ALTMAN POLL

there are several great Altman films, and a lot of good ones, but I thought Popeye was mediocre.

I haven't seen a lot of what might be regarded as second-string Altman. There's something laborious about watching his movies that means that if they are not actively enjoyable, it's hard for me to step back and take the good with the bad.
The odd exception for me is Quintet, usually seen as the bottom-of-the-barrel, which I actually found quite watchable. Literally watchable, because the sets, costumes and cinematography outclass the script so completely.

Best film not on that Guardian list is Buffalo Bill and the Indians, it is an semi-interesting semi-failure.

it was a very odd film but I enjoyed it

I hated Popeye and never looked at it a second time; thought Buffalo Bill was pretty good, better than some of the films on that list.

extremely weird to do a top 20 list for a guy who directed 35-ish movies. Why not just rank them all as in the clickbait trend these days?

they do these top 20 lists every week, this one is presumably to tie in with the Altman season at the BFI

I saw Popeye at the cinema when I was about 7 and can barely remember anything about it other than it seemed visually quite unusual to me at the time and for some reason I have a much clearer memory of seeing trashy but extremely fun sci-fi b-movies of that era like The Black Hole and Battle Beyond The Stars.

I was probably the same age when I saw Popeye and my main memory of it was my dad complaining about it as we were leaving the theater.

Bad news for fans with multi-region players:

Some followers of the INDICATOR label may be aware that, some years back, we teased Robert Altman’s CALIFORNIA SPLIT for a future release. Sadly, and despite a great deal of time and effort, legal complications have proven too much of a hurdle and we can now confirm that this release will not be happening. We are, of course, as upset with this news as you are, but hope to make up for it with many exciting releases of other great films to come.

For all its raging misogyny, MASH still holds up well.

XP Some good chat about that with a poster who works with the label over at criterionforum (starts at post #32)

https://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=752664#p752645

TL;DR version is it came down to budgetary reasons that weren't obvious when Indicator initially licensed the title, and they can't fulfill now.

A friend was telling me about Ann Prentiss from California Split (and Paula's younger sister--you'd swear they were identical twins). God, what a story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Prentiss

Prentiss was convicted in a California court of a 1996 assault against her father, and a subsequent threat against members of her family. The district attorney claimed that Prentiss, while incarcerated on the assault charge, had attempted to hire another inmate to kill three people, including her father and actor-director Richard Benjamin, her brother-in-law. On July 23, 1997, the court sentenced her to 19 years in prison.

She was still there when she died in 2010.

For some reason the second sentence of that wikipedia article is: "Her father was of Sicilian descent." hmmm.

It was between the sisters, Aimless. He had nothing to do with it.

Whoa, that story's a trip. We watched The Out of Towners over the holidays and were like 'why is Paula Prentiss in this tiny little walk-on role?' which is when we learned of the wholly separate existence of Ann Prentiss.

They have the same voice too, which is freaky

Very much so. I saw the Out of Towners a few times as a kid--no recollection of her in that (she plays a stewardess).

Bad news for fans with multi-region players:

Some followers of the INDICATOR label may be aware that, some years back, we teased Robert Altman’s CALIFORNIA SPLIT for a future release. Sadly, and despite a great deal of time and effort, legal complications have proven too much of a hurdle and we can now confirm that this release will not be happening. We are, of course, as upset with this news as you are, but hope to make up for it with many exciting releases of other great films to come.
― Max Hamburgers (Eric H.), Thursday, 17 February 2022 14:59 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just noticed last night that Amazon Prime (in the UK) have California Split in the correct aspect ratio and with all music cues intact, no cuts. It's leaving in 30 days. Even by Altman's standards, it's a wonderfully woozy film - sometimes the camera seems to just drift away from the action and there are whole scenes where the main actors are shot virtually out of frame. Laughed at the Aaron Spelling producer credit - he must have been DELIGHTED when he saw the finished film.

Aaron Spelling also has a producing credit on another favourite of mine, Three O’Clock High (1987).

I’m amazed that JAZZ ‘34 want included in the original poll

That's a favorite of mine, and I didn't even like Kansas City very much.

Not the best visual quality but here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48gZLCft9ak

Aaron spelling produced house of yes; i had forgotten this due to being enamored w parker

Happy birthday, Bob!

The only filmmaker I can think of whose death made me actually tear up, although others made me proudly sad (Nagisa Oshima, Seijun Suzuki, Bigas Luna, Suzan Pitt, etc.)

One anecdote about Altman, I was unaware of how much the man loved marijuana. Generally not surprising, but apparently the guy loved to smoke really, REALLY strong weed and more than a few collaborators have recalled others warning them not to smoke anything he offered them because if you do, you wouldn't be able to work or think straight for the rest of the day.

A short that he made in the mid-60’s, POT-AU-FOU, is about his love of reefer

Re: California Split & streaming & the cancelled Indicator Blu...This was just posted over at the Criterion Forum by a user who works with many UK labels, including Indicator:

I'm often told that "surely [insert title] must be available because there's clearly an HD master out there" - but that master may have been created primarily for TV/streaming, which means that certain rights won't necessarily have been cleared. A good example being California Split, which exists in two versions: the full version as signed off by Robert Altman, whose theatrical and broadcast rights were cleared at the time but whose home video rights weren't (since this wasn't an issue in 1974), and a shorter version created by Sony in the mid-2000s for DVD release that removed a couple of tracks after they turned out to be too expensive to license the home video rights for retrospectively.

It appears that broadcasting rights automatically encompass streaming rights, hence the uncut version of California Split being made available for streaming - but, as Indicator found out the hard way, releasing the full version on home video requires shelling out what turned out to be an unrealistically huge sum (and unrealistically huge for Sony, never mind a small British boutique label). And while they could have released the shorter version, they reckoned - no doubt wholly accurately - that people would loudly protest not only because it was a cut version but also because the uncut version is easy enough to see on other platforms, so surely the label must be full of utter blithering incompetents who don't know what they're doing (and so on for several more ranty paragraphs).

And there's no easy way round this, which is why so many wishlists are full of titles that, realistically, are very unlikely ever to be made available on home video.

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.