A chronicle of the interconnected lives of a group of people in the lead up to Paris Fashion Week.A chronicle of the interconnected lives of a group of people in the lead up to Paris Fashion Week.A chronicle of the interconnected lives of a group of people in the lead up to Paris Fashion Week.
- Awards
- 3 wins & 3 nominations
Anouk Aimée
- Simone Lowenthal
- (as Anouk Aimee)
Rossy de Palma
- Pilar
- (as Rossy De Palma)
- Director
- Writers
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaDanny Aiello and Lauren Bacall clashed during filming, with Bacall calling him a bully due to his behaviour towards other cast members.
- GoofsIn the hotel room, Anne Eisenhower lifts a glass of wine from Joe Flynn's dining cart with her left hand and takes a drink. Joe makes a comment and it can be seen that Anne's left arm is up to her face (she is visible from the chest down), but when we cut back to Anne the glass is in her right hand as she puts it down.
- Quotes
Kitty Potter: This is fucking fruitcake time. I mean - is that fashion, is it? I mean is there a message out there? I mean you got lot of naked people wandering around here.
- Crazy creditsThe film's opening scene where Sergei buys the 2 Dior ties is set in Moscow's Red Square and the first 2 lines of credits (a Miramax production and a Robert Altman film) appear solely in Cyrillic characters
- SoundtracksHere Comes the Hotstepper (Allaam Mix)
Written by Ini Kamoze, Salaam Remi (as Salaam Gibbs) & Chris Kenner
Performed by Ini Kamoze
Courtesy of Columbia Records
By arrangement with Sony Music Licensing
Featured review
I feel bad for brilliant directors. They make one movie that isn't as great as their many other masterpieces and BAM! — it's thrown into the trash heap, classified as a miserable pile of dookie. Some (critics) like to designate a less successful film as an interesting mess; what they really mean, though, is that they can't decide if they liked the film or not — but one thing is for sure: it wasn't as good as (insert Oscar adored movie from a multiple-award winning director here). It's unavoidable — everyone wants an Orson Welles to have a career full of Citizen Kanes, nothing experimental, nothing tricky. Sigh. People are human, you know. It's hard to make a masterpiece!
As an admirer of Robert Altman's work (Nashville, Short Cuts), even the slightest of a failure remains watchable to me. Is it the overlapping dialogue? The devastatingly star-studded casts? The magnificent giganticness of the plot, the characters, the script? Not all of Altman's films are equally chatty — he is capable of going gloomy and dry (Thieves Like Us, The Long Goodbye) — but when he wants to go all out he goes all out. The Player, a Hollywood satire, featured nearly sixty celebrities making random cameos for the sake of making a cameo. Nashville had twenty-four main characters, all of them somehow as well-characterized as the last.
Ready to Wear, a fashion week parody, comes directly after The Player and Short Cuts — Altman's biggest successes of the 1990s — and it continues the trend of a large cast and cheerfully rambling dialogue. But arriving in the shadow of these terror twins can only be described as a sort of curse. Three is hardly a magic number, and Ready to Wear learned that all too soon, considering the critical destruction it faced upon its release. Altman died in 2006, his legacy coming in the form of the films I mentioned earlier; Ready to Wear, in the meantime, got filed away in the reject folder.
I've spoiled myself these last few years. I have only sat through Altman movies Ebert promised I would like — and I have yet to see one that I haven't admired in some way or another. Ready to Wear is my first wild card (it currently holds a 26% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, panned for "not being mean enough", "not being focused enough", etc). 133 minutes later, I can confidently say that I don't understand the lack of love for Ready to Wear.
Fine, the humor isn't as sharp as it could be (this is supposed to be a satire, after all). Okay, Altman and his co-screenwriter, Barbara Shulgasser, aren't decisive enough to really make consistent characters out of the massive ensemble. But I like Ready to Wear, along with its hiccups. Things to like include the setting, Paris, of all places; how extensive this fictional fashion week is, loaded with brilliantly timed cameos and dynamic catwalk sequences (soundtracked with Salt-N-Peppa, Björk, more); and, most significantly, the cast, which is possibly too ravishing to resist, including Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Lauren Bacall, (a scene-stealing) Kim Basinger, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Forest Whitaker, Tracey Ullman, Sally Kellerman, Lili Taylor, Teri Garr and Lyle Lovett. Some portray insiders, some out, all compelling.
