Michael J. Fox Takes a Major Detour in Doc Hollywood

The first man I ever had a crush on was Michael J. Fox. When I was a kindergartener, I never tired of watching him on Family Ties – with a very goofy expression on my face, I’m afraid. By the time I dove into the Back to the Future franchise a few years later, my enthusiasm had dimmed to a more respectable level, but I’ve always enjoyed Fox’s performances, so I’m surprised I never saw Doc Hollywood until this year.

In this 1991 movie based on the book by Neil Shulman and directed by Michael Caton-Jones, Fox plays Dr. Benjamin Stone, a hotshot physician on his way to L.A. to begin a promising career as a plastic surgeon. After he takes a wrong turn, Benjamin wipes out on the highway, landing in the sleepy town of Grady. His car’s a shambles, and so is the picket fence that the judge built with his own two hands. While he waits to regain his wheels, Benjamin must serve the sentence the judge hands down to him: 32 hours working as a doctor in the town’s clinic.

What this movie reminded me of right off the bat was Cars, the Pixar film about a self-absorbed racecar who blunders into a small town, makes a mess and, in the process of cleaning it up, learns the value of a simple life and genuine friendships. It’s pretty clear from the beginning that this movie has the same general arc. Benjamin doesn’t think much of Grady at first. However, as he treats its residents, he gradually comes to feel real affection for them – and especially for Lou (Julie Warner), a strong-willed single mother who drives the town ambulance.

The romantic storyline is fairly sweet, a typical tale of two seemingly very different people learning that they actually have more common ground than they realized. It’s made more entertaining by the presence of a large pig that gets passed around town as payment for various services rendered and ultimately helps Benjamin win the approval of Lou’s young daughter. Woody Harrelson’s turn as the not-as-dopey-as-he-seems Hank Gordon, who has his own romantic designs on Lou, is fun as well.

However, it’s the town as a whole that really serves as the movie’s heart. While Benjamin falls in love with Lou, he also becomes enamored of the way Grady’s residents live. It’s funny to see David Ogden Stiers, usually so uppity, as Nick Nicholson, the folksy mayor of Grady. Yes, he is in a leadership position, but he is very much a down-home kind of guy and the chief proponent of the town’s charms. While others extend a temporary welcome, it’s plain that Nick would be happy to have Benjamin stay. Less gracious is Dr. Hogue (Barnard Hughes), the cantankerous physician currently serving all of the town’s residents on his own.

From the surly nurse to the humble, illiterate family whose letters from a long-winded relative become a favorite entertainment, the people of Grady gradually open their hearts to the doctor, and he does the same as kindly widows push food upon him and the mayor entreats him to at least stay for the town’s big festival. Benjamin is starting to feel at home, but his destiny lies on the opposite coast on the sunny streets of Los Angeles. Or does it?

While there is some profanity, as well as a bit of nudity that surprised me but helps establish the remote setting, it’s generally a pretty mild PG-13. Hence, I would term this a cute and mostly family-friendly movie about a young man’s deepening sense of community and compassion. I may not swoon for Fox anymore, but Doc Hollywood aptly demonstrates just how charming he can be.

Ebenezer Bunny Gets a New Shot at Easter in Springtime With Roo

I recently reinstated my Netflix account, taking it off hold in anticipation of renting a plethora of Christmas movies to help get me in the holiday spirit. But I haven’t gotten around to updating my queue, so the first few movies have been surprises to me. I had to laugh at the seasonally inappropriate nature of my latest selection when I spotted the title Springtime With Roo. However, while the movie, with its array of Technicolor flowers and its emphasis on Easter, is thoroughly rooted in spring, except for the puzzling appearance of a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins, I discovered that it wasn’t such an oddball choice for the Christmas season after all.

Springtime With Roo, like most Winnie-the-Pooh movies, is on the short side. Clocking in at just about an hour, this direct-to-video release begins with a hyper Roo (Jimmy Bennett) disturbing the tranquil opening narration of David Ogden Stiers, who explains that the young joey will be the subject of this particular tale. To some extent that’s true, though the movie is just as much about Rabbit (Ken Sansom), who sets the main conflict in motion when he shatters his friends’ anticipation over the annual Easter egg hunt by declaring it Spring Cleaning Day instead. It soon becomes clear that Rabbit no longer considers Easter an acceptable holiday, and while Roo is disappointed to be missing out on so much fun, his biggest concern is his friend’s unhappiness.

It took me a while to cotton on to this, but Springtime With Roo, much like Veggie Tales’ An Easter Carol, is an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Persnickety Rabbit is an ideal choice to play the role of curmudgeonly old codger; he’s as much a neat freak as Scrooge is a miser, and at his worst, he can be quite the misanthrope. Owl might have been a good choice too, but he doesn’t make an appearance in this video, nor does Christopher Robin. Gopher isn’t in the main feature but does turn up, in typical pyro mode, in the New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh episode Trap as Trap Can, which follows Hunny for a Bunny in the Special Features.

