Word: altmans
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...only possible complaint is not what it excludes but what it includes. The recent films--Sleuth, The Long Goodbye , Klute. Harper and The Last of Sheila-- leave you wondering what kind of touch less than-stellar directors like Michael Curtiz had that today's better directors like Robert Altman, don't Sleuth is simply a too-cute stage play turned into a too-cute (and what's worse for a mystery, too easy to figure out) movie: The Last of Sheila and Klute derive their chief interest not so much from their plots as from their settings, an ocean-liner...
...Long Goodbye. What with Robert Altman speaking at Tufts tonight, this showing, paired with Altman's Brewster McCloud, supplies a good chance to see the director's two most controversial films...
...FACT you have to swim, because an upright analytical approach to this graceful and observant film will leave you cold and bored. It's not, as some have charged, that Altman has nothing to say. He's got plenty, but he wouldn't be able to write it down. Here he shows us the mood of gambling culture in California (which is not just the gamblers) without bothering us with a moral. There's a music in the way gamblers talk with each other and, more telling, the way they talk to themselves. When a singing voice finally enters...
...Spark (played by scriptwriter Joseph Walsh). So he's betting for survival--if he can control chance just for a minute, maybe he can get a grip on his life. When he finally wins he doesn't even want the spoils. A classic kind of gambler, which Segal and Altman do credit to, but it's nothing...
Which is why comparisons to The Sting or to the "camaraderie" movies about male companionship are ill-drawn. Altman may be trying to recover from the disaster of Thieves Like Us (his advertising got pulled) by making a sure-fire picture that will fund his "own" movie in Nashville, but with a few exceptions California Split is not a cheap turn-on picture. It's just a muted, funny movie that is very close to American life, and to call it empty would be like calling life empty--a moot point...