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wellntruly · 8 months

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M*A*S*H (not that one)

I went to Manderley again--rewatched the Altman M*A*S*H. Completely worrying pattern, being nearly exactly one year after the first time I saw it. If I end up watching M*A*S*H (1970) in the last weeks of August every year that’s going to wind me up on some sort of list. By women. And they’ll be right.

I hadn’t known at first, but the eventual realization was as inevitable as anything in the movie, a sort of regrettable slide of “no, I’m gonna.” Why does anyone do the things they do in M*A*S*H. Why does anyone do M*A*S*H. Both of these questions don’t have question marks because it’s just already happening.

There are some attenuating circumstances, sure. War, weather, Robert Altman, a friend, a kind of numb seeking for the sword of time that will pierce your skin. Elliott Gould, probably, also.

If you embark on a Hot ‘70s Summer, you don’t actually leave it. Winter just falls, and you go into that mode of the ‘70s, bundling up in inadequate materials against the cold, and still somehow, feel cozy. But before that turn, those still, hot weeks hanging hazy at the top of the year, the most Hot ‘70s Summer, 1970, the most ‘70 movie to ever exist: Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H.

I was an hour and thirty minutes into it before I remembered with a little twitch that at some point, in the beginning, this was set in the 1950s. Hilarious to recall. Maybe it’s the 1950s in Richard Hooker’s book about his time in a Korean War field hospital, also titled M*A*S*H; I do not know. I simply know it is not the 1950s here, it is well 1969 precisely, at filming, and America has just achieved its dismal high water mark for the number of troops currently deployed in Vietnam. This is Vietnam. It’s not Korea, it’s not Japan, it’s the crest of the Vietnam War in a mountain park in California, and a nation knew that immediately, knew that with everything they had, which was mostly nihilism.

M*A*S*H (1970) dir. Robert Altman is probably the most historically specific film object I have ever seen. You cannot navigate, valuably, anything this movie is doing outwith its historical and cultural context. Some works of art are timeless, and on the other end there is M*A*S*H, made OF time, yanked out of the fabric of it with film cameras rolling and a sound mix that says: all of it, and that act winds up changing what will happen--historically, culturally--as time continues on.

M*A*S*H is its time. It meets America head-on, and leers. It’s not that it breaks something in the culture, it just reflects back something that was already broken, the people already scarring over. M*A*S*H only works if you’re watching it knowing that. Not to be didactic. Something the movie resolutely refuses to be, at any moment, which causes audiences today, removed from the milieu, to question, alarmed, do they know? Do they know that they're awful? Oh yes. Do they also take delight in their being awful? Oho yes. We are all broken. :).

The tagline of this movie, still on a lot of the posters you’ll see, was “M*A*S*H gives a D*A*M*N.” This is so curious to me. It is either a straight up lie, or a key. This would appear a movie predominately peopled with characters who seem, in kind of post-modern incongruity with their surroundings, almost implacably non-committal. Removed, irreverent, careless. Sure it turns callous, sure in trying to deflect the stupid brutality of war they often just end up turning brutal stupidity onto others. A catalog of non-definite acts, something to mask the desperation.

I think a lot about this one Chris Fleming video where he said something like, “ever since my parents grasped that a movie can still be good even if it doesn’t make you feel good, they’ve been going absolutely ham at the independent theater.” Realizing this really does open up your world, and also gets you on lists (I deserve to be there!!). This is how lightly sweating in a slowly turning fan at the end of summer you think, mm, gonna watch M*A*S*H…

Why? Vibes. But the vibes are bad. Yeah I know. But they’re also….I think the phrase I used in a message to the friend I first watched this movie with, as soon as those opening credits started playing over me again, was “badly enchanting.” There’s something about the way it looks, the way it sounds. Khaki-colored sunlight and dirt and those Japanese covers of old standards playing through a PA system. That Altman calling card layered up dialogue where they somehow arrange it just-so so that you still hear the parts you’re supposed to, god.

