Word: cinema
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...Altman came out of Kansas City, breeding ground of such fertile creators and benders of American popular art as Walt Disney and Charlie Parker. (He paid tribute to his hometown's jazz heritage in the 1996 Kansas City.) It was there young Bob fell in love with pop cinema in all its apparent spontaneity. " Those movies just seemed to happen - nobody made them, you know?" he told John C. Tibbetts for a 1992 profile in the Salisbury State University Literature Film Quarterly, "And I guess that's the way I still see movies - I want them to be occurrences...
...lesser 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...
...afraid that, for even a moment, they will lose, addle or exasperate the audience. The wisdom from behind the megaphone is: Go bigger, go simpler. As a result, most American films are sitcoms, predictable from first reel to last. More precisely (in this era of Short Attention Span Cinema), they are commercials, peddling primitive stories with comfortable emotions. Today's typical filmmaker is a moneychanger in a fine old temple. And Altman, ostensibly the iconoclast, is actually the idealist, the conservative, keeping the faith, fighting to preserve what's best in movies: the sense that the screen can contain...anything...
...Cinema v?rit? translates as movie truth, but the subject's story doesn't have to be true; it only has to compel the viewer to keep watching. Anyway, the lies or evasions people bring to explanations of their lives can be as revealing of their real personalities (if there are such things) as the truth (if that even exists). And in Edith and Edie Beale, Albert and David found a mother-daughter act eager to act out their lifelong psychodrama. As Edie, who was 56 when the movie was shot, confides to the brothers about her dreams of nightclub stardom...
...admirers called it "the Lubitsch touch"--a deft, vigorous approach to comedy that graced Hollywood romances like Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka and Heaven Can Wait. But before Ernst Lubitsch arrived in the U.S., he had helped establish the infant German cinema as a beacon of sophisticated drama and innovative technique. Kino, the top DVD label for silent films, offers a four-disc sampler of the director's early work, all from 1919 to 1921, including lavish historical dramas (Anna Boleyn), mountain films (The Wildcat, with a very feral Pola Negri) and delightful comedies. Best is The Oyster Princess, "a grotesque...