The cinema of Robert Altman was marked by characters who snaked through their lives by insisting on moving forward instead of first reckoning with trauma that they had accrued or engendered. This may have first manifested in the original cut of M*A*S*H where members of the 4077 dispassionately play poker as the body of Ho-Jon, […]
Read More MAGNOLIA (1999)It’s a strange thing to consider but for all of the power that sex wields to start wars, topple the powerful, and put people into financial or personal ruin, the porn industry is small time. That’s not to say that the porn business doesn’t make boatloads of cash. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I […]
Read More BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)If there was ever another filmmaker who could work as comfortably in any American state on the map as Robert Altman could, I know him or her not. While the Coen Brothers might be able to stake a claim to have traversed the lower 48 with the same kind of bemused charm as Altman, their […]
Read More COOKIE’S FORTUNE (1999)Robert Altman’s Short Cuts is a mosaic of people who are perpetually faced with bad decisions and who constantly take the wrong path. So, basically it’s about you and me. A spiderweb crack of broken souls stitched together by geography, relationships, and happenstance, Altman takes his well-traveled formula of regular folks just doing regular folks […]
Read More SHORT CUTS (1993)
Apollo Twin 