Like Father Like Son

10 Movies About Healthcare Congress Should See

By Christopher Campbell posted 5 months ago

Barack Obama gave a speech to the American Medical Association yesterday in an attempt to get the organization’s members on board with his plans for healthcare reform. The president’s appearance alone may have been good for his cause, given that it was the first such address to the AMA in 26 years, but many doctors are apparently still skeptical of the government’s ideas and how they’ll actually work.

Meanwhile, the issue of healthcare reform continues to be a difficult topic in Congress, and the road to legislation is sure to be long and filled with much debate. So, to help Washington in the process, or at least to keep the politicians sane with a little entertainment, we’ve come up with a little healthcare movie marathon.

The ten films selected are admittedly more left-leaning in their potential influence, but that’s not necessarily a political move on our part. We simply chose titles we like, and maybe it just so happens that we like movies that show charity as good, greed as evil and healthcare as a right that all humans should be afforded.

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Classics, Featured, Lists

10 Cliches of the Body Swap Movie

By Christopher Campbell posted 7 months ago

Despite having a title that reminds us of that George Burns-Charlie Schlatter role-reversal movie from the ‘80s, 17 Again is not in fact part of the body swap genre. Rather, it’s more like Peggy Sue Got Married without the time travel. It’s also like a backwards Big, a movie many people mistakenly assign to the genre, which more technically includes such classics as The Hot Chick, Dream a Little Dream and Like Father Like Son. Of course, age-swapping films like Big, 13 Going on 30 and now 17 Again share many conventions and clichés with body swapping movies, so aligning them with that genre’s films is not entirely a film classification no-no.

Most familiar body swap movies owe their basic plot structure to F. Anstey’s 1882 novel Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers, which is, yes, the source material behind the 1988 movie starring Fred Savage and Judge Reinhold, as well as the basis for four other, prior film adaptations and a short-lived TV series. Even the three movie versions of Freaky Friday are more akin to Anstey’s story than the Mary Rodgers’ novel on which they’re based. In a way, because of the lesson learned in 17 Again, this new movie is also reminiscent of Anstey’s novel, even if not in a walking-in-someone-else’s-shoes sort of method.

But are there any other similarities to the body swap genre? You decide. While watching 17 Again this weekend, be on the look out for any of the clichés of the body swap movie, which we illustrate below, in order to determine its closeness to the classification.
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