through early morning light i see

MASH: the dialogue is overlapping because war is hell DO YOU SEE?

the pantsing of the xtian is the big flaw in the film, i think -- and generally the way the pranks are conceived, and then perfectly unfold... it undermines the "war is actually stupid chaos" line, since hawkeye and trapper john are also waging war (their stunts should also sometimes just dissolve into inanition)

i love the music, and the way donald sutherland plays with his accent

BUD CORT! I forgot he was in it.

funny how the carefully artless looseness comes across quite stylised now

they fail to keep the kid from conscription

imo it was important for them to win a lot; for the peace-y hipsters to be right. the sexism is prob the worst thing abt the flick.

"what do think i'm running? an english boarding school?"

^^^that was ages ago but i forgot to post it

actually yes it's the humiliation of hotlips which is the horrible element, isn't it? and sally kellerman plays her so cartoonish anyway -- robert duvall has a kind of pinched bigot's dignity

the surgery scenes are pretty good -- a bit static and mild i guess after four further decades of gory hospital emergency drama, so quite hard to recapture how they must have seemed in 1970

haha acc.sutherland (acc.wikipedia) he was the only person on-set not using drugs (and altman never worked with him again)

jesus last supper tableaux

the sexual attitudes are definitely more palateable as a document of a moment than as any kind of manifesto -- the hippy freelove moment portrayed as scampish utopian alternative (except the hippy freelove female was getting a bit fed up of the manipulative bullying that the hippy freelove male found he was rather relishing, round about 1969: whence second-wave feminism getting into its political stride c.1970, as a sharp pushback -- i don't think this film would have been made the same way two years later)

even so, there's likeable glimpses of a more pragmatic sexual beatnikish camaraderie, not so much in the main story as in the ease the actors and actresses have around one another, when the camera isn't directly on them -- a sort of make-the-best-of-it sense of unshockable semi-undeluded destructured fuckbuddyish friendliness, which premuably IS the beatnik ideal, hard enough to catch on-screen (and not exactly sustainedly achieved by actual real beatniks or any of similar mind since)

(i never read catch-22: is that in the same ballpark as this?)

forgotten how boring the football section mostly is :(

Roger Bowen's line-reading -- given the circumstances under which he delivers it -- on, "Well, then, goddammit, Hot Lips, resign your goddamned commission!" is GOAT territory for me.

I think it's "morning fog" mark s

(i never read catch-22: is that in the same ballpark as this?)

yes btw. haven't read it since '93 when young & bushy-tailed, seemed amazing at the time but history has done a lot of things since then/I'm wiser maybe

oh probably i am useless at songwords

this passage, the famous one, earns its place imo

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.