Word: altmans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...acerbic early years to its earnest latter seasons (starring--above, from left--Alan Alda, Harry Morgan and Mike Farrell), it was a tour de force of TV writing. This 36-disc set offers it all, plus documentaries, a trivia game and the 1970 movie by the late Robert Altman. (The spin-off AfterM*A*S*H is thankfully omitted.) Fire up the still and settle in for a long, hilarious...
...tone of an Altman film - the desperate milling, the sense of isolation within a community, the urgency to no clear end - is a reflection of life on any movie set. Or in any political campaign (Tanner '88, the TV series he concocted with Garry Trudeau, plays now like a prophetic parody of media manipulation by such masters as James Carville and Karl Rove). Or any reception (A Wedding), convention (H.E.A.L.T.H.), concert (Nashville), casino spree (California Split), couture opening (Ready to Wear), country weekend (Gosford Park) or old-time radio show (A Prairie Home Companion). Any social gathering, in fact, where...
...Typically, Altman's contribution to the omnibus film Aria focused not on the singers but on the operagoers. Everyone gets to be a prima donna, or a spear carrier, in Altman's daring democracy. Not many directors would think to open a film with an elegant eight-minute tracking shot that brings dozens of characters together and introduces a whodunit teaser. Altman did it, and so much more, with The Player. He continued his innovations with film form in Short Cuts and Ready to Wear and the 2001 Gosford Park. By then, as happens to most pioneering artists, experiment...
...bigger, go simpler. As a result, most American films are sitcoms, predictable from first reel to last. More precisely (in this era of Short Attention Span Cinema), they are commercials, peddling primitive stories with comfortable emotions. Today's typical filmmaker is a moneychanger in a fine old temple. And Altman, ostensibly the iconoclast, is actually the idealist, the conservative, keeping the faith, fighting to preserve what's best in movies: the sense that the screen can contain...anything. As Streep and Tomlin, finally in unison, said at the end of their Oscar introduction, "You leave his movies knowing that life...
...everyone's nerves at the end of Short Cuts, Tom Waits shouts at Tomlin, "This is it, baby! We're goin' out together!" That could have been the tag line for love for the 90s: exuberant togetherness on the fault line of the millennium. And that was immortality, Robert Altman-style. With his death today, he took some of the spirit of cinematic adventure with...