Work, Working, and Working for the Weekend. And Apocalypto.

(When Eryn Attacks - Part 3 is still forthcoming...)


Last week's work load reminded me somewhat of residency. I was on call from the Friday before last until Thursday before this past weekend. Seven days of inpatient duty, basically working from 7:30 am until roughly about 7 pm each night, though I stayed later a few nights. It brought me back a little, and it also really wore me out.

The inpatient scene at Landstuhl is a little nutty relative to most other hospitals. Though not exclusively, it tends to be a young person's hospital. Young soldier/patients are scattered about in disconcerting numbers. Most have traumatic injuries - burns or missing limbs - and the wards at times can seem just disproportionately filled with the relatively young. In my case, the young people I get on my team are medically "interesting" types, with weird blood diseases, leukemias, odd infections, inflammatory bowel disorders, and the like. And interesting from a medical perspective is never good from the common view point. These types come and go relatively independent of the violent waves in Iraq. But the trauma patients are a different story.

The weekend before last was an especially bloody one down there. And when the violence spikes, it becomes inevitable that 24-48 hours later the hospital feels the backlash, and our ward and ICU beds slowly swell up with patients like the soft tissue surrounding a badly sprained ankle. When that surge comes, it is again, mostly trauma. But the increase in workload affects eveveryone, even the internists. There are consults to be had, and work to be pushed off onto other services. The surgeons become busier, and by proxy, so do we, especially on other, more middle-ground cases. The ICU nurses are always calling asking when my old CHF-guy can be transferred to the ward. There is buzz and activity all over the place. Planes and buses are constantly coming and going. Patients are being wheeled everywhere.

I don't particularly like walking through the ICU at Landstuhl. On my way to see my patients (typically an older sort), I have to walk by the beds of young kids with no legs, kids with tubes sticking out of their mouths, kids with visibily horrific burn wounds taking up large portions of their bodies. There's nothing good about it. Its an ugly, daily reminder of what's happening down there. Some days, its just too real. It makes me shake my head.

But I won't dwell on that too much today. Just thought it worth mentioning.


Because of my long work week, I chose to relax for much of the weekend. Didn't do anything too exciting.

I did go to the movies twice, though.

I have seen exactly five movies in the theater since I got back from Iraq. I liked the first four:

"Casino Royale" - The best Bond in DECADES. Highly recommend it. Its perhaps a half-hour too long (mostly thanks to a chase scene in the beginning), but I really liked it. It was dark, quite compelling, and actually looked at the dark side of the Bond character. Plus, it was an actual film rather than the average Bond which is more of a brand-name franchise of one liners, gadgets, and calendar girls.


"Borat" - Certainly not for everyone, but I laughed my ass off through most of it. I don't know what else to say. I will never get some of the images of that wrestling scene out of my head.

"The Departed" - Classic Scorsese. Engaging. Best acting I've ever seen from DiCapprio (though "Catch Me if you Can" was good for him too) . Good film.

"Children of Men" - I saw this on Saturday night. Not a bad film at all. It's dark - quite dark. Once you get past the primary suspension of disbelief (i.e. that all women in the world are infertile, for some reason, 25 years from now), though, and take THAT for what it is, its not a bad film at all. It certainly lacks subtlety at points - and perhaps to a fault in its anti-war messages - but its some of the best technical film making I've seen in a while, and it certainly kept me thinking about it for several days after. I'd say worth a viewing for sure, though don't go in expecting the "Feel Good hit of the year"....


And then there's number five. "Apocalypto."

Ah, Mel Gibson, is there anything he doesn't do? I'm not sure where to start, or even how much to write, but here it goes.


(WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW. IF YOU WANT TO SEE APOCALYPTO AND NOT KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON - DON'T READ THIS...)

If "Children of Men" gives you one fair improbable that requires a suspension of disbelief, then "Apocalypto" gives you about twenty. At times, this sort of thing reaches laugh-out-loud proportions. I'm sorry, but "Apocalypto" just didn't work for me.

Basically, its the story of a peaceful tribe of Mayans who are attacked and essentially kidnapped by a not-so-peaceful tribe of Mayans. The entire village is rounded up, killed or captured, and the survivors are marched off to a far away place where the women will be sold as slaves and the men sacrificed a vengeful Sun God. Our Hero (Tm) manages to save his pregnant wife and young son prior to his own capture, by lowering them into a hole in the ground during the early portion of the raid where they aren't discovered. He then joins the fray in the village. Ultimately, and after some brutal Mayan-style beat downs and killings, he and the others are all defeated and they're hauled off as described above. Along the way, they're tortured of course (It's A Mel Gibson film) and treated like less than human. No surprises here.

Mel Gibson has some serious issues. Even taking his recent public faux-pas out of the picture, you only need to watch one of his movies (meaning the ones he directs) for about thirty minutes until you realize he's more or less a complete sadist. He also likes painting his protagonists blue for some reason.... Anyway, this is a Mel film, so there's beatings and rape and barbaric savagery throughout, and enough of all of it until you not only get the point, but also have it shoved down your throat thoroughly and repeatedly like an amazonian spear. We get it. People are savages.

