Robert Altman Films Ranked/Rated/Reviewed

A very funny comedy, not really an anti-war film - as deluded Reds might want to lead you to believe. I don't doubt that Altman was "anti-war"(except when Soviets were invading a non-communist nation, he didn't mind such wars), as all Reds (allegedly) are, but that's not what defines the film, at all.

Nor is it a mockery or a diminishing of the achievements of the U.S. army, as incorrigible "progressives" are inclined to hallucinate. It's a laid-back situation comedy, albeit a black one at times, about how a bunch of miserable conscripts deal with a depressing situation, namely by mucking about. It's not intended to be realistic - despite the decidedly realistic visual quality. It's supposed to be funny, which is where it succeeds.

I don't like Gould much, but this role was tailor-made for him. The rest of the cast is good too, particularly Hot Lips Kellerman, and also Duvall as the humourless bible-thumper.

Viewings: 80s, 00s (about 3 times)

9/10

Like so often with Robert Altman's movies, it's either hit or miss: his films are either quite bad or really good (not counting the mid-90s onwards, when everything he touched was crap). At his best when delving into the psychology of interesting characters, at his very worst when trying to preach communism.

There is much to recommend here. First of all, the eeriness Altman creates shames 99% of all horror films - and this isn't even a proper horror film in the classic sense, but more like a psychological drama with strong "Twilight Zone" influence.

No time is wasted here; right from the start strange things start happening. It's a weird mystery that will keep you guessing - until the decidedly UNhappy ending.

I have no idea why this movie is both hard to come by and totally forgotten, with fairly few votes for a famous and communist director. Instead, whenever Altman's name is mentioned, we hear how great "The Player" is supposed to be. Forget "The Player" and that boring nepotist Tim Robbins; instead, check out "Images", "3 Women", "Vincent & Theo", and of course "M*A*S*H*", to see Altman at his best.

Viewings: 1997, 00s (about 3 times)

Intelligent (or at least interesting) character studies don't require intricate plots. Capiche, Stevie King fans?

8/10

This movie is proof that a pretentious drama can be good. Perhaps it is true that Altman was trying to rip off Bergman’s overrated “Persona”, but either way 3W is superior to this half-baked, taste-free Swedish meatball, so it makes no difference even if he did choose a pompous Swedish director’s non-masterpiece as something to bow down to and perhaps be “inspired” by. Bergman can only wish he had a tenth of Altman’s skill-set and diversity; the Swede was mostly limited to suicidal relationship soapers, whereas Altman successfully wrote-directed several very different movies.

Besides, Altman got the idea for 3W from a dream he had. No, not a wet dream, despite the fact that Sissy was in it. Interestingly enough, the dream involved Spacek and Duvall in a desert backdrop. So it is questionable how much influence Bergman had on this. Certainly the idea for initiating this particular film didn’t come from any “Persona” worship. Not to mention that they are two very different films. And anyway, how do we know that Bergman didn’t take cue’s from Polanski’s “Repulsion”?

SPOILERS

Altman’s choice of an atonal score, plus many close-ups of the demonic drawings, don’t have any concrete meaning, whether they were intended to or not being of no interest to me, but they are valuable in terms of helping create a unique mood – which separates this movie from practically all other dramas. Sure, the excellent “Images” that he shot several years earlier also dealt with the female psyche, or to be more specific with female mental instability, but the two films have little in common aside from the atonality and the basic theme of insanity. That was much more of psychological horror mystery whereas 3W is almost 100% character study, with only smaller doses of mystery and tiny doses of horror.

Duvall’s and Spacek’s characters are very well defined, and interesting throughout. Both are great, but Spacek steals the show with what is by far her best role. There is plenty of pathos related to Duvall’s Millie, and a good measure of weird childishness related to Spacek’s Pinky, around whom the mystery exists. Her background is foggy, and her subsequent loss of memory after the suicide attempt only adds to the questions about her, because at times she acts almost like an alien visiting Earth, disguised as a woman.

What I found very interesting, content-wise, are the shifts in power between the two women. (The film is called 3W, but in fact it’s about these two.) At first Millie is the wacky insecure eccentric who almost autistically fails to realize that she is unpopular and largely ignored. She is treated as almost invisible by most people, yet she either blocks this out as a possibility because she can’t handle it, or she is genuinely deluded i.e. slightly crazy. At the beginning Pinky is submissive and Millie is increasingly arrogant and hostile toward her, egotistical even. After the suicide attempt, Pinky gets the “upper hand”: whether through Millie’s guilt or Pinky’s own memory loss (or both), Pinky starts dominating.

