Ill will

Crazy Sexy Cancer documents one
filmmaker’s uphill battle against the disease

STARING DOWN SICKNESS: Carr

by MATTHEW HAYS

Though they’ve made a lot of progress in the war on cancer over the past 30 years, it remains an entirely unwelcome diagnosis. In Kris Carr’s deeply personal feature documentary, the actress/photographer invites us into her own story of getting diagnosed with a very rare form of the disease.

That’s among the first pieces of bad news: the rarer the form of cancer, the less research and attention from the medical community it will have received. There are quiet moments of understandable exasperation, as Carr shares with us, in video-diary form, her basic fears: “I just don’t want to die,” she sobs during one particularly fraught moment. And after another inconclusive medical check-up: “I’m not discouraged. I’m just more scared.”

People struck with terrible diseases cope in various ways, and I don’t want to seem for a moment like I’m knocking any of them. In the past few years I’ve seen several friends cope with cancer, and it’s as complex as it is horrific. There are myriad responses to the news, but the one I can’t stomach is touched upon during Crazy Sexy Cancer, a theory embodied by that dreadful, horrid book The Secret, in which the ignorant bitch who wrote it suggests that if we just visualize things, then presto—they’ll become reality!

It’s as appalling as it is cruel; in its grubby heart, this theory suggests that people who get cancer somehow earned it by not thinking positively enough. The theory should be painfully killed, immediately. It has no place in therapy, nor in the medical profession, nor in our ugly Dr. Phil-drenched pop-culture universe. No one asks for cancer, and no one gets it due to their outlook on life.

Sure enough, Carr does stumble into New Age turf, in the form of a infrequently-bathed guru with bad hair and a honkin’ beard that looks like it’s home to an entire extended family of rodents.

Thankfully, this bit of the film is mercifully short. Most of the time, Carr presents an uplifting look at herself and several other cancer patients as they do their best to stare down the disease with dignity and courage. It makes for a documentary that’s at once bitter and powerful.

CRAZY SEXY CANCER
OPENS THIS FRIDAY,
AUG. 29

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