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DVD Catch-22
Joseph Heller's novel was one of the seminal literary events of the 1960s, but Mike Nichols's film ultimately proved too literal in its attempt to bring Heller's fragmented fiction to the screen. Still, Nichols, who made this on the heels of The Graduate, seemed the ideal candidate to tackle this Buck Henry adaptation. The story deals with bomber pilot Yossarian (Alan Arkin), who has flown enough missions to get out of World War II but can't because the number of missions needed for discharge keeps getting raised. The satire and absurdity of Heller's book get lost in Nichols's effort to give screen time to the members of his all-star cast, which includes Orson Welles, Jon Voight, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Richard Benjamin, and Martin Sheen, among others. --Marshall Fine
A terrible adaptation of a classic that deserves better.
I was tempted to give this movie one star just to offset the "stellar" reviews already given. But that's not fair because this is really a 2-star movie. I loved the book. I also realize that there is no possible way to convey the sum contents of such a convoluted absurdist story as is presented in the book. But PLEASE!
First, Alan Arkin's performance is pathetic. I'm not sure if he was directed to act like a 15 year old in a school play or if he's just a crappy actor (haven't seen him in any other major roles). Oh well, bad acting and bad direction can be forgiven if the story is solid. It is not. I was abysmally aghast at what they've done to the plot, the characters, the atmosphere.
Any chances for deep characterization for any character besides Yossarian have been destroyed. The story has been utterly drained of humor, many of the pivotal points of the plot have been summarily butchered. When random non-Yossarian character acts irrationally, the movie makes them seem simply to be abject morons instead of possibly-once-thinking human beings trapped in the systemically propogated self-destructive thought-processes of the military bohemeth during a "popular" war.
Cameos by Orsen Wells and Martin Sheen add a glimmer of hope that vanishes as soon as it is appearant that Nochols was only using their star-presence to fill an otherwise undressed screen.
This movie premiered the same year as M*A*S*H*, and yet it seems, in every respect, trying to >BE< M*A*S*H*. Why? The sinister and absurd humor of the book has been bled dry and filled with lack-luster stabs at irony (as if the audience is not smart enough to handle that part on their own).
I understand the difficulty in trying to translate a book like Catch-22 to the screen. I also understand that the "times" will color the production in a way that may not have been anticipated at the time of the books publication or appreciated by the reader/viewer many years later. But I would rather this movie had never been made than to see the story so thoroughly trashed.
Everybody's crazy
Here is a pitchblack satirical comedy about the insanity of war that goes beyond the limits of satire into the realm of disgust. The movie focuses on an air force unit in Italy during WW II and a handful of characters who have become crazy. Yossarian (Alan Arkin) wants out but can't get discharged (that's the Catch-22); Milo (Jon Voight) has turned the war into a means of getting rich; Col. Cathcart (Martin Balsam) is just looking for glory in the Saturday Evening Post; etc., etc. It's a one joke idea: war is insane, and it's looked at from a number of different angles. Most of these angles are hilarious, but after a while it's as if everyone starts saying this isn't enough, like a wild man holding us by the shirtfront demanding that we see, we understand, and thinking that we don't, we couldn't possibly, just piles on the excess. It goes on too long and begins to batter us so much until what was funny and crazy is now just sickening. Like Heller's book, Mike Nichols, the director, doesn't know when to back off.
5 WORDS-CHARLES GRODIN AS "AARFY" AARDVARK!!!!!!!
AM READING BOOK...BOOK GOOD
MUST WATCH MOVIE "AARFY" AARDVARK FAVORITE CHARACTER
WHEN YOSSARIAN PUNCHES HIM, HIS BELLY ABSORBS BLOWS
Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) has a problem with time: he keeps jumping about in his own life, principally between three key scenes. The "present" is a kind of glowing suburban bliss involving a dutiful wife, large house, and presidency of the local Lions; the "past" is being a prisoner of World War II and experiencing the firebombing of Dresden from the wrong side; the "future" takes place in a glass dome on the planet Tralfamadore, to which Billy has been mysteriously spirited along with the woman of his fantasies (Montana Wildhack, played by Valerie Perrine). It isn't meant to make too much sense, since the point is to represent a man (and a century) that has witnessed things too unbearable for a wholly sane person to make sense of. In fact author Kurt Vonnegut's anguished cry on the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Michael Sacks - Ron Leibman Director(s): George Roy Hill DVD Release Date: Released the 25 May 2004 Usually ships in 6 to 7 days
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Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made, Stanley Kubrick's cold-war classic is the ultimate satire of the nuclear age. Dr. Strangelove is a perfect spoof of political and military insanity, beginning when General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a maniacal warrior obsessed with "the purity of precious bodily fluids," mounts his singular campaign against Communism by ordering a squadron of B-52 bombers to attack the Soviet Union. The Soviets counter the threat with a so- called "Doomsday Device," and the world hangs in the balance while the U.S. president (Peter Sellers) engages in hilarious hot-line negotiations with his Soviet counterpart. Sellers also plays a British military attaché and the mad bomb-maker Dr. Strangelove; George C. Scott is outrageously frantic as... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Stanley Kubrick - David Naylor DVD Release Date: Released the 27 February 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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It's set during the Korean War, in a mobile army surgical hospital. But no one seeing M*A*S*H in 1970 confused the film for anything but a caustic comment on the Vietnam War; this is one of the counterculture movies that exploded into the mainstream at the end of the '60s. Director Robert Altman had labored for years in television and sporadic feature work when this smash-hit comedy made his name (and allowed him to create an astonishing string of offbeat pictures, culminating in the masterpiece Nashville). Altman's style of cruel humor, overlapping dialogue, and densely textured visuals brought the material to life in an all-new kind of war movie (or, more precisely, antiwar movie). Audiences had never seen anything like it: vaudeville routines played against spurting... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Donald Sutherland - Elliott Gould Director(s): Robert Altman DVD Release Date: Released the 08 January 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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One of the key movies of the 1970s, when exciting, groundbreaking, personal films were still being made in Hollywood, Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest emphasized the humanistic story at the heart of Ken Kesey's more hallucinogenic novel. Jack Nicholson was born to play the part of Randle Patrick McMurphy, the rebellious inmate of a psychiatric hospital who fights back against the authorities' cold attitudes of institutional superiority, as personified by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). It's the classic antiestablishment tale of one man asserting his individuality in the face of a repressive, conformist system--and it works on every level. Forman populates his film with memorably eccentric faces, and gets such freshly detailed and spontaneous work from his ensemble... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Milos Forman DVD Release Date: Released the 24 September 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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