This goes on for a while, until Pinky fails to hail a doctor for the 3rd woman’s birth, which ends in a stillbirth. Out of guilt, or shock, Pinky reverts back to her weird child-like behavior whereas Millie appears to me “empowered”, though far from happy. Millie is in fact very clearly not a happy person, and neither is the pregnant 3rd woman stuck in a bad marriage. Pinky sticks out as the cheerful, naïve country girl, unjaded in ways the others are. However, there can be no talk of some “alienation” theme, which gets left-wingers all wet, because the world Altman creates here isn’t real, it isn’t 70s America hence cannot be construed as any kind of “subtle critique of U.S. society”, much less capitalism – and we know that THIS is what left-wing film buffies always want to find in any drama. After all, the extent to which everyone brushes off and ignores Millie is obviously totally exaggerated, regardless of Altman’s directorial style which tends to make things look very realistic. Yet there is a big difference between the trademark realistic altmanian dialog and how the characters actually behave. Nearly everybody is strangely aloof (which is/was not typical of Americans at all) except the two women and the pregnant woman’s unfaithful husband, who turns out to be a central character in many ways. He is the only one, aside from the two, who seems to have a personality. All the others only engage in murmuring and one-dimensional wallpaper behavior.

The major end-twist however isn’t that the roles had gone back to “normal” between Pinky and Millie, it’s the fact that the women conspired to punish the husband by murdering him with one of his own guns, making it out to be an accident.

Aside from these two things – murder and the 2nd reversal – the film has no true ending. It doesn’t need to have one, it’s a character-based drama hence no need for convoluted plot-twists, numerous goings-on and what-not.

As for style, the film greatly benefits from that unsurpassed 70s grainy visual quality plus great photography.

This film is definitely not for everybody, not just because it has so little “real” plot, because it’s so blatantly non-commercial (the kind of film that could NEVER have been made nowadays, despite two-three women being the focus), but primarily because it’s so depressive a lot of the time, mainly due to the score and the slow pace.

Viewings: 90s, 00s, 2023

8/10

It's been decades, so this rating may or may not be accurate. Initially I'd given it a 9/10, but reduced it just to be on the safe side...

I was young and green, and my criteria was lower back then. Maybe it is a 8 or 9, maybe it's lower...

First Viewing: 1996

8/10

The melodramatic, unusual, moody soundtrack has a lot to do with why I liked this film. And Roth is very good, as usual. Somewhat gritty, as it should be. Van didn't lead a glamorous life by any means, more like a hobo in fact, and that era was anyway filthy and tough, which is probably why the likes of Spielberg, Zemeckis, Howard and Attenborough never went anywhere near this kind of bio, or specifically the one about the ol' Van. They would have disneyfied it to the point of hilarity.

First Viewing: 1996

"Oh no, a very bleak, gloomy future! Help help, I'm being depressed, repressed and oppressed by this dark movie! It sucks!"

The reaction of a typical voter...

7/10

Not at all a disaster that "critics" consider it to be. The film isn't perfect, nor is it excellent, but it is interesting, which is much more than can be said of his Red films.

Altman does manage to create a vision of a future with a mood and feel all its own; it's fairly original. It doesn't have quite the bleakness of a futuristic (though, of course, entirely different) film such as "1984", nor does it have to, but it's certainly no "Star Trek" either: no mindless optimistic nerd future for convention geeks. On the bleakness level it's something on the level of "THX 1138", which is fairly bleak.

The music is good and typical of many Altman films (like "3 Women", "Images", or "Vincent & Theo" – his best movies, interestingly enough).

SPOILERS

The improvement could have been done mainly on the ending, which is somewhat pointless. Why does Newman leave the city only at the end of the film? Why didn't he leave earlier, since he was both in danger - even though he maybe wasn't entirely convinced of that all the time - and since there was nothing for him to do there? Was he resisting leaving the city because he ran out of seals in the outside world? Doesn't seem to be much of an explanation. Or did he wait until the game was over so he'd collect a prize, which he thought he'd get? Also not a reasonable enough explanation.

First Viewing: 90s

7/10

I might re-visit this one at some point.

First Viewing: 90s or 00s

6/10

You can tell this movie is from the early 70s from a mile away. Experimental, cynical, satirical, and overtly left-wing: cops are dumb, capitalism stinks, and subtle preaching against anti-Communism and racism being scattered all over. Actually, to be fair, considering when it was made – and by whom (Altman was one of those incorrigible Reds) – it isn't even that political or critical of (Western) society. As it could have been.

