Word: altmans
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ALMOST FIFTY YEARS after the first Popeye cartoon, director Robert Altman and cartoonist-author-screenwriter Jules Feiffer have adapted the sailor to another medium--that of the musical-comedy feature film--using real people instead of animated figures. When such heavies team up with a talent like manic Robin Williams to interpret a piece of American folklore, the result ought to transcend the original material. Instead, they produce a faithful if restrained reproduction of the cartoon version--and somewhat of a disappointment...
...Altman has gathered together the whole crew of crazy caricatures and shipped them off to the ramshackle town of Sweethaven. In residence, there are the Oyls, most notably Olive, Popeye's confused and confusing "sweet pattootie"; Swee'pea, Popeye's mischievous "adoptik infink"; the villainous, animal-like Bluto; J. Wellington Wimpy, the hamburger moocher; Rough-House, the short-order cook; Geezil, a boarder at the Oyls; and Poopdeck Pappy, Popeye's long-lost father. Several other bizarre characters skulk about having no apparent role other than adding to the absurdity...
FLASH GORDON Directed by Mike Hodges; Screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr. POPEYE Directed by Robert Altman; Screenplay by Jules Feiffer...
...real trouble is Altman's direction, at once spacy and junked up. He caused an entire small town, Sweethaven, to be constructed on Malta, and it is as jumbled as Segar's Thimble Theatre was clean-lined. Worse, the sound track is constantly amutter with asides, off-screen voices, half-overheards-Altman trademarks at odds with the spare, sharp verbal play that was one of the delights in the comic...
...spinach cure. As a result, his moral force -and he was once one of the great comic-strip exemplars of righteousness tied to a short fuse-appears sicklied o'er with the pale cast of self-absorption. The rest of the characters-excepting Swee'Pea (played by Altman's grandchild, Wesley Ivan Hurt)-are blurs of lost innocence...