Teach 109

This forgettable short is from the Perverse Destiny anthology, and the subject was later made into a feature film by the writer/director Richard Kletter, with a different cast.

The change of cast hopefully was an improvement, since here neither Elizabeth Perkins as a surgeon and Jason Patric as her android patient, make much of an impression. Both are mannered performers, and though their roles may make them seem well cast, it still doesn't allow either to bring much to the material.

Kletter only raises the energy level with the use of the Sam Cooke song "Wonderful World", which is repeated, and although he also uses Talking Heads' "This Must Be the Place" for a car scene, it serves to highlight how static the movement is. The car, incidently waits while a piano is carried across the street.

Patric gets to sing a song at a piano, in a boyish voice supposedly to give his character poignancy, but the song is so lightweight that it doesn't provide the humanity his android supposedly yearns for. Rather, we think, this is a composer we can do without. And the climax stoops to using the expression "The operation was a success. The patient died".