They heal the sick. They care and share, they nurture and touch lives. They are male pediatricians with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and for a bunch of guys they know a heck of a lot about colic and breast feeding.
But once every couple of months these sensitive docs gather for a night of gratuitous thrills, vicarious violence and macho posturing. They are the core of a group called the Men's Film Circle, and they have a taste for cinematic red meat.
Dr. John Andrews, a 36-year-old assistant professor of pediatrics at Hopkins from Kalamazoo, Mich., is the founder, charter member and alpha male of the group, also called the MFC. He has two ironclad rules for choosing MFC films.
First, something must explode.
Second, it must be a film that MFC members would not otherwise see with their wives.
So about three or four times each year, he leads an expedition to a local theater to see the biggest, loudest and baddest of the exploitive blockbusters.
"This is kind of our alter-ego, or our release, our chance to serve the part within us that isn't fed by our careers," said Andrews. "It is our night off from having a conscience."
Generally, Andrews said, he spots a likely MFC movie by carefully reading the reviews. "They'll call it 'testosterone-laden,' 'adolescent,' or 'mindless.' Those kinds of adjectives are generally the hallmarks of a good MFC movie. 'Bloated' is another one."
"Armageddon," the Bruce Willis film about an asteroid headed for Earth, was dismissed by The Sun's Ann Hornaday as "massively insipid." Long stretches, she wrote, "bear an uncanny resemblance to Budweiser, Nike, Coca-Cola and Reebok commercials."
That got Andrews' attention.
L "We thought that was a pretty ringing endorsement," he said.
So earlier thih Andrews sent forth the call, via e-mail, to the more than 100 guys in the MFC.
They range in age from their 20s to their 60s, though most are 30-something. Besides pediatricians, MFCers include physicians in other specialties, a lawyer, an architect, an engineer, an accountant, psychologists, a fiction writer and a newspaper reporter. (This one, though I joined only recently.)
Quoting from the Book of Revelations, Andrews called his fellow cineastes together for the end of the world:
"And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. (WE WILL GATHER INTO A PLACE CALLED WHITE MARSH.)"
Andrews founded the MFC four years ago, after listening to a couple of female colleagues talk about their women's book club. (Women slightly outnumber men among the pediatric faculty at Hopkins. Two-thirds of the pediatricians-in-training are women.)
Shouldn't the guys, Andrews wondered, find something they had in common, too?
"That," Andrews said, "was the ferment in which the Men's Film Circle was born."
As a joke, Andrews handed out pink, hand-written invitations at department meetings. He and a few stalwart Y-chromosomed pediatricians showed up for the first few films. Their numbers rapidly grew.
They have watched "Time Cop," "Broken Arrow," "Executive Decision," "The Rock" and "Diehard With a Vengeance." They gathered for "Face/Off," "Last Man Standing" and "Godzilla." The group's high-water mark came last year, when 50 guys showed up for an evening in one of the Senator Theater's sound-proof rooms, built for families with crying babies. They watched "Con Air," ate 22 pizzas and guzzled six cases of beer.
"It had just nonstop action," Andrews recalled fondly. "It had a sense of humor and it was entirely pointless."
Not that kind of group
Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of the MFC. A few months ago, someone in the group posted an e-mail that ridiculed women drivers. It drew charges of sexism from some pediatricians-in-training.
Andrews publicly appealed for his fellow Circlers not to get carried away.
"We're not using our Men's Film Circle to be a he-man, women-hater's club," said Andrews, who is married with three children. "It's more about going out to stupid movies and then talking about it over a beer on a more or less regular basis."
Once, a theater owner discreetly asked if the MFC was a gay organization.
"You check your sexual preference at the door," Andrews said. "We don't discriminate. But I think painting us as a gay group is a little bit off."
Andrews' wife, Beth Andrews, calls the MFC "a marriage-saver."
"It spares me the agony of sitting through a lot of Bruce Willis films," she says.
