A wounded soldier is shown unconscious with giant bloody holes in his chest. As doctors and nurses move around the table caring for him, we see that he is Korean.

Hot Lips: That man is a prisoner of war, doctor.

Hawkeye: So are you, sweetheart, but you don't know it.

So it's a little sexist. I know, we could all write an essay for Women's Studies 101 on the politics of doctors calling nurses "sweetheart."

But look what's in the news today:

In one of the deadliest sectarian assaults since the ouster of Saddam Hussein, explosions from at least three powerful car bombs and a mortar shell tore through teeming intersections in the Shiite district of Sadr City today.

How many people here feel like a prisoner of the Iraq War?

We're all prisoners -- we're imprisoned by this damned war.

I'm watching M.A.S.H. today and aside from the many politicial anachronisms that make it an honest portrait of the way people were back then, I find that every single scene has something important to say about the way people are now.

The discussion here of the relative merits of Altman's work is interest, but I'd like to pose a question to those who don't think much of his work. Even if you view particular works as failed or offensive, isn't Mr. Altman a great example of that nearly extinct species... an artist whose medium is film?

What working director in the Hollywood today approaches film primarily as art? For all of the thosands of credits clsaiming "a film by..." how many are actually the work of a diorector with individuality, art, and vision?

Soderberg maybe, in the films without "Ocean" in the title. After that, pickings are slim.

Okay, so that might have sounded a bit sarcastic. In truth, almost any Altman film, even an O.C. & Stiggs or a Dr. T, is better than most of the hundreds of films Hollywood rams down our throats year after year. I believe the reason is that Altman's films had the unmistakable imprint of Altman himself (a funny, sarcastic, whimsical, sad, angry, artistically humanist man) whereas most other movies have the imprint of a studio (test-marketing, demographics, will-it-play-in Peoria?, etc.).

As a teenager in the '70s, no other filmmaker reached me the way Altman did. I will always have a place in my heart for Brewster McCloud, The Long Goodbye, California Split, Nashville and, for some odd reason, Quintet. Most impressive was his ability to leap genres yet there never was any question as to whether you were watching an Altman film.

Of course I never would have been interested in Altman in the first place if it wasn't for the movie that started it all, M*A*S*H. The letter writers who have slagged off Altman's first of many masterpieces as misogynist and racist must have a tough time enjoying anything cultural, whether it be highbrow or lowbrow. Picasso? Sexist. Dashiell Hammett ? Sexist. Bugs Bunny? Sexist, racist. The Beatles? Sexist and pillagers of black culture. Showtime's Weeds? Racist. Tennessee Wiliams, John Dos Passos, Ken Kesey, Martin Scorcese, David Lynch...the list of "offensive" artists could go on and on and on. You might as well just crawl in a hole otherwise you'll never be safe from the depravity of books, TV, film and paintings.

Dear Editor:

Altman was a kind of American rightious man, i.e. someone whose living existance represented some sense of truth about our country, always so full of its pretentious and hypocritical imagined sense of itself. As long as we knew that he was alive and continuing to make movies, we knew that some sort of truth could prevail. We knew that we were not alone in how we felt about and observed our country. His great movies about the American experience, MASH, Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Short Cuts, and others reminded us of what this country is like as we actual live it and know it. The dark side of life in our country which we feel every day but never ever dare to admit.

Often MASH is thought of as an anti-war movie, or more specifically, an anti-Vietnam war movie. But in many ways, this film was far ahead of its time, its characters representing certain political phenomina which arrived much later. Don't the indifferent and self absorbed Colonel Blake and General Hammond in the MASH movie remined us of Donald Rumsfeld or Richard Cheney? Doesn't the Frank Burns of the MASH movie remind us of the religious right with all of its mixture of self-rightiousness and actual depravity?

Nashville exposed in an artistic venue the emotionally and spiritual messiness of the actual American life. True to this lived reality, when the music came on everything seemed perfect and emotionally awesome, only for the music to stop again and return us back to the same always confused, dark, and far more messy sensibility. The most thematic song in the movie, chimes in its chorus, "We must be doing something right to last 200 years," says so much about the problem of the mainstream political discourse: Yes we must be doing something right, but is that really enough? Can't we aspire to do it far better?

Of course I knew that Altman was mortal, but somehow I could never imagine him dying. As if the idea of him continuing to make his films confronted the wide schism in our society between how we feel about it inside, and how we discuss it outside and in public. I was truly shocked and sadded and grieven when I head of his death. His directing was a sort of voyariusm, he zoomed in and saw what was actually there and present and in doing that we were better able to see it too.

Sincerely,

Arthur C. Hurwitz

Altman was an artistic genius in the truest sense. I'm going to miss his incisive humor and empathetic storytelling, the subtle character revelations, wonderful tracking long shots, fearless exposition and experimentation.

To call the man a sexist is to be blind to all that he has done for female characters and actors over the years.

Ken Schellenberg posted that Soderberg may be the only director working in Hollywood left with the independent artistic vision of an auteur. Leaving Altman to rest in his own category, and using the term "Hollywood" most loosely, I would add (off the top of my head, in no particular order):

The Coen Brothers

P.T. Anderson

Wes Anderson

Richard Linklater

Christopher Nolan

Darren Aronofsky

Sofia Coppola

Steve Buscemi

Quentin Tarantino

Christopher Guest

Alejandro González Iñárritu

Ang Lee

Noah Baumbach