Anyway, cut away to the human-sacrifice scenes which are as gory as you'd expect from old Mel, complete with cut off heads rolling down the stairs of steep, mossy temples in the South American sun. Our Hero is led up the ramp with his buddies to the top of a large temple where all these evil medicine-man types are knee deep in the hooplah. Its like a gorier version of Temple of Doom, complete with hearts being ripped out and everything. Our Hero suffers through watching some of his buddies be "sacrificed", and then its his turn to go up. After several deep reflective moments and slow motion scenes meant to elicit emotion, he is ultimately saved from sacrifice by a plot device once used in an old Batman and Robin TV episode - namely a solar eclipse occurs while he is literally on the chopping block. This is SYMBOLIC, of course, and the high priest proclaims that whatever Sun God they worship has "drank his fill" of human blood.

Quite convenient. Now Our Hero is released back to his originial captor and thereby free to be tortured with his village buddies some more - this time in a different way! They are marched down from the temple and into a large sand field of sorts. They are told to "run" toward a corn field (about 100-150 meters away) located on the edge of the jungle (and hence freedom) while their captors throw spears and launch arrows at them. Best of all, in a show of fatherly pride, the head baddie (who is also the main captor) elects to send his son out near the start of the cornfield to wait and be the "finisher", clearly a respected position. The son waits out there until the victims are writhing around on the ground, inevitably with spears and arrows sticking out of them. Then he whacks them in the head with his club or cuts their throat with his hand-me-down-from-dad knife and finishes them off, making father proud the whole time.

Well, finally its Our Hero's turn to run. He's cut free of his bonds, gets a wicked stare down by one of the other baddies (and man can you can sense a future showdown coming between THESE two...) and then he takes off with his partner (they run in pairs). Smarter than your average captured Mayan villager, our hero actually serpentines (the first pair ran utterly straight for some reason) as he sprints toward the corn. Everything looks good at first. He's quick, he's cutting back, he's dodging arrows my mere inches - he basically looks like a USC Reggie Bush highlight film set in the amazon basin circa 1600.

Meanwhile, Our Hero's running partner doesn't fare as well. He's felled with an arrow and goes down hard in the dirt. Not Our Hero, though. He keeps bobbing and weaving - he's almost there....

Oops, he's suddenly skewered with a spear - a large-bore javelin thrown with incalculable precision (over a 100 meter distance I might add) by the head baddie himself! What a shot! The spear goes right through the right side of his abdomen, just below the rib cage and liver - its a through and through wound. It looks bad. And thus Our Hero, too, begins his ground writhing. And here comes sonny, over to finish him off. First he finished off Our Hero's hapless partner, giving Our Hero precious time to consider taking the spear out of his abdomen. Oops, too late. The son walks over. It's Our Hero's turn to get clubbed like a seal, or knifed to death, or whatever. But wait! One of the other downed buddies is still alive. He grabs an ankle! The son slips! That's all it takes. Now Our Hero is the driver's seat. He blocks the killing blow and then turns the tables. Then, before you know it the son's throat is getting cut (and with his own knife - which was just given to him by dad - oh the irony!) and Our Hero is pulling the spear out of his abdomen, getting up, and starting toward the corn again. I knew he could do it!

But uh oh. You know who doesn't like that - and with a look the head baddie's face melts from fatherly pride into twisted rage. He begins to charge as Our Hero slips into the jungle. The head baddie runs up to his dying son. Some pseudo-deep "goodbye scene" occurs, the kid finally dies, and then the uber-baddie turns his thoughts quickly and completely to revenge on Our Hero. He gathers his posse of 10 peeps or so and they all charge into the jungle after Our Hero, who by the way was SKEWERED WITH A SPEAR only moments earlier. Man, is he tough!

And thus the stage is set for the next hour of the movie - a long, long chase through the jungle as Our Hero runs back towards his original village (to his wife and son) with the team of baddies on his heels. It all plays out like a highly digital game of "Pitfall" with every jungle menace becoming part of the action. And here, as if it wasn't bad enough already, the suspension of disbelief simply grows to ridiculous proportions.

Our Hero is apparently able to SPRINT (and I do mean sprint - like full speed, ALL THE TIME) in a jungle for hours at a time, always with his enemies anywhere from 30 to 150 feet behind him - they are also constantly sprinting. He does all this, of course, after enduring a forced jungle march while captured, which took about two days and during which he was tortured and starved. Oh also, before all this running, did I mention he was SKEWERED WITH A SPEAR?

And so the action gets ridiculous. He literally outruns a jaguar for a hundred meters in the jungle. He climbs trees, makes astounding leaps, engages in hand to hand combat, even goes over a massive water fall - all with a perforated bowel, which occured, of course, at that point in which he was skewered with a spear. He literally rubs some dirt on it, however, which seems to help.

Anyway, it just sort of goes on from there. There are snakes, poison toads, blow guns, and other classic jungle devices which come and go. Our Hero, who's name in the movie is Jaguar's Paw (look out - more in-your-face symbolism), begins to spiritually morph into a jaguar as time goes by. He even starts running on all fours at one point (and gets turned black from quicksand a la Arnold in Predator in one scene). Yikes.

Slowly but surely he turns the tables on all his attackers. He eventually gets the best of them all, including grizzly showdowns with his early nemesis (stare-down guy) and of course the head baddie himself. There's lots of violence, lots of blood, lots of bad dialogue (hey one-liners are OK as long as they are spoken in a dead language, right?) and again a scene where a jaguar bites a man's face off. Our Hero eventually gets home to his wife and all is well...well, right up until the point where he dies of massive infection from his perforated bowel. But they don't show you that part - it must be on the upcoming DVD....