Ken Cohen, a 37-year-old Hopkins pediatric oncologist and charter MFC member, is a lean, intense man who talks very fast. He specializes in brain tumors.
"Part of the job, for me, is that you've got to get away a little bit," he said. "I make a concerted effort to separate work from not work." The MFC, he said, "is a little bit of a breather for me."
And so it came to pass that on a recent Tuesday night about 20 members of the MFC gathered in the main lobby of the Loew's White Marsh Theaters for the 8 p.m. showing of "Armageddon."
MFCers checked their consciences and good taste at the door of Loew's Theater Number 14. They plopped into a couple of rows of the bouncy, upholstered seats. One guy rose and headed back to the candy counter in the lobby.
"Soda?" he shouted.
"Cool," came the reply.
"Big, small?"
"Bladder-sized."
Before the film came the previews. One for "Enemy of the State," shot partly in Baltimore, was extremely loud and, with its quick zooms and cuts, dizzying.
"If the preview makes you feel sick, it's got to be good," Andrews said.
Finally, the feature began. An intrepid bunch of misfits, led by a tough but lovable rogue, rocket into space and try to save the world from almost-certain doom. Many things explode, including Paris and New York's Grand Central Station. Still, the film doesn't meet the MFC's exacting standards.
There is a serious romance. Bruce Willis weeps. There are heart-tugging scenes of heroic astronauts walking in slow motion and Americans swaddled in the flag. Lovable characters die. The film ends with a wedding scene.
For Cohen, this was the last straw.
"That's a direct violation of the rules," he growled.
"What's the last time they threw a bouquet at the end of a Men's Film Circle movie?" Andrews wondered.
Post-mortem
As they marched out of the theater, some MFCers cried out in anguish.
"I feel deceived," someone said. "Too much about relationships."
They crossed an ersatz Main Street, part of the new mall complex, headed for a brew pub. There, they drank $3 microbrews and pondered the lessons of the evening's 10,000-megaton morality play.
"The best kill of the whole thing was the first one," someone said. "The guy in New York, hanging in the hole."
"Except for New York and Paris, I think the body count was pretty poor," another complained.
"I guess the best way to make up with your estranged wife is to go up to an asteroid and blow it into a fiery ball," someone offered.
"Did you notice the burgeoning obesity of people in the United States" in the crowd scenes? asked David Cooke, 37, a pediatric endocrinologist.
"Spoken like an endocrinologist," someone sneered.
There was talk of how the astronauts refueled at a Russian space station.
"The best thing was, it was self-serve," someone said.
Harold Shinitzky, 38, a pediatric psychologist at Hopkins, said the Rorschach ink-blot cards used on the misfits in the film looked like the genuine article.
"That violates a lot of principles," Shinitzky said. The tests are not supposed to be publicized, so patients don't become familiar with them. Otherwise, how can they free-associate?
Other MFC members were having no trouble free-associating.
"Why were there cars falling out of the sky when the asteroid hit?" Andrews pondered.
Someone wondered about "space dementia," which strikes one misfit. Is it listed in the manual of psychiatric disorders, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM-IV.
"I was offended that they didn't take Baltimore out" with meteorite impacts, said Rich Hardart, a Hopkins pediatrician. "What was that about? We're not important enough?"
Someone points out that Harvard Medical School didn't get hit, either. It is small consolation.
"Who are these people in Hollywood?" Cohen demanded. "Do they think we're complete idiots?"
"Ken, the evidence is clear," Andrews said. "We just spent $150 on this movie."
Andrews took a vote, and "Armageddon" received an official MFC pan. But most of the guys sitting around the three cast-iron tables were smiling. The beer and bonding phase of the evening was, by silent consensus, a big success.
There was talk of gathering again in a few weeks for another
high-caliber action film: "Lethal Weapon 4."
"What are we going to do?" Andrews asked. "Go to see 'Saving Private Ryan?' That's about men actually feeling things."
Pub Date: 7/28/98