![]() ![]() Stewart still doesn’t give Milo the same wacky treatment that Jon Voight did in the 1970 movie. And it’s hard to not like Daniel David Stewart as Milo Minderbinder, a mess-hall cook who parlays his access to luxury goods into full-blown corporate capitalism. Kyle Chandler plays the evil Colonel Cathcart as a kind of Coach Taylor from hell. In the supporting role of General Schiesskopf, he fumes and twitches in full O Brother, Where Art Thou? mode. He directs the horrifying final flight sequence in the final episode. The miniseries features a lot of scenes of them taking outdoor showers under the pleasant Mediterranean sun, as though they were prepping for a dance number in Mamma Mia Here We Go Again instead of a bombing raid on German fortifications in Italy.Ĭlooney himself seems to understand the source material best. The actors who play his fellow “Merry Band” members are largely nondescript, and equally handsome. ![]() When he emotes, you can definitely see him acting. He plays Yossarian with an undefinable East Coast accent. The TV adaptation of Catch-22, on the other hand, stars Christopher Abbott, a handsome gentleman to be sure, but no comic genius. Alan Arkin played Yossarian with a kind of manic tsuris. Just looking at him gives you the jitters. But that movie was at least recognizable as a comedy, with a cast that included Bob Newhart, Buck Henry, and Charles Grodin. His book had the early buzz of the counterculture, which thoroughly informed Mike Nichols’ weird film adaptation of the book in 1970. We live in incredibly self-serious times, sort of the opposite of the climate in which Heller wrote Catch-22. So how are we supposed to drop our jaws at Clooney’s handsome-looking but ultimately pointless goody-two-shoes book report? Anti-war satires hold no surprises when we’ve all seen M.A.S.H., Full Metal Jacket, and Three Kings. It’s hard to do an elegy for the Greatest Generation after Band Of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan and Heartbreak Ridge and The Sands of Iwo Jima. The George Clooney-produced six-hour-long Catch-22 miniseries, which feels like 15 hours, is now flopping around like a dead fish on Hulu. Shocking!īut it’s a lot less shocking to say that now, with WWII 80 years in the rearview, and nearly everyone who fought in it dead. Military, he said, was just another money-grubbing bureaucracy. But Heller dared suggest that even defeating Hitler was a pointless existential task. WWII, in our imagination, was a titanic struggle against the greatest evil in human history. When Joseph Heller published Catch-22 in 1961, the end of World War II was closer in time than 9-11 is to us now. ![]()
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