Altmans Nashville

Also it's really not "clever" because the guy had already been set-up as kind of creepy and weird.

I grew up in Nashville, and people here hate the film, which only proves its power as a commentary on what this town has always been--and just in the last few years has the city become self-conscious enough to see how the movie is about politics, not music. There's talk afoot of doing a 30th-anniv. thing about the movie, with the usual panel discussions, etc. As a look at the California-ization of Nashville, it fits perfectly into Altman's other work, too, and there are lots of transplanted Californians and New Yorkers here now who get the movie, too. It's lost a bit of its power for me over the years--I prefer Altman's Chandler film to "Nashville" these days--but it's still pretty great.

Made in a cloud of pot smoke, apparently.

http://www.bam.org/film/series.aspx?id=64

There are some great quotes in the Stuart book from Rex Reed that show he was just as big an idiot 30 years ago.

However, simplistic?? Anything but.

Loretta Lynn had a great quote about being the basis for Barbara Jean, something like "It's fine they had me goin' in and out of hospitals and havin' a messy marriage, but SHOOTIN' me and haulin' my carcass off the stage is too much!"

Nixon resigned in the middle of theNashville shoot, so naturally there was a celebratory party. A teary-eyed Roy Acuff shouted at the company, "See what you've done to our president!", then locked himself in a dressing room and played his fiddle for a couple hours.

Gary Busey has a songwriting credit at the end -- I think he was sposed to play the cuckold in Keith Carradine's trio.

Man, that "I'm Easy" scene is dramatically brilliant; Jackson Browne fuck-me-I'm-sensitive ballad performed by compulsive dick-wielder.

Didn't get to hear more than a fraction of Altman's commentary, but did catch "You know, all the songs weren't supposed to be good."

"Lil Jimmy's been wishin' / That IIIIII'll take him fishin' / His Little League pitchin' is somethin' to see..."

A couple of Gibson's arrogant asides are the funniest lines in the film next to karen Black's dubiousness over Julie Christie being an Oscar winner. "She caint even comb her hair!"

Watched about 2/3 of this tonight before wife started to drift off and agreed to leave the rest for tomorrow.

Eh, I dunno. The songs are great deadpan jokes, but something about Altman's sense of rhythm always seems a bit off to me. Too many scenes with too many people talking at once, often with good lines getting buried as a result.

i just watched shampoo again the other night and i think it does somewhat the same thing as nashville, but i like it better.

I can't fathom another movie doing the same thing as Nashville, much less doing it better.

Too many scenes with too many people talking at once, often with good lines getting buried as a result.

That was kind of his thing. Intentionally so. I can see why you might someone might find it annoying, but it's something that I really appreciate and a big part of the reason I love re-watching his movies.

Except Dr. T & the Women.

Yeah, and I guess it's for atmosphere, or to capture that sort of imperfect and awkward aspect of reality, but I feel like it makes too many scenes tense and frustrating that shouldn't be.

My wife pointed out that the Christopher Guest movies - esp. Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind - seem like they owe something to Nashville.

I can't fathom another movie doing the same thing as Nashville, much less doing it better.

what is this thing exactly that you and nashville enthusiasts think the movie does? because no matter how many times i watch it what i get is broad and not very original social satire (americans are hypocrites! and mean!), readymade '70s paranoia, a sort of generic indictment of money-grubbers and squares, freshman seminar dark-heart-of-democracy stuff ... i like the performances, but the movie just seems achingly obvious and overly satisfied with itself. (and, you know, i like it better than say short cuts. but i don't really like short cuts much at all. hell i like gosford park more than nashville.)

challenging opinions and all, i know. and i like altman. nashville's just never felt particularly honest or revealing to me.

gosford park was incredibly cutting - upper class people are bad! lower class people are good!

arguing themes of movies strikes me as mostly ridiculous, unless you have serious disagreements with them

well yeah, i don't think big ideas are really altman's strength in general. (although fwiw i don't think those are exactly the big ideas of gosford park.) when he's good i think he's good on character, the loose spontaneity of conversation, the untidiness of life as it's lived etc. nashville does that stuff well to some extent, but because it's this deliberately cartoonish political lampoon, the characters and situations are all bent to the needs of the grotesquerie.

i think the movie's kind a straw-man exercise, i guess is what i mean.

always disliked this one. it's like being trapped in a crowded elevator for four hours.

