E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dubious occupations Side Effects at the MFA;Occupation: Dreamland at the Coolidge BY GERALD PEARY

In Toronto recently, I compare-shopped an arthritis medicine that my senior-citizen mother buys by prescription, a criminal $350 at her pharmacy for 30 pills. The same costs $30 in Canada but is blocked from the States by lobbyists and the Bush administration. There’s a sobbing need for a film that exposes the greed and graft of the American drug industry. It’s certainly not Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau’s pseudo-muckraking narrative Side Effects, September 30 and October 1, 2, and 6 at the MFA.

You’re stuck for 98 minutes with a sub-basement TV movie vaguely about "important issues" that you’d click off in 10 minutes viewing at home. It’s the tale of a young woman who sheds all integrity in today’s for-profit business world before recapturing her soul at the "heartwarming" conclusion. Karly Hert (Katherine Heigl), a poly-sci-major college grad, secures a job way outside her field as a pharmaceutical salesman. Both naive and ambitious, Karly does her duty persuading doctors to invest in shaky, undertested drugs that sometimes cause physical damage.

Her boyfriend (Lucian McAfee) also works as a drug salesman, but he’s conscience-stricken and gets out. A good guy, a "green" guy, he wants to build a house in the forest with his own bare hands. Karly, however, pushes on at work, seduced by ritzy presents from her company including a car and a silver watch. As on all TV movies, our heroine, in the climactic third act, Learns Something: she’s being a bad young lady, endorsing the miracle drug of her company (Vivexx, a swipe at Merck & Company’s discredited Vioxx) that in fact causes liver disease. Karly wins a Salesman of the Year award.

You can guess what she says in her big speech, at a formal dinner, shocking her corrupt bosses. This isn’t, thematically, Barbara Ehrenreich, or, formally, Andrei Tarkovsky. Side Effects is feebly lit and unimaginatively shot, and there’s a soundtrack of Kraft-cheesy rock. Oh, for Billy Joel! Katherine Heigl, now on TV’s Grey’s Anatomy, is a hot blonde with a knockout shape. Many scenes have the starlet bouncing about in bra and underpants for no apparent reason, and certainly not for any social-conscience reason. Stop dishonest drug companies? Side Effects is a fake political film. At the end, a card on screen says, "$25 billion are spent a year on drugs. This film cost $190,000." Your response: "What a waste of $190,000!"

Garrett Scott and Ian Olds get it right with Occupation: Dreamland, which opens this Friday at the Coolidge Corner. In 2004, they spent an intense several months living with, and shooting footage of, the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, which was holed up in Fallujah and charged with bringing freedom and a lasting peace to post-Invasion Iraq. Their documentary is what anyone with any sense would expect, which means nobody in the Bush administration will ever watch it. With almost no exceptions, the soldiers interviewed don’t understand why they’re there, why the war is worth fighting, and they acknowledge that the Iraqis are right to be disturbed that an American army is in their midst, as US citizens would be horrified if an alien military invaded their home towns. What to do? The GIs of Occupation: Dreamland shrug and keep on fighting.