IT’S BECOME a Hollywood trope: Three or four vignettes cobbled together to form a cinematic tableau that’s supposed to shed some light on an intractable social issue.

Think “Traffic” and drugs. “Babel” and violence. “Crash” and race. “21 Grams” and death (that most intractable of problems).

Now, there’s Thom Fitzgerald’s “3 Needles,” a star-studded public service announcement about AIDS that will premiere in New York City and Los Angeles on December 1, World AIDS Day.

Vignette No. 1 centers on a group of nuns (played by Olympia Dukakis, Sandra Oh and Chloe Sevigny) who care for HIV-infected children in South Africa. Meanwhile, in Canada, a struggling porn actor (Shawn Ashmore) fakes his AIDS test by swiping some of his dying father’s blood. And in rural China, Lucy Liu in full peasant mode plays the owner of a blood-collection service who ends up infecting a whole village.

We were initially intrigued by Lucy Liu’s interview with ComingSoon.net about the movie. (Question: “Can you talk about the scene where you’re still pregnant and the police find out that you’re smuggling the blood in and they all raped you when you’re pregnant?” Answer: “I know. Isn’t that great?”).

But then the reviews came in. According to SlantMagazine.com’s Ed Gonzalez, “Each of these stories is a hissy fit of heinous proportions, one progressively worse than the other: all end on a sickeningly satisfied note of irony, tied together with hectoring narration.”

What?! You mean important and self-important are two different things?

We can’t possibly see this movie now. We hate homework. We’d much rather have said needles stuck in our eyes.

Does this make us evil? Bannally evil?

Yeah, it does, damn it.

We’re off to the movie’s MySpace page to donate to AIDS relief. •