One of the scariest moments of my life was when I was hospitalized for complications resulting from chemotherapy, aka the time when we called 911. Chemo sucks, of course, but a lot of folks tolerate it reasonably well, suffering side effects like fatigue and nausea but otherwise managing. In my case, everything that could go wrong did. My white blood cell count plummeted while my temperature spiked, a combination called neutropenic fever that’s life-threatening. I developed sores in my mouth and throat, so both eating and drinking were prohibitively painful. Even when I could get something down, it quickly came out one end or the other. Several of the essential minerals that regulate your body chemistry—potassium, sodium—dropped to levels that could be fatal. This all happened gradually over a week, then all at once during a twelve-hour stretch on Sunday, and I bottomed out during the penultimate episode of Succession. When I could no longer stand up and it felt like I was watching Kendall Roy through the wrong end of a telescope, I asked Danielle to call an ambulance.
I felt safer at the hospital, but things got worse before they got better. We were waylaid in a hot, stuffy corner of the ER for close to 24 hours, the doctors giving me blood transfusions and various IV bags as we waited for a room to open. Eventually I got one, and spent two days shitting myself in a sleepless fog. At some point I conked out, and when I came to I remember feeling like I was on the other side of something—that maybe I wasn’t going to die, at least not that day (cuz, like, I still had cancer). The milemarker for this return from the void was the 1989 screwball comedy classic Major League.
The Best Movies to Watch When You’re Sick. That’s the list that should accompany this post, and hell I’ll probably use it as the clickbait-y headline, cuz why not. But for sure Major League is on my list, and possibly tops it. Danielle knew as much—she stumbled upon it, nudging me out of my stupor with the good news. And so we spent that morning watching Charlie Sheen and Wesley Snipes lead the Cleveland Indians1 to their unlikely victory on the hospital’s janky TV, served up with commercials and the curse words dubbed over, as God intended.
How many of these movies are on your list? I think mine has about 10, and Major League is toward the top. (When it was over, My Cousin Vinny came on next—not in my top 10, but still a pretty good sick movie.) Another movie that’s up there is Road House, starring Patrick Swayze as the world’s most chill shitkicker. The original Road House has all the hallmarks of a good sick movie—classic one-liners (“Pain don’t hurt”), a breezy, paint-by-numbers plot, a Sam Elliott cameo. Would the recent reboot measure up? I had no intention of finding out, but I did anyway.
The Road House remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Doug Liman is the first movie I’ve watched since last fall. This is kind of a bummer—not the movie itself, but the fact that with the exception of Barbenheimer I missed all the Oscar nominees and all the other good movies from the last few months. There just hasn’t been any time—caring for a newborn is both time-consuming and time-distorting, and the idea of finding two hours to watch Poor Things has just seemed out of the question.
But I did watch Road House. I watched it entirely on my phone, interrupted by bottle feedings and other bedtime routines, as God intended. The nice thing about the remake is it’s not trying to be anything other than a good sick movie—campy, goofy, even a bit hacky. It’s the kind of movie that feels like someone wanted to see boat chases and a scene where a bad guy gets eaten by an alligator, and they went in search of a plot to make that happen.
Where they wind up is the Florida Keys. This is an odd choice. Drop our cosmically gifted martial artist bouncer in a major metropolitan area or for that matter a small town with a despotic quasi-mayor, as the first film did, and I’ll believe there’s a healthy supply of criminals and ne'er-do-wells for him to slug his way through. But Margaritaville? That’s a stretch.
And the new setting isn’t the only thing the remake screws up. In the original movie, Dalton’s backstory is that he once killed a guy in self-defense. That’s pretty much it—we know he studied “philosophy” and has a thing for billowy pants, but how or why he transformed himself into a killing machine for hire goes unexplained, and that’s just fine. A good sick movie shouldn’t work too hard to justify its setup.
Liman’s reboot does the opposite, not only making Dalton a UFC fighter, but larding him up with a backstory about the time he short-circuited during a fight and beat a guy to death. This breaks rule No. 1 of action movies, which is that the heroes can only kill bad guys (rule No. 2 is that violence is never inflicted against dogs or kids…did you know I went to film school?).
This all might seem nitpicky but the thing with sick movies is you gotta keep the cognitive dissonance to a minimum. Case in point is obligatory final boss Conor McGregor, who essentially teleports into the movie, sent there by a disembodied voice on the other end of a pay phone (no joke), presumably that of Jeff Bezos. McGregor’s there for marketing purposes, obv, and because they couldn’t have Dalton put the alligator in a chokehold (although that might have made more sense, plotwise). His characterization is basically “crossfit Snidely Whiplash,” and it’s not that it’s unbelievable, because none of the movie is, but that it’s annoying, which the movie otherwise largely isn’t. In fact, I liked this reboot as a whole. Would I be as happy to wake up from a stupor to find the new Road House playing as I was when it was Major League, or for that matter the original? Probably not. But I don’t think I’d change the channel either.
Alright, fine, here is my sick movie top 10. What’s yours?
Major League (“You put snot on the ball?)
Commando (“I eat green berets for breakfast, and right now I’m very hungry.”)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (“You’re Abe Froman?”)
Better Off Dead (“I’m sorry your mom blew up, Ricky.”)
Big Trouble In Little China (“If we’re not back by dawn, call the president.”)
The first Michael Keaton Batman (“I’m Batman,” but lipsynced into a mirror.)
Three Amigos (“It’s a sweater!”)
Road House (“No one ever wins a fight.”)
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (“Well by god we take it back.”)
Heat (“For me, the action is the juice.”)
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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, in the months to come.
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How’s that for three things that basically don’t exist anymore?
National Treasure (“I’m gonna steal the Declaration of Independence!”) and School of Rock (“Cello, you’ve got a bass.). Agreed on the new Road House. It’s a great action movie and a terrible everything else movie. But my husband and I still enjoyed watching it for the camp of it all.
I've long been a fan of Tarantino movies for a sick day. I can doze off for an hour and wake up without losing my place.