Word: altmans
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...cranky uncle at Christmas dinner, daring to utter indiscretions about the family members who were trying to talk over his bad manners. He was the eternal renegade, refusing to make feel-good movies or boys'-life adventures or simple melodramas - simple anything. For more than 35 years, Robert Altman, who died Monday night in Los Angeles at 81, was the truth-telling leper outside the film-industry cathedral, and the most cunning chiseler at the staid monument Hollywood has made of movie...
...Hollywood decides to love its rebels when they've either died or outlasted most of their enemies. Altman managed to stick around long enough, and return investments to enough small businesses in Tinseltown, to get his tribute at the Academy Awards ceremony this March. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin introduced him with a beautifully executed double monologue, overlapping their lines in the fashion Altman had made famous in most of his 42 feature films - most notably MASH, the 1970 war comedy that spawned the (much more domesticated and liberal) TV series M*A*S*H, and remains the film that...
...when she died. "By that calculation, you may have given me this award too early. I think I have 40 years on it, and I intend to use it." He didn't. A Prairie Home Companion, the uneasy blend of Garrison Keillor's folksy humor and Altman's corrosive take on human foibles, was his last film...
...great Altman, Prairie was pure Altman, for it dealt with the subject of his strongest films: America, chatting as it flailed away, ignorant of its imminent demise. It was subject he painted on a vast, teeming canvas - Brueghel reimagined by Jackson Pollock - where folks elbow and fast-talk their way toward your attention. His fugue format, pouring dozens of plots into a post-ethnic melting pot, gave everyone a brief grab at movie immortality. On the great plains of Altman's precious wide screen, America bustled, hustled and tussled. His searching telephoto lens, focusing on this micro-event or that...
...could stop these creatures, or shut them up? Not Altman: he hears America talking, endlessly, engagingly, whether or not it makes sense. Even in an two-person conversation, the Babel of off-screen voices tells you that the main story is just one of many that could be told-are being told, in shorthand, at the edges of the frame. The murmur of overlapping blarney isn't a carpet of sound; rather, it's swatches, hundreds of gorgeous samples to choose from. This blend of image and voice, meticulously designed, may seem like a glorious mess. But that is Altman...