ALTMAN POLL

“you may say that I ain’t free but it don’t worry me” from Nashville is prophetic

echoing my thoughts exactly, altho when I rewatched it in March (2 days after pandemic declared), the finale with Barbara Harris really hit hard. yes, exactly, that ending is just a perfect demonstration of America in miniature: a horrible, motiveless tragedy occurs, complete chaos for a few minutes, and then it's a singalong. Nothing ever changes, but throw those flowers into the crowd and tilt up to the cloudy, grey sky. CLOROX PRODUCTS! WITH RED DOTS ON 'EM! thats right

For a heavy psychological drama (and despite its dysphoric 1970s score) 3 Women seemed almost light in a really appealing way until the end. It was very strange and unlike any other Altman film I’ve seen. Shelley Duvall won the Cannes best actress award for it but Sissy Spacek was equally amazing

I liked Altman’s comment about “empty vessels in an empty landscape”, and also the idea that the California desert represents "a space of death but also one of creation"

A Wedding was an interesting follow-up to Nashville and 3 Women

marriage celebrations (and marriages) are messy and chaotic and relationships are often unequal, charged, and fraught with peril, but we can always decide to move ahead

saw on the cast list that Joan Allen, John Malcovich, Laurie Metcalf, and Gary Sinise were extras, but the scenes were so complex that I didn’t even notice them

*Malkovich

I love that throwaway line, "You can get cancer from smoking pot?"

I only spotted Metcalf (I think)

Popeye is so broad and dumb, it's hard to believe this is the same director who made McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville

think his next film Come Back to the 5 & Dime will be better

Saw Popeye when it came out, immediately erased everything from my mind. Come Back I saw years after the fact--some positives, I think.

Come Back is too long but good

revisited a couple of his movies yesterday.... Brewster McCloud, good lord, so bad... so much worse than I remember... just stupid and not funny and so boring...

but Nashville was even more of a masterpiece last night... there's that incredible match cut of the old man crying at the hospital after his wife's died right to Michael Murphy and Ned Beatty laughing in the club.

I also think it's worth noting the final three shots: there's the zoom out from the stage, and then right as the lens is pulled completely back, there's a cut to one last shot of the crowd: two cops walking around wearing aviators. Cut back to the wide shot, tilt up to the gray sky. Maybe it's an arbitrary shot, but going back into the crowd after that relatively long zoom out to show two cops who look like they're looking for trouble, it feels absolutely intentional--a brief reminder of reality, that the dream is almost over

Crisp description, flappy. Every time I wanna knock Nashville to a second tire I remember that match cut.

I still prefer Brewster McCloud to M*A*S*H*, but yeah--Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller--he got better as the 70s went along.

Seeing Brewster McCloud at 18 and reading Robert Kolker's A Cinema of Loneliness (about the New American Cinema) was the first real spur to my becoming a cinephile, and conscious of auteurism and the role of a director. The film is completely chaotic and doesn't really have a centre other than Altman's whims, but I would rank it above such vote-getters in this poll as M*A*S*H, The Player and Short Cuts.

Paul Schrader, on Facebook today:

3 WOMEN. Several FB friends have been harrumphing for years about the greatness of Altman's 1977 film to the extent I felt psychologically arm twisted to watch it again. Which I just did. I disliked it when it came out, I disliked it ever more on belated viewing. The corona of condescension, superficiality and self importance which exudes from Altman and his films like a marijuana haze is in full display. And that score? Could it be the worst serious score ever? Nice prod design, though.

classic schrade shade

there's a cut to one last shot of the crowd: two cops walking around wearing aviators.

Is one of them the female cop? I think she gets the frame to herself.

Seeing Brewster McCloud at 18 and reading Robert Kolker's A Cinema of Loneliness (about the New American Cinema) was the first real spur to my becoming a cinephile

Me too, although I'd swap a few dozen films in for BM (which I didn't see for years and didn't like). Excellent book

I should say Brewster is only bad relatively imo, it has plenty going for it. Watching it with a couple other people, and none of us laughed... well, it looked good as most Altman movies do, and there's great stuff here and there. I should say that if I found more of the leads attractive it would work. Bud Cort is too close to the 2001 baby for me to get interested, much less excited.

That Paul Schrader writeup is INSANE. Hilarious, his opinion can only be taken so seriously since he was a competitor with Altman at the time. All one has to do is counter with is Cat People.

Schrader bagging on another filmmaker for "self importance" is pretty rich

there's that incredible match cut of the old man crying at the hospital after his wife's died right to Michael Murphy and Ned Beatty laughing in the club

otm, altho it’s murphy and geraldine chaplin, not beatty— the most evil char and the dumbest char. you can work out that what they’re laughing at is barbara baxley’s kennedy monologue. chaplin says the assassination’s her fault for owning a gun. lol

Whoa! Great catch

(the monologue happens earlier to be clear but p sure opal from the bbc has just been telling advance man tripple about it when we cut to them in that moment.)

whole last scene is such a symphony. otm about the ominous dissonance of that cut into the angelus-novus-pov pullback. oh, man, i can’t stop that blood, man!

lmao. Somebody sing.. SING!

I've been filling in the Altman I haven't seen yet and I got to O.C. & Stiggs and holy shit it's bad. Like hateful terrible bad. What the hell?