Problematic and sprawling as it is, Ready to Wear keeps us busy and keeps things charming — finding ourselves entertained is accidental. There's so much going on, so much to enjoy. So stop, please stop, thinking and comparing and underrating Ready to Wear because of Nashville and Short Cuts and M*A*S*H and The Player. You'll have a better time that way. There's much to savor. Altman pays homage to 1963's Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow by recreating its striptease scene with its now senior stars, Loren and Mastroianni, and the final sequence, featuring a scad of gorgeous (and nude) models, cements the film's carefree approach to do whatever the hell it wants. Sure, you should watch one of the Altman greats first (I won't name them again), but Ready to Wear acts as a smart pastime. You can't get all this from the September issue anyway.
Read more reviews at petersonreviews.com
As an admirer of Robert Altman's work (Nashville, Short Cuts), even the slightest of a failure remains watchable to me. Is it the overlapping dialogue? The devastatingly star-studded casts? The magnificent giganticness of the plot, the characters, the script? Not all of Altman's films are equally chatty — he is capable of going gloomy and dry (Thieves Like Us, The Long Goodbye) — but when he wants to go all out he goes all out. The Player, a Hollywood satire, featured nearly sixty celebrities making random cameos for the sake of making a cameo. Nashville had twenty-four main characters, all of them somehow as well-characterized as the last.
Ready to Wear, a fashion week parody, comes directly after The Player and Short Cuts — Altman's biggest successes of the 1990s — and it continues the trend of a large cast and cheerfully rambling dialogue. But arriving in the shadow of these terror twins can only be described as a sort of curse. Three is hardly a magic number, and Ready to Wear learned that all too soon, considering the critical destruction it faced upon its release. Altman died in 2006, his legacy coming in the form of the films I mentioned earlier; Ready to Wear, in the meantime, got filed away in the reject folder.
I've spoiled myself these last few years. I have only sat through Altman movies Ebert promised I would like — and I have yet to see one that I haven't admired in some way or another. Ready to Wear is my first wild card (it currently holds a 26% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, panned for "not being mean enough", "not being focused enough", etc). 133 minutes later, I can confidently say that I don't understand the lack of love for Ready to Wear.
Fine, the humor isn't as sharp as it could be (this is supposed to be a satire, after all). Okay, Altman and his co-screenwriter, Barbara Shulgasser, aren't decisive enough to really make consistent characters out of the massive ensemble. But I like Ready to Wear, along with its hiccups. Things to like include the setting, Paris, of all places; how extensive this fictional fashion week is, loaded with brilliantly timed cameos and dynamic catwalk sequences (soundtracked with Salt-N-Peppa, Björk, more); and, most significantly, the cast, which is possibly too ravishing to resist, including Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Lauren Bacall, (a scene-stealing) Kim Basinger, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Forest Whitaker, Tracey Ullman, Sally Kellerman, Lili Taylor, Teri Garr and Lyle Lovett. Some portray insiders, some out, all compelling.
Problematic and sprawling as it is, Ready to Wear keeps us busy and keeps things charming — finding ourselves entertained is accidental. There's so much going on, so much to enjoy. So stop, please stop, thinking and comparing and underrating Ready to Wear because of Nashville and Short Cuts and M*A*S*H and The Player. You'll have a better time that way. There's much to savor. Altman pays homage to 1963's Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow by recreating its striptease scene with its now senior stars, Loren and Mastroianni, and the final sequence, featuring a scad of gorgeous (and nude) models, cements the film's carefree approach to do whatever the hell it wants. Sure, you should watch one of the Altman greats first (I won't name them again), but Ready to Wear acts as a smart pastime. You can't get all this from the September issue anyway.
Read more reviews at petersonreviews.com
- blakiepeterson
- May 1, 2015
- Permalink
- How long is Ready to Wear?Powered by Alexa
Details
Box office
- Budget
- $18,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $11,300,653
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $2,026,295
- Dec 26, 1994
- Gross worldwide
- $11,300,653
- Runtime2 hours 13 minutes
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 2.39 : 1
- 2.35 : 1
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content