to a toilet at home and thus are vulnerable to a range of health risks.

"Sanitation is a cornerstone of public health," said WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan. "Improved sanitation contributes enormously to human health and well-being, especially for girls and women. We know that simple, achievable interventions can reduce the risk of contracting diarrhoeal disease by a third."

Although WHO and UNICEF estimate that 1.2 billion people worldwide gained access to improved sanitation between 1990 and 2004, an estimated 2.6 billion people - including 980 million children – had no toilets at home.

If current trends continue, there will still be 2.4 billion people without basic sanitation in 2015, and the children among them will continue to pay the price in lost lives, missed schooling, in disease, malnutrition and poverty.

“Nearly 40% of the world’s population lacks access to toilets, and the dignity and safety that they provide," said Ann M. Veneman, UNICEF Executive Director. “The absence of adequate sanitation has a serious impact on health and social development, especially for children. Investments in improving sanitation will accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals and save lives.”

Using proper toilets and hand washing - preferably with soap - prevents the transfer of bacteria, viruses and parasites found in human excreta which otherwise contaminate water resources, soil and food.

This contamination is a major cause of diarrhoea, the second biggest killer of children in developing countries, and leads to other major diseases such as cholera, schistosomiasis, and trachoma.

Improving access to sanitation is a critical step towards reducing the impact of these diseases. It also helps create physical environments that enhance safety, dignity and self-esteem.

Safety issues are particularly important for women and children, who otherwise risk sexual harassment and assault when defecating at night and in secluded areas.

Also, improving sanitation facilities and promoting hygiene in schools benefits both learning and the health of children.

Child-friendly schools that offer private and separate toilets for boys and girls, as well as facilities for hand washing with soap, are better equipped to attract and retain students, especially girls. Where such facilities are not available, girls are often withdrawn from school when they reach puberty.

In health-care facilities, safe disposal of human waste of patients, staff and visitors is an essential environmental health measure.

This intervention can contribute to the reduction of the transmission of health-care associated infections which affect 5% to 30% of patients.

“The focus on sanitation is fundamental to human beings,” says Pasquale Steduto, UN-Water chairman. “The MDG target on sanitation is seriously lagging behind schedule. The entire UN System has a shared responsibility in mobilizing concrete actions towards its achievement; investments must increase immediately.”

UN-Water is the coordinating mechanism of the UN agencies, programmes and funds that play a significant role in tackling global water and sanitation concerns.

World Water Day provides an opportunity to draw attention to the International Year of Sanitation 2008, a year in which the UN General Assembly in December 2006 has called for a focus on addressing sanitation and hygiene problems.

The International Year of Sanitation 2008 aims to raise the profile of sanitation issues on the international agenda and to accelerate progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goal target of reducing by half the proportion of people living without access to improved sanitation by 2015.

Within the UN system, the focal point for the International Year of Sanitation is the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, in collaboration with the UN-Water Task Force on Sanitation.

Sanitation is not a dirty word. Sanitation matters.

For further information contact:

WHO:
Ms Fadela Chaib
WHO Communications Officer/spokesperson
Tel.: +41 22 791 3228
Mobile: +41 79475 5556
Email: ChaibF@who.int

Ms Sari Setiogi
Media Relations Office
Health Security and Environment
Tel.: +41 22 791 3576
Email: SetiogiS@who.int

Ms Nada Osseiran
Advocacy & Communications Officer
Public Health and Environment
Tel.: +41 22 791 4475
Email: OsseiranN@who.int

UNICEF:
Veronique Taveau
UNICEF Geneva Regional Office
Tel.: +41 22 909 5716
Mobile: +41 79 216 9401
Fax: +41 22 909 5907
Email: vtaveau@unicef.org

Veronique Cordier
UNICEF Media – International Year of Sanitation
Tel.: +1 212 326 7516
Email: vcordier@unicef.org

Women in New Jersey have suffered a civil rights defeat in the State of New Jersey when the legislature recently passed a bill that forces each pregnant woman and her newborn to be tested for HIV.

Despite the fact that only two infants tested positive in 2006 in New Jersey, and none in 2007, the State opted to blast personal liberty and violate civil rights with a law that is both unncessary and cruel.

Women who are pregnant have a high "false positive" rate, and when specificity and accuracy are evaluated in the general population, all HIV tests are of questionable value.

