Word: altmans
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...feminism takes a nasty hit. (I could name one young bride who, after storming out of a screening room at the end of that shower scene, literally went home to her mother, telling her husband, "I don't want to live with someone who thinks that is funny.") Altman continued to be pursued by this reputation as a prankster on all humanity, depantsing people of their pretenses and setting up an impregnable barrier between the hip and the square. And, as it happened, he earned...
...extent, Nashville, he would quickly line up five more films that didn't cost much and didn't have to make much. The flurry of films that followed MASH were no blockbusters, but they helped shaped a generation's idea of its own potential, and of the cinema's. Altman subverted genres like the western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) and the private-eye thriller (The Long Goodbye) with equal parts energy and anomie...
...Impossible to pin down or pigeonhole, as full of contradictions as his movies, Altman became a specialist in both two movie forms: epic and the intimate. Nashville, a Doomsday kaleidoscope set to country music, splashed the whole South with his wily cynicism; Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson said that American history was a lie dressed up in showbiz frills; and A Wedding, his black spray-paint on a four-tier nuptial cake, contained 48 characters, for no better reason than that Nashville had had 24. But there was a quieter, artsier side to Altman...
...told, he directed 14 films in the 70s; no American worked at that pace, or at his level. The decade ended with Altman's second largest box-office grosser, Popeye, after which Hollywood and its most persistent renegade tired of each other's company for a time. Other directors might go into retirement or hiding. Altman moved to the side streets, to the movie equivalent of off-Broadway, to fashion his next career: as the formidable director of stage plays on film and videotape (10 of them, from 1982 to 1988). In 1992 he stormed back from exile with...
...tone of an Altman film - the desperate milling, the sense of isolation within a community, the urgency to no clear end - is a reflection of life on any movie set. Or in any political campaign (Tanner '88, the TV series he concocted with Garry Trudeau, plays now like a prophetic parody of media manipulation by such masters as James Carville and Karl Rove). Or any reception (A Wedding), convention (H.E.A.L.T.H.), concert (Nashville), casino spree (California Split), couture opening (Ready to Wear), country weekend (Gosford Park) or old-time radio show (A Prairie Home Companion). Any social gathering, in fact, where...