Word: altmans
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...Altman's Short Cuts is a panoramic human comedy...
...Altman's impatience with conventional narrative animates his film, so does his patience with and trust of actors. He's always been a man who encourages his performers to riff on a script's themes, and they respond with astonishing brio. "This movie was like a symphony, with Bob serving as the conductor," says one of his featured players, Matthew Modine. "It created a tremendous amount of pressure because you have to understand where you're at, when you come in, and what your role is. It's like a musician standing in front of these two big timpani drums...
...Altman, in contrast, is an exuberant inclusionist. His best and most characteristic films (MASH, Nashville, The Player) teem with characters bouncing from one level to another of multilayered stories that are full of chance encounters and crazy coincidences. "There's something about this mural-type film that interests me," he says simply. It was -- what else? -- chance that brought Altman to Carver. He asked his secretary for reading matter for a transatlantic flight, and she provided several collections of Carver's stories. Dipping in and out of them as he dropped in and out of sleep, Altman found that...
...Maybe Altman gives Carver's people more interesting or eccentric jobs than they originally had; maybe he condescends to them occasionally; maybe one story that is his own and Barhydt's invention is melodramatically overweening. Nevertheless, this movie works. In part, that's because Altman and Carver do share one important characteristic: short attention spans. They like to touch a moment and move quickly on. True to his title, Altman does not linger on any of his stories. Nobody is ever on long enough to grow tedious, and his linkages between stories (the screenwriters used color-coded file cards pinned...
That quality is Short Cuts' great redeeming grace. But it is Altman's refusal to linger on it sentimentally, his joyous appreciation of his actors' wicked inventiveness, and everyone's passionate, quick-witted desire to expose the vagaries of human behavior under quotidian pressure that simply sweep you up and sweep away whatever doubts you may have about its grand design. It is, finally, as a richly pulsating, hugely entertaining human comedy -- antic, wayward, glancing -- that Short Cuts bemuses, amuses and finally entrances...