A sprawling LA cityscape twinkles in the distance as helicopters are filled with poisons to spread across the landscape and eradicate some treasonous foe. The helicopters take to the skies in an explosion of light and fly in tight military formation, looming over the heads of all 22 primary characters of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts as …
Robert Altman never really slowed down throughout his entire career. He made masterpieces in the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s right up until his death in late 2006. He made films unique to him, his stamp was on everything he did from M*A*S*H* through his final film A Prairie Home Companion. For this final film …
In a gratuitously verbose title selection unseen since Sergio Martino’s Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean finds Robert Altman at his most nostalgic for an effusive flavor of Americana that will forever be remembered with fondness , the smell of …
How could this possibly be a Robert Altman film? There’s only one character, for starters and it’s all set in one room. Far from the sweeping character mosaics and open spaces of M*A*S*H*, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, A Wedding, and HealtH comes Secret Honor: a film version of a one-man play about a post- …
There’s no better way to enter the world of high art, than with an audience rudely chatting as a ballet performance is about to start. The talkers are of course prodded by the dedicated loyalists with loud shushes. Robert Altman’s The Company examines the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago casually through seasons of ballet. The …
The Graduate 2, starring Julie Roberts as the daughter of Ben and Elaine. This silly concept is pitched in the opening of Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player. Like the rest of the film, it’s humorously silly but scarily accurate to the Hollywood of the 1990s and today. Right from the get-go, one can see classic notions of Hollywood …
Following a string of career-defining films, such as M.A.S.H. (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and The Long Goodbye (1973), Altman set his sights on the country music capital of the world. Nashville is just as iconic, if not more so, as any other Altman film because it accomplishes so much with such grace and finesse. It is an …
Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977) is replete with psycho-sexual tension. From beginning to end, the atmosphere captivates the viewer. It is at once disturbing and provocative, constantly luring one into the void which subsumes both the film and its characters. Taking note from Bergman’s Persona (1966), Altman crafts a story of post-modern decay by juxtaposing the …
Slow brooding camera movements ponder spaces overflowing with the paranoid preoccupations of a woman tortured by her work, psychological fragility, or secret conspiracies aimed at tormenting her psyche. Buried amidst these expensive accouterments of leather and wood, she formulates a story as …
Long mired in music rights issues and considered a relatively minor entry in the Robert Altman canon, California Split now looks more like a crucial point in the evolution of film sound technology and one of the best exemplars of Altman’s patented brand of naturalistic cinema. It’s a transition point between the genre-revising likes of …