POO: Altman films

1. Nashville (1975)
2. The Long Goodbye (1973)
3. Short Cuts (1993)
4. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
5. MASH (1970)
6. Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976)
7. Tanner '88 (1988)
8. Gosford Park (2001)
9. The Player (1992)

Frankly, the top 4 are all even in my book.

Should I go see That Cold Day in the Park? Sandy Dennis as a lead makes me wary.

I've always found it hilarious that Altman has the detective off himself at the end of the chase rather than accept defeat.

It's also entirely possible that Altman and co. were just smoking a lot of weed and making stuff up on MGM's dime.

^yes to these thoughts^

re: brewster mccloud btw

It's also entirely possible that Altman and co. were just smoking a lot of weed and making stuff up on MGM's dime.

One of my professors was a camera loader on the film and he basically confirmed this.

so much hate indifference for Beyond Therapy.
Julie Hagerty is still my neurotic dreamgirl.

Wow I don't get the Brewster McCloud hate on this thread AT ALL...

i love it! it's perfect altman for ppl who hate 'nashville' (like me).

Was watching "Short Cuts" for the first time in years. I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that I think every female star (even Frances McDormand) is given a nude scene, or at least an underwear scene, including a suicide attempt and the dead body in the river. Something about it just seemed so ... gratuitous in their casualness. Like, if this were a stage play, one of the actresses would have a casual nude scene, just in passing, matter of fact. Or just Julianne Moore's famous scene. I wonder, if this movie were made a few years later, if Altman would have had more of his male stars get naked, too, beyond Huey Lewis flashing his wiener.

NASHVILLE tho Short Cuts a close second

mccabe

finally watched 3 women the other day, rly natural+confident homegrown u.s. surrealism-- made me think of persona of course but not because it felt made after studying it. (also so deeply a california movie, without having to openly stress it as much as the long goodbye or the player or p.t. anderson.) duvall rly great, as pretty much always. maybe too much of the murals shot thru water i guess.

Check out Images (out on blu soon via Arrow) for more of Altman in a similar mode.

Images, out 3/20 on blu-ray---good?

https://mvd.cloud/images/AA025.jpg

The early seventies were a period of remarkable activity for Robert Altman, producing masterpiece after masterpiece. At the time he came to make Images, MASH and McCabe & Mrs. Miller were behind him, with The Long Goodbye, California Split and Nashville still to come. Originally conceived in the mid-sixties, Images concerns a pregnant children's author (Susannah York, who won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival) whose husband (Rene Auberjonois) may or may not be having an affair. While on vacation in Ireland, her mental state becomes increasingly unstable resulting in paranoia, hallucinations and visions of a doppelgänger. Scored by an Oscar-nominated John Williams, with "sounds" by Stomu Yamash'ta (The Man Who Fell to Earth), Images also boasts the remarkable cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

more info:
https://mvdb2b.com/b2b/s/AA025
https://mvdb2b.com/b2b/s/AA025

A Prairie Home Companion is my personal favorite

Would need to concentrate on 3 Women to verify that McCabe is the best that others would acknowledge

dow check out the post directly above yours

i haven't seen it, excited for this reissue

3 Women is the one I keep coming back to over and over.

McCabe massively overrated. 3 Women is fantastic. but Nashville is my pick.

I finally saw Images at the RA retro at MoMA a few years ago ... it's worth seeing but doesn't really work. He did Bergmanism better by doing it less in 3 Women.

Images is a failure -- he nailed this shards-of-glass approach on 3 Women -- but every film from this period is worth watching.

Nashville is more sweeping than the other films of the period, but I don't find it to be better

McCabe for me too.

You are wrong about McCabe, flappy, but it's not uncommon for ppl to not really gel with it on first encounter and fall in love with it later. Was my experience and apparently Tarantino's as well.

Think the story was he bought a print of it for Linklater because it was one of his favorite movies and decided to watch it first himself and ended up keeping it, heh.

Every Altman film from Brewster McCloud through Nashville is worth seeing at least once or twice, and most are stone classics. After that, things get a bit spottier.

And yes, I intentionally excluded M*A*S*H (one of his lesser efforts), so sue me.

There are times when I think Tanner '88 is my favorite of them all, but not a film so...

why would you stop before Buffalo Bill, 3 Women, A Wedding? All better than Brewster.

heads up Oc and Stiggs has aged really well.

No.

