Word: altmans
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...BEST MOMENT in Robert Altman's film version of Sam Shepard's play Fool For Love comes when the heartsick cowboy Eddie pops a quarter in a motel room Magic Fingers machine. Sprawled out on an unmade queen-size bed, dressed in faded jeans and a trailworn denim jacket, and nursing a tin of day-old Skoal and a bottle of worm-blessed Mexican tequila, Shepard rides the bed like a rundown rodeo star, and when he throws his girl May a particularly wistful smile, all the humor and pathos of Shepard's writing comes shining clean through...
...Director Altman has given the claustrophobic tension of Shepard's stageplay breadth and richness without upsetting the mood. The story unfolds in a disheveled motel room, a fenced-in playground, a formica dinerette. The action shifts comfortably from the present to the past, the comic to the tragic, the real to the imagined. And the characters, both skillfully drawn and portrayed, swing with lightning quickness from the pathetic to the courageous, from the cruel to the ridiculous...
...Altman, whose classic Nashville had an equally jarring conclusion, seems right at home in Shepard's irresolute world. It is his prerogative to leave things open-ended, and ours to question the repercussions of his choice. Altman's version of Shepard's play is certainly more than filmed theatre. The world he gives us is tangible and authentic, and no film in recent memory has as meticulous a look. Eddie's truck is a masterpiece of mud and birdcrap, like a Jackson Pollack custom-designed Chevy. May's motel room is a working model for entropy, strewn with dirty underwear...
...Altman does an equally amazing job of translating Shepard's fascination with the role of myth. In Fool For Love, and other Shepard dramas, characters provide conflicting versions of the past, leaving the audience to sift through an ash-heap of half-truths and seeming contradictions. Altman, ingeniously, lets the camera paint the past, while the characters consciously or unconsciously falsify it. In one scene, May describes her mother holding her hand so hard she fears her bones might crack. The camera shows mother and daughter walking at a distance. Eddie describes the night he and his father stroll silently...
...Engineers, holders of a 9-2 record and the favorite, easily handled the visiting Crimson spikers, who came into the night with a 4-7 slate. M.I.T. took a 3-1 decision at Dupont Cage despite playing what Engineer Coach Karen Altman considered "pretty lethargic" volleyball...