Bow down to Robert Altman...

it'll do wonders for your temper!

xpost

i mean, if Big Themes and grand gestures were what made great art, it'd be the easiest thing in the world to make

and stanley kramer would be the greatest director ever

or maybe volker schlondorff

you'll never believe this because anosognosia etc

anosametoyou

well, sure

but you're the one you can't even imagine someone preferring an action film to a Canonical New Hollywood Classic

whose superiority seems self-evident to you because...

actually, who gives a shit.

"action film" is a marketing tem. I prefer Wages of Fear to Sorcerer.

DISPROVEN, IPSO FACTOID

i agree about wages of fear!

think he meant Morbs, Eric

Oh probably, and I bow to the master when it comes to goading.

suggesting that a cinema of big ideas and grand gestures automatically leads to stanley kramer is pretty facile, amateurist

that's not what i said

i was saying that if that was _all_ it took to make a good movie, stanley kramer would be the best director ever

fortunately there are other things in movies worth getting excited about

this is in response to morbs, who trolled with the idea that die hard didn't have "sublime" themes therefore was patently worthless

he brings out the worst in me, though, so i apologize for being catty on this thread

i assume it's a "he"

i was saying that if that was _all_ it took to make a good movie, stanley kramer would be the best director ever

fortunately there are other things in movies worth getting excited about

I think that's the exact point I'm making about Nashville--whether or not you believe it has anything to say, there's 150 minutes of other stuff worth getting excited about.

maybe 75 minutes :)

srsly though
i recognize that you're arguing that, and i agree w/ you to a point.

i wasn't saying that nashville was worthless, i was just responding to morbius's comment which suggested that if a film didn't have explicit (or implicit!) grand themes that it was self-evidently worthless

i'm not even sure he would argue that as a general point but that's what his snarky comment suggested

which just means i should ignore morbs, a good lesson for us all

If that's how much good stuff you get, then sure, you're not going to care for it. Don't agree, but that's fine. But I wouldn't place too much emphasis on the ending in trying to explain why you don't think much of the film.

One of the reasons I respond to Nashville is because its grand themes are also woven into the fabric of something raucus, irreverent and lively. The exact opposite of Kramer.

"Your miserable life is not worth the reversal of an amateurist decision." xxp

altman is several leagues beyond kramer as a director, but there's a didactic streak in altman that isn't completely un-kramer-esque, even if it comes out as sarcasm rather than high-mindedness

i mean ultimately nashville strikes me as pretty moralistic

moralistic, moralizing, i forget which word is more appropriate

something raucus, irreverent and lively

That's it exactly. And why I always have a hard time defending the film when people focus on the music or the alleged self-importance--I love most of the music, do think it has stuff to say (or at the very least reflects its moment in fascinating ways), but it's what Eric says that explains why I've watched it a zillion times, and you're either in sync with that or not. And if you're not, I can relate in terms of other films. I was as out of sync with Playtime as humanly possible.

morbsidizing

I was as out of sync with Playtime as humanly possible

:(

that said, i can totally understand tati as an acquired taste.

the weird thing about altman's "liveliness," and i don't mean this as a putdown, is that it feels held under glass. like he's set in motion something quasi-spontaneous but filmed it at a remove, in an almost anthropological way (at times). this is less true of mccabe & mrs miller which feels much more subjective to me.

xpost

i apologise for misrepresenting yr argument, amateurist, but i do find that yr often expressed hostility to the 'serious' (or the aspirationally serious) sometimes leads you to a very cramped, formally conservative ideal of what cinema can and should be. and really, you don't like bergman?

sometimes "self-important" is used as a synonym for "ambitious," it seems to me

you could say the same of tati, in fact, though i think his mise en scene is much more obviously and painstakingly "orchestrated"

xpost

ward, i wonder if that's just b/c of the positions i take in opposition to morbs and other folks here. certainly there are a lot of very intellectual forbidding films i admire, from eisenstein to straub/huillet. i just don't think seriousness in itself is necessarily a value.

i guess as a personal preference i like films that wear their ambitions lightly, but that's not always the case, viz. ivan the terrible / thin red line / etc.

I subscribe to the Raymond Durgnant theory. Movies that aim extremely high or movies that aim even more extremely low.

(Nashville probably doesn't exactly qualify on either count, tho it's trying for both.)

