Dr. T & the Women (2000)

(Dr. T) Richard Gere is perfectly cute for Dr. T. I'm really not that jealous of Gere here being basically besieged by beautiful babes because I like him so much. He deserves it, he's awesome. It could have easily been worse, way worse, like, Billy Bob Thornton worse.(the Women) Where do I start? Let's just start with the most beautiful one, Helen Hunt. I love Helen Hunt. She is so hot and so perfect and so sweet, seriously. What a babe. A golf date followed by dinner and wine at her place, sign me up, please, please, sign me up. Helen shows Dr. T a passing look at her unbelievable body getting into the shower. Whoa, Helen. The shot looks good off the tee, it's in the air, and it looks like it's gonna be a hole-in-one...and it's in the hole! Farrah Fawcett, the classic beauty. Fawcett, just in her 50s, takes the name 'strip mall' a little too literally as she playfully strips down in the middle of a crowded shopping mall fountain. OMG, wow. Farrah is just to die for. I love her. At this point, I'm just now learning who Lee Grant is. I likey. Definitely now gonna check out her past movies. Janine Turner, 'You look absolutely fantastic actually. You do, you look just wonderful, just great. Does anyone tell you that lately?" Oh, they did, well does anyone tell you that you have a sweet butt lately? Oh, they did, my nurse, my bookkeeper and my receptionist, all in the last 10 minutes? 'Well then it must be true.' Mmh huh...it's true. Shelley Long is next and thanks to arriving at Shelley Long you will have to excuse me for a second while I lift and dump this giant 5-gallon bucket of ice water on my crotch for getting through all these women so far. Just kidding, but geeeeez. I almost forgot how sexy this movie is. Okay, back to work. Shelley Long is so ultra-cute. Long easily makes me laugh. I love hearing her Texas accent. Speaking of Texas accents, holy Laura Dern! Speaking of really funny, too. Dern is so sweet. So hot, too. So good actress too. You know, sometimes I think, and it would be really, really hard if I had to pick between one of these, insanely beautiful women..........NOOOOOOTTT! Kate Hudson is so easily the 1 that I choose. Hudson looks prettyyy darn cute at cheerleading practice. Kate Hudson is the best. I love Kate Hudson. Liv Tyler is really beautiful too. I would definitely choose her 2nd. God I love her. Lol! This movie doesn't quit. Liv is real. Steven Tyler's daughter and Goldie Hawn's daughter kissing is very cool. Tara Reid is last but she is definitely not least. Tara is way too cool and way too pretty and way too smart. I love her. Man, writing this review has taken its toll on me. Being a doctor must be really hard.

Robert Altman's "Dr. T and the Women" (2002) is an ensemble dramedy with some romance detailing an overworked, socially-in-demand gynecologist (Richard Gere) in Dallas who faces problems with an assortment of women beyond his practice. His daughter, Dee Dee (Kate Hudson) – a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader – is getting married, but his younger daughter (Tara Reid) drops the ball that Dee Dee's a lesbian having a relationship with a former co-ed (Liv Tyler). Worse, his wife (Farrah Fawcett) reverts to a child-like state and is, consequently, placed in a mental institution. Desperate for love, the doctor turns to an independent golf pro for succor (Helen Hunt). Meanwhile, his sister-in-law is an alcoholic (Laura Dern) and his office manager is in lust with him (Shelly Long).This movie has a horrible reputation, but it's actually not bad as long as you're in the mood for a drama with amusing touches. It's far from great, but it's certainly not bad. Gere is very likable in the title role and bends over backwards to help all the women in his life. The women are likable too, although many of the peripheral ones are somewhat annoying.I find the criticism that the film is "misogynistic" funny in light of the