This is how you end up saying, oh this movie is not like, a nice time, I occasionally quite dislike the sensation of watching it, and yet also, sometimes it's just what I want to watch. I don’t know, it’s AltM*A*S*H. One minute I’m thinking, incredible that you thought this was funny, and then the next I’m like, you are the only people who understand this particular thing I think is funny. Primarily in that though it’s three things: 1. unhinged heavily metatextual opening and closing pacing & especially this narrating voice at the end just being like “welp, that was that” and rapidly rehashing clips of the cast at ever increasing speed, 2. two Bud Cort moments, 3. GaryBurghoffRadarO’Reilly.

This is the juncture where I get off actually, because if I keep going in this mode about the completely insane thing that somehow happened next, to M*A*S*H and to me, M*A*S*H (1972-1983), we'd be here 10 years and I would die, whichever comes first.

But I will tell you one thing! Just one thing!!! If I’m in what, 1972, much like I was 2022, and they’re like, there’s gonna be a M*A*S*H TV show, and the one person who will be the same is that kid Radar, I’m like oh, of course, the most character who can travel between worlds performance of all time.

#here is a thousand words on the film “M*A*S*H”#M*A*S*H (1970)#Robert Altman #M*A*S*H hours #Wellntruly's Watch Log

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wellntruly · 9 months

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The 4077 Film Festival

I watched three (plus) movies that they watched on M*A*S*H; this is my book report.

“Marlene Dietrich is back in town.” / 2x24 ‘A Smattering of Intelligence’

Okay so this one is actually just referenced in dialogue, not a specific film we watch them watch, but it happened that I watched two of Josef von Sternberg’s Marlene Dietrich films right before starting the M*A*S*H fest programming in earnest, so prologue, baby, prologue!

I had moved Shanghai Express (1932) up my watch list ever since it kicked off the Little Gold Men podcast’s Pride month Oscar flashbacks series this year, reminding me that I really wanted to see another Marlene Dietrich movie. Just stepping forward a few years into the 1930s also felt good, felt right after watching just so many (all) of Buster Keaton’s movies from the 1920s. Hot Chronological Summer!

I ended up watching both it and Morocco, because Shanghai Express SO enchanted me. Morocco (1930) is the one where Dietrich dresses in a tuxedo and steals a kiss from a woman, but Shanghai Express actually felt more pervasively, albeit subliminally queer to me, perhaps because she and her fellow sapphically inclined co-star Anna May Wong were rumored to have had an affair at some point. There’s just something about the scenes of the two of them lounging in a train car together just listening to music or silently playing cards and coolly eyeing anyone who comes in that says ‘gay culture.’ The actual romance plot is heterosexual of course, but it was wild how much more I was into that relationship than I was her one with Gary Cooper in Morocco, a much more famous and famously handsome star than [looks him up yet again] Clive Brook, and yet Brook all the WAY for me, girl. If we have to choose between Marlene Dietrich’s male love interests in von Sternberg pictures.

Anyway in the second season M*A*S*H episode ‘A Smattering of Intelligence’, Radar is engaged in a bit of hoodwinking (the 4077th’s second favorite pastime after flirting), and to indicate that he’s surreptitiously swapped some papers to further confuse some spy vs. spy antics going on, lights a cigarette and strikes a leg-up pose silhouetted in the doorway, causing spy #2 to ask if that’s the signal, and Hawkeye to remark, “Either that, or Marlene Dietrich is back in town,” and honestly describing Radar as being in drag as a famous bisexual woman from the ‘30s is not necessarily the least accurate description of Radar’s ideal gender that I can think of.

Should you watch Shanghai Express? Babe yes, so moody in the best way. The play of light and shadow! This mysterious cast of characters all thrown together on a train! The Chinese civil war??? SHANGHAI EXPRESS.

Should you watch Morocco? Also looks so so beautiful, but if you only have room in your life for one Marlene movie, easy choice it's the above.

Blood and Sand (1941) / 3x05 ‘O.R.’

