Word: altmans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us opens with a gentle pan from the hazy skyline of a Mississippi morning across a field of grass along the tracks where a chain gang's flatcar rolls through a thicket, and to the pond where two convicts paddle a boat ashore and escape into a car which pulls into view as the camera completes its circle. All the way around, it pans a whole expansive environment, a distance of soft green and damp air which will dominate the film, cushioning the violence of its bank robber heroes like their own lonely needs...
...this large effect, the sense of an atmosphere and a mood, which Altman asserts is his primary goal. John Simon '46 has accused him of being a director who can boast of every great director's qualification of skill and sense--except that of having something to say. But Altman resists that intellectual demand: "I don't have anything to say to anybody except to show them what I see. I can't draw their conclusions," he told me. "Of course all the material is filtered through me, and is going to have some shape of mine, but that...
...Altman is something of a maverick among Hollywood directors. Since his first widespread recognition with M*A*S*H, he has found himself too often making movies which threaten to have to wait ten or twenty years for recognition because of ineffectual studio backing. When I talked to him earlier this week he was at his office at "Lionsgate Productions," a studio he started simply "to make my own films, in my own little studio." He is determined "to keep away from the atmosphere of studios and keep the people I work with away from them. Because all that stuff...
...much confidence in their audience. The opening and closing scenes of Zardoz state with no attempt at subtlety that this movie's tongue is unequivocally planted in its cheek. The bulk of the movie is far less obvious. One suspects the distributor was learning the lessons of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. But while that film, after being recalled, was left unmutilated with a change only in the advertising campaign, Zardoz has been more clearly, albeit unnecessarily, labeled...
...sound track is filled with the sweet melodrama of old radio programs like Gangbusters, which Altman uses both to locate Bowie, Keechie and their pals in popular mythology and as an ironic counterpoint to lives that are too pressingly real. He gets fair, subdued performances from his cast and in addition admirably captures the poor rural South. Shot in muted autumnal tones, the film seems overcast, sad and dense with a kind of elemental menace...