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I truly believe
this film, as well as Adams himself, was made solely for my benefit, to drive
me utterly insane and get me to start killing random people, like a code word
for a sleeper agent. I hate this film more than any fucking film made, ever. If
someone made a snuff film starring my own mother, I’d still hate Patch Adams
more than that film.
Let me preface this with a few factual tidbits
of my life. I went to medical school. I dropped out my third year, because it
sucked beyond compare. It was the single most miserable, depressing, soul-crushing
experience of my pathetic life. Independent of anything else, medical school
sucked horribly, but adding in a cascade of personal nightmares that started
with my fiancé leaving me one month before our wedding, my whole life and
anything associated with became unbearable. As a result, I turned my back on
just about everything that held any meaning in my life, starting with medicine.
It made sense to me at the time: I lost one of the two most important things in
my life, my fiancé, so I gave up the other, medicine, to make things "even." I
also gained 40 pounds and shaved my head bald, so that’s where I was in the
area of personal judgment at that time.
Prior to that,
though, I was once a happy medical student with a pretty little fiancé, with my
whole future in front of me. And during my first happy year of medical school,
I went to a seminar where Patch Adams was the keynote speaker. He went on about
how we were all too serious, how we all needed to remember how powerful
laughter was. He even had statistics to support his retarded claims. Most
importantly though, he wasn’t funny. At all. He’s like your "wacky"
Uncle Larry who always had something "funny" to say during family
get-togethers, and he always sat near you because you were a kid and you
politely forced a laugh at every stupid fucking thing he said. I caught myself
right before I asked him, in front of most of my faculty and my class, "So,
your personal philosophy is to make terminally ill patients beg for an early
and quick death after being exposed to your Godawful attempts at humor long
enough?" Many of us left, and we were soundly rebuffed by some of the attending
faculty later. My point that I wouldn’t have gotten very far in life if I had
tried to laugh out my ruptured appendix when I was eleven instead of having
surgery wasn’t appreciated. But at that point in my life, I was nailing A’s and
B’s on my exams and nailing my pretty little redheaded fiancé, so who gives a
flip about some ugly fruit in clown makeup telling me to lighten up? Even in my
moment of supreme happiness, though, I still wanted to kill that fucking faggot
Adams, after suffering through his horribly self-serving film and suffering in
his horribly self-serving presence at my school. And after all these years,
after all this shit I’ve been through and put myself through, I still
want to kill that fucking cunt Patch fucking Adams. Fuck him, and fuck this
fucking faggot film that glorifies his pathetic nonexistence as a fucking rodeo
clown that woke up in a hospital and refused to leave, that worthless oozing
cunt.
Maybe I can’t
blame the filmmakers for everything that is wrong with this syphilitic chancre
of a film, since most of it is drawn from that fucking idiot Adams and his
pretentious, self-serving book, Why I Am a Dick or whatever it’s called.
You can’t make diamonds out of dogshit unless you’re Superman, and nobody
involved with this film will be mistaken for The Man of Steel. Unless you count
Adams, who probably thinks it’s funny to wear his underwear outside his pants, the
comic mastermind that he is.
First of all,
this movie is so full of shit you should get a complimentary laxative every
time you watch it. I’ll ignore the Hollywood convention of making everyone
better looking for a film adaptation of "real life", I guess, but the real
Patch is butt-fucking-ugly and I sincerely doubt that Carin Fischer looked
anything like Monica Potter. The real Patch has a ridiculous mustache and looks
like Gene Shalit after getting whacked in the face with a cast-iron frying pan.
My hero, the suicidal drunken fucking clown who claims doctors are all
worthless because their comic material is lacking. The first half-hour of the
film is so ludicrous, I thought Oliver Stone was the director, not Tom Shadyac
(the director of Ace Ventura. Also, Steve Oedekerk wrote the screenplay.
These two idiots teamed up on The Nutty Professor 2. What the fuck were
they doing making this film?). So Patch went to Virginia Medical University,
got the highest scores with no effort at all, and eventually became disillusioned
with the whole thing when he discovered how great it was to make sick people
laugh in spite of the static he received from other doctors and his dean for
it.
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
Let’s start at
the beginning. Of the film anyway, not Adams’ life, since 40 years or so of
that passed before the film begins. Super medical genius Adams was apparently
some wandering idiot who tried to commit suicide and ended up in a mental ward.
Fine, I’ll buy that from this fruit; if only he’d been successful. What I don’t
buy is that while in the mental ward, he bonded with one of the patients
(played by Michael Jeter, the way Jeter plays every character he’s been since The
Fisher King) by helping him shoot imaginary squirrels. And with that
revelation, he went to medical school. Get the fuck out of here, Patch. Maybe
you really spent a day or two in a mental ward because you made a half-assed
attempt at checking out, you pansy, but don’t expect me to buy that you bonded
with anyone there. I, and many others, have worked in mental wards; there’s no
fucking bonding among patients, certainly not in that trite and obviously bogus
fashion. Fine, you got into medical school at 40, and that’s no small feat. But
what he (and the film) wants us to buy right away is that not only is he one of
the top students, he’s one of the top students with hardly any effort on his
part, since all he wants to do is talk to patients. Let me tell you something:
nobody is that fucking smart. Nobody. Medicine isn’t some fucking I.Q.
test where you barely need to study to get all the answers right, because
they’re all just common sense. That’s what a fraud like Adams would like you to
believe, what clueless retards like Shadyac and Oedekerk probably think is what
medicine is actually all about. Bullshit; studying medicine is like studying
law or engineering or any other complicated post-graduate profession. Oh but
wait, there’s Adams in a courtroom defending himself successfully near the end
of the film. See, Adams is so motherfucking awesome, he can practice
medicine and law without ever cracking a single textbook. I know Patch
hates doctors so insulting them is his stock-in-trade, but I guess he doesn’t
like lawyers either so he has to insult them too, the ungrateful asshole.