And now we reach the movies they actually watch on the show, although the first is a slight feint: this one we only hear. Early in the third season episode ‘O.R.’, recognizing that they’re all going to be working through the night, Radar asks Henry if he should pipe the audio from the movie in over the PA system, and Henry approves of this. I IMMEASURABLY approve of this, and think hearing the sound of old movie dialogue and Spanish guitar playing half muffled overhead as they operate is one of the most spellbinding atmospheres this show ever captured.

But the interesting thing about the choice of Blood and Sand for this episode, is that what this movie was most known for was actually its bold Technicolor visuals. Reportedly, director Rouben Mamoulian would carry around spray paint with him so he could change the color of props at a moment’s notice, and was also known to just paint shadows onto the walls sometimes if he couldn’t get the effect he wanted with light alone. The efforts of Mamoulian and his crew nabbed them the Academy Award for Best Cinematography: Color for 1941 (this was the era where there were two cinematography categories for color and black & white; ran until the 1960s actually!), as well as a nomination for Art Direction.

Though the film got no other notices and somewhat mixed reviews overall, Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth were big deal movie stars, and their star-power is probably what contributed to much of this movie’s commercial success. When Father Mulcahy, hearing a scene playing over the speaker, asks what this is, Henry just states the title and their names. From another table, Hawkeye adds as a piece of description: “The Frank and Hot Lips of Old Seville.”

As it happens, Hawkeye’s joke is not so far off really! Tyrone Power is playing a passionate dumb matador married to a beautiful and innocent Linda Darnell (secret stalwart of the M*A*S*H programming, she's in two of these!), but gets swept up in a tumultuous affair with a powerful temptress played by Rita Hayworth. Something I learned watching Blood and Sand is that when Loretta Swit is playing Margaret in glimmering, half-lidded seduction mode, a big loose enticing smile on her lips, she is absolutely channeling Rita Hayworth in movies like this. And given the way Blood and Sand goes (I am so sure you can guess), Hawkeye would seem to be implying that Margaret is fully capable of destroying Frank’s whole hapless married ass.

Verisimilitude Corner: What plays over the speakers is 100% a scene in Blood and Sand, but I believe that the Spanish guitar I so love is actually lifted from a different part of the score and layered in with this particular Power & Hayworth dialogue. It creates a much more distinctive auditory profile to weave through the background of this scene; I completely understand why they would have done this.

Should you watch Blood and Sand? Naw, it’s sure got a look, but story and construction aren’t exactly anything to write home about

Leave Her to Heaven (1945) / 3x18 ‘House Arrest’

The first thing I noticed about Leave Her to Heaven should have occurred to me earlier: 20th Century Fox. All three of these titles turn out to be Fox movies, making all the sense in the world, as M*A*S*H the show was produced by the Fox television arm, after the success of the feature branch’s surprise hit, M*A*S*H the Altman film. Licensing clips of movies is definitely easier when they are also your movies.

The next framing element we need to discuss is that once more, this film was known for its vivid Technicolor cinematography, again the winner of the Academy Award for Cinematography: Color its year! And yet, what they’re watching on M*A*S*H is definitely Leave Her to Heaven, and definitely in black & white. Come to think of it, they all are.

I have tried to figure out what’s going on here, and in the process have learned a lot more about the mechanics both physical and economic of Technicolor film, but have not come up with any definitive explanation (yet), just an educated guess. Which is, as it so often is, especially with the Army: cost. Shooting Technicolor film was outrageously expensive, involving huge cameras that you had to rent by the day from the Technicolor company, through which you would run three strips of film that were treated in different ways, so would respond to light and then dye differently (yes they dyed the film! incredible! are you seeing why it was SO ‘SPENSIVE), and then they’d all be layered together, et voilà: the richer-than-life colors you see in Technicolor films from the 30s-50s.

And as a side product this process also resulted in: a black & white negative. Now I have not yet found anyone confirming this, but my suspicion is that the studios would also make some copies off this negative that were not run through the pricey dye process, and those black & white reels would have been available for cheap if you were, say, the U.S. Army, looking for a discounted way to distract for a couple hours the people you’ve sent to fight a war from the fact that you’ve sent them to fight a war. I think it’s a good theory! But if anyone has actual info PLEASE let me know, I’m so so interested in what was going on here.

