Word: altmans
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...Robert Altman's The Player has the razorsharp quality of a grudge long nursed by lucid bitterness. Adapted by Michael Tolkin from his own book, the film plays like every screenwriter's revenge fantasy. With strychnine-laced, on-target humor, Altman's movie dissects Hollywood as if it were a corpse that hasn't quite died...
From the gloriously insolent eight-minute tracking shot that opens the movie, Altman established a sardonic, Multi-layered texture. Replete with inside jokes, the film is so sure handed and exquisitely paced that Altman's audacity takes the audience's breath away. Moving from icy satire to sleek thriller to offbeat love story to behind-the-scenes expose, Altman has made Sunset Boulevard's 92's offspring...
...recent afternoon in New York City the director, dressed all in black, sat at his desk in his all-black production office, hustling deals. It is a Robert Altman sort of place. Just behind him is the neon onstage logo from his production of Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, giving him a perfect glitzy-tacky roadhouse penumbra. An old cheese and some scraps of baguette sit on the coffee table, and beyond the table sits his William Morris agent, listening in on a phone extension as Altman assures someone else's agents that...
Still, better to be accused of being a sellout than a has-been. And while Altman gleefully nurses some particular grudges -- against certain producers, certain executives, certain critics, Sam Shepard -- he seems free of general bitterness. Sure, he feels a little gypped out of M*A*S*H money ("I never got paid anything ((from the TV series)) -- anything"), but for all his visceral mistrust of Hollywood, he doesn't seem sour about his decade of reputation shrinkage and quasi-exile. After all, every few years he has been lucky enough to turn out something great. So what...
Thanks to a witty new film, Robert Altman is a player again...