Link: Robert Altman, Iconoclastic Director, Dies at 81 - New York Times.
I didn't love them all, and I particularly didn't like "A Prairie Home Companion," even though I'm from the Midwest and probably grew up in Lake Woebegone. But that film didn't take me there, even with the fun moments.
At one time, I thought M.A.S.H. was sheer brilliance, something nothing could ever top. It didn't age as well, however. But that is an art too, being so perfectly OF one's time. Years later, I bought M.A.S.H. on VHS, and it was sort of like watching "Laugh In" 20 years later. The jokes became rudely dated, and the hilarity lost its edge.
"Nashville," while also very much OF its time, ages better, I think. I came to that one late, and really only latched on to it long AFTER it was totally dated. But it still shines with Lily Tomlin and so many other wonderful quirky performances.
But for me, the essential Altman was "The Player." By then I'd studied enough screenwriting to get all the screenwriting "in-jokes," so I suppose that's cheating.
"The Player" is brilliant for that one long opening shot alone, but my greatest joy is watching it use reversals agressively, to set up expectations, set up an expectation of a reversal, and then do just what you originally expected it to do.
Really, "The Player" is one long excuse to do pitch parodies, and for that, I laugh out loud.
I was just watching the HBO series "K Street" on DVD the other night. It's just amazing. I love it. It ends, which is sad, but I still just love it. And when Elliot Gould shows up, as with Ocean's 11, it's Gould doing pure Altman. I think the whole show is just a tribute to him anyway. The ending certainly is.
Until reading the article below, I'd forgotten about "Gosford Park," but I love period stuff, so that was all I needed for my "Manor House" fix. And Maggie Smith RULES.
The NY Times obit casts Altman as trickster anti-hero. That's cool.
Link: Robert Altman, Iconoclastic Director, Dies at 81 - New York Times.
November 21, 2006
Robert Altman, Iconoclastic Director, Dies at 81
By RICK LYMAN
Robert Altman,
one of the most adventurous and influential American directors of the
late 20th century, a filmmaker whose iconoclastic career spanned more
than half a century but whose stamp was felt most forcefully in one
decade, the 1970s, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81. His death, at
a hospital, was confirmed today by a friend, the singer Annie Ross. The
cause was not announced. Mr. Altman had a heart transplant in the
mid-1990s, a fact he publicly revealed for the first time last March
while accepting an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony.
A risk-taker with a tendency toward mischief, Mr. Altman is perhaps
best remembered for a run of masterly films — six in five years — that
propelled him to the forefront of American directors and culminated in
1975 with what many regard as his greatest film, “Nashville,” a complex, character-filled drama told against the backdrop of a presidential primary.
They were free-wheeling, genre-bending films that captured the jaded disillusionment of the 70s. The best known was “MASH,”
the 1970 comedy set in a field hospital during the Korean war but
clearly aimed at antiwar sentiments engendered by Vietnam. Its success,
both critically and at the box office, opened the way for Mr. Altman to
pursue his ambitions.
[...]
Unlike most directors whose flames burned brightest in the early
1970s — and frequently flickered out — Mr. Altman did not come to
Hollywood from critical journals and newfangled film schools. He had
had a long career in industrial films and television. In an era that
celebrated fresh voices steeped in film history — young directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese
— Mr. Altman was like their bohemian uncle, matching the young rebels
in their skeptical disdain for the staid conventions of mainstream
filmmaking and the establishment that supported it.
Most of his actors adored him and praised his improvisational
style. But Mr. Altman was also famous in Hollywood for his battles with
everyone from studio executives to his collaborators, leaving more
burned bridges than the Luftwaffe. He also suffered through periods of
bad reviews and empty seats
[...]
In his prime, Mr. Altman was celebrated for his ground-breaking use
of multilayer soundtracks. An Altman film might offer a babble of
voices competing for attention in crowded, smoky scenes. It was a kind
of improvisation that offered a fresh verisimilitude to tired, stagey
Hollywood genres.
He was often referred to as a cult director, and it rankled him.
“What is a cult?” Mr. Altman said. “It just means not enough people to
make a minority.”
[...]
Mr. Altman’s interest in film genres was candidly subversive. He
wanted to explode them to expose what he saw as their phoniness. He
decided to make “McCabe and Mr. Miller” for just that reason. “I got
interested in the project because I don’t like Westerns,” Mr. Altman
said. “So I pictured a story with every Western cliché in it.”
His intention, he said, was to drain the glamour from the West and
show it as it really was — filthy, vermin-infested, whisky-soaked and
ruled by thugs with guns. His hero, McCabe (Mr. Beatty), was a
dim-witted dreamer who let his cockiness and his love for a
drug-addicted prostitute (Ms. Christie) undo him.
[...]
“Nashville” interweaved the
stories of 24 characters — country-western stars, housewives, boozers,
political operators, oddball drifters — who move in and out of one
another’s lives in the closing days of a fictional presidential
primary. Mr. Altman returned to this panoramic, multicharacter approach
several times (in “A Wedding,” “Health,” “Short Cuts,” “Prêt-à-Porter” and “Kansas City”), but never again to such devastating effect.
“ ‘Nashville’ is a radical, evolutionary leap,” Ms. Kael wrote in
The New Yorker. “Altman has already accustomed us to actors who don’t
look as if they’re acting; he’s attuned us to the comic subtleties of a
multiple-track sound system that makes the sound more live than it ever
was before; and he’s evolved an organic style of moviemaking that tells
a story without the clanking of plot. Now he dissolves the frame, so
that we feel the continuity between what’s on the screen and life
off-camera.”
[...]
Mr. Altman said giving actors freedom could draw things out of them
that they did not know were there. “I look for actors where there’s
something going on there, behind that mask,” Mr. Altman said. “Tim Robbins fascinated me. This John Cusack guy: I always see something going on in there and I don’t know what it is.”
He never mellowed in his view of the movie business.
“The people who get into this business are fast-buck operators,
carnival people, always have been,” Mr. Altman said in a 1993
interview. “They don’t try to make good movies now; they’re trying to
make successful movies. The marketing people run it now. You don’t
really see too many smart people running the studios, running the video
companies. They’re all making big money, but they’re not looking for,
they don’t have a vested interest in, the shelf life of a movie.
There’s no overview. No one says, ‘Forty years from now, who’s going to
want to see this?’ No visionaries.”
I'm thinking of another Altman film, if I'm not mistaken. It doesn't make mention in the story above, but didn't that Richard Gere, "Dr T and the Women" come from him? Yup. I never saw that when it came out, but happened upon it on TBS, late night cable movie surfing. Liked it so much (in that feel-good way) that I have to watch it all the way through every time it's on now.
Digging around on Internet Movie Database, I also see he did a TV adaptation of Marsha Norman's "The Laundromat." I did that piece in college. I've always loved it, although I never really saw Carol Burnett as Alberta.
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