But meanwhile: in the third season M*A*S*H episode ‘House Arrest’, Hawkeye, on the titular house arrest, learns that Gene Tierney, striking in any color scheme, is in the movie they have that week, and is ready to move Heaven & Earth, or at least Father Mulcahy, to be able to see her. What Hawkeye does not know at this moment, nor would anyone watching this episode who has not seen John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven, is that it also predominantly takes place in SMALL TOWN MAINE. I love the idea of M*A*S*H writers putting this easter egg in here, winking “and this will be one for the Criterion crowd :)”, also predicting the emergence of the Criterion Collection ten years later.

Verisimilitude Corner: For reasons I cannot fathom, the Leave Her to Heaven clips playing on the wall of the Swamp are happening all out of order. The first scene we see set at a table takes place in the early middle of the film, then we cut way back to the beginning portion in New Mexico, before swinging all the way to a piece in the last act. There is no wedding scene, no matter what Father Mulcahy says, but it is in fact even funnier that Henry cries at the one he does, as this is actually one of Gene Tierney's big dangerous femme fatale moments (for all that like, they all are—tbc!!), and his weeping at it tracks with how Nurse Able is mystified by his reaction, and earlier he'd complained that after looking away for two seconds he had lost the plot.

Should you watch Leave Her to Heaven? So turns out Leave Her to Heaven is considered one of the few COLOR NOIRS, and it kinda fucks totally. It looks so Douglas Sirk melodrama gorgeous, but with a plot straight out of Gone Girl. And like, you ever seen Vincent Price, young? NOT I. Impossibly tall. Shows up in a literal rain storm in the desert. Martin Scorsese has said this is one of his favorite movies—the taste.

My Darling Clementine (1946) / 5x22 ‘Movie Tonight’

And finally, from the Potter era, and from Potter’s heart, comes the fifth season episode 'Movie Tonight', where we watch really a remarkable amount of the battered copy he’s managed to track down of his favorite film, the John Ford western My Darling Clementine.

Harry Morgan is so cute, the phrase “My Darling Clementine” is so cute—with its lilting song to match—and this episode itself: it’s cute. The film screening works just as Colonel Potter hoped it might: a way to bring his campful of grown theater kids together during a tense patch. It’s very funny how little urging it takes for them to begin using every unplanned projector failure intermission as an opportunity to get up and start doing impressions for each other.

But do you know what’s so intriguing? When I finally watched My Darling Clementine, I found it actually struck a kind of harmony with M*A*S*H’s more melancholy currents. Filmed in 1946, it’s been called one of the first true post-war westerns, and there does feel something sort of haunted in it, this sense of loss. It starts in the song even, which after those first lines you remember is actually about a young woman “lost and gone forever.” So many of the characters are carrying some sort of wound, physicalized in coughs or injuries if not simply the toll clearly being wrought on them by the deaths that keep falling around them.

And then there’s that the two main characters are a brooding, Shakespeare-loving, TB-stricken outlaw surgeon (oh okay!), and their reluctant but-I’ll-do-it new marshal, a mellow, even-voiced, semi-secretly then not at all secretly total fucking weirdo, who caused me to message a M*A*S*H friend part-way in, hey, did we know Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp is Such A BJ. Fun, FUN. That would have been fun in the mess tent.

The film itself isn’t devoid of humor, either, should mention! Particularly around Old West Hunnicutt. It's that element as well as its dreamy bleakness that pairs well with a mobile hospital post in Korean War sitcom purgatory. Colonel Potter, famously, loves horses, so his 2/3rds horse-based explanation for why he loves this movie raises zero questions, but what that doesn’t indicate is you’re also going to get scenes like one where Doc Holiday is having alcohol poured over his hands so he can do emergency surgery on a pair of scrubbed tables in the saloon. This was a good pick, M*A*S*H writers, is what I’m saying.