Though the nods to the original story are not as plenteous as they could be, Roo is an excellent stand-in for Tiny Tim, while Tigger (Jim Cummings) exudes a Fred-like joie de vivre. Meanwhile, the narrator, with some help from the storybook and Tigger, provides the proper ghostly framework. The tale’s inspiration is most obvious toward the end, when Rabbit repents, first distraught over his friendless future, then “giddy as a school bunny” that he’s been given a second chance. At this point, if anyone still hasn’t gotten the reference, Tigger, with a broad wink at the viewers, demands, “What the Dickens - and I do mean Dickens - is going on here?”

Tigger gets all the best lines in this flick, with energetic bursts of jibberish that lead to him uttering one of my favorite words: onomatopoeia! Equally random: at one point, while showing Roo all of his Easter gear, Tigger accidentally unearths a dreidel. “Whoops, wrong holiday!” he amends. He also gets to sing a couple of short songs, as do most of the main characters. Eeyore (Peter Cullen) doesn’t have any songs to himself, but his fondness for a pair of fluffy bunny ears is good for a lot of laughs. While none of the musical numbers are still rattling around in my head, they’re fun in context.

Among the Special Features, the First Look at The Magical World of Winnie the Pooh is most worth perusing. What it amounts to is two episodes of the aforementioned series; Magical World was evidently the name of a set of DVDs containing episodes from the show. The first, in which Rabbit decides to give away his beloved bunny bookend because he believes he will never find its mate, fits particularly well with the movie, while the second is a fun romp involving a scrawny heffalump and his burly, heavily allergic father.

Sounds of Spring features three clickable scenes; click on the arrow pointing to an object and hear a corresponding noise. This activity is rather fun, but Decorate Rabbit’s House is annoying, since it is constantly correcting the improper placement of decorations. After a movie in which Rabbit’s fastidiousness proves to be problematic, it seems to go against message to insist decorations go in one particular spot when they would look just as good someplace else. Another feature includes step-by-step instructions for making a sort of butterfly puppet that looks neat but seems like it would fall apart easily. The rest of the features are DVD registration and a preview for Pooh’s Heffalump Movie.

Even though Springtime for Roo is an Easter story, its Dickensian nature renders it a suitable choice for this time of year, since it’s fun to compare it to the oodles of other versions of A Christmas Carol floating around. I’m still waiting for Eeyore to get a centric Pooh movie, but I have no complaints about this outing with Rabbit and Roo.

Get to Know a Lighter Version of the 4077th with M*A*S*H - Season 1

I grew up on M*A*S*H. It's been one of my favorite TV shows for as long as I can remember. It used to be in reruns almost constantly, so I watched quite a bit of it, though I don't think it was until high school that I got to know the first wave of M*A*S*H characters, the folks who preceded a sort of changing of the guard midway through the series. I had some recollection of pesky Frank Burns (Larry Linville), who was always trying to lord his authority over pranksters Benjamin "Hawkeye" Pierce (Alan Alda) and B. J. Hunnicut (Mike Farrell), but then he stuck around two years longer than Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson), the colonel initially in charge of the 4077th, and John "Trapper" McIntyre (Wayne Rogers), Hawkeye's first partner in crime. These were certainly characters worth getting to know.

M*A*S*H, of course, is the long-running sit-com about a group of doctors and other personnel living and working at the 4077th M*A*S*H unit in Korea during the Korean War. M*A*S*H stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital; they must be prepared to pick up and leave at any time, so the accommodations aren't exactly cushy. As for the medical part, the wounded come in bursts, with the distant sound of an approaching helicopter the tip-off that it's time for another marathon session in the O.R. This particular group has a remarkably high success rate with its patients. Even so, there are some who don't make it, and being surrounded by young injured soldiers takes its toll on each of the doctors, particularly star surgeon Hawkeye. He also is the camp's head jokester, as he has discovered that laughter is the only thing that can stave off despair in situations like this.

It's pretty heavy stuff for a sit-com, serious enough that I have a hard time sticking this in the same genre with the likes of The Monkees and The Brady Bunch. Nonetheless, the show is funny, more consistently entertaining than just about any show I can think of, so the comedy label is not applied inappropriately, and in its first few seasons, the focus is definitely on the lighter side of life at the 4077th. That's not to say that the darkness doesn't intrude, but there's so much silly stuff happening early on that it almost reminds me of Hogan's Heroes.

That has a lot to do with the characters featured here but not in later seasons. Frank is a sniveling stick-in-the-mud whom nearly no one respects. He's whiny and petty, easily duped and not much of a doctor. In season one, he's firmly in league with Head Nurse Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan (Loretta Swit), the show's only really prominent female character; the only one who comes close is Kellye Yamato (Kellye Nakahara), a nurse who's in about half the episodes but rarely in the foreground. Frank is married, but he and Margaret have a torrid affair going on. They'd like to think it's clandestine, but everyone in camp knows about it. As the series progresses, Margaret becomes much more sympathetic, but in season one, she's a shrill tattletale and a self-righteous hypocrite. When she and Frank aren't busy making each other's nostrils flare, they're plotting ways to dispose of Hawkeye and Trapper, who get away with their shenanigans in part because they're a lot more likable than Frank and Margaret, but more importantly because as surgeons, they are indispensable.

