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Starring Matthew Modine. There are two reasons the movie Animal House is genuinely funny; 1) it never takes itself too seriously, develops a heart, or tries to teach a message about societal ills and 2) it contains a lot of little scenes, that are sometimes no more than ten seconds, that have nothing to do with anything else in the movie, that build to something damn funny; think of the drunken John Belushi dumping mustard on himself.Gross Anatomy, named for the first year med school class of the same name, is another movie that begins to do this. As I watched the first forty-five minutes of the movie I was laughing out loud at the short scenes that were put together, a sample of dialogue from one: INTERVIEWER: Why do you want to be a doctor? And the scene ends and another one quickly begins. This is a rapid fire comedy approach; if you don't find one scene humorous, we'll give you another and another. There was nothing being preached, there was no Full House lesson of the day, no violin music being played, just funny scenes about Matthew Modine's first year of med school. Modine's Joe is the type of character you like too. For me, Joe is what I would have been had I gone to medical school, a slacker, a guy to whom studying is something you do when you can't play basketball or talk to that cute girl across the corpse from you, that still manages to score better on his exams than the majority of other students in the class. For some reason, after the first forty five minutes of the movie are over, this "we're going to kill ourselves trying to make you laugh" mentality stops abruptly and melds into a sort of "it's time we change the medical school process for the better" kind of movie. The laughs stop, and a more serious tone develops. Now instead of girls and basketball, Joe has to worry about his roommate's amphetamine habit, his advisor's apparent dislike of him, his classmates' desire not to work with him, the doctors at the hospital treating him like a slave, and so on. Although the tone of the movie shifts, you soon adapt to the new feeling and go onward. Even so, I must admit, I was rather disappointed that the characters stopped making the disgustingly funny remarks about their cadavers, that no two people ended up throwing a liver or pancreas around the lab as if it were a football, and that no body parts ended up being snuck out of the lab and being used as practical jokes, because if you think about it, putting an ear in someone's bed or backpack would be kind of funny. Still, even with the dramatic twist to the second half of the movie, Gross Anatomy is enjoyable to watch. The acting is solid, the script decent, and Modine's lead, someone to root for, even if his basketball shooting form is as ugly as Manute Bol's. If you've become interested in the ever burgeoning comedrama (pronounced ca-ma-dra-ma) field and don't know where to begin, Gross Anatomy is a good place to start.
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