Word: altmans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Altman's impatience with conventional narrative animates his film, so does his patience with and trust of actors. He's always been a man who encourages his performers to riff on a script's themes, and they respond with astonishing brio. "This movie was like a symphony, with Bob serving as the conductor," says one of his featured players, Matthew Modine. "It created a tremendous amount of pressure because you have to understand where you're at, when you come in, and what your role is. It's like a musician standing in front of these two big timpani drums...
...Robert Altman's Short Cuts -- one of the season's most widely anticipated films -- opens with shots of helicopters, photographed so they look like giant bugs as they roar across the night skies, doing battle with a little bug, the Medfly, terror of the California fruit industry. This periodic chemical warfare, in which insecticides are noisily laid down across entire neighborhoods, is one of the minor, faintly comic annoyances of Los Angeles life. All that technology; such a humble and primitive...
Whether the film, which has the prestigious opening-night slot at the New York Film Festival this Friday, achieves its highest aims is likely to prove hotly debatable as it rolls slowly into theaters during the fall. L.A. is, after all, the world's easiest satirical target. Moreover, Altman and co- screenwriter Frank Barhydt are adapting -- freely commingling is a better description -- short stories by the late Raymond Carver. These have quite a different bleakness about them and are, anyway, resistant to the implicit cultural generalizations the movie tries to impose on them. Carver was content to capture discrete moments...
...Altman, in contrast, is an exuberant inclusionist. His best and most characteristic films (MASH, Nashville, The Player) teem with characters bouncing from one level to another of multilayered stories that are full of chance encounters and crazy coincidences. "There's something about this mural-type film that interests me," he says simply. It was -- what else? -- chance that brought Altman to Carver. He asked his secretary for reading matter for a transatlantic flight, and she provided several collections of Carver's stories. Dipping in and out of them as he dropped in and out of sleep, Altman found that...
...Maybe Altman gives Carver's people more interesting or eccentric jobs than they originally had; maybe he condescends to them occasionally; maybe one story that is his own and Barhydt's invention is melodramatically overweening. Nevertheless, this movie works. In part, that's because Altman and Carver do share one important characteristic: short attention spans. They like to touch a moment and move quickly on. True to his title, Altman does not linger on any of his stories. Nobody is ever on long enough to grow tedious, and his linkages between stories (the screenwriters used color-coded file cards pinned...