Word: altmans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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FLASH GORDON Directed by Mike Hodges; Screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr. POPEYE Directed by Robert Altman; Screenplay by Jules Feiffer...
...real trouble is Altman's direction, at once spacy and junked up. He caused an entire small town, Sweethaven, to be constructed on Malta, and it is as jumbled as Segar's Thimble Theatre was clean-lined. Worse, the sound track is constantly amutter with asides, off-screen voices, half-overheards-Altman trademarks at odds with the spare, sharp verbal play that was one of the delights in the comic...
...spinach cure. As a result, his moral force -and he was once one of the great comic-strip exemplars of righteousness tied to a short fuse-appears sicklied o'er with the pale cast of self-absorption. The rest of the characters-excepting Swee'Pea (played by Altman's grandchild, Wesley Ivan Hurt)-are blurs of lost innocence...
...what I yam," shrugs Popeye the Sailor, which may be easy for him to say. But just try being Popeye for a while, as Robin Williams did while making a Robert Altman film about the old gob, set for release in December. Not only did the actor have to master a vocabulary of malapropisms far more complex than the nano-nanos of Mork from Ork. He had to cavort under the fierce Malta sun, wearing thick rubber arm pads to simulate the cartoon sailor's anvil forearms. He had to squint perpetually out of his left eye, speak...
...additional footage. Still, Coppola and Lucas are hardly the only directors to have joined the emerging slice-and-splice school: Stanley Kubrick cut 19 minutes from 2001: A Space Odyssey a week after its release in 1968, and three minutes from The Shining after its opening this May. Robert Altman planned an eight-hour Nashville saga for ABC, and Martin Scorsese hoped to restore many of the sequences cut from New York, New York for telecast on NBC; so far, neither dream has been fulfilled. Bernardo Bertolucci is a compulsive tinkerer. After the release of Last Tango in Paris, Critic...