I like Altman movies because of their immersiveness. They feel lived in, and I appreciate the fly-on-the-wall perspective, the general avoidance of "DO YOU SEE?!?!", the loose pacing, and the organic feel of his work. Nashville isn't his best movie, but it's one of my favorites because it's almost meditative in its avoidance of a standard-issue plot.

Nashville feels like a culmination, but I prefer Thieves Like Us, The Long Goodbye, and M*A*SH.

omg I just realized Opal = Momus

A friend somehow stumbled over this: a review from George Will, originally written for The Washington Post and reprinted in the Lewiston Morning Tribune, August 3, 1975.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=fYFfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=gTAMAAAAIBAJ&dq=pauline%20kael&pg=4228%2C772177

His obvious revulsion at the film isn't all that different from the revulsion expressed by some actual film critics, although he opts for derisive quotes (from the movie, from other critics) in lieu of explanation.

His use of those quotes with little elaboration suggests that he's writing to an audience that would immediately "get" what he's showing, namely that these film critics are a bunch of schadenfreude-loving, america-hating liberals.

anyway I don't agree with that obviously, but something about this film just never rings true for me

I guess I never saw this Jim Emerson piece analyzing it through Lady Pearl:

http://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/string-of-pearl-the-lady-of-altmans-nashville

There's a series of Altman talks coming up here by a guy who does a lot of these things:

http://www.milesnadaljcc.ca/arts-culture/film/media-mondays/204-the-enigmatic-genius-of-robert-altman

I'll probably go to the Nashville one, and maybe Tanner '88. The problem (for me, anyway) is that it's just Courrier and some clips, not an actual screening.

Molly Haskell's Criterion essay: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2978-nashville-america-singing

In a fittingly clamorous debut, Nashville opened to a barrage of wild enthusiasm and an acerbic—if less intense—push-back, most of which revolved around Pauline Kael’s “prereview” in the New Yorker. After David Picker’s withdrawal, Jerry Weintraub had come in as producer and Paramount as distributor, but Paramount was dawdling. In a shrewd maneuver, Altman invited Kael, his most impassioned critical ally, to an early screening. The film wasn’t even in its final cut when Kael jumped the gun with a dithyramb (“Coming: Nashville”) intended to drum up media excitement and pressure its hesitant distributor into setting an opening date. The critic was at her most deliriously oxymoronic: “Is there such a thing as an orgy for movie lovers—but an orgy without excess?” she asked rhetorically, before telling us how we should expect to feel: “You don’t get drunk on images, you’re not overpowered—you get elated.” (It was Kael who said, apocryphally, that the movie would change the nature of filmmaking.)

Inevitably, there was grumbling and resentment from the critical fraternity: Pauline had inserted herself into the marketing of the film in such a way that it became almost impossible to respond to the movie without responding to her review. Most reactions were positive, some ecstatic: Newsweek gave it a cover spread and, quoting “I Hear America Singing,” from Leaves of Grass, called it Whitmanesque. I myself likened it to “a Chaucerian musical pilgrimage whose Canterbury is Nashville.” And when names like Joyce, Chekhov, and Fellini were tossed around, the backlash was inevitable.

I don't always like Rick Perlstein's writing style in The Invisible Bridge--he'll have weirdly and noticeably formal sentence construction now and again, and, at the other end of the spectrum, an awful word like "gobsmacked" doesn't belong in a book about the mid-'70s--but his two pages on Nashville are excellent, maybe the best thing I've ever read on the film after Kael.

There was a curious little movie that came out the previous summer, the summer of Jaws, which cineasts adored but the public avoided. Brilliant, yes, but difficult: a sort of scattered, discursive allegory for a national mood buried a bit too far beneath the surface of the national consciousness to make it a simple thing to explain.

I liked it more than tipsy seems to, but agree that it seemed more about character developement, maybe built up from improvisation, to some extent, like some of his others (Sissy Spacek said there was a script for Three Women, "but he wouldn't let us see it.") Gibson nails the Roy Acuff-based self-appointed righteous guardian of the American Tradition (which may be what led Perlstein along The Invisible Bridge back to Reagan). But otherwise, don't see anything political, beyond the para-office politics of the music industry (and how they're connected with the privileges of Keith Carradine's character, the soft rocker with the perpetual hard-on). What did I miss??