It also helps that Hawkeye and Trapper pretty much have Colonel Blake in their pocket, thanks largely to their alliance with sweet but shrewd company clerk Walter "Radar" O'Reilly (Gary Burghoff). Blake is a skilled doctor and a heck of a nice guy, but he's fairly oblivious about the intricate workings of his camp, and Radar has a knack for tricking him into signing everything from requisitions forms to permissions for leave in Seoul, everyone's favorite (well, pretty much only) vacation destination. The bespectacled young man has a strange clairvoyant streak that allows him to predict exactly what the colonel is about to tell him, and this flusters Blake so much that it makes it even easier to pull the wool over his eyes.

Blake is as different from seasoned, efficient season-four replacement Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan) as Frank is from his eventual replacement, Charles Winchester (David Ogden Stiers), who is uppity and cosseted but also a brilliant doctor and ultimately a pretty good guy underneath all of his pretension. The Trapper-Hawkeye dynamic is extremely similar to the B. J.-Hawkeye dynamic, but while B. J. is pretty clean-cut and constantly thinking about his family back home, Trapper doesn't let the fact that he's married stop him from being as shameless a philanderer as Hawkeye. He's more sarcastic than B. J., and as Hawkeye's sidekick, he lives in his shadow much more than B. J. does.

A couple of years ago, my brother bought me the first two seasons of M*A*S*H for my birthday, so whenever I watch the show, I find myself thinking of him, especially when Hawkeye, with whom he shares a first name, is on screen - which is most of the time. This frisky, wise-cracking, incredibly dedicated doctor is one of only four main characters to last the run of the series, and from the beginning, the show tends to focus on him more than anyone else. Though it's an ensemble comedy, Hawkeye is the star.

The only other major players are Max Klinger (Jamie Farr), a corporal most notable for his persistent attempts to get out of the army by convincing his superiors he's insane, and Father Francis Mulcahy (William Christopher), a humble priest who really has his hands full as the camp's chaplain. Neither is given terribly much to do in the first season, but Klinger is more noticeable because he's always parading around in stylish women's clothing. Minor recurring characters this season include African-American doctor Oliver "Spearchucker" Jones (Timothy Brown), part of Hawkeye and Trapper's posse; Australian anesthesiologist "Ugly John" Black (John Orchard) and Korean houseboy Ho-Jon (Patrick Adiarte), who Hawkeye helps send to medical school at his alma mater.

While my favorite seasons of M*A*S*H are probably four through seven, I still love the early seasons, and the first one has many stand-out moments. For instance, there are episodes with notable guest stars. Leslie Nielsen turns up as reckless Colonel Buzz Brighton in The Ringbanger; his disregard for the safety of the troops under his command is such that Hawkeye and Trapper plot to put him out of commission. Ron Howard plays underage soldier Walter Wendell in Sometimes You Hear the Bullet, the most moving episode of the season, in which Hawkeye takes one death especially hard and receives the following solemn pep talk from Blake in an unusually sage moment: "Look, all I know is what they taught me at command school. There are certain rules about a war. And rule number one is young men die. And rule number two is, doctors can't change rule number one." Although I wasn't familiar with his name, I was tickled to recognize Alex Henteloff - who had a brief but very memorable role as the scientist Scotty and Bones visit in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - in Dear Dad, Again, in which he plays a genius who takes on a number of careers without going through the proper certification process. This episode also includes one of the season's funniest and most cleverly shot scenes, in which Hawkeye walks across camp naked to try to prove to Trapper that no one will even notice.

Romance is always in the air at the 4077th, and two stand-out episodes revolve around unlikely pairings. In Edwina, Hawkeye is elected to go woo the lovable nurse of the title (Arlene Golonka), whose accident-prone nature has caused the men of the camp to avoid close contact with her. In Love Story, Hawkeye and Trapper help hook Radar up with an erudite new camp arrival; this is fun to watch, but what really got my attention here was the revelation that Radar had once been engaged. He's my favorite character, but I had no idea!

My two favorite episodes of the season both involve a ridiculous chain of events. In The Longjohn Flap, Hawkeye receives an extraordinarily warm set of long underwear from his father. The weather in camp is frigid, so this is a highly coveted prize, and before the episode is over, just about every major character has managed to get his or her hands on it. Watching the longjohns pass from person to person via every method from gambling to extortion is a hoot, as is Hawkeye's agonized reaction.

My other favorite is Tuttle, in which Hawkeye modestly gives credit for his charitable donation to an orphanage to a captain by the name of Tuttle. They say that no good deed goes unpunished, and Hawkeye learns this the hard way when news of this noble, nonexistent captain gets around and he, Trapper and Radar must scramble to maintain the illusion. By the time the episode ends with Hawkeye killing the captain off before the situation spirals completely out of control, everyone has grown thoroughly attached to him; indeed, both Frank and Blake are convinced that they had meaningful relationships with Tuttle. It's an audacious con, but in the end, everyone wins.

It's not vitally important to start from season one and work your way through the series in the proper order. But if you want the real scope of M*A*S*H as a show, you'll want to start off here. It isn't the best of the seasons, but it's a wonderful introduction to one of the finest television shows ever created.