Word: altmans
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...Ready to Wear, which Altman wrote with Barbara Shulgasser, is a high concept poorly executed. Too often the characters are simply mannequins for nasty jokes. What, for example, is the essence of the fashion doyenne played by Lauren Bacall? That she is color-blind, and that her friends apparently don't tell her she's wearing shoes of different shades. Why is Danny Aiello, as a buyer for a Chicago store, in the film? So he can cross-dress in a Chanel suit. At 60, Loren looks great, in or out of her array of glorious millinery...
When you hear the word French, you may think of elegance, hauteur and haute couture. When Robert Altman hears the word, he thinks of farce, polluted rivers and dog doo under everyone's foot. Pret-a-Porter (Ready to Wear) is the director's long-winded hate letter to the fashion industry and those who cover it. The film is a flaccid mess, missing its easy targets. It is also undiluted Altman -- a movie that sums up his attitude toward actors, audiences, the press, humanity. When you hear the word contempt, you think of Robert Altman...
Fashion is in a particularly ugly, aimless, self-parodying phase at the moment, so perhaps it deserves a chronicler as cynical as this one. Anyway, a cynic is what it got during the industry's big pret-a-porter shows in Paris last spring, when Altman mingled with the modish elite and found room in his film for many of them: designers Christian Lacroix, Jean Paul Gaultier and Issey Miyake, models Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington and CNN fashion maven Elsa Klensch...
...class family, H.E.A.L.T.H. to the organic-food business and The Player to Hollywood, so is Ready to Wear to fashion: a comic panorama of people pretending to get along under stress, creating a bogus community, playing games of power and privilege, establishing who's boss. The tone of an Altman film -- the desperate milling, the sense of isolation within a crowd, the urgency to no clear end -- is the reflection of life on any movie set and, indeed, in the working lives of most people. When the scheme works, as in MASH and The Player, it does so by giving...
Never blame actors; their mission is to do whatever their director tells them. Blame Altman, whose mission here was to assemble some of the most glamorous performers in world cinema for a mass hazing, a humiliation on camera. He is like the scuzzy photographer played by Rea: he finds people eager to make unedifying fools of themselves, takes their picture, takes some money and calls it art. And he has done to his actresses what male fashion designers so often do to their models and customers: make beautiful women look ridiculous. Imitation is the sincerest form of parody...