Patch Adams (1998)
Directed by Tom Shadyac
The true story of Dr. Hunter "Patch" Adams, who in the 1970s found that humor is the best medicine, and was willing to do just anything to make his patients laugh—even if it meant risking his own career.
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What critics compared Patch Adams to
That said, it’s actually possible to distill the life philosophy practiced by elementary school teacher Winfried to a Patch Adams -ish level: he too believes that laughter is the best medicine.
The movie’s most impressive trick is that while Winfried’s stated philosophy is “Don’t lose the humor,” his disguises never descend into a Patch Adams-type aggressive whimsy.
In the meantime, Arthur takes a shine to his new gun, which falls out of his clown costume while he's entertaining at a children's hospital--a startlingly funny taboo gag of the sort at which Phillips excels, one that pings off latent antipathy for Patch Adams (yours, mine, ours) while also serving as a handy counterargument to Republican idiot Dan Crenshaw's conviction that friends should be allowed to borrow his firearms.
The zany parody of '70s Hong Kong martial arts movies is the brainchild of actor/writer/director/all-around silly guy Steve Oedekerk, writer of such films as “Patch Adams,” the Eddie Murphy remake of “The Nutty Professor” and “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls,” which he directed.
Only Oedekerk (he also wrote "Patch Adams" and "The Nutty Professor") expands the level of appropriation: re-creating the film's sets at a Mexican location, body-doubling the Hong Kong actors from the original film and adding new characters, scenes and visual effects.
For this chop-socky farce � the title an obvious reference to the 1973 Bruce Lee classic Enter the Dragon � writer/director/star Steve Oedekerk (he penned the hammy script for Patch Adams) has taken a superfluous 1976 Hong Kong actioner (Tiger & Crane Fists), redubbed it with silly, droll dialogue, and spliced himself into the plot � as the protagonist, of all things.
Steve Oedekerk wrote Patch Adams and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.
Unfortunately, writer/director Steve Oedekerk - the writer of "The Nutty Professor" and "Patch Adams" and director of "Ace Ventura: When Nature calls" - either didn't see that film or learn its lesson of brevity as he's delivered a full-length version of what's essentially the same gag in "Kung Pow! Enter the Fist."
That's all Oedekerk ( Nutty Professor II: The Klumps ), Patch Adams ) has done, although he's also added in live-action fantasy sequences that we as technically challenged teens couldn't without our own film studio.
In fact, "Bruce Almighty" is one of Carrey's funniest and smartest movies -- right up to the point when the screenwriters and director Tom Shadyac ("Ace Ventura," "Liar Liar," "Patch Adams") reel in the clever comedy and roll out the stock plot conflicts (Grace walks in on Bruce being kissed by a sexpot anchorwoman and now he must win her back!) and the cloying, heavy-handed moral-of-the-story messages.
He was the man behind the gruesome Patch Adams (1998), in which Robin Williams brought inspirational zaniness into the lives of terminally ill kids, and last year's Dragonfly, in which Kevin Costner was haunted by a ghost with a loving agenda.
Director Tom Shadyac is complicit in the breakdown, indulging the same Capra-esque impulse that coated his "Patch Adams" with a thick layer of goo.
All of this might go down easier if Carrey and director Tom Shadyac (Dragonfly, Patch Adams) weren’t so determined to set their sights equally low in every other respect.
But director Tom Shadyac can't resist slipping into Patch Adams mode.
See, the first thing I’d do if I was God for a week would be to cast “director” Tom Shadyac into a nice, deep, despairing pit of hell, where there’s nothing to do but watch Dragonfly and Patch Adams over and over.
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But as a feature, the alternately violent, slap-sticky and sappy “Chappie” is all over the place, employing a cloying, “Patch Adams”-like sentimentality and abandoning logic at every turn.
For an example of how badly wrong this sort of thing can go, just think Patch Adams , where the manipulation never stopped coming.
And it never plays the Patch Adams moment.
Add cheerfully inclined director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, responsible for mediocre Hollywood generica like “Batman and Robin” and “Practical Magic,” and you can almost be sure that the end product will be in the ghastly tradition of films like “Shine,” “Nell” and “Patch Adams,” with their bogus sympathy and showboating lead performances.
This is no Patch Adams, filled with saccharine-coated artificiality.
"Scoring the Film" (6 mins.) asks composer James Horner to analyze his work on A Beautiful Mind; a puff-piece HBO special (the 23-minute "Inside A Beautiful Mind"), a list of mental health organizations and their contact numbers, a selection of pressroom interviews from this year's Academy Awards, a Universal commercial, trailers for A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, The Family Man , K-Pax, and Patch Adams, and--something I've never seen before--DVD previews of the latter four titles cap off the Awards Edition DVD of A Beautiful Mind.-Bill…
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Stiller plays fading action star Tugg Speedman, who has run a “Die Hard”-like franchise into the ground with “Scorcher 6: Global Meltdown” and tried unsuccessfully to reinvent his career playing a simple-minded farmhand in the mawkish “Simple Jack” (think “Patch Adams”).
So what makes Signs differ from, say, something like Patch Adams where there’s got to be big red lights just off the frame of the picture signaling the comedic, sad and happy points?