When you think George Clooney, chances are the word "s---head" doesn't immediately come to mind. But that's what, and who, he plays in Catch 22 (Stan), the six-part series based on Joseph Heller's 1961 novel about the experiences of an American bombardier in World War II. Scheisskopf – German for s---head – goes from lieutenant to general over the course of the novel, and moves from training inductees in the art of marching to commanding them on the battlefield. In the series, Clooney plays him brilliantly as the embodiment of lug-headed military stupidity. He barks orders that make no sense even to himself. He demands robot-like precision in the marching technique of his charges, wishing he could drill bolts into their legs and attach wires "with exactly three-and-a-half inches of play" so they might finally get the arm movements right. And when someone is stupid enough to provide the answer he demands to a rhetorical question, he punishes them for doing so. Oh he's a Scheisskopf all right. Clooney is clearly one of the key attractions and selling points of the series, which was created by Australians Luke Davies (writer of Candy and Lion) and David Michod (writer-director of Animal Kingdom and War Machine). He's an executive producer and one of three directors (with Ellen Kuras and Grant Heslov) too. But he's not really one of the main actors; he's in the first third of episode one, barking those nonsensical orders on the parade ground, but not in episode two at all – only the first two episodes have been made available for preview – though I suspect (and hope) he will reappear in later ones.<doc-sep>There’s a moment late in Catch-22, as a second world war bomber returns from a mission over Italy, that I realized planes can land with their engines on fire. The plane, smoke trailing its left engine, wobbles to the runway, which seems ridiculous – if the fire is literally at hand, how can it just land normally? But apparently, that’s the way it is. That shot – extraordinary treated as normal, routine marred but not upended by disaster – captures, like many others, the pendulum of contrasts in Catch-22, Hulu’s limited series adaptation of Joseph Heller’s canonical 1961 novel. Executive produced and part-directed by George Clooney (with Ellen Kuras and Grant Heslov), Catch-22 enjoys a jarring cut – the lurch from control to chaos, tranquillity to brutality, upbeat swing music to ominous score, a sunbaked beach to lines like: “His eyes, there was no life flashing before them or anything like that. Just terror.” It’s a book that revels in the absurdity of war and impotent bureaucracy, which on the screen translates into an exquisitely filmed, disorienting send-up of our ability to rationalize insanity as just the way things are. 01:38 Watch the trailer for Catch-22 - video This is, after all, a show that opens with a naked Christopher Abbott, streaked in blood and walking along the tarmac before promptly jumping back two years to basic training. John “Yo-Yo” Yossarian (Abbott) prepares to depart for the Mediterranean theater (in the show, both a physical location and a theatre for the arbitrariness of bureaucratic decisions and their dramatic consequences). Yo-Yo endures the indignities of training from General Scheisskopf (Clooney) with his best friend, Clevinger (Pico Alexander) before shipping out to the island of Pianosa, off the west coast of Italy. Unlike the novel, Hulu’s Catch-22 unfolds chronologically from 1942 to roughly 1944, as Yo-Yo and his compatriots fly an ever-growing number of missions over the Italian countryside, as ordered by the bumbling Colonel Cathcart (Kyle Chandler, remarkably both intimidating and idiotic) and apathetic Major de Coverley (Hugh Laurie). But it’s not all death and destruction; in his satire of the military and the meaninglessness of war, Heller luxuriated in paradox and circular reasoning – “I mean, you know what I mean?” – and Clooney’s camera lingers on Yo-Yo and his time in the Mediterranean sun. There is sunbathing, dates in Rome and fresh tomatoes with olive oil, imported by the most ambitious mess hall supervisor of all time, Milo (Daniel David Stewart). Over time, Catch-22 establishes a distinctive, destructive pattern: lounge on the beach, jump into the water, fly another mission, maybe survive; count down the mission quota to get home, only to have it raised again; repeat. Yossarian wants nothing more than to go home alive, but the more he tries to inject free will or control into his military life, the more chaos ensues. George Clooney in Catch-22. Photograph: Philippe Antonello/Hulu It’s quite a famous catch, and Clooney’s adaptation is immediately impressive – visually deserving of a bigger than a laptop screen – with a cohesive, arid palette and shots ranging wildly in scope from resonant closeup to sweeping landscape. But it takes a couple of episodes to settle into the show’s polarizing rhythm, which is less a film-making issue than the high-level entry to the source material’s cunning conceit. A story about the seesaw of insanity, filtered through detached ridiculousness and aesthetic of a Mediterranean vacation, isn’t exactly accessible in the first 30 minutes; like Yo-Yo and Clevinger’s punishment in training – carrying buckets along the edge of a circle – it’s not easy to pinpoint where the loop starts and ends. Only when you calibrate to its repetitive satire do the points in Catch-22’s yo-yoing seriousness become clear – just in time to realize, by the third episode, that it’s not a circle after all, but a downward spiral. Abbott, as the star, is a slow burn but ultimately fascinating as the frustrated Yo-Yo, his every grimace grounding the show’s destabilizing ridiculousness. Catch-22 is indisputably well-made, and above all a smart show, perhaps too smart for its own good – every shot feels considered, every head-spinning layer worth talking out to make sense of it. Whether all those parts add up to compelling TV is, given Catch-22’s swift tone shifts, less a question of the show than what the audience wants from TV. It’s easy to imagine how some would find the brutal, nihilistic irony of the story grating, though if it were otherwise then it wouldn’t be an adaptation of Catch-22. The show spins ridiculous conversations into humor but pulls no punches with gore. And unlike other recent Hulu series such as Ramy or Shrill, or other portrayals of the second world war, Catch-22 doesn’t delve into character studies; though Clooney was wise to stretch the adaptation into six episodes, even Yossarian barely has a backstory, better to foreground his vacuous, unwinnable struggle but not for casual viewing. That cycle can make you dizzy, and the dizzier you get – the more you align with Yo-Yo’s claustrophobic hamster wheel – the easier it is to keep going. It’s not for everyone, but as TV binge catches go, it’s close to the best there is.