Word: altmans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Harvard hit much stronger tonight," Engineer Coach Karen Altman-Velazquez said. "They improved their serve, and kept us from passing well...
...Altman, whose classic Nashville had an equally jarring conclusion, seems right at home in Shepard's irresolute world. It is his prerogative to leave things open-ended, and ours to question the repercussions of his choice. Altman's version of Shepard's play is certainly more than filmed theatre. The world he gives us is tangible and authentic, and no film in recent memory has as meticulous a look. Eddie's truck is a masterpiece of mud and birdcrap, like a Jackson Pollack custom-designed Chevy. May's motel room is a working model for entropy, strewn with dirty underwear...
...Altman does an equally amazing job of translating Shepard's fascination with the role of myth. In Fool For Love, and other Shepard dramas, characters provide conflicting versions of the past, leaving the audience to sift through an ash-heap of half-truths and seeming contradictions. Altman, ingeniously, lets the camera paint the past, while the characters consciously or unconsciously falsify it. In one scene, May describes her mother holding her hand so hard she fears her bones might crack. The camera shows mother and daughter walking at a distance. Eddie describes the night he and his father stroll silently...
Fool For Love is an important film for a number of reasons. It establishes Shepard as one of our finest screen-writers, and confirms the staying power of Altman, who has always been one of our most solid directors. Shepard's collaboration with Wim Wenders on Paris, Texas, and now his work with Altman, hints at a possible Shepard film canon. Coppola doing Buried Child? Kurosawa's A Lie of the Mind? Kubrick's Curse of the Starving Class? A Lucasfilm version of The Tooth of Crime? The mind reels...
...while prospects look bright for a Shepard-filled future treat yourself in the interim to Altman's Fool For Love. It's better than tequila, or Barbara Mandrell, or Tex-Mex chili, or a pocketful of quarters and a virgin Magic Fingers. And despite Harvard Square Theatre's highway-robbery $5 ticket price, you'd be an ever-lovin' fool for missing...