![]() ![]() This is a problem for me with many comedies from the ‘80s and early ‘90s. I should disclose that there are many times during the movie when there’s a wide gap between how cute and charming you’re supposed to think Ben is and what a dipshit I find him to be. Just your average professional adult who believes it makes sense to try to impress a lady by taking on pig ownership while staying in a borrowed cabin for a few days. When Lou, who is a vegetarian, mentions something about him saving the pig, he runs across town in a breathless panic to the butcher shop he actually sold the pig to. One patient, for reasons I didn’t understand, gives Ben his pig. I wonder if it has this same belief that fancypants doctors need to shut the fuck about about their stupid fuckin books and experience because if they lived in a small town where they knew all their patients well they could just use little tricks and gimmicks instead of medicine. According to reviews on Goodreads the book is pretty different and doesn’t have much of the romance. The movie is based on a 1979 humor book called What? Dead… Again? by Neil B. He knows the families well and figures out what’s going on. Ben rattles off a bunch of medical jargon, lectures the doctor for endangering his patient and tells him to “Get your fat ass out of bed and do your job!” You get a real “all right, this is a real medical professional here, you dumb hicks” type of feel, but it’s a misdirect – the doctor convinces Ben that it’s actually just diarrhea. Hogue, who asks him if he tried giving the kid a can of Coke. There’s a ridiculous scene where he finds a serious heart defect in a child, orders a helicopter to take him to a real hospital for emergency surgery, and calls the unfriendly Dr. It’s a tiny town, but there are enough wacky comical medical problems for hijinks-filled montages of him on the job. ![]() You can pretty much guess every detail of the town, like that everyone knows each other and eats at the same homey little diner and there’s a gruff waitress (Frances Sternhagen, same year as The Golden Years) who talks mean to him then gives him breakfast on the house.Īnd he sees a naked lady who turns out to be the ambulance driver, Lou (Julie Warner, “Joe’s Woman,” FLATLINERS) and he falls in love with her and follows the standard romantic comedy arc. The nurse at the front desk (Eyde Byrde, the grandma from RAPPIN’) gives Ben the unfriendly welcome he deserves, but the mayor (David Ogden Stiers, same year as BEAUTY AND THE BEAST), the city council and the local knitting circle treat him like a rock star, assume he will love the town and attempt to hire him as the eventual replacement for aging Dr. (This story was later remade as Pixar’s CARS and Vanilla Ice’s COOL AS ICE.) And then he puts on his LEON-style round glasses, gets a bunch of gum and toothpicks to chew on, and hops in his red ’56 Porsche Speedster to head for the 90210.īut on his cross country drive (during which he laughs at how fucking awesome he is when he drives on a shoulder to pass a bunch of traffic) he crashes literally into a white picket fence and is forced to to do community service at a small country hospital in “the Squash capital of the south” on “the buckle of the Bible Belt.” Seems like a pain in the ass at first, but then he Learns a Valuable Life Lesson and/or Discovers What He Really Wants Out of Life. “Okay, question: Beverly Hills, beautiful women and plastic surgery – what do these three things have in common? Me, in less than a week,” he says to another doctor, clearly convinced this is a fuckin cool thing to say. emergency room doctor who gives it all up to become a plastic surgeon on the other coast. Benjamin Stone, an arrogant Washington D.C. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate watching DOC HOLLYWOOD 30 years later. ![]()
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