ALTMAN POLL

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.

yes, McCormick was occasionally in the Mighty Carson Art Players. He also played Grover Cleveland in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, was in the Smokey and the Bandit series, etc.

The kid in the movie running around taking the photos and talking about monster movies was Mark Deming, who grew up to be an online critic for Allmovie and Yahoo. He wrote a nice obit for the former (which appears to have been taken down) talking about the experience.

thinking about running a McCabe/Long Goodbye runoff poll years later

How about the top 3? I just want Nashville to win--even though my sense, from reading Altman commentary on here, is that The Long Goodbye would win any kind of a follow-up configuration.

(xpost) Kael singled out Deming as one of the things she liked about the movie. Can't find an image--he had a great look.

Long Goodbye would come in third for me in a runoff against Nashville and McCabe, but it's all win-win-win up there.

yah that's probably true for me too, plus I probably like Brewster more than McCabe (though not like much more).

for me it's like Nashville>Brewster>McCabe>Long Goodbye>Thieves>3 Women. Hate MASH, and I haven't yet seen any of the 90s ones (let alone the 80s). I'd have to watch California Split again before I could decide on it, it's been ages...

I highly recommend Short Cuts, also the entirety of Tanner '88. (Not as big on The Player, although you should see that too.)

my short list to a tyro:

McCabe...
The Long Goodbye
Thieves Like Us
3 Women
Vincent and Theo
The Gingerbread Man

Gingerbread Man?!

Might have to take another look at this one, as I remember hating it when it was new.

I didn't care much for The Player when it came out. I recognized that it was well done, but I didn't connect with it at all, not on any level (i.e., even conceding that it aims for chilly acerbity, and is supposed to be off-putting).

I go back to it every few years, and it gets better and better every time. I'd almost put it up on my shortlist of favorites--it's at the top of the second tier, at the very least. The thing that most impressed me last night was Tim Robbins--what a great performance. Sometimes he's as coolly venal as J.J. Hunsecker, elsewhere he's like a hapless noir patsy. The cameos are almost uniformly perfect. (I'm looking at Wikipedia's list, and some of them--Martin Mull, Brad Davis--I missed.) Weirdest: Rod Steiger. Lots of just-starting-out people to look for, too.

vhs of kansas city in my living room, i think it's my roommates. worth watching?

Never seen it. Belafonte has one of the most prominent cameos in The Player.

Don't know if I'd go as far as calling The Player my favourite Altman, but it is the one I find the most purely pleasurable. And yeah, Robbins' best performance without question.

some of them--Martin Mull, Brad Davis--I missed.

You didn't miss Brad Davis. He was in an advanced stage of AIDS when his cameo was filmed, and he passed away shortly after. Altman elected to leave the scene out of the film.

I go back to it every few years, and it gets better and better every time. I'd almost put it up on my shortlist of favorites--it's at the top of the second tier, at the very least. The thing that most impressed me last night was Tim Robbins--what a great performance.

You nailed it. The Player was the first ROBERT ALTMAN movie I was aware of. It got a decent ad push, so much so that my local paper devoted Sunday arts coverage to "The Master is Back!" type story. A weird release iirc -- late spring or early summer? I didn't get to it until its video release in early spring the following year. Because so many of his films were unavailable in the early nineties I rated it high; the casual acerbic tone, matched by the gliding camera and the odd bits of punctuation (those shots of movie posters) were unlike anything I'd seen. I went into Short Cuts expecting a masterpiece, and it took somethign to get a group of non-film friends into the theater. I sat rapt while they fidgeted. I didn't want to admit then what I would a few months later: not only doesn't the "Carver soup" cohere, you can't assemble short stories into a pattern and have them make sense; besides, what Altman movie follows a pattern anyway?

Then in the next couple years I saw McCabe, The Long Goodbye and the rest. But, yes, The Player is top of the second tier.

The Player was my first Altman as well, at least if we don't count Popeye (nothing to do with the quality of the film, but I would have had no idea who Altman was when I watched it), and I was similarly made excited by a bunch of coverage that touted the triumphant return of a figure whose work I didn't know but now knew that I should. Saw it in a shopping mall in Detroit one afternoon with my dad while my mom and sister shopped, where I sat rapt while he fidgeted. I even got the Criterion laserdisc (!) for Christmas either that year or the one after--like my Criterion disc of Tootsie, its one of those things I hang on to even though I have no way to watch it anymore.

The Player really fell out of favour didn't it? it was a Big Deal when it came out but you never hear anyone mention it these days. i wonder if it's because gossip and insider-stuff about The Industry is now commonplace. also it feels like its attitude/sensibility has been ripped off by a bunch of TV shows.

my favorite Altman film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3V-7DEAgdc

Now, after years in the making, Robert Altman brings to the big screen the long-awaited Liberian Girl, with 24 -- count 'em -- 24 of your very favorite stars!

born 90 years ago today; strange to think of him as just under 10 years Welles' junior, when he had his breakthrough just as OW had only one completed feaature to go.

Film Comment video on the Altman TV years:

https://vimeo.com/116894504

CA Split is not worth going out into Hoth for, right?

I'm about the only person who would agree with that.