The AV Club has a pretty good article about Robert Altman here:
www.avclub.com/articles/robert-altman,57945/.
I disagree with a few things, and there are a couple of factual errors, but in general it's a very good overview of Altman and his work.
Add comment June 23rd, 2011
A friend just emailed me the news that Robert Altman has died.
I emailed back:
It's too bad, of course, but not surprising, and it makes him one of only two major directors I can think of who went out at the peak of his powers, after a long career, and with a final film which was fitting (in subject and style) to be his final film. John Huston is the other, and he knew and planned that The Dead would be his last. Altman's situation was different (he wasn't directing from a hospital bed, for one thing), but he obviously knew it was possible it would be the last one. He knew that, at the end of A Prairie Home Companion, the person the Dangerous Woman was coming for might be him.
It's too bad there won't be any more, but there are a hell of a lot of good ones (and quite a few great ones) to look back on. Going out as he did, after a long life doing what he wanted, and doing it as well as anybody ever has, that's the best deal any of us can hope for.
So, see all his films, if you haven't (or even if you have), but most especially McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, Kansas City, Gosford Park, and A Prairie Home Companion.
In other news, I scurried out today at lunch time and bought Against the Day, the new novel by Thomas Pynchon. I've read the first chapter already, and I'll write about that more here when I'm not supposed to be working.
Addendum:
I just read that Elliot Gould said of Altman, "He was the last great American director in the tradition of John Ford." I think this is very true, much more accurate than all the descriptions calling him a maverick and a Hollywood outsider. Ford, Hawks, Huston, these were directors who knew how to make the films they wanted to make, within the Hollywood establishment, entertaining and artistic and individual. As the saying goes, a film where you could tell who the devil made it, which was certainly true of Altman.
He was the last, the next generation were all the film school graduates: Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola (pere). A very different breed.
Addendum #2:
I talk about the honorary Oscar and Altman's influence on me here.
My Robert Altman reviews are here.
2 comments November 21st, 2006
It’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been accumulating little notes here and there about things I could write about, but none of them were really strong enough for a whole blog post.
So, here is a selection:
1) “No Comfort” by Fintan O’Toole
I read O’Toole quite often, mostly about politics, but this (even though it starts about Elon Musk) is not about politics. It’s about the inescapable cliche that Shakespeare wrote about “heroes” who were brought down by “tragic flaws.”
To offer a brief quote:
The most obvious problem with all that is, even if it were true, it would be crushingly dull. Moral tales in which people do bad things because they have wicked instincts and then get their comeuppance are ten a penny. The clichés shrink Shakespeare to the level of Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, the author of a three-volume novel of “more than usually revolting sentimentality” who explains that in her book “the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
Well worth reading.
2) Shelley Duvall (1949 – 2024)
Here are two good obituaries of Shelley Duvall:
This article is good, too: “The slim but powerful movie career of Shelley Duvall emerged from a Robert Altman crowd“
It’s really too bad that so many people these days know her, if they know her at all, from her (excellent) work in The Shining. She was consistently good, in a variety of roles, in all the movies she made with Robert Altman.
Speaking of Altman, this was interesting: “The 10 Best Robert Altman Movies, Ranked.” I don’t entirely agree with the ranking (if I made a Altman Top Ten list today, I would undoubtedly disagree with it by tomorrow), but it enough in sync with my own preferences that I’m tempted to re-watch 3 Women, which I haven’t seen in ages and which I’ve never reviewed (and which stars Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek).
Also:
I’ve still been dipping in and out of Across the River and into the Trees, from time to time, but my opinions haven’t changed. And now there are no more Hemingway novels for me to read for the first time (I have no interest in the posthumous ones). Oh, well, the short stories are generally better anyway.
I’ve also been re-reading parts of A. E. Hotchner’s book Papa Hemingway, which is about the years they were friends (and collaborators, since Hotchner adapted quite a few Hemingway stories for the screen). And during that time, they (and several other people) traveled around Spain following a season of bullfighting, partly because of a very intense rivalry between two great matadors, both of whom Hemingway was friends with.
Hemingway wrote a book about that summer, called The Dangerous Season. I’ve never read any of his non-fiction writing, but I decided to try this one.