Should you watch My Darling Clementine? Oh yes if I was not clear: Yes

4077 Film Festival: Closing Remarks

I enjoyed this process so much. I love conceptual experiences and homework, so. Really optimal for me. And I love old movies and I love M*A*S*H and I love their use of old movies on M*A*S*H! Contemporary cultural elements like this do wonders I think to call you to their actual time period, as this show is so much about the 1970s and Vietnam, that remembering it's actually set in the '50s can give me an enjoyable swoop in my stomach as I suddenly fall back further in time. It was the 1950s... The records that show up in 'Your Hit Parade' are all jazz... M*A*S*H: good show, good movie & music supervision.

Up next: NOT Bedtime For Bonzo (1951), a real movie, that also underscores my statement above as I just need to express to you: starred future president Ronald Reagan. M*A*S*H!!!!

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wellntruly · 1 year

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Hello! I so enjoyed your previous film rec I thought I'd try my luck again. What would you suggest to watch when it's very early spring and it still feels like winter so we're still in scarves but the days *are* getting longer and the air *is* warmer. And/or something to watch on a night when you have a fancy hotel room by yourself. <3

Okay I have been THINKING on this one. Very early spring is such a tricky period! But I've finally decided to go with

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) dir. Ang Lee

If you've seen it before, this is a great time to rewatch it (Michelle Yeoh! There's even a new 4K restoration going around in some cinemas!) If you haven't seen it before, such as me around this time last year, this is a great first time to watch it (again: Michelle Yeoh!)

And I think it's suited seasonally to this time of year because it is a BIG SAGA, a genre for when the weather is cold and you want to be indoors and just swept up in a long story. But also, there is such GREEN in this movie, the color of the coming spring. By the time you get to the part in the trees, all this green and the soft sound of leaves, I think in late March that could nearly stop a heart.

It also feels like an elegant choice for watching in a fancy hotel room.

I hope this helps! I love getting these questions!

#replies #bakingblues #Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon #Ang Lee #Wellntruly's Watch Log

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wellntruly · 1 year

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Happy Day After Oscars Day. Honestly, pretty darn sweet & moving time, a lot of that!

Which was really nice for me, because honestly again, this was an odd year for me in movies. While I was going wild on things from 20-70 years ago, just so many of the 2022 releases I reacted to like, sure! A gentleman's 3 out of 5. I eventually petered out at 38 new releases, my lowest number in a few years.

But when I closed off the list yesterday right before the ceremony, fussing again one final time over the order, I found that I did actually care quite a bit about a few of these. There were some that really did reach me, ones that stuck. And so I want to share them with you.

My top ten list for 2022, new ones this time

(Title link is to my original Letterboxd log; apologies that some are basically mini essays and others are like, a line. Keeping it unpredictable!)

1 The Fabelmans, dir. Steven Spielberg

My curse to bear this season has been that all the marketing for The Fabelmans makes it look like the most saccharine celebration of ~the magic of movies~, when in fact it's like, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Disassociator. It's a depiction of movie-making that's ambiguous and complex and in many instances quite dark, if not even quite fucked up, and also it looks like a Steven Spielberg movie: glowy and perfect. And that itself becomes part of what is fucked up and complex and ambiguous in this context! Best scenes are all the ones where, to paraphrase Emily St. James again, you can feel Spielberg's screenwriter, bestie & off-book therapist Tony Kushner, going, huh, do you think we should maybe unpack this a little, Steve?, and Steve going oh, no thanks!, that's what making it a movie is for! This is one of the most legible filmmakers of all time, an incredible skill that often gets discounted as "populism" because he presents scenes and ideas and emotions just so understandably, here presenting scenes and ideas and emotions that sometimes he still doesn't understand, for which he has no answers, just knows that everything that was going on here was important. And that shimmering push & pull between his clarity as a filmmaker and the thorny, confused memory project he's engaged in, seems to either not land (many viewers, of those who even saw it), or land so fucking hard (the few, the brave, the Sammy Fabelman fans).

2 Aftersun, dir. Charlotte Wells

It has a tragic fragmentary dream ballet they keep returning to with incrementally building context like the Christmas party flashback in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, obviously I am heart-sore in love with this one.

