60 - M*A*S*H*

    A group of military surgeons and nurses have fun goofing off and pulling pranks at their base, in between the time they spend patching up the wounded.
    As a child, while my parents would fall asleep, I would hear some of the shows they would watch.  There would be Cheers, sometimes Taxi, and usually MASH.  I was too young to appreciate it.  A few months ago, I started to watch the series, and I’ve come to like it.  It’s not spectacular, but it’s very enjoyable, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single show like it.  It’s got such a strange blend of comedy and tragic dramatic themes.  The longer I watch it, I find it more affecting.
    So I’ve been wanting to watch the movie.  It came out two years prior to the TV show.  I knew that only Radar was retained from the movie, so I thought there would be a little bit of a learning curve.
    I hate to say it, but I didn’t care for this.  Most of the characters are poorly drawn.  There’s no actual plot, it’s just a slice of life, and even the heavier themes about the absurdity of war are effectively nonexistent.
    One character seems to have an arc, and it doesn’t seem to be much of one.
    During the first season of the TV show, there’s an episode where the camp is living in fear of a sniper nearby.  None of this tension is present in this movie.
    I know that Altman likes to mimic the normal rhythms of human interaction by making his characters talk over each other.  I liked that when I saw it done in Rope.  But here, it’s nearly constant, and it stops adding to a sense of reality.  It mostly just gets annoying.