MASH is directed by Robert Altman. You might want to watch some other of his movies to see how they compare with MASH. The most famous may be Nashville.
Best thought of separately from the show since the two diverged so much. It’s a very funny movie in parts and a reasonable amount of anti-war stuff got in the movie. Burns is less doofus and more actually evil in the movie. I’ll never forget him saying, “Never mind…you killed him.” when that medic was too slow getting the right injection.
Donald Sutherland is good in the movie, but he’s not really the Hawkeye I picture when I think of the character. I love Duke, Trapper, etc. in the movie. The funeral/last-supper scene is a total classic. “I just want you to know…you are wasting your entire education.”
The cruelty to Hoolihan in the shower scene is too far, to be honest. Not funny, just evil.
Good movie, though.
You can see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. I believe they are on the moon in the night time shot of it.
A pretty standard action movie until the paradox is revealed and you see how the direction of things changes accordingly. I enjoyed the movie.
Bit of both, but I think it’s more Lawrence knows that Benitez is a good man and would be a good Pope, and that the previous Pope that Lawrence admired had already effectively “vetted” Benitez and was fine with his secret so there was no need for Lawrence to agonize over it.
Lawrence gets what he wants: someone who doubts, who will bring the church further to the left, who is as unpolitical as one can be as a cardinal, and who will allow him to finally retire. The alternative is to blow the whole thing up, harm the church, probably land Tedesco as Pope, and drag on for ages before Lawrence could go.
There would have been more of a moral dilemma (of sorts) if Lawrence had been the first to discover the secret, but he wasn’t.
Also Ben Davidson and Fran Tarkenton. Tarkenton was the quarterback for the Giants at the time. Davidson was on the Raiders. I’m pretty sure there were several other pros in the movie that might have been known in 1970 but are forgotten now.
I watched the film last night and enjoyed it. I think that your interpretation of Lawrence’s struggle is very good.
I was happy to see that the twist wasn’t that Lawrence had masterminded all of the conflicts in order to get himself elected. I am still not 100% sure if Tremblay did pay off other Cardinals for their votes.
Maybe. I read through some of the IMDb trivia. They were indeed filming during Apollo 11; however, someone noted that the phase of the moon shown in the movie was not the same as when they were on the surface. I can neither confirm nor deny.
Agreed. I’m nearing the end of season three (when Wayne Rogers and McLean Stevenson left), so I thought this would be a good time to revisit the movie, while the original characters are still fresh in my head.
Alan Alda is on record saying he wanted to play a different kind of Hawkeye than Donald Sutherland. You can still see where he borrowed a bit of his characterization from his film counterpart, as all of the TV actors did to varying degrees. But even Radar (the only main role played by the same actor) doesn’t feel the same. Of course a network TV show can’t have the same feel as an R-rated movie, and Gelbart, Alda, et al clearly had a different vision than Altman did. Which is neither a good nor bad thing, just different.
I kind of wish I’d been able to see the movie without having had the characters defined for me by the TV show first. Did anyone here see it in its original run, and do you remember what you thought of it then?
Saw Warfare.
Thought it was okay, AMAZING sound and visuals, but it seems all sizzle no steak.
There’s almost zero characterization, except maybe that’s the point? But it’s really hard to get invested in a story when somebody is injured and you literally have no idea who that is. They spend 20 minutes just standing around at the start, which is when you should be establishing characters but they barely do anything with that. When you have to refer to the actors names and not character names in podcasts discussing the story to keep things clear that really is a bad sign.
I did, and it may have been the only time I have seen it. I don’t have any firm recollections of it (it was 55 years ago, and I was 15). But I do remember thinking when the TV show came out that they had really watered down the characters, and not caring that much for the show for that reason.
Oh, you mean a typical Robert Altman movie? Yeah. I think I’ve mentioned Gosford Park is one of my favorite movies (directed by Altman), and every single time I watch it (maybe ten times now?) I notice something I didn’t notice before.
Same for me. It took a season or so to adjust, and then I just accepted the TV show for what it was.
I did. I thought it was hilarious, and I chose to model my life after Elliot Gould: grew a mustache and a fondness for Hawaiian shirts.
It was also the first time I’d ever heard an “F-bomb” in a movie.
Yeah, it just kind of slipped in. I don’t think it was intentional. While not the first f-word in a movie, it was probably one of the first popular movies with one.
While it may seem crazy that Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould tried to get Altman kicked off the movie, when you watch it and picture what they saw while filming, it looks disastrous. Without the announcements to sort of tie the whole thing together, it just looks like a bunch of unrelated scenes.
