Word: altmans
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...include radio broadcast versions of the film, interviews filmed especially for the disc, alternate versions, lucid and useful commentary tracks, sometimes more than one, and a printed edition of any published work that a film was based on. (Check out the volume of Raymond Carver stories packaged with Robert Altman's Short Cuts and Eric Rohmer's short-story versions of the films that make up his Six Moral Tales...
...last night, Food Network host Joey Altman cooked and then drank so much with us that he got out his guitar and led a sing-along of Brown Eyed Girl. Then we hugged, traded e-mails and promised to stay in touch. And much as I think s'mores are better than they really are, I've already bought some Diageo wine. But not nearly enough to make up for all that Georges de Latour Cabernet I drank...
...better films (and they are not many in comparison to those he has messed up) Altman has used his peculiar style - mumbled dialogue often overlapped, a restless camera zooming, panning, tracking - to obscure the fact that they have very little to say. The lives he recounts are hopelessly muddled and ruled by chance and coincidence, with their outcomes generally a nasty surprise both to the players and to us in the audience. The way he encourages (or at least permits) his actors to improvise makes him a beloved figure to them, and permits his more impressionable viewers to feel they...
...saying that a movie can reasonably be expected to come to a halt while Keillor tells one of his stories. But this weightless film needs to have found some equivalent to them , and there were times in A Prairie Home Companion when I wanted the old Altman to assert himself, to let some mumbling and zooming happen, if only to obscure the paucity (and desperation) of Keillor's thin and casual plotting, to make poignantly manifest some of the sadness and confusion of people trying to do a live radio show while knowing that it is to be the last...
...Altman just shoots it, without directorial comment or commitment. He's no more than a technician, fearful, it seems, of intruding too heavily on Keillor's territory. But that territory is, in this case, essentially undefended by its founder-proprietor. It is waiting for someone, something, to grant its people felt and wayward lives. If A Prairie Home Companion functions at all it is as a performance film - some of the songs, though not particularly well shot, are at least lively. But that's not enough. Streep's work aside, you can pretty much get all that's worth having...