Word: altmans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL'S HISTORY LESSON Directed by ROBERT ALTMAN Screenplay by ROBERT ALTMAN and ALAN RUDOLPH
America's most interesting active film maker, Robert Altman, has created a sly, wry, wise study of what fame does to people cursed with that most mixed of blessings. Buffalo Bill Cody (superbly played by Paul Newman) was a legend created out of flimsy cloth by a pulp writer and promoter named Ned Buntline (impersonated by Burt Lancaster), who lurks around the fringes of the film...
...this great land, unless it comes up again next morning"). He has a letch for operatic sopranos and a strange hatred of birds, and he is comically unsteady on his snow white charger-especially when he tries to make it rear in the grand manner. One suspects Altman has based his Buffalo Bill on movie stars he has known-people whose celebrity has cut them off from the reality that the rest of us share, as well as from their earlier selves, the selves that first touched a common chord and gave them their alienating fame...
Buffalo Bill and the Indians. After seeing his bomb, it's not difficult to see why Dino de Laurentis pulled Altman off the Ragtime project. Altman is best at presenting little stories, but he has this awful tendency to cast himself as the grand philosophe. In Buffalo Bill, the oracle has come down from the mountain to tell us that we have lied to ourselves about our history and that we mistreated the Indians. How interesting. At the Cheri III, in Boston...
...skies for a decade (she won a National Book award for her last batch of reviews), they now accuse her of floating a series of "puff pieces." The controversy came to a head a year ago, when she gave herself over to unabashed adulation for Robert Altman's Nashville. She called it "an orgy without excess" and made it sound like a gentle, cinematic orgasm. ("I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness.") Before, her fans had loved her pyrotechnic style and classy sense of nuance, what you might call enthusiasm with bite. Now, they complained...