SPOILERS

The movie has rather wild, quick editing, which aids the timing of the gags – of which quite a few are funny. The unpredictability and zaniness of the fast-paced and fun first half unfortunately is followed by a weaker second half, which gets bogged down in weak/unfunny resolutions (like Murphy committing suicide – what the hell was that?!). Even the very funny bird-dropping gags started to wear a bit thin.

Toward the end, there is even a car-chase in which Duvall – for some strange reason – decides to have a cat-and-mouse game with the cops. This was stupid. Even dumber was Duvall suddenly informing the police of Cort. The obligatory (for this movie) end-of-movie flying sequence looks pretty good, but ultimately only the first half remains in good memory.

First Viewing: late 90s or early 00s

You might wanna ignore this very old review (and the rating) until I revisit this film...

6/10

SPOILERS

The first half is quite boring, while the second one gets considerably better, especially the last half-hour which actually has suspense in it. Half of the dialog is incomprehensible and nothing much happens in the first half. Well-directed and nice photography, though. The cast is good, but Altman overdoes it with his casual-simultaneous-blablabla dialog style, especially around the beginning, where all the dialog melts into one big murmur and as a result one can't follow any of it; it worked in "M*A*S*H" but not here. The title is a little strange; Mrs.Miller (Christie) has a supporting role, and her relationship with McCabe (Beatty) isn't much of a concern to Altman nor is it central to the story, and as a result the viewer is left guessing what kind of a thing the two had together. Or maybe it was said at one point in one of the many "murmur" scenes with everyone jabbering away, and I simply failed to pick it up. Subtitles, please.

First Viewing: 1996

5/10

I was probably not even 20 when this played on TV. I have never had any inclination to re-visit it, because I sense I might be somewhat bored by the incessant babbling, and perhaps annoyed by how Altman portrays this segment of the American populace, him being a pompous, elitist Red film-maker and all...

Plus I know how it ends, so really, no re-visit is likely. The rating is hence a guess.

Very old review, from the 90s:

A clever film with rather thick, complex characterizations, done with the trademark Altman "it-all-sounds-like-real-people-and-not-actors-because-it's-partly-improvised" style of film-making. Fortunately, unlike "McCabe & Miller", the dialogues rarely overlap and interfere with each other so that it's possible to follow almost all of them, without getting lost in a huge murmur of incomprehensible babble - as is the case with the other film.

However, "Nashville", with all of its realism, and with it's almost documentary, fly-on-the-wall feel to it, is not up there with Altman's best, despite what the critics say. The main drawback is the music. Altman's (commendable) striving for advanced realism backfired in the music department; in his quest for realism he got the actors to not only sing country songs, but to actually write a lot of them. Bad idea. Voice-overs from real country singers would have made the music much more pleasant to the viewer's ears, and - ironically - would have made the film sound more realistic. It's far too obvious to anyone with half a hearing problem that the singing ranges from passable (Black) to mediocre (Gibson, Harris) to unbearable (Carradine). Country stars of that era were of a better calibre than the crap we get today.

In fact, listening to Carradine's rendition of his own song "I'm Easy" was torture to my poor, already MTV-raped ears. Considering that the songs and the singing are both blah, there are too many musical segments that go on for too long.

I can also nit-pick at the casting; why this talented man sees talent where there is none (or little) as is the case with Chaplin's daughter and Carradine, is beyond me. Geraldine Chaplin's fake-sounding English accent (in spite of her Papa's British background), and Carradine's stone-face (non-)expressions are certainly not what great acting is all about. The rest of the cast is good. Nevertheless, especially in the 90s, Altman has shown a troubling tendency to cast his movies not with the best people available, but with nepotist kids. I don't understand that at all.

As for his (left-wing) politics, Altman wrongly picked the country music scene as the platform for critiquing celebrity endorsement, American politics, and America in general. It's not a bad choice - perhaps - but then again he could also make a movie about Hollywood's left-wing endorsements and the corruption, drugs, and abuse of power there.

I'm kidding, of course he never will. He is a hypocrite.

Altman is - allegedly - more at odds with Hollywood than he is their friend, so why doesn't he mock Hollywood's political involvement?

He has no issue with pathetic braindead movie stars endorsing the Democrats, or things he agrees with, so he doesn't touch that. As pathetic as Nashville's behind-the-scenes world is portrayed here (the accuracy of it being debatable), I can guarantee that a look behind Hollywood's facade would reveal a world that is far more pathetic, sleazy, and fake than the one shown here in this alttmanized version of Nashville.

