You should have been born in August.

Seinfeld

2.11: The Heart Attack

The Premise

Admitted to hospital with a suspected heart attack, George is semi-relieved to discover it’s just his tonsils acting up; they’ve grown back. Kramer’s suggestion of seeking relief through alternative medicine appeals to a budget-conscious George.

Observational

Larry Charles comes up trumps again. This starts out as a simple case of George being a hypochondriac but, with Charles’ anarchic sensibilities brought to bear, transforms into a poke at healthcare from all angles. Indeed, its great strength is how suited the main characters are to the different positions they are required to adopt on the subject.

Charles scripts are often distinctive for latiching onto Kramer to float non-mainstream thought. Charles isn’t necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with a topic; he’s simply recognising the comic mileage he can get out of it. So Kramer, whose often unreconsituted counterculture leanings maroon him two decades from home, can espouse what he sees as the dangers of modern medicine (“Get out right now! They’ll kill you in here!”), while the highly conservative Jerry is unremittingly dismissive of the quackery of alternative healer Tor Eckman (“And you’re not a doctor, but you play one in real life”; a rare example of the show accessing a character’s interior monologue).

It might seem that Jerry is proved right; George’s remedy resolutely fails (Tor turns George bluish purple, and fails to cure his tonsillitis) and he pays the price for being a cheapskate. But Jerry is as gullible as everyone else deep down (“You really think I’m eating too much dairy?” he responds to Tor’s diagnosis). And, while Jerry and George are suffering whiplash, Kramer has made full recovery (“Kramer went to see Eckman. He feels all better already”). Right in the middle is George. He is completely impartial with regard to alternative therapies, as long as they aren’t expensive; it’s another nice twist that the most materialist character buys into hippy remedies out of parsimoniousness.

George repeatedly gets short shrift from Jerry (“Why can’t I have a heart attack? I’m allowed”), culminating in the comedian’s mock smothering of his stricken friend (by this point he knows George has the all clear, but George is in the dark).

George: Just take the pillow and put it over my face.

Jerry: What, kind of like this?

(Elaine enters, startled.)

Elaine: Jerry!

Jerry: (Pretending to be caught in the act) Elaine… What are you doing here?

George’s reaction to the imminent diagnosis is priceless (“Oh, God. Mummy!”) but his relief on getting good news is predictably short-lived (“I completely skipped healthy adulthood”). Only George’s tonsils would grow back (and he didn’t even get some ice cream when he first had them out).

The big guest star of the episode is Stephen Tobolowsky. Except this was in his pre-Groundhog Dayera, when he was just beginning to get a foothold in movies with a succession of variable supporting turns (Bird on a Wire?) He’s great, but then it’s fair to say he has a gift of a part. When Kramer first mentions his herbalist friend (“He’s holistic”), Jerry expresses surprise that he’s out of prison, but presumably he knows him by hearsay rather than direct contact (“See, the medical establishment, they tried to frame him. He’s a rebel”). His stream of random advice is the highly eccentric, as he instructs George to wash only in cold water (“Can it be lukewarm?”)

Elaine’s date, or “Doctor Tongue” as she ends up calling him, is no less certifiable. Ever superficial, he catches her eye when he’s tending to George (Louise-Dreyfus’ giddy schoolgirl antics see them getting in each other’s way) but it soon turns sour on their date when he holds her tongue and holds forth on the organ’s wonders. By which time Elaine is thoroughly put-off (“A kiss? With the tongue? I don’t think so”).

The ambulance scene is possibly a bit too broad and indelicate a means of getting to the final scene. It’s amusing, but Seinfeld usually isn’t at its best when it does “action”.

The Heart Attackis also notable for the first mention of Kramer’s friend Bob Sacamano, who went in to hospital for routine surgery (a hernia operation) that was botched. Now he sits in the corner of a room intoning “My name is Bob!” Kramer is even more unhelpful than Jerry regarding George’s fears; completely oblivious, he brings a meal to George’s room and sits at the end of the bed like he’s watching him on TV.

Larry David also makes an appearance; he’s in some sci-fi cheapie on TV dressed in silver foil, going on about the end of the world (“flaming globes!”). Jerry awakes laughing in the middle of the night and jots down an idea he then finds illegible; when he discovers it was “Flaming globes of Sigmund” he is very disappointed. “That’s not funny”; except that it is. Very.

Quotable

Larry David: The planet’s on fire! It is just as you prophesised! The planets of our solar system are incinerating, Sigmund, like flaming globes!

George: Why can’t I have a heart attack? I’m allowed.

George: There’s nothing wrong with me?

Doctor: Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

George: Lupus? Is it lupus?

Doctor: And when you wake up, you can have some ice cream.

George: Yeah, that’s what they told me the last time.

Kramer: Get out right now! They’ll kill you in here!

Kramer: The next thing you know, you’ve got a hose coming out of your chest attached to a piece of luggage!

George: Oh, yeah. Holisitc. That’s what I need. That’s the answer.

Tor: You should have been born in August.

Elaine: I’m sorry, I can’t stay long. I don’t want to run into Doctor Tongue.

Verdict:

You were this amazing occidental samurai.

Ricochet (1991) (SPOILERS) You have to wonder at Denzel Washington’s agent at this point in the actor’s career. He’d recently won his first Oscar for Glory , yet followed it with less-than-glorious heart-transplant ghost comedy Heart Condition (Bob Hoskins’ racist cop receives Washington’s dead lawyer’s ticker; a recipe for hijinks!) Not long after, he dipped his tentative toe in the action arena with this Joel Silver production; Denzel has made his share of action fare since, of course, most of it serviceable if unremarkable, but none of it comes near to delivering the schlocky excesses of Ricochet , a movie at once ingenious and risible in its plot permutations, performances and production profligacy.