Back to my
original point. Adams frequently gets into trouble because the absurdly mean
dean of his school (Bob Gunton) won’t let him talk to the patients. Booo! How mean!
Or rather, how appropriate, since most medical schools won’t let dumbass
medical students anywhere near patients until their third year. The
first two years are all bookwork to prepare you for the third and fourth years,
when you rotate through the hospital. You don’t let a pilot in training jump in
the cockpit and try to fly a plane the first day; Adams was trying to do just
that in a medical sense, and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him and revile
the dean for chastising him? Because Adams is such a motherfucking medical wunderkind
that he’s past all that silly nonsense form the first two years? Patch, you
fucking clueless faggot, the dean isn’t yelling at you for simply trying to
talk to patients (yeah, doctors should never talk to their patients.
Give me a fucking break, like any dean of a medical school would imply that),
he’s yelling at you for doing it out of turn. You’re BREAKING THE FUCKING LAW
talking to patients like that, Patch. You’re trespassing, you ignorant
jackass. They never make the point later in the film that, in his third year,
practically all Patch got to do was talk to patients, while the residents got
to do all the cool stuff like operate. Talking to patients and sticking your
finger up their asses, that’s third year in a nutshell. But Patch has a
persecution complex, and he’s an old narrow-minded crank who thinks he’s the
only one who’s right in any situation.
The whole film
reeks of his pompous attitude. If he doesn’t come across as a natural genius at
medicine, he’s afraid that no one would take anything he has to say about
medicine seriously (He’s right, but trying to pawn himself off as a prodigy of
medicine doesn’t camouflage that). He throws in that he’s at the top of his
class because if he didn’t, most of the audience would wonder why the fuck
anyone should listen to his nonsense about communicating with patients. Poor
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character has to scratch his head in bewildered
amazement at your entirely fictional ability to ace classes when all you claim
to do is briefly study, talk to patients whom you have no business talking to,
and try to lay some poor girl about half your age. See folks, Patch not only is
completely full of shit, but the shit he’s slinging at you is even worse than
the truth, unless your idea of a hero is an old, lazy, ignorant lech. But the
worst affront he makes at this point is the bald-faced hypocrisy he flaunts in
order to try to get you to sympathize with him. As I said, he uses the offhand
references to his mysterious medical genius to set himself up as being far
wiser to the true ways of medicine, that since he knows it all already, he’s
already around the corner to the True Way, the Way of Dressing Like a Retard
and Cracking Lame Jokes. So in essence, that backsliding fuck is using the very
discipline he denounces to validate his own stupid beliefs, so you’ll buy them
and him. Plus, he really is a doctor in real life, which means he studied like
crazy and eventually did whatever the dean or anyone told him, like a good
little bitch. He’d have gotten thrown out if he hadn’t, believe me. No one’s
dying to get 40-year-olds through medical school. What a cunt.
The movie is
full of ersatz emotion, forced upon the audience by sweeping violin scores to
hammer the point home. What, you think the guys behind the comic subtleties of Ace
Ventura and The Nutty Professor can handle drama? Please. Patch’s
Gesundheit Center eventually went under, and we’re supposed to care. Why would
anyone want to give money to a non-government-funded halfway house? Why would
even the government want to? That’s like giving donations to a guy who built
his own dilapidated post office, claiming the U.S. Postal Service is
incompetent because dogs don’t like the mailcarriers. Meanwhile, he rarely
delivers the mail to the right address, but you should support him because he
doesn’t make you use postage stamps. Adams has to defend his center in that
horribly cliché courtroom scene, which is pure fucking fiction. Even so, maybe
instead of Adams stubbornly and selfishly defending a place that serves no
useful purpose solely because he thought of it, he should let it get shut down
out of respect for the girl he loved (who supposedly loved him) who was murdered
because of it. Fuck you Patch, fuck you for-fucking-ever for foisting your
self-centered, utterly misguided ideals on us, while you stomp on the grave of
some poor girl you conned into helping you to serve your own ends. You fucking
disgusting subhuman pile of shit. I was chastised for leaving your speech
early, I should have been congratulated on my restraint for not charging the
podium and beating you to death with one of your own oversized clown shoes, you
miserable selfish fuck. And I should have had to fight my own colleagues and
professors for the privilege, as well.
There’s nothing
to like about this film, beyond Williams’ occasional ad-libbed moments of humor
that someone who wasn’t seething and praying for the real Adams’ immediate
painful death while watching might find funny. For me, that was just Williams
breaking character and being Williams independent of anything else; an old dope
like Adams couldn’t have come up with anything nearly that funny. This idiot
still dresses like a fucking clown, for God’s sake. Who thinks a fucking
clown is funny anymore? And that bit about the giant legs he put up for the
visiting gynecologists? Pure fake fictional fucking horseshit. Tell me a better
one Patch, one I might believe, because you aren’t Robin Williams and you
aren’t even Gallagher, either. You’re a fucking fraud, and in the sense of this
film being your life story it inadvertently gets that part right, because it’s
as big a fucking fraud as you are. I hope you get colon cancer Patch, like that
poor guy in the film who you reduced from a person into a straight man for some
of Robin Williams’ (not your) jokes, and let’s see if you try to fucking laugh
your way into a cure. I’ll be there to laugh with you, at your fucking funeral.
Isn’t pissing on your grave a fucking scream, you charlatan?
 Bill Dungsroman
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