3 Hit the Road (جاده خاکی), dir. Panah Panahi

Do you know about the Iranian family road trip movie? It's a jewel. Alive and inventive and funny and beautiful, and tragic, as while the rest of the family is hiding the purpose of their trip to the Turkish border from their irrepressible youngest, we understand all too well why they're taking his older brother there. Of the top five needle drops in film this year, three of them are in this movie. I love everything about the way this film constructs itself. Hit the Road!

4 Everything Everywhere All At Once, dir. Daniels

I ping-ponged between this and Nope for my fourth slot for ages, but finally I just kept thinking about how Dan Kwan accidentally wrote a line from the Nine Days song 'Absolutely (Story of a Girl)', and then decided to just do it a few more times and make it a ~motif~. There is simply such renegade joyousness in the creation of this movie, and it pours through in every earnest unhinged minute. I'm so proud of them!!!!!!

5 Nope, dir. Jordan Peele

I LOVED this. This year's best marriage of ideas and filmmaking, and also somehow about filmmaking without ever feeling too recursive, instead feels frankly--hi to number one--most of all like a '70s Spielberg horror movie. And not for nothing, also several of the best performances of the year. I actually wrote quite a lot on Letterboxd about this one, more there! (spoilers!)

6 Benediction, dir. Terence Davies

The film equivalent of the time someone sent me this message and I replied like this

I mean of course it was for me.

7 Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, dir. Dean Fleischer Camp

A remarkable and wonderful amount of depth packed into this movie about the tiny shell.

8 Decision To Leave (헤어질 결심), dir. Park Chan-wook

The Really Kept Growing On Me champion of the year? I just kept thinking about images and vibes from this movie! THE romantic drama of 2022, understanding that something that is so romance is a pair of sad weirdos surveilling each other.

9 TÁR, dir. Todd Field

And the Meme champion of the year, which is like, you know how at the start of a project it's good to define 'what would success look like for us?'

10 Catherine Called Birdy, dir. Lena Dunham

Do you know how hard it is to make a movie this watchable and winning?? Buoyant with talent and colorful textiles, I laughed, I cried, what a treat! Give it a watch! Give us something like this every year!

*****

And some assorted specific performances and crafts not part of the awards conversation that I'd like to single out too:

Cinematography: Gregory Oke, Aftersun, and Hoyte van Hoytema, Nope

The perspective in Aftersun, I've been talking about it everywhere. You are so rooted to this young girl, who sees a lot, and yet you are also piecing together things that are going on that you can tell she isn't quite seeing. Just gorgeous filmmaking.

And are you KIDDING me with what they pulled off in Nope! Depicting not looking at something immense, but still capturing the immensity of it--the finesse! Also that day-for-night, kiss.

Supporting Actors: Steven Yeun, Nope, and Andrew Scott, Catherine Called Birdy

The best supporting male performance of the year actually won and that's so fucking incredible, LOVE you Ke Huy Quan. But I also want to mention these two guys, who similarly do beauuutiful supporting work in each of their films, rich and dynamic and perfectly elevating the work as a whole at exactly the right moments, with exactly the right notes.

Lead Actor: Jack Lowden, Benediction

The best lead male performance of the year, astonishing, real ones know (my parasocial critic friends who also kept bringing him up)

Supporting Actress: Kristen Stewart, Crimes of the Future

Haha what the fuck <3

Lead Actress: Tang Wei, Decision To Leave

She's so key to the lingering quality this one had on me. A masterclass in rendering an enigmatic performance that somehow isn't opaque. Enchanting, in a magic trick kind of way.

Director: Dean Fleischer Camp, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On

This man deserves more credit for spending seven years carefully making a stop motion movie with his brilliant ex-wife and managing to find exactly this emotional balance of soft and spiky and grieving and hopeful. Lovely work.

Adapted Screenplay: Dan Trachtenberg and Patrick Aison, Prey

Tight, tight, tight action filmmaking. And love you, Amber Midthunder!

Costumes: Alex Bovaird, Nope, and Amela Bakšić, Murina

Two words: Keke Palmer, and those two swimsuits.

#Wellntruly's Watch Log #Oscars

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