The Study of DisEase
Sep. 26th, 2008 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustCal's birthday went really well, though I'm not feeling so great this morning...sickening for something? Christ, I hope not. Plus, my stupid period still hasn't started, and I'm having the worst PMS since last month; this may be why I spent some ill-advised time digging around inside one aureola with a pin yesterday, trying to excavate one of my legendary ingrown witch-hairs and coming up with nothing but meat. Luckily, a continual slathering with Polysporin seems to have kept things from getting any worse. Ah, how I love being female.
Last night, meanwhile, I watched the second half of Pathology, a medical thriller (of sorts) written by the same guys who wrote Crank. This is one of those films I would have thought was the absolute shit when I was seventeen, and now (while I don't think it's shit instead, since it's far too well-put-together for that) mainly causes me to think: Wow, seriously? The plot revolves around Dr Ted Grey (Milo Ventimiglia, so for all of you out there who've wanted to see what Peter Petrelli's ass looks like during sex, this is maybe the one to rent this weekend [unless you're also allergic to the gooshy stuff, of which there is plenty]), young Harvard grad, who pulls a Pathology internship at some prestigious college in (L.A.?). He has a rich fiancee who's mad sexy and nice (Alyssa Milano, all her tattoos conveniently CGI'ed out), everybody likes him, he has a great job as a coroner already lined up, etc. Almost immediately, however, he falls in with Dr Jake Gallo (Michael Weston) and his merry band of Dr Lecter wannabes/fellow residents, including the hot-yet-cold Dr Juliette Bath (Lauren Lee Smith).
These guys have formed a club which meets in the disused yet conveniently in fairly good repair part of the hospital, where they impress each other by killing people, then pulling the bodies from the morgue and letting the others autopsy them, thus challenging their "friends" to figure out what diabolical methodology was used to kill the person in the first place (Got him to do a whip-it of liquid nitrogen! Switched his blood with an HIV-positive fellow patient's!). Naturally, this little subculture they've developed also involves self-mutilation, random violent sex, abuse of dead bodies (the very first scene has Jake and Juliette using cadavers to act out the orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally, leading a third doctor to comment: "We're all goin' to Hell.") and smokin' crack, because...well, why not? They're doctors! They can get away with anything!
The film seems to pivot on two observations, neither of which is necessarily untrue: Taking dead bodies apart for a "living" causes you to regularly confront the very worst of what human beings do to each other, and may well thus cause you to stop valuing human life altogether (including your own)--so it's not such a stretch to presume plotting and executing "perfect murders" might possibly become the dark flipside of some particularly brilliant doctors' Savior/God complexes. That said, I do find it difficult to believe that Jake, who's charismatic but basically butt-ass crazy by the end, could ever find more than two or three playmates at a time (Juliette and Ted being the real points of the triangle, while everyone else just exists to be gratuitously creepy: The guy who talks like Jack Nicholson, the bisexual 'ho of uncertain extraction, that...other dude). And it becomes very hard to root for Ted by the end, given that he's revelled in the joys of thrill-killing and dirtyweird sex without really feeling particularly bad about it (aside from what inevitably happens to his fiancee), and gotten away with it all mainly because--unlike sweaty, bearded Jake--he's at least personable enough to make friends with the geek all the rest of the cool kids ignore and dismiss. (Though I have to wonder exactly how long THIS little alliance is likely to last, afterwards.)
So, yeah: Smart, dark and slightly hollow, with a worldview and cinematographical scheme which reminds me strongly of Se7en...as with River's Edge, this is a movie full of people whose philosophy (were they to voice it articulately) might well be that you do shit, and then it's done, and then you die, and none of it matters (unless you decide that it does). Which is why I'm not surprised this one ended up going straight-to-DVD, overall; it's a hard sell in a hard world, even with all the pretty young people fucking amidst the grue.
P.S.: Fans of Nacho Cerda's Aftermath should watch for the shout-out/"homage", as Ted autopsies his own fiancee's luscious corpse, in loving detail! (Though I'm happy--or should that be sad?--to report he does not actually take her brain home and make a smoothie out of it, at least not that I noticed. Maybe Jake's, though.;))
Amended to add, P.P.S.: Once again, I note that Jim Emerson is whipping up the froth re The Dark Knight. Parts of his "The Sins of Critics" essay I obviously agree with, since I'd be utterly disingenuous not to. But is there really nothing assumed to lurk between the two rather outsized opinion curve-points of o this iz thee bestest movie EVAR, one one eleventy one one exclamation mark and congratulations, moron peons, you've been HAD! anymore? Just askin'.
