Word: comas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Coma is the worst major film to appear this year, and without a doubt the most offensive. Director Michael Crichton '64 uses operations to keep the audience on its toes, and since the movie is devoid of humor there's nothing to relieve the tension. It's so solemn and literal-minded that it makes The Exorcist look positively expressionistic. Richard Widmark plays the head of a Boston hospital where young, healthy patients keep going into unexplained comas during routine operations. When he explains why he's doing it--the unimportance of the individual compared with the advancement of science...
...Robin Cook, who wrote the fast, enjoyable book on which the movie is based, goes on Johnny Carson, and instead of saying, "I wrote Coma to make some money and to have a bit of fun with people's fears about hospitals," he says, "I wrote Coma because I felt people should be made aware of the urgent need for organ donors, and of the emerging black market for body parts." Yeah, sure...
MAYBE DOCTORS and medical-school students will have a good time at Coma, nudging each other in delight whenever they recognize an organ, or giggling helplessly every time a decaying body on a dissection table brings back raunchy memories. But most of us aren't doctors, and our tolerance for this sort of thing is low. Why should a director bother to compose a frame so that it's charged with subliminal tension when he can just shove a fresh, juicy kidney into the camera and the audience will dive out of its seats? If you're going...
...actress--unfailingly charming--but here she battles four forces which succeed in overwhelming her: the hospital administrators, her skeptical fellow-surgeon lover (Michael Douglas), Crichton's tedious script, and her own French accent, which, despite her valiant attempts to obscure it, makes more comebacks than Napoleon. She does give Coma its interesting moments, however; when she climbs a ladder, the camera looks up her dress with unabashed voyeurism...
...Coma would be negligible, except that it epitomizes everything wrong with most movie thrillers these days: they have become clinical. Directors like Michael Crichton and William Friedkin put their audiences under the scalpel, and so far audiences have responded enthusiastically. Even good movies like Marathon Man are so crammed with sliced hands and slit throats that they're hard to watch, and films have to be gorier and gorier now to make an impression. It's part of a de-sensitizing, or perhaps, in the case of Coma, an anesthetizing of the audience. No wonder audiences are bored with those...