Because the protein markers used in these tests, like p24 or gp41 (p=protein gp=surface protein or glycoprotein, number X=molecular weight in kilodaltons), are not specific to the possibly benign retrovirus identified as HIV, there are some who argue that all positive HIV tests are false positives .

Biologically, pregnant women are much more likely to exhibit these or the other nonspecific protein markers that are used in diagnosing HIV.

Therefore, any policy, or worse, any law that forces expectant mothers to take what some consider to be a useless and irrelevant HIV test, risks causing catastrophic trauma to the pregnant woman, leading to depression, suicide, elective abortion, or the unnecessary administration of highly toxic substances like AZT or Nevirapine to the newborn and/or mother.

A bill signed into law Wednesday by the Senate president, Richard J. Codey, in his capacity as acting governor, requires two tests for pregnant women, at the beginning of the pregnancy and again in the third trimester, unless the mother objects. If the mother objects, the objection will be noted and the newborn will then be tested for HIV, with the only exception being on religious grounds. Newborns will also be tested if the woman tests positive.¹

Like the many national laws around the world, including the United States, denying entry of HIV positive individuals, official government policy and law are based on faulty HIV positive tests, and at the foundation, a faulty theory of HIV.

The reality is that studies have not in fact uncovered any process by which the elusive so-called "human immunodeficiency virus" kills CD4 immune t-cells, or any other actual cause-and-effect pathogenic process.

Riki E. Jacobs, who heads the Hyacinth AIDS Foundation, a New Jersey nonprofit AIDS service organization, is even opposed to the new law passed late 2007.

"I am adamantly opposed to this bill. New Jersey already reduced the perinatal rate of transmission with mandatory counseling of pregnant women. The issue is getting those women who are not in prenatal care in for services and testing. I definitely think it is an invasion of privacy."

Both the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and the New Jersey National Organization for Women chapter have questioned the legality of the bill, signed into law by Richard J. Codey, NJ senate president, and acting governor.

What's even more confounding is that it appears infants can be born testing "HIV positive" even though the mother doesn't, which destroys the entire assumption about "mother to child transmission" or "MTCT" in AIDS industry careerists' lingo.

A Reuters news brief reported recently the results of a London study.

Infants can be born with HIV infection even if their mother tests negative for the virus in pregnancy, the results of a brief report show.

The study, which is published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, involved a review of the prenatal test histories for 25 infants diagnosed with HIV infection at a referral hospital in London from 2001 to 2005. The study focused on 21 of the cases in which prenatal care had been provided in the UK.

Twelve of the mothers had not been tested for HIV infection during pregnancy, Dr. Hermione Lyall, from St. Mary's NHS Trust in London, and colleagues report. Of the remaining nine, four tested positive, but five did not.

Infants whose mothers were not diagnosed with HIV infection fared worse than other infants. Infected infants typically had severe infections, which proved fatal in six cases.

The important message is that a negative prenatal HIV test in the mother does not mean an infant is not infected with HIV and this possibility should be considered for any child with symptoms of immunodeficiency, the investigators emphasize.²

##

1. "N.J. Orders HIV Testing For Pregnant Women - Some Groups Call Law Unneeded and Intrusive" By Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, December 28, 2007; Page A03
2. Negative prenatal test doesn't assure infant free of HIV, Reuters, Thu, Jan 31, 2008 (Reuters Health)

Clean drinking water, a luxury most of us take for granted, is sadly unavailable for a billion or so of our brothers and sisters around the world.

NotAIDS! has published various charts and editorials about the shameful lack of attention to the world's most solvable health problems.

Having enough food to eat isn't a question for most people of the West, many of whom are overweight, and a frightening majority of whom are obese.

But in developing nations, and amongst the lower income in the cities and towns of the rich West, malnutrition is shockingly common.

In a surprising shift towards common sense, some important voices are joining the call to correct these gross imbalances.

The Associated Press recently published an article by Maria Cheng, "Experts Call for Rethinking AIDS Money." She quotes some of the statistics NotAIDS! has graphically represented over the past two years, data which has been available for some time, but for some reason until now hasn't been sexy enough for the likes of celebrity ambassadors such as the always-sunglassed Bono.

As the charts show, easily curable conditions cause the most premature deaths, like parasites in untreated drinking water, or malnutrition.