fact that the screenplay was written by a woman, Anne Rapp. Others argue that the story's pointless and the ending is ridiculously unbelievable. While the latter point is true, this IS a dramedy/satire and not everything is SUPPOSED to be strictly realistic. As to the former criticism, just enjoy the ride and reflect on the plot and subplots. You may not agree with its points, and they may be elusive, but it's not pointless.While I like the film and it contains scores of beautiful women, I'm only giving it a marginal "thumbs up" because they could've done better on this front considering the wealth of resources they had to work with, not to mention the opening credits sequence is noticeably overlong and dull. Interestingly, the ending graphically details the birth of a baby -- a male.The film runs 122 minutes and was shot in the Dallas area.GRADE: B-

If you showed this movie to the survivors of the Rwandan genocide and asked them which was worse, seeing their families hacked to death with machetes or watching Dr. T and the Women…only some of them would choose the machetes.Dr. T (Richard Gere) is a gynecologist in Dallas, Texas. He has a wife (Farrah Fawcett) who's gone crazy, a daughter (Kate Hudson) who's getting married, another daughter (Tara Reid) who is half plot-device and half lame joke about the Kennedy assassination, a sister-in-law (Laura Dern)who is a lush and a horde of yapping women who jam his waiting room like it's an overstuffed hothouse of demanding Southern Belles. Though he's drowning in a stormy sea of estrogen, Dr. T is an insanely, sickeningly perfect man who is totally understanding of all of the crazy feminine behavior that buffets him every day. His only respite from it all are hunting trips with his buddies and an affair with the new golf pro at his country club, Bree (Helen Hunt).Like many Robert Altman films, the plot of this movie just sort of slowly spreads out in all directions like vomit on a bare floor. There's also enough trademarked Altman-babble in this thing to choke even his most devoted fans. Dr. T and the Woman is morally confused, emotionally phony, head-slappingly contrived and has an ending so stupid and bizarre that it would take an entire team of mental health professionals to figure out what the hell Altman was thinking. If there was ever a film that could be introduced at a competency hearing as evidence of senile dementia, it's this one.In fairness, most of the acting here is very mannered but relatively okay. The best performance actually comes from Shelley Long as Dr. T's long-suffering head nurse. She's funny and lively and the most enjoyable person on screen, until her character is brutally sacrificed on the altar of Altman's barnacle encrusted sense of humor. Helen Hunt might have been just as good as the independent Bree, but after creating the character it's really damn clear Altman didn't have the slightest idea what to do with her.If you're still not clear on how awesomely bad Dr. T and the Women is, Helen Hunt gets briefly but clearly naked in it and it's still unwatchable. That's right. It makes naked Helen Hunt unappealing. That's a magical feat on the order of turning lead into gold, which would make Robert Altman the master alchemist of cinematic suck.Now, if some Altman fans happen to stumble upon this review, I can already hear their excuses about how his films aren't meant to be conventionally entertaining and you have to appreciate his creative vision and I just don't "get it" and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The fact that several decades ago he injected some juice into American movies should not give Altman a get-out-of-jail-free card for the rest of his career. The fact that he keeps recycling the same old bag of tricks is not creative vision. It's a guy who doesn't have anything new to say as a storyteller.This movie is terrible. Even if you've liked some of Altman's other work, do not watch it.

