Word: screens
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...That's a 180 from the prevailing notion in classic Hollywood, where optimism was the cardinal belief, at least on-screen. (It was in the front office that the knives came out.) Most movies, whatever their genre, were romances; they aimed for tears and ended with a kiss. But to serious critics then, and to the mass audience now, sentiment is suspect. Feeling is mushy, girly - for fools. To be soft-hearted is to be soft-headed. So critics will see a horror film with extreme violence, or (less frequently) an erotic film with extreme sex, and accept these...
...vast, teeming canvas - Brueghel reimagined by Jackson Pollock - where folks elbow and fast-talk their way toward your attention. His fugue format, pouring dozens of plots into a post-ethnic melting pot, gave everyone a brief grab at movie immortality. On the great plains of Altman's precious wide screen, America bustled, hustled and tussled. His searching telephoto lens, focusing on this micro-event or that, suggested the eye of a man who is always interested, was rarely impressed by all the milling. This was the director, of course, whispering to his characters, "Go on, make fools or heroes...
...could stop these creatures, or shut them up? Not Altman: he hears America talking, endlessly, engagingly, whether or not it makes sense. Even in an two-person conversation, the Babel of off-screen voices tells you that the main story is just one of many that could be told-are being told, in shorthand, at the edges of the frame. The murmur of overlapping blarney isn't a carpet of sound; rather, it's swatches, hundreds of gorgeous samples to choose from. This blend of image and voice, meticulously designed, may seem like a glorious mess. But that is Altman...
...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. As Streep and Tomlin, finally in unison, said at the end of their Oscar introduction, "You leave his movies knowing that life is many things at once...
...SCREEN TEST Maybe you're well aware that Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings, but how up are you on today's pop culture? Take this week's quiz and find...