No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

The Matrix (1999) (SPOILERS) Twenty years on, and the articles are on the defining nature of The Matrix are piling up, most of them touching on how its world has become a reality, or maybe always was one. At the time, its premise was engaging enough, but it was the sum total of the package that cast a spell – the bullet time, the fashions, the soundtrack, the comic book-as-live-action framing and styling – not to mention it being probably the first movie to embrace and reflect the burgeoning Internet ( Hackers doesn’t really count), and subsequently to really ride the crest of the DVD boom wave. And now? Now it’s still really, really good.

People still talk about Pandapocalypse 2002.

Turning Red (2022) (SPOILERS) Those wags at Pixar, eh? Yes, the most – actually, the only – impressive thing about Turning Red is the four-tiered wordplay of its title. Thirteen-year-old Mei (Rosalie Chiang) finds herself turning into a large red panda at emotive moments. She is also, simultaneously, riding the crimson wave for the first time. Further, as a teenager, she characteristically suffers from acute embarrassment (mostly due to the actions of her domineering mother Ming Lee, voiced by Sandra Oh). And finally, of course, Turning Red can be seen diligently spreading communist doctrine left, right and centre. To any political sensibility tuning in to Disney+, basically (so ones with either considerable or zero resistance to woke). Take a guess which of these isn’t getting press in reference to the movie? And by a process of elimination is probably what it it’s really about (you know in the same way most Pixars, as far back as Toy Story and Monsters, Inc . can be given an insi

I can’t be the worst. What about that hotdog one?

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) (SPOILERS) It would have been a merciful release, had the title card “ The End ”, flashing on screen a little before the ninety-minute mark, not been a false dawn. True, I would still have been unable to swab the bloody dildoes fight from my mind, but at least Everything Everywhere All at Once would have been short. Indeed, by the actual end I was put in mind of a line spoken by co-star James Wong in one of his most indelible roles: “ Now this really pisses me off to no end ”. Or to put it another way, Everything Everywhere All at Once rubbed me up the wrong which way quite a lot of most of the time.

We’ve got the best ball and chain in the world. Your ass.

Wedlock (1991) (SPOILERS) The futuristic prison movie seemed possessed of a particular cachet around this time, quite possibly sparked by the grisly possibilities of hi-tech disincentives to escape. On that front, HBO TV movie Wedlock more than delivers its FX money shot. Elsewhere, it’s less sure of itself, rather fumbling when it exchanges prison tropes for fugitives-on-the-run ones.

Well, something’s broke on your daddy’s spaceship.

Apollo 13 (1995) (SPOILERS) The NASA propaganda movie to end all NASA propaganda movies. Their original conception of the perilous Apollo 13 mission deserves due credit in itself; what better way to bolster waning interest in slightly naff perambulations around a TV studio than to manufacture a crisis event, one emphasising the absurd fragility of the alleged non-terrestrial excursions and the indomitable force that is “science” in achieving them? Apollo 13 the lunar mission was tailor made for Apollo 13 the movie version – make believe the make-believe – and who could have been better to lead this fantasy ride than Guantanamo Hanks at his all-American popularity peak?

He’ll regret it to his dying day, if ever he lives that long.

The Quiet Man (1952) (SPOILERS) The John Wayne & John Ford film for those who don’t like John Wayne & John Ford films? The Quiet Man takes its cues from Ford’s earlier How Green Was My Valley in terms of, well less Anglophile and Hibernophile and Cambrophile nostalgia respectively for past times, climes and heritage, as Wayne’s pugilist returns to his family seat and stirs up a hot bed of emotions, not least with Maureen O’Hara’s red-headed hothead. The result is a very likeable movie, for all its inculcated Oirishness and studied eccentricity.

He's not in my pyjamas, is he?

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) (SPOILERS) By rights, Paul Mazursky’s swinging, post-flower-power-gen partner-swap movie ought to have aged terribly. So much of the era’s scene-specific fare has, particularly so when attempting to reflect its reverberations with any degree of serious intent. Perhaps it’s because Mazursky and co-writer Larry Tucker (also of The Monkees , Alex in Wonderland and I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! ) maintain a wry distance from their characters’ endeavours, much more on the wavelength of Elliott Gould’s Ted than Robert Culp’s Bob; we know any pretensions towards uninhibited expression can’t end well, but we also know Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice have to learn the hard way.

I think World War II was my favourite war.

Small Soldiers (1998) An off-peak Joe Dante movie is still one chock-a-block full of satirical nuggets and comic inspiration, far beyond the facility of most filmmakers. Small Soldiers finds him back after a six-year big screen absence, taking delirious swipes at the veneration of the military, war movies, the toy industry, conglomerates and privatised defence forces. Dante’s take is so gleefully skewed, he even has big business win! The only problem with the picture (aside from an indistinct lead, surprising from a director with a strong track record for casting juveniles) is that this is all very familiar. Dante acknowledged Small Soldiers was basically a riff on Gremlins , and it is. Something innocuous and playful turns mad, bad and dangerous. On one level it has something in common with Gremlins 2: The New Batch , in that the asides carry the picture. But Gremlins 2 was all about the asides, happy to wander off in any direction that suited it oblivious to whet

There is a war raging, and unless you pull your head out of the sand, you and I and about five billion other people are going to go the way of the dinosaur.

The X-Files 5.14: The Red and the Black The most noteworthy aspect of this two parter is that it almost – but not quite – causes me to reassess my previous position that the best arc episodes are those that avoid tackling the greater narrative head-on, attempting to advance the resistant behemoth. It may be less than scintillating as far as concepts go, but the alien resistance plot is set out quite clearly here, as are the responses to it from the main players.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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