ALTMAN POLL

YES. That scene was amazing. It's the outdoor performance, during the lightning storm. I was just agog the first time I watched that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n37R4o1WTM

Altman had a really terrific final stretch. I love all of his last three movies, and Tanner On Tanner weren't bad, neither.

<3 Deric! But tbh scenes like that are made to be seen in theaters.

I've wanted to see Brewster McCloud for about ten years...unfortunately it's not on DVD.

1. Nashville, 2. California Split, 3. The Long Goodbye, 4. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 5. Short Cuts. I'm not that big a fan of M.A.S.H., Thieves Like Us, or The Player; Tanner '88 and its more recent follow-up are uneven, but often quite good; Secret Honor seemed much less impressive to me on recent viewing than when it first came out. Gosford Park, bleah, and after that, the morass--very little of which (maybe four or five films) I've seen. One thing I've realized from ongoing Dave Marsh polls over on ILM is that while the offbeat and overlooked stuff generates the commentary, the staples almost always win. So although Nashville should take this going away, it wouldn't shock me if M.A.S.H. comes out on top.

will Jimmy Dean ever become available on DVD?

saw this a couple years ago, it is not good. worse than OC and Stiggs. I don't think Altman was served well by that period where he was just filming plays in the 80s, I pretty much haven't liked any of those.

and yeah still waiting to see Brewster McCloud cuz VHS copy at the store was too fried to watch bah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBFQg7P5YKw

fuiud

There is a torrent somewhere out there of Brewster McCloud recorded, I believe, off of AMC. The quality is pretty decent.

long goodbye. but i haven't seen california split.

The Long Goodbye (1973)
Thieves Like Us (1974)
California Split (1974)
Nashville (1975)

god, what a run

going with nashville

those aren't the only four i like or anything, just a really remarkable output for a three year period

^^^this

Voted Calisplit

Charlie Waters: "If it takes a watermelon five minutes to water. How long does it take a sweetpea to pee? As long as it takes a pair of dice to crap."

Long Goodbye, just over Short Cuts. I should reveal, tho, that I have yet to see Nashville. It is one of my gaping wtf cinema blind-spots (tho not the biggest..)

I did not realize he was behind The Gingerbread Man. Ouch.

just finished Robert Altman: The Oral Biography and it's pretty much exactly like a Robert Altman film.

My local has Brewster McCloud on vhs. It's in decent shape, too. It's pretty great! Not gonna vote for it, though.

Re: ...Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, yeah, I don't think Altman was terribly well-suited to adapting plays. One, I think he felt compelled to follow the scripts a little more slavishly (which he usually avoided). Two, I think he was a little too hemmed-in by the smaller cast (Secret Honor, in particular, seems like a pretty counterintuitive project for someone who seemed to thrive working with larger ensembles). Three, I just don't think strict adaptations of plays hardly ever work very well as movies.

yeah its the kind of film where I don't really understand what drew him to it (apart from maybe the characters and the overall plot/tone...?) Limiting himself to small casts and confined sets (doesn't this whole movie take place within a single setpiece?) and strict scripts - those all play against his strengths. maybe he thought of it as a challenge, but if so, he didn't rise to it.

the script itself is also decidedly play-like ... lots of monologues, distinct three-act arc, a big "reveal" twist at the end (which is heavily telegraphed from the beginning). its weak all around.

and I like Karen Black.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

thanks s-man

I'm just gonna throw it out there: System is the most boring poster on ILX. Utterly predictable, completely played out. Hey, I'm just sayin' what everyone else is thinking, right?

yo I'm voting for popeye

When I saw Short Cuts, I was sitting next to a guy who had clearly been dragged there with his wife and two teenage kids. About 90 minutes into the movie, I saw that he kept looking at his watch. I told him that the movie was over three hours long. "What?!" he said. And then we went back to watching the movie. And then he said, "What?!"

A Prairie Home Companion, btw.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Well, I certainly can't argue with that top three. M*A*S*H, as I said before, is overrated, and I'm not the biggest fan of 3 Women.

Top four is pretty unimpeachable. Good work, ILX.

well the winner's okay with me.

lol @ popeye beating the player

BTW, Brewster, The Company, and Images are all v. good, despite receiving no votes.

Yes. Opening credits of Brewster alone deserved at least one vote.

streamers coming out on dvd next week

i watched HealtH, it was bad

was unaware 'a perfect couple' is essentially a musical ugh

weird period of altman around then, seems like he was p. into hippie/bohemian culture

think it was where the hot chix were

the tie result so perfect for me

jesus popeye got 4 votes ? it's worse than oc & stiggs imo (watched both this wkend)

Nillson vs. King Sunny Ade ennit

(personally I'll stick w Nilsson - barely made it through OC & Stiggs myself)

Welcome to L.A. yesterday, Three Women today. I've had a home-taped VHS for years that I never watched, figuring it would show up at the Cinematheque sooner or later; it never did, and I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't played here since its release. I'd read enough about it to know there'd be some Persona in there, and there is, but what it really reminded me of was Lynch--generally, for the first hour, and then towards the end it felt like Mulholland Dr. (Which I was a little more receptive to when I watched it again last week.) I recognized Liberty Bell from The Paper Chase right away--he plays the doctor (or whatever he is) at the spa. Eight votes in this poll seems very generous, but I was ready to really dislike it, and I didn't.