Durgnat

wait, what's his theory? i like durgnat a lot but i don't recall this.

Oops, I think I conflated something I once read Durgnat say about cinephiles (that they're constantly disappointed by cinema, or something similar to that) and a taxonomy by Adrian Martin, who wrote this in what still seems like a definitive article about canon-building:

Critics who are truly cinephiles, I believe, often champion extremes. They go for the highest and the lowest. They champion the most difficult, severe, rigorous, minimalist, experimental films; and, equally, they also champion the often despised, maligned and overlooked products of popular culture - like vulgar teenage comedies, gross horror, trashy exploitation, ultra-violent action, even pornography. At both extremes, cinephile critics look for excess and intensity. A piece of their aesthetic credo is summed up in the words of critic Paul Willemen, who once proposed "frenzy, madness, neurosis, extravaganza, monstrosity, etc" as "positive values" in a work of art. (2) What such critics usually do not like, on principle, is a certain middle-of-the-road, middlebrow cinema - or, more exactly, a middle-of-the-road taste in cinema, safe and predictable, between those two extremes of the highest and lowest.

The other Durgnat theory I subscribe to is, of course, that Hawks Isn't Good Enough.

everything but the blood hounds snappin' at your rear

Critics who are truly cinephiles

blech

i mean, good on adrian martin if that's his favored brand of criticism (and it's certainly an accurate description of a common-enough critical stance), but when he puts it like that--making it a litmus test for "true" cinephilia--he just sounds like a bully.

and jeez altman doesn't fit into either of those extremes; by martin's standards he'd be irredeemably middlebrow, stuck between straub and huillet and "massacre at central high."

Playtime feels like an excellent example of a film with a fairly banal 'big idea' - modern life is rubbish - that's transformed into something beautiful and profound by the originality of its mise en scene. The same is true of lots of Antonioni, imho.

the most obvious implicit meaning of playtime is /almost/ banal. it's not just that "modern architecture is dehumanizing and sterile," it's also that "human beings have the power to transcend the sterility of the modern built environment." but yeah it's not those ideas but rather the exhaustive/exhausting density of the mise en scene and the way the film teaches you how to watch it that makes playtime something unique and (to me anyway) joyous to experience.

re. martin's formula... one thing i like about dave kehr is that at one moment you think he's like one of martin's critics, favoring "body genre" films on the one hand, and poststructuralist art films on the other. but then you remember that he's also robert zemeckis's biggest fan. i'm wary of any formula for what makes the "best critics" (or the "best films" for that matter) but surely containing multitudes is a good bet...

i have to say that i like antonioni less and less as his films seem to get more and more portentous. i've always found "red desert" and "blow up" oppressive in their obvious desire to evoke matters of great significance while remaining coyly uncommunicative. and i think that just as he starts signalling his ambitions more obviously, antonioni's formal brilliance begins to abandon him (though not completely until after "the passenger"). it's not unidirectional though, of all his films i think i like the attenuated melodrama of "story of a love affair" and "l'avventura" the most.

i should add that i wouldn't be too quick though to posit playtime as "solely" a masterpiece of form since what tati is doing (and what a lot of terrific artists do) has some interesting implications for human perception/cognition. malcolm turvey is writing a book about this.

btw that should be invoke, not evoke

sorry for overposting. :(

Are you ever not in policing mode?

"policing mode"? what does that mean?

I think California Split is now my second-favourite Altman film--it has eclipsed McCabe and The Long Goodbye. There are a couple of parts that still bother me. Gould and Segal singing drunkenly as they leave the bar--that's a little too much of that word Οὖτις used above. The Bert Remsen shakedown is funny...but kind of mean, too easy, and obviously dated. And no, it's not a feminist landmark.

There's just so much amazing by-play, though. (My favourite line reading might be the way Gould says "They're playing pretty well, aren't they?" when Segal points out the Suns have won five in a row.) And if you like poker films, I can't think of anything except Roundersthat comes close.

I bet C. Grissom can answer this: when Segal shows up unannounced and Gwen Welles says she's "just reading my book," what's the book?

With Prentiss and Welles, especially Welles, I will say that--conceding that hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold was a tired cliche even 40 years ago--they have their moments. Welles' slow goodbye wave to Segal as she's up trimming the tree is nicely bittersweet.