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Playing God: Exactly As Fun As It Soudns


In case you're wondering, midterms are over, and I did pretty well, but now I'm already stressing the oral exam in my philosophy class.

In other news, I finally rewatched Playing God the other day. Playing God is crime thriller from the mid 90s, starring David Duchovny as a surgeon who lost his license because of drug use, and Timothy Hutton as an organized crime boss. Angelina Jolie's also in there as a mutual love interest to make a neat little triangle.

I watched it back when it first came to home video, and it made a really big impression on me, I've always thought of it as one of my favorites. Watching Timothy Hutton as a sort of anti-hero on the show Leverage has lately had me wanting to rewatch my favorite role of his.

I still really like Hutton's character, I really wish this had let him branch out to playing more villainous roles, but the movie was a critical and commercial flop. The rest of the movie, is pretty bad. Duchovny was tailor made for the noir-esque narrating monologues, but he seems to lack any kind of real emotions throughout the entire movie. Perhaps that's because he's stoned out of his mind on heroine for it, but he just seems like a robot.

Really this is a movie where the bad guys get to shine, but in the end they all lose. Hutton's phenomenal, all of his henchmen are above average, and there's a great car chase at the end. But other than that, there's not really a lot going on in this movie, and I find myself kind of wishing that I hadn't watched it again, so that it could have stayed the way I remembered it.

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