Tag: Robert Altman

Notes on a Slow Zoom: Robert Altman’s 3 WOMEN (1977)

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Standing in an aquarium with his arms outstretched, the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes a cameo appearance in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, but his presence is anything but gratuitous.  Like everything else in this poetically unified film, he is there to echo, relect, or comment upon some other aspect of the movie.  3 Women is a movie filled with doubles [...]

Henry Gibson 1935-2009

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Henry Gibson was not only a gifted comedian (Laugh-In), but a remarkable character actor with at least three great performances to his credit: Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Nashville and, more recently, as big tipper “Thurston Howell” in Magnolia (above) by Altman disciple, P.T. Anderson. Born as James Bateman, he adopted the name Henry [...]

Misleading Cover Art, Part 2 – The Dumb Waiter

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Neither of the two versions of the promo art for John Huston’s The Dead presented by Erich Kuersten, below, are *quite* as misleading as the cover art for the VHS version of The Dumb Waiter, a 1987 half-hour television film directed by Robert Altman based on the one-act play of the same title by the [...]

Ron Howard to Direct Nixon Film

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Say what? Ron “Opie Cunningham” Howard is going to direct Nixon/Frost? (Thanks to Screengrab for the link.) This seems to be Hollywood’s standard M.O. these days. Take a controversial subject – e.g., The DaVinci Code – and assign it to the nicest, least controversial director around. I’m surprised they aren’t casting Tom Hanks as Nixon. [...]

BOBBY – Better Than You Might Expect

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I approached Emilio Estevez’s Bobby with trepidation, knowing it was Estevez’s attempt to make an Altmanesque ensemble film, a format perfected, of course, by the late Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts) and further elaborated by P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), but rarely successful in the hands of others. Paul Haggis’s Crash, for example, is one [...]