Last night, meanwhile, I watched the second half of Pathology, a medical thriller (of sorts) written by the same guys who wrote Crank. This is one of those films I would have thought was the absolute shit when I was seventeen, and now (while I don't think it's shit instead, since it's far too well-put-together for that) mainly causes me to think: Wow, seriously? The plot revolves around Dr Ted Grey (Milo Ventimiglia, so for all of you out there who've wanted to see what Peter Petrelli's ass looks like during sex, this is maybe the one to rent this weekend [unless you're also allergic to the gooshy stuff, of which there is plenty]), young Harvard grad, who pulls a Pathology internship at some prestigious college in (L.A.?). He has a rich fiancee who's mad sexy and nice (Alyssa Milano, all her tattoos conveniently CGI'ed out), everybody likes him, he has a great job as a coroner already lined up, etc. Almost immediately, however, he falls in with Dr Jake Gallo (Michael Weston) and his merry band of Dr Lecter wannabes/fellow residents, including the hot-yet-cold Dr Juliette Bath (Lauren Lee Smith).
These guys have formed a club which meets in the disused yet conveniently in fairly good repair part of the hospital, where they impress each other by killing people, then pulling the bodies from the morgue and letting the others autopsy them, thus challenging their "friends" to figure out what diabolical methodology was used to kill the person in the first place (Got him to do a whip-it of liquid nitrogen! Switched his blood with an HIV-positive fellow patient's!). Naturally, this little subculture they've developed also involves self-mutilation, random violent sex, abuse of dead bodies (the very first scene has Jake and Juliette using cadavers to act out the orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally, leading a third doctor to comment: "We're all goin' to Hell.") and smokin' crack, because...well, why not? They're doctors! They can get away with anything!
The film seems to pivot on two observations, neither of which is necessarily untrue: Taking dead bodies apart for a "living" causes you to regularly confront the very worst of what human beings do to each other, and may well thus cause you to stop valuing human life altogether (including your own)--so it's not such a stretch to presume plotting and executing "perfect murders" might possibly become the dark flipside of some particularly brilliant doctors' Savior/God complexes. That said, I do find it difficult to believe that Jake, who's charismatic but basically butt-ass crazy by the end, could ever find more than two or three playmates at a time (Juliette and Ted being the real points of the triangle, while everyone else just exists to be gratuitously creepy: The guy who talks like Jack Nicholson, the bisexual 'ho of uncertain extraction, that...other dude). And it becomes very hard to root for Ted by the end, given that he's revelled in the joys of thrill-killing and dirtyweird sex without really feeling particularly bad about it (aside from what inevitably happens to his fiancee), and gotten away with it all mainly because--unlike sweaty, bearded Jake--he's at least personable enough to make friends with the geek all the rest of the cool kids ignore and dismiss. (Though I have to wonder exactly how long THIS little alliance is likely to last, afterwards.)
So, yeah: Smart, dark and slightly hollow, with a worldview and cinematographical scheme which reminds me strongly of Se7en...as with River's Edge, this is a movie full of people whose philosophy (were they to voice it articulately) might well be that you do shit, and then it's done, and then you die, and none of it matters (unless you decide that it does). Which is why I'm not surprised this one ended up going straight-to-DVD, overall; it's a hard sell in a hard world, even with all the pretty young people fucking amidst the grue.
P.S.: Fans of Nacho Cerda's Aftermath should watch for the shout-out/"homage", as Ted autopsies his own fiancee's luscious corpse, in loving detail! (Though I'm happy--or should that be sad?--to report he does not actually take her brain home and make a smoothie out of it, at least not that I noticed. Maybe Jake's, though.;))
Amended to add, P.P.S.: Once again, I note that Jim Emerson is whipping up the froth re The Dark Knight. Parts of his "The Sins of Critics" essay I obviously agree with, since I'd be utterly disingenuous not to. But is there really nothing assumed to lurk between the two rather outsized opinion curve-points of o this iz thee bestest movie EVAR, one one eleventy one one exclamation mark and congratulations, moron peons, you've been HAD! anymore? Just askin'.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-27 01:44 am (UTC)(Tangentially, have you seen Ruzowitzky's Anatomie flicks? Not bad, not bad at all.)
(And why have I not been getting my
no subject
Date: 2008-09-27 02:31 am (UTC)As for Alyssa's tatoos, I think it's more that her character (some sort of Ivy League chica) is supposed to be "too good" to have a rosary on her thigh, or what have you. Certainly, when it's revealed that Juliette herself has a tattoo, I think we're definitely supposed to believe this confirms her crazy-slut-on-medical-marijuana status.