Word: altmans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...decades ago, companies provided one-size-fits-all health insurance. It had a deductible, co-insurance and an out-of-pocket maximum. But with medical costs skyrocketing, that system became far too costly for employers to maintain. Says Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent philanthropy that studies health-care issues: "The country made a de facto decision to go with a market-driven health [care] system based on competition and choice." Some folks were most interested in low cost; others wanted to see any doctor, go to any hospital or take any test they felt necessary...
...contained in the single issue. But just to mess with us a bit, the narrative has been divided into 29 vignettes that range in length from a single strip to several pages. Some of them continue a running narrative throughout the book and others are just "one-shots." This Altman-esque technique of weaving different story threads across each other forms a tapestry of lives rather than a straight narrative...
STARRING: Michael Gambon, Jeremy Northam, Maggie Smith, Stephen Fry, Helen Mirren, Ryan Phillippe, Emily Watson DIRECTOR: Robert Altman...
...idea--Agatha Christie meets Upstairs, Downstairs. But something goes wrong in the telling of this tale of murder at the Gosford Park house party, circa 1932. That something can be summed up in two words: Robert Altman. People want him to return to the form of what they fondly recall as his glory days--Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But those days are long gone, and we are pretty much left with Altman's signature mannerisms (improvisatory off-camera and overlapping dialogue), attitudes (a glum and witless misanthropy about his characters) and, above all, the lack of dynamics...
...exceptions, of course. Smith is both noisily and funnily imperious as an eccentric, impoverished dowager; Northam invests a real character, music-hall star Ivor Novello, with a wry and wistful intelligence; and Fry's self-important detective, cluelessly investigating the murder of their host (Gambon), is also funny. Altman wants us to sympathize with the servants, and it turns out that the crime is justified by a back story of Dickensian sentimentality, but tedium overwhelms caring well before this endless film finally concludes...