4077

It all started with a link. A link to a website that streams dozens of classic television shows constantly. And, in my boredom, I made the fatal mistake of clicking on M*A*S*H. When I was younger, it was known as the boring war show my mom watched. Now it's my new obsession.

The bad thing is, I can't pause the series online, so while I search for some freaking place in this damned city that has it for rent, I figured I would watch the movie (that shares the name but not the asterisks), that was inspired by the book, MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, but also inspired the TV series.

In short, MASH follows doctors Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce and John McIntyre through their daily shenanigans and life-saving on site during the Korean War. There are other characters (with some pretty good nicknames i.e. Radar, Hot Lips), too, who all add to the black comedy of the film (and series).

For the most part watching the movie, I was utterly confused. Why were lines of dialogue running over each other to the point of completely not being to understand any of it? Who was the twelve-year-old in the O.R. who slipped up and then began to cry like a little baby? Why did the whole 4077 assist with the dentist's suicide? (Like, they even threw a freaking farewell party.) Why did McIntyre suddenly punch some other guy in a closet? Why did Donald Sutherland sound like he had been drinking all day? These questions remain unanswered.

Speaking of Donald Sutherland, who played Hawkeye, he was so totally unlikable in the movie compared to Alan Alda's Hawkeye in the series, I could have cried. Like, Movie Hawkeye is such a dick. TV Hawkeye is more sassy.

The writing in the movie was also surpassed by the series, which is a little strange considering only one guy, Ring Lardner, Jr., wrote the screenplay for the movie, while over a dozen different people were involved in writing the episodes for M*A*S*H in the first season alone, including Alda himself. Usually those result in the opposite effects.

So I definitely like the series better, which is no surprise considering I love Alan Alda, yo.

I mean, effing look at him!

But it's also quite terrible because it's freaking eleven seasons long and no freaking video store in my area seems to have the seasons at all (which, I'll admit, is a good thing because I should be studying).

Picky, Picky

Ah, the great feeling of finding an article about movies that I can simply write about instead of having to think of my own original idea. That's the good stuff. More specifically: “How We Transformed Into Nitpick Nation”, an editorial by Dalton Ross, published in Entertainment Weekly in the February 22 issue.

“HWTINN” describes that, in the past couple of decades, television has gotten way more prolific and original. America can't just go back to Father Knows Best and Three's Company for their weekly entertainment (although the latter is some great shit) because they've already seen The Sopranos and Lost (and you can never unseen Lost). We're now programmed to watch these hard-hitting dramas and others like them and pick apart everything and find flaws and then comment on message boards so that everyone else will see the flaws too.

Now while Ross focuses on television dramas such as The Following and The Walking Dead, I can't really go further into that because (1) this is a blog about movies and (2) the only TV I watch includes tight clothing and Derek Hough (well those are the only things I pay attention to anyway).

But take, for instance, the dark days of my sixth grade year of school. Before Twilight was an ill-acted movie with an annoyingly-large fan base of emotionally-unstable preteens and middle-aged women, it was just an semi-popular book among middle-schools (oh my God, sorry for all the hyphens), one of which was me. I mean, I liked the series until half-way through New Moon, when it just got so Goddamn boring that I skipped a few hundred pages and got to the part with Edward and an unconscious Bella in the Volturi's lair in Italy. As the couple is leaving, Bella notices a group of tourists coming down and it's obvious (except to twelve-year-old me because I had to reread the freaking thing like three times before I got it): the evil Italian vampires pretend to give tours to attract people whom they then kill and feed on.

Once I understood this, I couldn't get over how ridiculous it was. What? Nobody had reported a loved-one missing, gone on a trip to Europe and never come back? Left the hotel for a tour and didn't make it to breakfast the next morning? These disappearances haven't been investigated with no correlation found between them that all of the people who are missing went such after telling someone they were going on some tour in the deep depths of Italy? But then I realized that the whole freaking story was ridiculous. I mean, Twilight centers around a girl who found love with a freaking vampire and must keep his and his family's secret, along with her friend's, because oh guess what he's a wolf.

A year or so ago, Young Alec Baldwin sucked me into watching Beetlejuice. The title character lives in Netheworld, and to be summoned his name must be said three times. When he and a young girl named Lydia first meet, she asks his name but Beetlejuice is like, “I can't tell you because then you might tell your friends and they'll be running around, shouting it everywhere.” So then he goes on this whole shebang, acting out his name with charade-like gestures, until Lydia finally guesses correctly.

Like, okay? So this chick can still tell all of her friends what his name is and they can summon him themselves. Why did he have to act it out? If he's that concerned with it then maybe he just shouldn't tell people his name. But yeah, it's a movie about “a recently deceased young couple who become ghosts haunting their former home and an obnoxious, devious 'bio-exorcist' named [Beetlejuice] from the underworld who tries to scare away the new inhabitants permanently.” (Wikipedia and sorry I'm so lazy).

Ross ends his article with admitting that he “should be happy that the medium offers so many exciting alternatives” and declares that he'll “do better” with ignoring some of television's discrepancies. I say that these writers need to get their shit together and also that I should've never read Twilight.