Dr. Richard Horton, editor of Lancet, a British medical journal, had this to say, "We have a system in public health where the loudest voice gets the most money. AIDS has grossly distorted our limited budget."

This evaluation of spending budgets is certain to be uncomfortable to AIDS researchers and the techno-medical-government complex who fatten themselves at the expense of HIV positive guinea pigs and unwitting taxpayers.

In her January 18, 2008 essay, Maria Cheng notes some important points the "Rethinkers" have been discussing for years.

The world invests about $8 billion to $10 billion in AIDS every year, more than 100 times what it spends on water projects in developing countries. Yet more than 2 billion people do not have access to adequate sanitation, and about 1 billion lack clean water.

In a recent series in the journal Lancet, experts wrote that more than one-third of child deaths and 11 percent of the total disease burden worldwide are due to mothers and children not getting enough to eat — or not getting enough nutritional food.

"If we look at the data objectively, we are spending too much on AIDS," wrote Dr. Malcolm Potts, an AIDS expert at the University of California, Berkeley.

Even the World Health Organization (WHO), sharply criticized on the pages of NotAIDS! for its propagation of misguided health policies, admits global health funding priorities are screwy.

Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the AIDS department at WHO sheepishly remarks on his work in Kenya. "It did feel a bit peculiar to be investing so much money into anti-retrovirals while the people there were dealing with huge problems like water and sanitation."

As celebrity spokespeople with the best intentions glamorized AIDS funding, less sexy problems like clean water projects, sanitation systems, and food for the billions of our brothers and sisters around the world took backstage.

Ironically, the popularity of the AIDS cause was spurred on by the death of Hollywood actor Rock Hudson, who few know didn't even test HIV positive. Mr. Hudson died just months after quadruple bypass surgery, and whose copious consumption of liquor and 4-packs of cigarettes a day led to his dramatic decline and untimely demise.

Many researchers in the AIDS world like to use the term, "resource poor" when referring to the war-torn, poverty stricken nations ravaged by the imperial colonialism of the last two centuries.

The term couldn't be more inaccurate. The lands of Africa, for example, rich in natural resources and mineral deposits, are pillaged by the corporate interests of the West, whose policies and public discourse, and AIDS work fattens the wallets of pharmaceutical companies, and whose politicians hide the criminal ransacking that continues unabated.

The middle classes of the West are busy trying to maintain a moderate quality of life, taking for granted the faucet in the kitchen, the food in the refrigerator, the weekly trash collection, while the entrenched poverty of billions of our bretheren continues.

While billions go hungry, and billions suffer cholera and dysentery from parasite infested waters collected in street puddles, billions of dollars are poured into the black hole of AIDS research, ultimately landing in the bank accounts of pharmaceutical companies.

But "trying to redirect AIDS money will take a long time," complains Dr. Richard Wamai, a Kenyan doctor at Harvard's School of Public Health. "It's a bit like trying to stop an ocean liner."

"No one is beating the drum for basic health problems," said Daniel Halperin, an AIDS specialist also at Harvard University's School of Public Health.

It's time we listen more carefully.

##

Through these extreme rises and falls, Arenas is always writing, his typewriter his most faithful lover and weapon (by way of smuggled manuscripts) against the dark forces that surround him. As Time magazine's Richard Corliss wrote, Arenas is "a serious actor's dream role: to be a gay Jesus in a modern Passion Play," and Javier Bardem--the first Spanish actor to receive an Oscar nomination--inhabits the role with subtle ferocity, charting this emotional odyssey with outer reserve but blazing infernos of internal passion. And while Schnabel suffers from a hyperactive camera, there's poetry here--visual, dramatic, and literal--and vibrant humor to temper the deep tragedy of Arenas's life. Schnabel also uses his actor friends to good advantage: a nearly unrecognizable Sean Penn adds an ironic touch to his brief appearance as a peasant, and Johnny Depp is both funny and fearsome in dual roles as a drag queen and vicious army interrogator. --Jeff Shannon

