Catch-22 has long been my go-to answer for “best novel you’ve read” – mostly b/c it’s the one novel in the Canon that is enjoyable and i actually remember reading.
This is a great look into Henry’s views of money & power and how he worked it into the film (which was already pretty cynical). Real quick read:
I thought Nichols’ Catch-22 was hilarious and couldn’t understand why Altman’s completely inferior M*A*S*H was the bigger hit. I even greatly prefer Catch-22 to The Graduate, which has some flashy direction but is otherwise rather uninteresting. I don’t think Nichols or Henry were all that interested in the counterculture when they made that movie, and couldn’t really relate to the genuinely countercultural guy who wrote the novel. The result is a completely boring protagonist whose appeal to multiple generations of Robinson women is a mystery. When they initially brought the film to college campuses the kids all complained that it wasn’t about Vietnam, so how it eventually became emblematic of the “generation gap” is another one of those oddities.
Catch-22 has long been my go-to answer for “best novel you’ve read” – mostly b/c it’s the one novel in the Canon that is enjoyable and i actually remember reading.
This is a great look into Henry’s views of money & power and how he worked it into the film (which was already pretty cynical). Real quick read:
http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2020/01/bucks-scene-not-joseph-hellers/
I thought Nichols’ Catch-22 was hilarious and couldn’t understand why Altman’s completely inferior M*A*S*H was the bigger hit. I even greatly prefer Catch-22 to The Graduate, which has some flashy direction but is otherwise rather uninteresting. I don’t think Nichols or Henry were all that interested in the counterculture when they made that movie, and couldn’t really relate to the genuinely countercultural guy who wrote the novel. The result is a completely boring protagonist whose appeal to multiple generations of Robinson women is a mystery. When they initially brought the film to college campuses the kids all complained that it wasn’t about Vietnam, so how it eventually became emblematic of the “generation gap” is another one of those oddities.