They had no idea the edit would come out so well.
I’m pretty sure he did. We did learn that he’d offered Bellini the SoS job in return for his support, which involved the mention of simony.. The bit I’m not sure of is whether the late Pope had actually dismissed Tremblay, or if he just told the other guy afterwards that he had in order to put his plans in motion.
On a recent trip to Austin for SQLSaturday, I watched two moveis:
Moana 2
Hunger Gamed: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
Moana 2: Almost none of the magic from the first movie made it into the second movie. Missing were the strong, powerful vocals that enveloped you during the first movie, and Dwayne Johnson’s personality was super-flat here. Your kids might enjoy this (if they are little) but the adult crossover appeal is gone.
Hunger Games: I don’t know why they decided they needed to write this story or make this movie, which follows the development of Coriolanus Snow from a broke entitled asshole to a rich entitled asshole. Rachel Ziegler’s voice shines through with some nice songs and she is adorable and charming, but you realize at the end that while you may have thought this to be a story about a good guy who slowly breaks bad due to circumstances, he was really just a dick all along.
The Insider (1999). If there’s anything better than watching a great movie for the first time, it’s doing so when you know virtually nothing about it and watch the story unfold. This is a very engrossing drama with fine acting by some big names, beautifully scripted, and directed by Michael Mann.
Edit: The blurred stuff below isn’t really a spoiler, but in the spirit of allowing others to enjoy this without any prior knowledge if you don’t already know about this movie, I’ve blurred it. It just gives you a very general idea of what the movie is about.
Russell Crowe is a research scientist and VP at Brown & Williamson, a tobacco giant, which fires him when he opposes their practice of chemically enhancing the addiction potential of nicotine. Al Pacino is a producer at 60 Minutes who tries to entice him to be a whistleblower despite the confidentiality agreement he signed. Christopher Plummer plays Mike Wallace.
Based on a true story, this has some of the same vibes as Dark Waters, this time with B&W and Big Tobacco in general replacing DuPont as the evil corporation that shatters the life of a lone hero.
Very highly recommended.
Money.
I was surprised to find it a more nuanced story than that overall, although Viola Davis’s scenery-chewing villain did its best to stomp on all nuance. I viewed it as someone who wanted to be a good guy but who breaks bad due to the fact that he was raised to be an entitled asshole and didn’t know how to be anything else.
I saw in in 1970 and thought it was hilarious. The operating room sequences were a bit shocking (lots of spurting blood) and the humor was undeniably mean-spirited, but to an anarchically-minded 18 year old, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. And nobody believed that it was really about Korea. Just look at how the characters were groomed and dressed.
I was skeptical when I heard it was going to be a TV series because it would have to be watered down and family-friendly. The first couple of seasons were weak, I thought, but once the series took on its own life I accepted and enjoyed it. People I know who didn’t see the movie first but loved the series almost always hate the movie once they’ve seen it.
Robert Altman’s son Michael wrote the lyrics to “Suicide Is Painless” in five minutes and since then has made millions of dollars off it, as did Johnny Mandel, who wrote the tune. Altman himself was only paid $70,000 to direct the movie.
Regarding Altman, M*A*S*H.
One thing that made Altman’s movies of that era “dense” was the overlapping dialogue. People talked over each other a lot. This was not common at the time. It also had to be hard on the actors who were probably used to “Okay, once you say your line, then I’ll start my line.” way of acting.
The decline of such things in his later movies made them far less interesting.
I saw M*A*S*H. in the theater when it first came out with a “tough guy” relative who squirmed and closed his eyes during the bloody scenes. I had no problem.
My favorite real football player in the movie was Ben Davidson. Infamous “cheap shot” player for the Raiders for many years. He started the year 1961 with a Rose Bowl win and ended it with an NFL Championship under Vince Lombardi. He played in Super Bowl II against his old team and lost.
He did a decent amount of other acting, including one of the heavies in Conan the Barbarian. He also played a bouncer in Behind the Green Door. Apparently the only cast member of either M*A*S*H or Conan that appeared in that film.
He was probably famous to a wider audience from the old Miller Lite commercials. “All we need is one pin Rodney.”
Midas Man
A disappointing biopic about Brian Epstein. Cheap production values (they sprung for the licensing of two Gerry and the Pacemakers songs) and weak performances. The script ignores 50 years of Beatles research and reappraisal and is essentially the same story that might appear in a 1970s TV movie. It checks the boxes of all of the well-worn tales about Epstein and the Beatles, even the ones that have been shown to be inaccurate. If I wasn’t stuck on a plane, I would not have watched the whole thing.