<doc-sep>If you aren’t particularly attached to the book, and if you have a taste for World War II melodramas with lots of big-band music on the soundtrack, then this “Catch-22” may suit you fine. Largely shot on Italian locations, in an umber Mediterranean palette, it has a burnished, prestige-film handsomeness. (Martin Ruhe was the director of photography, and another distinguished cinematographer, Ellen Kuras, directed two episodes.) The direction is straightforward and understated; Grant Heslov (who also appears as Doc Daneeka) took on the bum assignment of directing Yossarian’s nighttime odyssey through the streets of Rome, and he did a better job of restraining his inner Fellini than Nichols did. Clooney is fun to watch as the bullheaded Scheisskopf, and a few other performers manage to make an impression, like Daniel David Stewart as the uber-capitalist mess sergeant Milo Minderbinder and Graham Patrick Martin as the resourceful pilot Orr. Most of the cast, though — including Christopher Abbott as Yossarian and top-notch actors like Kyle Chandler (Colonel Cathcart) and Hugh Laurie (Major de Coverley) — can’t overcome the dullness of the screenplay, with its very un-Hellerian tendency to moralize. The most obvious change Davies and Michôd made was to take apart Heller’s collagelike text and refashion it as a chronological narrative, beginning (after a very brief flash-forward opening) with flight training in California and then moving to the Army Air Forces base on the Italian island Pianosa, where selected incidents from the book are forced into a sequence. (Even at four and a half hours of screen time, much of the novel’s action has been jettisoned.) The focus of the plot is distilled to Yossarian’s continually frustrated effort to log enough bombing missions to be sent home, tracked by onscreen totals. It’s an understandable choice — recreating the third-person consciousness that holds together the manifold threads of the novel, woven over seven years of writing and rewriting by Heller, would have challenged Robert Altman (whose “M*A*S*H” was the critical and commercial hit Nichols’s “Catch-22” wasn’t).<doc-sep>George and Amal Clooney are packing birthday celebrations and date night into one evening out! The power duo made an appearance at the premiere of Hulu's Catch-22 adaptation in Hollywood on Tuesday, the day after George turned 58. They were joined by celebrities like George's pal Matt Damon, Kyle Chandler, Kristin Davis, Don Cheadle, and more from the show's cast. We last saw George and Amal make a public appearance in Scotland at a charity gala back in March. They rarely make red carpet appearances separately anymore, since their gorgeous wedding in 2014. They share two children together, 2-year-old twins Ella and Alexander, and George believes they're turning into pranksters. Sounds like they take after him in that way! Keep reading to see more photos from his and Amal's glam outing, aka date night for Mom and Dad.<doc-sep>
(CNN) — Joseph Heller’s anti-war novel “Catch-22” is set during World War II, but was published just as the US began getting into Vietnam, and the 1970 movie came out in the midst of that conflict. George Clooney brings his considerable star power to bear in bringing the satire to Hulu, but the six-part series feels like less than the sum of its parts. Strange and at times surreal, the story hinges on Yossarian (Christopher Abbott), a bombardier flying missions over Italy. Surrounded by kill-crazy commanders and eccentric peers, he desperately yearns to escape more missions, pleading with the unit’s doctor (played by Grant Heslov, Clooney’s producing partner) to declare him insane. Ah, but there’s the catch: Anyone who is sane would want out of Yossarian’s situation. So asking to be spared from the insanity of war merely proves that he’s not. The profundity of that feels as true now as it did then. Yet the craziness that surrounds Yossarian feels strained and stretched over six episodes, despite the big-name cast that surrounds Abbott, including Clooney as his cuckolded commander (whose wife takes refuge in sleeping with his subordinates); Kyle Chandler as the gung-ho Col. Cathcart, who keeps upping mission counts; as well as Hugh Laurie and Giancarlo Giannini. “I am gonna toughen you ladies up,” Cathcart snarls, fearing the wrath of his superiors far more than he frets about the lives of his men. The flight scenes are plenty harrowing, and the gallows humor of the novel and Mike Nichols movie remains very much intact. The additional length, though, does as much to muddy the narrative as clarify it. What emerges is a miniseries with a decidedly narrow, episodic feel to it – where an inadvertent act of violence or the promotion given a pilot with the unfortunate name Major Major (Lewis Pullman) stand out, but everything else has a way of blurring together. The marquee names notwithstanding, Abbott has to really carry the project, and he does so admirably under the circumstances. But Yossarian’s weary demeanor doesn’t make for an especially dynamic protagonist. To his credit, Clooney has always exhibited ambition as a filmmaker, leveraging his movie-star credentials to pursue passion projects, for good and ill. Taking Heller’s story to TV – and a service like Hulu, eager to cash in on his promotional cachet – surely enhanced his creative latitude. The overall result, however, is a production that’s intriguing but ultimately as thin as it is handsome, and emotionally removed in a way that dilutes the larger impact. For those reasons and perhaps others, unlike its conflicted hero, “Catch-22” never quite takes off. “Catch-22” premieres May 17 on Hulu.