(Weirdly, I do have to report that I felt a wisp of an obligation to insert a caveat explaining that I don’t approve of bullfighting. Looking at this objectively, this is odd, since I frequently read — and write — murder mysteries and I have never felt that I should clarify that I’m not in favor of murder.)
It is difficult to describe how much I enjoyed The Dangerous Season. Unlike Across the River, this is not Hemingway attempting “calculus” in prose (and did Hemingway even know what calculus was? — I doubt it) — this is Hemingway writing simply and well about people he knew and a sport he had studied for a lot of his life. It has humor, too, which the novel mostly doesn’t. (Orson Welles said that Hemingway could be really funny in life, but he obviously thought that humor had no place in serious fiction.) His humor can be rather dry and subtle, but it’s there.
In fiction, there are fairly predictable ways that this story could have ended (see the Lady Bracknell quote above), but these are real events and so they end as they ended.
One thing particularly amused me after reading this book and the Hotchner book referred to above. The two matadors whose rivalry is at the center of the book were Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. Dominguin’s sister Carmen was married to Ordóñez. Hemingway clearly liked Carmen, and writes about her with admiration, but what he never mentions (and Hotchner does) is that she had been a matador herself, and a very good one. Hotchner makes it clear that no woman could succeed in the macho world of bullfighting unless she had undeniable skills.
Why is this book so much better than Across the River (apart from the “calculus” question referred to above)? Frankly, one reason is that it was edited, and heavily (I think partly by Hotchner). As far as I can tell, Across the River was never even proofread, let alone edited.
Add comment November 29th, 2024
1) “Denis Villeneuve: ‘Frankly, I Hate Dialogue. Dialogue Is For Theatre And Television’“
“Frankly, I hate dialogue,” the filmmaker told The Times of London in a recent interview. “Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today.”
First off, no. If I bothered to have an all-time list of my Top Ten or Top Twenty movies, Robert Altman, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles would be heavily represented, and they were all very focused on dialogue.
However, what caught my eye about this quote is that this is exactly how I feel about Villeneuve’s movie Blade Runner 2049. I have long wanted to watch a version with the visuals, the music, and the sound design, all of which are amazing, with the dialogue buried way down in the mix somewhere. Once you know the plot of the movie, the words aren’t important, and none of them are memorable, but the rest is a constant pleasure.
2) There are rumors that Paul Thomas Anderson is going to make a movie based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland.
There are a few reasons that I should not be excited by this news.
One: It may not be true. (Anderson is apparently directing a movie right now, but it’s not confirmed what movie.)
Two: He directed Inherent Vice, also based on a Pynchon novel. I enjoyed that movie, or at least parts of it, but it is not, I would say, actually good.
Three: Vineland may be my least favorite Pynchon novel (with the necessary caveat that I still haven’t read Against the Day).
Nevertheless, I am curious, and if the movie actually exists at some point (see point one above), I imagine I will go see it.
Update: Yeah, Vineland is my least favorite Pynchon novel. By a wide margin. I just checked Wikipedia to make sure I wasn’t forgetting a novel, and, no, I remembered them all.
Add comment March 11th, 2024
I have mixed feelings about the Wes Anderson movies I’ve seen.
(This is not a question of “love/hate,” by the way. People use “love/hate” quite often for things which — as far as I can tell — never rise to the level of “love” or “hate.” This is just mixed feelings.)
Some people say all of Anderson’s movies are basically the same, and either you like them or you don’t. There are reasons this theory comes up, but it doesn’t apply to me.
I saw The Royal Tenenbaums years ago and I couldn’t stand it. Too many people who were all miserable for no apparent reason. I don’t remember if any of them changed in the course of the movie, but if they did it was, for me, too little and/or too late.
Quite a bit later, I have no idea why, I watched Moonrise Kingdom, and I immediately watched it every night for a week. I’ve talked about that before.
Then, when The Grand Budapest Hotel came out, I saw that. At first I found it to be so-so, but I’ve grown to like it much more over time. I believe I’ve been won over by how funny it is (it has a lot more laughs than either of the other two I’ve mentioned, or both combined).
I skipped The French Dispatch. It sounds like it was based on how much Anderson likes The New Yorker, and I grew up reading the magazine myself, but a movie? Really?
But now I’ve seen Asteroid City, and it’s a hoot.