The story centers around Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) and Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman), a gay couple that falls apart when Prior grows ill as a result of AIDS. But cancer is not the only thing invading Prior's life: He begins to have religious visions of an angel (Emma Thompson, Sense and Sensibility) announcing that he is a prophet. Louis, who doesn't cope well with disease and suggestions of mortality, leaves and starts a relationship with Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), a closeted Mormon who works for Roy Cohn (Al Pacino, Dog Day Afternoon)--the real-life right-wing lawyer, notorious for his ruthless behind-the-scenes machinations. Add in Joe's depressed and hallucinating wife Harper (Mary Louise Parker, Fried Green Tomatoes), his determined but open-minded mother Hannah (Meryl Streep, Adaptation), a fierce drag queen/nurse named Belize (Jeffrey Wright, Basquiat, reprising his celebrated performance from the Broadway production), and you've still only begun to discover the wealth of characters and storylines in Kushner's ambitious work.

The powerhouse cast (also featuring James Cromwell, Michael Gambon, and Simon Callow) is uniformly superb. The script has its weaknesses--some of the fantastic elements, including Prior's journey to Heaven towards the end, fall flat--but even what doesn't work is bristling with ideas and a ferocious desire to capture human existence in this time and place. --Bret Fetzer

The remarkable thing about Rent the movie is that nearly 10 years after the show debuted on Broadway, six of the eight principals return in the roles they originated. They're a bit older than would be ideal for their characters, but they do have the advantage of having learned the show directly from creator Jonathan Larson (who died of an aortic aneurysm while the show was in previews), plus they started young--we're not exactly talking Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford here. Alongside a polished performance like Rapp's--sometimes observer-commentator, sometimes participant in two of the score's showstoppers, "The Tango Maureen" and "La Vie Boheme"--the two new additions (Thoms in place of Fredi Walker, Dawson in place of the edgier Daphne Rubin-Vega) slip comfortably into the ensemble; the pivotal Dawson makes a seductive case as Mimi when she tempts Roger in the mesmerizing "Light My Candle" or burns up the stage of the Catscratch Club in "Out Tonight." Moviegoers who have an aversion to people who break into song while walking down the street probably won't have their minds changed by Rent (even if they are singing rock songs), and the gritty subject matter and lack of big-name stars make it unlikely to cross over to general audiences the way Chicago did. But fans of musicals should find "Seasons of Love" as stirring as ever, and the show's passionate admirers--the "Rentheads"--probably couldn't have wished for a more sympathetic director than Rent fan Chris Columbus, or a more faithful representation of the show they love. --David Horiuchi

On the DVD
Three powerful musical numbers cut from the final film are the highlight of the two-disc DVD. In the aftermath of the funeral scene, Anthony Rapp sings "Halloween," and he, Adam Pascal, and Rosario Dawson share "Goodbye Love" (both songs were in the stage version). Then in an alternate ending, the cast finishes "No Day But Today" on the bare stage on which the film began. There are worthwhile arguments for why these scenes were cut or replaced, so it's fortunate that the DVD lets us see these at all. Those musical numbers have optional commentary by director Chris Columbus, Rapp, and Pascal (two other cut scenes have no commentary), including one funny moment in which Rapp explains in great detail the technical challenge of shooting "Halloween" only to have Columbus say, "Yeah, but I don't know if that's the take we used." The three also provide commentary on the film itself, with Columbus discussing various decisions, criticizing the critics, and marveling "I still don't know how we got the PG-13," and Rapp and Pascal occasionally recalling differences in the stage version.

The other whopper of a feature is No Day But Today, a nearly two-hour documentary that uses video clips, still photographs, and interviews with family and friends to celebrate the short life of Jonathan Larson and his creation. Topics include his early interest in musical theater ("I want to write the Hair for the '90s."), the support of Stephen Sondheim, the impact of the AIDS epidemic, the long and difficult road of Rent (casting the show, Larson learning to collaborate, the transfer to a Broadway stage, and the Rentheads), and Larson's tragic death. The last 20 minutes covers the making of the film, director Chris Columbus, the decision to rely on most of the original cast (the only two principals who didn't appear in the movie, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Fredi Walker-Browne, are interviewed in earlier segments, but only mentioned in passing here), recording sessions, and location shooting. If the movie of Rent was a tribute to Jonathan Larson, the DVD is all that and more, a moving and incredibly detailed look at an extraordinary talent whom the world lost far too soon. --David Horiuchi

More Rent
Movie soundtrack
Original Broadway cast recording
Anthony Rapp's Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical "Rent"