John Q is a botch job, even though it's crawling with Oscar winners and nominees. Denzel Washington, fresh from his triumph in Training Day, stars as a blue-collar father holding a hospital hostage so his young son can get a heart transplant. Robert Duvall plays a hostage negotiator, and James Woods is the surgeon forced to operate at gunpoint. Happy paychecks, guys. What looked like a thriller with a social conscience — those HMO bastards! — is a subpar episode of ER. Working from a trite script by James Kearns, director Nick Cassavetes (She's So Lovely) stoops mighty low. In one scene, Anne (Call Me Crazy) Heche, as a hard-ass hospital lackey, tells John Q. that his son must die for lack of health insurance and then lets a tear trickle down her cheek when Dad bids his son farewell on TV — those media bastards sneaked in a camera! John Q. is as fake as that tear, an exploitative mess trying to pass as social activism.

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.