First of all, there were two moments which made me laugh immoderately and repeatedly. I think the last time I laughed like that at a movie was American Hustle.
Asteroid City has a nested structure, a story within a story within a story, like The Grand Budapest Hotel. A moment when that structure breaks is one of the two laugh-out-loud moments I mentioned above.
Here, that means that you never forget you’re looking at the actors playing actors playing characters (one of whom is a famous actor). The whole thing is all really just the writer/director talking to us (which is further emphasized by how often the characters address the camera directly).
Will Augie end up seeing Midge again? The question is moot, since, as we are reminded on a regular basis, neither is a real person, even within the movie.
So, the fact that the characters are, in some cases, wounded can be examined while maintaining a certain distance. With Anderson’s movies (as opposed to Robert Altman’s movies, or Les Miserables, for example) that’s what works best for me.
Also, enjoyably, it’s a movie of a play where both the actors in the play and the playwright himself are confused about what the play actually means. YouTube has tried to get me to watch various videos about “The Real Meaning” of this movie, but I haven’t watched them, just like I ignore all the videos which want to “explain” Mulholland Drive to me.
Explanations aren’t always necessary. When I was younger, I had a beloved cat for over twenty years. I never once had the urge to dissect him.
Add comment February 26th, 2024
Two more points on Ulysses by James Joyce (plus one added later).
1) I did go to see the exhibition “One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses” at the Morgan Library and Museum.
It was really good. It was all in one large room (the walls were painted with the blue and white of the Greek flag — the colors on the first edition of Ulysses itself). There were exhibits on the walls all around the room, but there was also a central structure, with other displays on its exterior and interior walls. The result was that the entire exhibition appeared to be organized chronologically, but the time scheme seemed to be going in several directions at once, on several levels — very appropriate for Joyce and this novel.
Some parts of it were more interesting than others (to me). Photographs of Joyce and members of his family were okay, but I think that was mostly for newbies. There were some interesting artifacts, such as the order J.P. Morgan’s nephew (I think that’s who it was — I didn’t take notes) mailed in to purchase his copy of the first edition.
But the best parts for me were 1) several wonderful displays showing Joyce’s influence on the visual arts, and 2) actual manuscript pages, and heavily edited and rewritten galley proofs. It was something to see the handwritten originals of the beginning and end of the novel. And, yes, the first and last letter of the book are the same (“s”), which is almost certainly not an accident (hey, his next book began and ended with fragments of the same sentence).
I also had a further thought about the different editions of Ulysses that I talked about before. I think another reason I’m not all that concerned about all the typos in the original edition is because I’m not aware of any evidence that Joyce cared very much about them. He was certainly aware of them, but he didn’t pursue any sort of project to get them fixed (unlike Henry James, for example, who, late in his life, revised much of his body of work for the 24-volume New York Edition).
As far as I know, Joyce wrote Ulysses, he managed, with some difficulty, to get it published (on his 40th birthday, as he’d wanted), and then he moved on.
I have great sympathy for this approach. As I wrote once about Robert Altman:
Once, years ago, he was asked how he felt about that the fact that, at that time, many of his best movies weren’t available on video. He said, “What can I do? I make another movie.”
2) I’ve thought periodically, over the decades, that I need to really study Ulysses and understand it better than I do now.
One thing that’s always held me back is that I haven’t read enough and I don’t know enough. Professor Owens, for example, who I referred to in my last post, said that, in order to write about Joyce, he made sure that he’d read everything Joyce had read before writing Ulysses, including newspapers, and books in several languages (Joyce was fluent in five or six languages).
But, to be honest, the biggest obstacle has been that I’m always being distracted by my own writing projects. Writing is more fun than studying Ulysses (although not always more fun than reading Ulysses, I admit).
3) I’ve been watching videos about Joyce and Ulysses, and I just saw one which clarified why I’m always drawn to Ulysses rather than to Joyce’s earlier works, even though they’re a lot easier to read.
Ulysses is funny, sometimes wildly funny. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are not funny.
I think it’s that simple.
I’ve been listening to readings of Ulysses, and there are points, in the “Cyclops” episode in particular, when I’ve laughed out loud. I never laughed out loud at Dubliners or Portrait — and I imagine that I’m in the majority.
Add comment August 25th, 2022