Links for the Day (November 22nd, 2006)
In keeping with the spirit of the moment, today's links are dedicated entirely to Robert Altman-related essays.1. : By David Sterritt
["Altman stood with the bravest filmmakers of the pre-Reagan years, and 3 Women stands with Altman’s boldest achievements of that remarkable time.
He received a green light from Twentieth Century Fox not only without a finished screenplay but with an expressed desire to make the entire movie without one. He had literally dreamed up the project during a restless night of tossing and turning as his wife lay seriously ill in a hospital bed. While his dreams that night didn’t provide the film’s story, they gave him the specific vision of making a film called 3 Women starring Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, set in the California desert, and centering on the theft of someone’s personality.
He was raring to get started as soon as he woke up."]
2. : By Michael Wilmington
["Nixon as Hamlet, Nixon as Lear, Nixon as Blanche DuBois, Nixon as Krapp—clutching every last tape to his breast with the wild fury and despair of a man on the precipice .
. . Nixon in his study, poring over his past, gazing at his own multiplied monochrome image in a bank of TV monitors .
. . Nixon fulminating, raging, screaming at a portrait of the “whoremaster” Kissinger, dictating with somber resignation his own defense against history and disgrace into a tape recorder .
. . Nixon drinking, defiant, dissolving into tears, Nixon Agonistes, Nixon bellowing every expletive you could imagine, then sinking to the floor in exhaustion .
. . Nixon with the gun to his temple, the final gambol and endgame of the Old Prankster, Tricky Dick in the mirrored halls of memory and conscience.
"]
3. : By Rick Thompson
["Kansas City is a period recreation film, a version of Kansas City, Missouri in 1934 that is grim, nasty and nostalgic. Like other Robert Altman films, it is not simple; unlike his other films, it is a musical of sorts.
Because Altman was born and raised in Kansas City, the film is sometimes seen as a sort of personal memory work looking back over a remarkable time: in 1934, Kansas City was the hub city of the large southwest region, like Chicago to the north, a national railroad interchange; the centre of a growing jazz movement, sending bands on tour from Texas to California to the Dakotas. Unlike nearly every other city in the country, in 1934 – one of the worst years of the great economic Depression – Kansas City was prosperous: it was in the hands of a canny political boss, Tom Pendergast, who finessed a political coalition of Anglo business and civic interests, Italian – read “Mafia” – newcomers, and a large black community. The Pendergast machine (which launched the career of President-to-be Harry S.
Truman) achieved this by running (often ruthlessly) an open city: gambling, liquor, prostitution, whatever people wanted and would pay for was available around the clock. During the 1920s and 1930s, the larger southwest region produced a disproportionately high number of top professional jazz players and orchestras who knew that if times got tough, they could always get a job in Kansas City. Altman is at pains throughout the film to gently but constantly remind us of these things.
"]
4. : By Adrian Danks
["At the outset, it is probably most useful to place Dr T and the Women (Robert Altman, 2000) within a couple of frameworks. First, it represents Robert Altman's latest excursion into the panoramic form, a fret-work of observations, plot-lines and characters that are situated within a particular social, cultural, political and/or geographical milieu.
In Dr T this is the world of high society women reputedly found in Dallas, Texas, and who revolve around easy on the eye gynecologist, Richard Gere. Second, Dr T might be considered as part of the autumnal phase of Altman's career, a mode or period of filmmaking that is noticeably more languid, outwardly frivolous and less hard-edged (and sometimes off the mark) than what has come before. Dr T certainly fits this description, but it is also surprisingly sprightly and breezily entertaining.
In this respect, the film can be said to resemble the work of some of classical Hollywood's great directors, such as Ford and Hawks, or that of a post-classical contemporary such as Clint Eastwood. In fact Eastwood's example sets up some useful comparisons to Altman's work, his background in television and the ways he uses specific actors and personas, in particular."]
5.
: By Nick Pinkerton
["What evidence exists of artistry comes through in its atmosphere. The film is shot, more-or-less throughout, with a lens that leaves the image foggy on all four sides, with only an oval in the middle of the frame in crisp focus—the effect is something like peering through a window pane rimmed with frost. Or maybe like looking in at figures frozen under ice—which is probably more appropriate, as the window implies warmth from within, maybe a blazing hearth.
And there is so little that seems warm in this movie: the cast seems genuinely numb in the Quebec winter, breath rolling out in plumes; the score, by Tom Pierson, is full of shivery plucks, little slippery flutes. The movie is very, very slow, even—appropriately—glacial. It starts out trudging; it ends trudging.
And in between it trudges—through a particularly lugubrious mystery, past a half-thawed romance, and into a final faceoff with a bellicose Vittorio Gassman (the movie’s casting screams “International Investment”) that plays a bit like the blizzard showdown at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But.
Whiter. And. Slower.
"]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
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