Perlstein's description of the film really registered for me in the context of the book. His description is fragmentary, like the film, and the like the description above--"a sort of scattered, discursive allegory for a national mood buried a bit too far beneath the surface of the national consciousness to make it a simple thing to explain"--he doesn't see it as explicitly political, but more as a reflection of general unease:

...you could pick through the various runes and try to make them signify something coherent, but the incoherence felt like the point--but an incoherence, be that as it may, that is shared.

There's also the more obvious connection, that Hal Philip Walker anticipates Carter in many ways, and the less obvious one, that he intersects (like Happy Days and lots else floating around) the desire after Watergate to go back to some make-believe simpler time, which is where Reagan comes in.

"scattered," "discursive," sure (though not too much; it's loosely tight, like a good jam going somewhere or other, enough to keep me watching so long)--but "allegory"? He thinks there's that kind of unity after all, under it all? I don't see anything beyond the obvious, like a campaign pro trying to rope the Acuff-based character in Lots of films had and have a general unease---but yeah, it's got that certain urban early-to-mid70s vibe for sure, the kind you can almost smell.

(Involuntary flashbacks to The Friends of Eddie Coyle as I wrote that last.)

premiered in NYC 40 years ago yesterday

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-altman-and-nashville

Finally watched this and found the ending oddly moving - all the kids who don't register what's happened and are getting into the song, all the rest coming through in the parents' expressions, and everyone weirdly sticking around, not screaming or trampling each other or anything, and Gibson simultaneously falling into shocked denial and showman's autopilot... I dunno, it got to me, more than most of the mini-plots or even their greater-than-the-sum juxtaposition. (Thank God for the format - a whole film or even a junior-size B-story about the folk trio love triangle would have been unbearable.)

It was a 'love' hexagon at the very least.

I find the ending extremely moving, in some ways I could explain and others I couldn't. Henry Gibson's "This isn't Dallas, it's Nashville" is weirdly heroic from such a buffoon.

Yeah somewhere a verse or so into the final song I started tearing up and could not then articulate why. Maybe some ghost of the ineffable qualities that struck such chords in the mid-70s, an "American Tune" sort of statement that doesn't say all that much literally but still gets at something that was off or wrong or sad about the way everything had turned out for a lot of people. Interesting also that except maybe Goldblum, who's a grinning, Zonker-esque clown cipher, all of the countercultural, big-city Hollywood outsiders are cynics, hacks, superficial morons or unfeeling shitheads. Not that the locals are all pure decent folk but certainly Tomlin, Wynn, Blakely and DoQui come off better than Duvall, Murphy, Chaplin and Carradine. Just thinking out loud, versus the notion that Altman is looking down at the South.

Part of it for me too is just grand a gesture it is, how audacious, and in the context of what was not exactly a commercial film, but one that did aim for a broad audience. (I get a little bit of that too from "God Bless America" in The Deer Hunter.) You can certainly argue, as many people do, that both films wildly overreach, which is where they get slammed for being pretentious (and, more so with Altman, smug). I don't agree (at all), but I can understand where that comes from. I find myself moved by the ambition of those endings. Does that still happen in (essentially) mainstream American films? Probably now and again, I'd have to try to think of some recent examples.

"how grand a gesture"

I could see Trump inspiring, if that's the right word, that kind of film.

James Gray comes to mind.

Found a good-shaped copy of Ronee Blakley's 1972 album for 75 cents a couple of weeks ago.

https://img.discogs.com/eG32IKnlKPviIuhxWNwmqzQjE38=/fit-in/256x256/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-2826604-1332401168.jpeg.jpg

It leads off with "Dues," three years before the film. Playing the album now--rest sounds pretty good, sort of country-gospelish.

RIP Barbara Harris

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/barbara-harris-dies-second-city-actress-freaky-friday-nashville/

Heard "I'm Easy" on the radio today. The song is inseparable from the film for me, that scene being so important and so perfectly directed, so I've never really had any reason to think about it as a thing unto itself. I wouldn't argue that you're knocking on Dan Hill's door here, though.

Altman said part of the reason ABC Films picked up the film was because they thought Carradine's songs would be hits and so they really wanted the soundtrack album. "I'm Easy" went to #17 Pop and topped the A/C charts (not to mention winning the Oscar), and Carradine cut two solo albums for Asylum.

SPOTTED: Henry Gibson reciting some of "Keep-A-Goin" on Dick Van Dyke in 1966

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tilp00uNlPg

The relevant bit around 08:45

I think I vaguely remember that--I loved DVD as a kid--but I'm not sure if I'm confusing it with Gibson doing the same on Laugh-In.