The film is rather long, and would flow more smoothly if the musical segments had been either improved by professionals, or cut-down significantly.

First Viewing: probably early 90s

An unsubtle display of hatred for wealthy American conservatives, badly presented through the use of unsubtle and sometimes downright idiotic humour.

4/10

I'd literally never heard of this film until very recently, despite it being from his more fruitful period, the 70s.

It's a typical Altman film, with zillion characters (yeah, it's a wealthy people's wedding so there's a good excuse for it this time) babbling a lot, non-stop, in the usual "casual/spontaneous" Altman way.

The Church intro is overly long, and generally speaking the first half-hour is very slow and only mildly interesting.

Things then improve, as we get better acquainted with the multitude of characters - as much as that is even possible when you have only 120 minutes for 20-30 of them - and so there are a few good jokes here and there. Though more bad than good.

Unfortunately, after the half-way mark the humour degrades, becoming too absurd hence unfunny.

Let me clarify (the obvious): there are different types of comedies. Some are subtle (the satires), some extremely unsubtle and broad (farce), and some deal in absurdist humour (ZAZ for example). Altman believed he could inject a few absurdist gags and cheap shticks into a basically satiric film, which leads to several idiotic scenes.

SPOILERS

For example, the ridiculous, far-fetched and utterly unfunny scene when BOTH the bride and the groom start French-kissing their "former" lovers, and in front of everybody. Tt the same time even, the couples standing next to each other.

This is so asinine, I can't believe it made it in the first draft (if it was there), let alone the final script. Now, if he had both the bride and groom SNEAKING a kiss in one of the rooms or the park, that would have worked. Perhaps not in a comedic way, but certainly it would have avoided degrading this at times solid comedy into a very stupid one (that wants to be clever too).

Basically, Altman wanted the perennial cake. You can't have it both ways. You can't have a clever satire and idiotic absurdist jokes. Satire is closely related to reality, in fact it is based in reality, whereas absurdist comedy is only vaguely rooted in our world, it's more of a weird parallel universe type of thing. Once you CHANGE your comedic approach halfway through you've ruined the movie. You can't do that. You choose one approach and stick with it.

Another example is when a security member (this is an upper-class VIP/political wedding) actually PHYSICALLY prevents the bride's father from covering up the naked painting. Why the f*** would the security give a toss what he does with the painting? And how would the security DARE use physical force on a VIP person, at the same time a key person at the wedding? Altman and the other writers (a bunch of them, which is rarely a good thing) completely lost themselves in these kinds of scenes. They lost focus and went for cheap, completely illogical jokes that simply aren't funny.

The fact that this painting was handed to the newlyweds as a gift in the first place, at a VIP wedding, in front of so many people, is in itself quite dumb. Who'd gift the bride and groom a painting of the bride naked, at a conservative upper-class wedding?! Hence it's not funny. You can do this in an absurdist comedy or a farce, it'd be a great gag, but in a satire this is high cringe.

Another dumb scene that involved security is when they pounced on an innocent man whom they found upstairs after everyone had been evacuated into the basement. Complete and utter crap. If you're going to make top-notch security people out to be incompetent loose-cannon clowns then just go all the way and do an absurdist comedy or cheesy farce instead. At the latest after 90 minutes, this comedy had deteriorated from being a satire of the American upper-class to a silly physical comedy, almost a farce in places.

These serious security tuxedo types could have been mocked far more efficiently by using subtle methods, not broad, dumb comedy that crushes satire.

Remember a golden comedy rule: humour (in satire) works only if it is believable i.e. credible enough. If it veers too far from reality then there is no longer a satiric element hence the entire foundation crumbles. A movie that neglects its own logic or contradicts its own style is doomed to fail. Beginners errors from Altman and his writers..

Another thing I disliked is the use of clumsiness to score cheap laughs. Whether it be the bishop acting as wedding priest or other characters stepping on each other's feet, I didn't find these scenes of "mild slapstick" suitable for the tone and style of this comedy. I expected more intelligent humour, not people dropping things or whatever. Any ass can write such crap. (Admittedly, Burnett and the big fat guy bumping into each other on a field was funny, but only because their relationship as a whole was very entertaining - the only truly funny sub-plot.)