3 Women is great, I think I liked Buffalo Bill okay but I frankly don't remember much about it, perhaps need to rewatch to see if his streak does in fact remain unbroken through 3 Women. A Wedding...not that into it. Brewster isn't among his greats but gets definitely points for taking big + weird chances.

If I'm honest, I may find Altman's later films more interesting or at least entertaining than the earlier ones, too few of which I've seen (I'd like to see Buffalo Bill especially). He's never struck me as having anything particularly trenchant to say about any sort of social or historical concern, and seems more interesting as a weaver of tall tales with sometimes-interesting character portraits. He seems most interesting, however, as an at least semifictional observer and to some extent participant in what he really knows - the popular or semi popular performing arts world he inhabits - and therefore I find most compelling his backstage final film among others in what might be deemed its late-period oeuvre, including the similarly quasi-documentarian The Company. I suppose that Nashville among others might be part of the same lineage, but it bites off more than I think he was (ever really) capable of chewing.

Any one of The Long Goodbye, McCabe, and California Split might be my favorite from that era, depending on my mood on a given day.

The Company is hands-down his best latter day film. But he definitely went out on top with his last few.

Thank you, this thread, for reminding me that I still need to watch the lo-res video file of HealtH that I pilfered from god knows where (since it's apparently the only Altman film that's never going to receive an official home video release ever).

I saw California Split for the first time only recently and it's top tier. Would be on my shortlist.

There's an Altman Coffee table book that normally sells for like 40 bucks but is now 9 dollars in a few places. Ordered a copy on Amazon just the other day.

https://www.amazon.com/Altman-Kathryn-Reed/dp/1419707779

It's pretty cool. I've read several Altman biogs so not a lot of new info but definitely a lot of production photos and ephemera I've never seen before.

Looking at my Letterboxd ratings from the MoMA retro, I really don't like the minor ones I caught up with there, all 2.5/5:

Health (liked it more when I was younger)
Images
That Cold Day in the Park
Countdown (the hire job w/ Caan and Duvall playing astronauts)

I preferred Kansas City (3/5)

Oh, I recently recalled in the midst of the post-Weinstein era that the recent-ish Altman oral history ended on a somewhat sad note as everyone talks around the story of Kevin Spacey ruining what turned out to be Altman's last directorial gig at the Old Vic. I knew he was a bad egg.

Oh yes and I've never seen Jazz '34, which I see is available online.

Also on the Kansas City DVD, iirc.

You are wrong about McCabe, flappy, but it's not uncommon for ppl to not really gel with it on first encounter and fall in love with it later. Was my experience and apparently Tarantino's as well.

― circa1916, Wednesday, February 28, 2018 3:02 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I've only seen it once and will definitely revisit soon

Altman's (better) films almost require multiple viewings. There's often so much going on in the frame and on the soundtrack that it's impossible to take it all in on a single viewing. I think I catch new dialogue every time I see the tavern scenes in McCabe.

McCabe demands multiple viewings, yes. My only reaction upon seeing it in high school was "huh?" Now I could be easily convinced that it is his best.

I had a similar reaction to 3 Women at first blush. It grows in my esteem with every rewatch.

I loved 3 Women on my first viewing, but I can probably credit that to my having already seen both Persona and Mulholland Dr.

oooh true

That says a lot for 3 Women, which I saw when it first came out, and remains the clearest and most compelling--scenes still still roll in memory with no known cue, the swimming pool murals appeared as I was waking up a couple mornings ago---- more recently, "Wellll, you two have a lot in common." "Lak whut?" "Oh, I don't know! Aren't you both from Texas or something?" kept coming up while I was trying to wait patiently for the doctor.

(I'd like to see Buffalo Bill especially). He's never struck me as having anything particularly trenchant to say about any sort of social or historical concern, and seems more interesting as a weaver of tall tales with sometimes-interesting character portraits. He seems most interesting, however, as an at least semifictional observer and to some extent participant in what he really knows - the popular or semi popular performing arts world he inhabits -
Which is why you might like Buffalo Bill, on a night when he's ramblin' around, gassin' about previous events and what he made of them, with the travelling Wild West Shows, Indian actors/re-enactors and all---Lester Bangs connected this to Dylan's theatrical self-presentation in his '74 reunion tour with The Band: a battered Americana legend-merchant in "full scraggle" (the raspy rattle of "It's Alright Ma" on that year's live Before The Flood is a good example).

That is, Bangs specifically cited this movie as a thematic link to Dylan's self-presentation, whether D. was thinking of or had seen this movie or not.