I don't know if there are prints of 3 Women available. I first saw it at a museum retro of Altman 70s films back in '03. IIRC, Fox supplied the print and it was absolutely beat to hell, with missing frames, audio drop-outs, specs and lines galore. At the time it looked like this was the best you could get to see the film properly. When the Criterion disc dropped the next year, the quality was a revelation.

If you're still around, I'd be very interested in hearing from the person who voted for That Cold Day in the Park. Took me almost a week to get through it. It went somewhere I didn't expect towards the end, so that was interesting, but if you love Altman for his mid-'70s run, you'd have a hard time finding that guy anywhere here. Or maybe not: between Cold Day and Three Women, plus what I know of two others I haven't seen (Images and Quintet), Altman seems to have had this side of him that wanted to make cold, cerebral films that denied you all the pleasures of his mid-'70s run. Maybe Persona was his inspiration--Cold Day and Three Women both have one lead character who never shuts up while the other lead listens passively. Stuff like The Collector and Bunny Lake Is Missing also seem to be precedents for Cold Day. Can't say I liked it much, but I found Michael Burns' ("the Boy") story interesting--he went on to be a history professor at Holyoke, and wrote a couple of books about the Dreyfus case.

yeah i also watched that recently & didnt think it was v successful. none of the characters motivations > actions ring particularly true or believable. i think it was adapated from a play? def felt stagey

Adapted from a dream iirc

Watched A Wedding for (I think) the first time ever. I'm not sure--I taped it off TV years ago, but I think I was holding out for a theatre screening.

The reviews were only middling at the time, but it's probably more the end of the beginning than the other way around--it and the two before (Buffalo Bill and 3 Women) were sort of a holding pattern until he really got hammered for Quintet. I thought it was pretty good. Took a while to get going, and it doesn't have anything even approaching the sweep of Nashville, but some of the performances are good, and Altman still directs with more or less a sure hand. My favourite character was the doddering old bishop--reminded me a lot of Mayor Milford in Twin Peaks. Carol Burnett and Howard Duff and Vittorio Gassman are good, and there are lots of just-getting-started people to look out for: Dennis Franz, Pam Dawber, Dennis Christopher, and a few I completely missed--John Malkovich, George Wendt, Joan Allen, Laurie Metcalf, Gary Sinese. I don't know what Altman thought Desi Arnaz Jr. brought to his role; he didn't do much besides smile. I liked seeing Mia Farrow play somebody less than wholesome, before Woody Allen turned her into a saint. The Anchor Bay CD I watched wasn't cleaned up much, so the color in some scenes was faded, in others garishly saturated. I feel like I should know Dina Merrill from something, but looking at her credits I don't.

I like the part where the bridesmaids get stoned to "Bird On A Wire"--oh ho, and Mia's "counting"! I agree w/it being closer to the "End of The Beginning". According to "Altman On Altman", Dawber & Mia were replacements for (respectively) Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek. Duvall was with Paul Simon at the time, and he'd gotten locked into a lease on a summerhouse, so she dropped out and Spacek then used her friend's exit to leave as well.

BTW, speaking of late '70s Fox Altman: Any opinions out there on A Perfect Couple?

Interesting. Mia felt like she belonged in an Altman film, but Dawber seemed out of left field (not sure if Mork and Mindy was on the air by the time the film came out). Not that she wasn't fine for the 10 minutes she was there. My first thought was that Arnaz was forced onto Altman by a studio, but at that point--maybe for his whole career, but definitely before Quintet--you couldn't have forced anything onto Altman. I started to watch A Perfect Couple one night and stopped after 15 minutes or so.

A Wedding was the first one I saw in a theater. Haven't RESCREENED in at least 20 years.

Dina Merrill was known for being married to Cliff Robertson. The big guy with the mustache who plays her husband, Pat McCormick, was a writer for Johnny Carson for years.

I knew I knew McCormick, couldn't remember why. He did sketches on the show too, right?

Kael's pretty tough on the film, which makes sense--mildly enjoying it in 2013 is one thing, writing about it a couple of years removed from Nashville is another. Agree with a couple of things she wrote. "It takes most of the movie to spot the actors who are listed and to figure out who they're playing and what their relationships to each other are"--for much of the film, I didn't know who was related to who or how. "There's no way into the movie"--yeah, it's just a lot of stuff, some of which works and some of which doesn't, but if felt mostly like I was just keeping score on that count.

I really liked A Wedding the couple times I saw it, but I'd have to watch it again to remember exactly why.

This goes before the first paragraph:

Part of the problem is that people think that sub-licensing is simply a case of the rightsholder handing over a master and wishing the project well - but in fact in order to get that master into a commercially releasable state there may be a ton of legal work involved, especially if the film dates from before the home video era when third-party rights may not have been fully cleared.