Thieves Like Us has been the big why-didn't-i-watch-this-sooner surprise. Keith Carradine & Shelley Duvall should have played Tom Verlaine & Patti Smith.

saw Streamers the other night, I liked it more than the other 80s stuff of his I've seen recently

but it did have that 'stage play turned into a movie' quality, like Come Back To the 5 & Dime and Secret Honor

Found this the other day, uploaded only 2 months ago, short making of on California Split

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDgCM-V41_A

Altman's hat is awesome

Vincent and Theo as a film adapted from a miniseries didn't have to be as long as it was, but I liked it

Saw 5&dime for the first time last month and I kinda loved it. It’s very ‘for hire’ even if he did the OG play but as a bottle movie is really moves

The Player and Short Cuts seem like a comeback for Altman after his non-commercial play-based films of the 80s

I was wondering about Short Cuts as I hadn’t seen it again since it came out. The missed connections between the characters and the earnestness of their trying to connect made the film for me, even if it didn't all come together

short cuts is my favorite altman even though, yeah, it doesn't quite all come together. i rewatched the player recently and it remains an excellent movie.

I think they're both pretty great--took me two or three times with The Player, Short Cuts right away.

My favourite latter-day Altman is Gosford Park; I found The Player really smug, and Short Cuts was laying on irony with a trowel. I haven't seen anything else post-87, in fact I get a strong aversion when scanning those titles because I remember not wanting to see them when they first came out.

He hit the trifecta on the way out imo (Gosford, The Company, Prairie Home Companion). I'm planning to watch all three over the winter.

I’ve never been quite as big on Gosford as most, but I did rewatch it in the last year and it’s had to argue against it being in the upper tiers of Altman’s career.

Watch remains of the day wings of a dove and room with a view THEN watch gosford and its like a coens movie

Kansas City was ok. I wasn’t that interested in the plot but I really loved the big band concert with the sword-fighting saxophones about an hour in

it has its moments. probably should revisit once I read that 2010 Altman oral history that went out of print. (it's really long--at least 150 pages before it gets to the 1970s)

watched The James Dean Story recently and man is it good. Some wack interview photography but at 80 minutes it zips along using mostly photos and voiceover and film clips and newsreels. It really felt like Jimmy Dean Mon Amour, but 2 years before the fact!

Watched Rich Kids, which he produced in 1979, for the second time last night, and it's marvellous. Strong proto-Baumbach vibes, down to the new york yuppie interiors, but a really sweet movie about kids growing up within divorce that is absolutely bewitching. Recommend me more movies like this, anyone who knows of any.

sounds like Paul Mazursky

I rarely feel compelled to go off on a film. I try to avoid stuff I don't think I'll like; I know I end up missing films I would like because of that, but with films I'm the guy who wants to let 100 guilty people go free rather than convict one innocent person. (If that analogy even works.)

God, I hated Prêt-à-Porter. I saw it when it came out, hated it then, assumed that would be tempered by 20 years and lowered expectations, possibly hated it even more today. Took me almost a week of how-much-can-I-stand? to get through it. Anouk Aimée, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, and maybe a couple of others managed to keep their dignity. At least two throwbacks to previous Altman films: Sally Kellerman humiliated like in MASH, Danny Aiello as Bert Remsen in California Split--like those jokes would improve with age. Very glad he got to make a few more films and go out on A Prairie Home Companion rather than this.

I was 17 when this came out and I rented it on VHS. I had seen and enjoyed The Player and Short Cuts and a few of the Altman classics so I was receptive. I recall it being one of the worst movies I had ever seen up to that point. Am I remembering correctly that characters kept stepping in dog poop every few minutes and that was supposed to be really funny? Maybe it's still one of the worst films I've seen! I'll never rewatch it to find out, though.

I haven't tried many of the reputed 80s stinkers but among them, HealtH is more enjoyable than this.

I was thinking about him the other day. I think 3 Women, California Split and The Long Goodbye are nigh (heh-heh) unimpeachable. Granted, McCabe is impressive in a stunt-filmmaking Herzog kinda way, and is good/great but I think is (affects cineaste voice) ultimately overrated, as is Nashville. And I love leonard cohen and country music! And america! And maybe even canada

Thieves Like Us is very good, but too depressing on balance for me to re-visit. It... could use more cohen brothers style levity. Which, it has some of, but not in large enough doeses to offset the overall subj matter and narrative. Brewster McCloud is great, if a tad too light, farcical.

His best films do life in just the right measure. Damn, california split is so good, tho it undoubtedly fails every variation of the bechdel test ever. But... i am not a big film person -- music has much more of a lasting impact on me. Even novelty songs about valley girls. But CS is one of those films that I couldn't stop thinking about for a long time after I watch(ed) it. The whole gambling thing is obv very fruitful metaphor on its own, w long long legs, but add in male friendships and i guess relationships in general, and damn. The ending is at once depressing, triumphant, and transcendent. There's a lot of ground covered there.

HH: you remember that running gag correctly--four or five times. Absolutely a low point for Altman. It's not just how awful the joke is, it's that I think he thinks he's making a statement on the film's subject matter. As I've said many times, I'm the rare person who isn't convinced that Altman is contemptuous of country music in Nashville; or at the very least, even if he is, he loves the characters so much it's a draw. Prêt-à-Porter feels like a work of contempt from start to finish, capped off by Kim Basinger's befuddled speech at the end. But not interesting contempt--just puzzling, like why would you fell compelled to make this film? (I think Basinger's supposed to be some version of Geraldine Chaplin in Nashville...not anywhere near as funny.)