"We haven't come close to the medium's full potential yet. Everything is still so linear." – Robert Altman Altman's technique is so alien, that most viewers automatically dismiss his films as being shoddily put together, which is a shame, because he really is one of the most consistently interesting directors out there.Typically, Altman begins by constructing an environment (military hospital, theatre, rodeo, diner etc), introducing a large cast, inserting some self referential "performance within a performance" (play, wedding, radio show, etc) and then adopting a style in which the whole cinematic world flows independently of what we see. In other words, his plots seem to unfold even when we don't watch, his camera floating from one nodule to the next, stumbling upon bits and pieces of a "story". But the story is itself non-defined, and it's up to us to synthesise the pieces and make it all coherent.The environment in this case is Dallas, Texas, a world which Altman viciously reduces to a set of stereotypes (Altman is always at his most mean-spirited in his supposedly lighter, more comedic movies). This is a cartoon world of gas guzzling, upper class Texans, giant SUVs, vapid students, expensive clothing, Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, JFK conspiracy theorists and so forth. Even the film's lead character is cast solely as to allow Altman to exploit Richard Gere's iconography (Gere has made a career out of playing suave womanizers).The film begins with a horde of women bickering in a gynaecologist's reception room. Their voices overlap and overlap until we're left with nothing but annoying static. It's up to Dr. T, a smooth, suave and sexy gynaecologist (played by Richard Gere, of course), to untangle all this noise and please his woman, satisfying their needs and fulfilling their various emotional problems.The very next scene works as a counterpoint. Dr T's mentally unstable wife walks through a shopping mall, takes off all her clothes and dances in a fountain. No surprise that she's under a shop sign which links her to a deity. She's not only a goddess, an innocent nymph who exists only to be naked, worshipped, twirl and look pretty, but another up-market commodity. As one psychologist says in the film, she's been "loved and pampered too much", Dr T putting his wife on such a high a pedestal that she eventually regresses to a childlike state, unable to do anything for herself.What follows are a number of symbolic little scenes. The men in the film are dumb carnalists who hunt and shoot flying golf balls, whilst the women are all ditsy airheads, drunks, lesbians or vacuous shopaholics. The women of Dallas are also fighting for a Dallas freeway to be named after a woman, an act which Dr T himself supports; anything to keep the ladies happy.Existing outside all these characters is a woman played by Helen Hunt. She's a retired golf pro, far more calm and collected than all the idiotic characters swirling around her. As a professional golfer, she's literally "in command" of all the balls in the film. She and Gere forge a romance, but she abruptly calls it off when he offers to provide and take care of all her needs. "Why would I want that?" she says with a shrug. Helen Hunt - the only female huntsman in the film - knows that men hide their dependency needs and narcissistic vulnerability behind a fairly primitive phallic chauvinism. She's also aware that men symbolically control their women through phallic mastery, supremacy and dependence.The film then becomes a sort of feminist tract, Hunt's character raising the issue of female empowerment and opining that women should "follow their hearts", "reject society's expectations", "be independent", "be strong" and "be as sexually promiscuous as men". Another character in the film, played by Kate Hudson, exhibits this same character arc: she turns her back on marriage and various authority figures (breaks the rules, answers phone in class etc) and embraces a lesbian love affair.But while the film advocates a form of women's liberation and suggests that women strongly dependent on men accomplish nothing (naming a freeway after a woman isn't a point for feminism, it's just a way to further placate loudmouths), such things are hardly new. It's been over half a century since the largest feminist movements, and if Altman genuinely wished to say something about womanhood, he'd have done so decades ago.No, what the film's really doing is presenting Dallas as the last bastion against the feminist revolution, and Gere, who thinks he's some smooth lover of women, as an unwitting ally of the anti-feminists. Worship at the alter of the uterus, in other words, and you reduce woman to the various stereotypes in the film. You remove their complexity, their desires. The alcoholism and vacuity of the women in the film is the direct result of men fawning over them.But the film goes further than this; so much so that you might even call it anti-feminist. Remove the chivalrous romantics like Gere, Altman says, and you're left with a world of Helen Hunts, family units destroyed, everyone sexually liberated, self-centric and cold. After realising this, Gere drives off into the rain, is sucked into a magical tornado (yes this really happens) and delivers a young Mexican woman's baby. In graphic detail, we see a child emerging from a bloody womb, a scene which immediately and violently clashes with everything we've seen before. Romance is gone, in other words, and replaced with cold biology.And yet Gere finds some nobility in his newfound role. Holding a blood smeared baby in his hands he allows himself a smile. He still worships at the altar, but that altar is no longer pretty. 8/10 – Excellent. Incidentally, Doctor T's name, Sullivan Travis, alludes to Preston Sturges "Sullivan's Travels", both films about a character learning their true value and contribution to society.