After the hurricane evacuation, everybody starts singing a stupid Church song, over and over, like a bunch of moron cult followers, which further killed the realism of this "satire". This isn't remotely how the upper-class would behave in such a situation, but Altman (who was... what he was) couldn't quite resist poking a bit of fun at "white Christians", the all-time favourite target of snotty liberals, but he did this in a way that doesn't seem believable at all. Seems too forced, as in forcing things to be stereotypically satirical - kinda the way Michael Moore cheats and manipulates events/interviews in his "documentaries" to mock certain demographics by intentionally misrepresenting them. In that sense, Altman was very politically-correct, before the term even existed. Besides, there is an unintended irony in this scene: this is what any random left-wing hippie commune might be more liable to do i.e. chant some stupid spiritual song, over and over, like fanatical Hare Krishnas. Not that Altman would have noticed the irony, i.e. this blatant similarity between the religious eccentricities/habits of Christians and hippies i.e. young Marxists (whom Altman supported).

Speaking of ironies, I was pleasantly surprised by the scene in which a blonde berates the elderly Socialist woman for being a hypocrite i.e. (paraphrasing) "you too seem to live well off your wealth, which you haven't exactly shared with the working class". I am amazed that this line made it into the movie, because I've practically never heard anything of that nature in an American film before. Imagine the mega-reverse-hypocrisy though (or whatever we can call it), because Altman himself never "shared his fortune" with the proletariat - yet he mocked OTHER left-wing hypocrites who do the same! Wow, what cajones he had. What a sanctimonious phony.

This is why he was politically speaking just another Hollywood "do-gooder" with nothing intelligent to convey about American society. He was comfortable only with tackling Christian/Republican/conservative hypocrisy (i.e. all these people at the wedding having affairs left and right and taking drugs - yet singing Church songs), yet where is the grand big satire exposing champagne Socialists? One line such as the one above doesn't even begin to cover it. Certainly in the absurdly overrated "The Player" he completely missed an opportunity to expose the massive decadence and hypocrisy of the Hollywood elites, who are nearly all left-wing and knee-deep in (illegal) debauchery. And as a supposed "maverick director" he was expected to do just that. Yet he chickened out. But that's just it, Altman was neither an equal-opportunity offender nor an insightful social critic. He was very partisan and biased in whom to "expose" and ridicule, comparable to the way CNN does 10,000 hours annually about Trump's "evil" and "racism", yet zero hours on anything negative about Obama or Biden - despite there being 100,000 hours worthy of dodgy stuff to discuss about those two "peaceniks". Hence why as a political and even social commentator he was absolutely useless. Whoever does satire always in a one-sided manner loses all credibility as a preacher of morality, and the films suffer for it.

The Carroll Burnett sub-plot is good though. The tall fat guy dancing with Burnett then persistently flirting with her was funny, very good situation comedy, but unfortunately just a small part of a movie too full of a multitude of characters, some of whom are plain awful such as the drunk woman. Their silly dance is not absurdist enough to not be funny, it is within-reason silliness. Nevertheless, his pushiness borders on sexual harassment, making some of these moments a little uncomfortable, because he is literally three times her weight and size, so whenever he corners her somewhere with no paths toward escape, which he does repeatedly, you have an uneasy feeling that she is totally helpless next to this lunatic who could easily force himself on her if he wanted to. Their chemistry works because these two roles were very well cast - in a movie full of sub-par casting.

Altman sometimes assembled a cast of nobodies, nepotists and homely women, and this is one such movie. So many boring actors in this one. Dezi Arnaz, Geraldine Chaplin, Mia Farrow, not to mention the many obscure and dull actors. Why did he cast Geraldine so often? That woman had nothing going for her, zero: not looks, not talent, not charisma. My guess is that many film-makers who were Chaplin fanboys simply wanted to suck up to him by casting his daughter in films that were way above her skill-set.

First Viewing: 2023

3/10

For people naive enough to actually believe this movie reveals the inner workings of the real Hollywood.

Tim Robbins is bad, as always. Whoopsie "The Only Good Thing About Me Is My Chest" Goldberg cast as a detective...

First Viewing: 90s

3/10

This must be really bad, I don't recall anything at all.

When a Communist makes a “revisionist” western. Altman stops short of portraying Buffalo Bill like Yosemite Sam.

2/10

Read up the definition of “revisionist western”. It is a genre that ALLEGEDLY avoids portraying “cowboys” and “Injuns” in simplistic black-and-white terms, but instead goes for a much more realistic approach.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway. In practice, these so-called “revisionist” westerns are to often simply the flip-side of pro-cowboy/anti-Indian westerns of the 20s and 30s: they are anti-white/pro-Indian. As simple as that. Instead of depicting the Wild West in non-biased terms, which they allegedly do (according to Red movie critics, who are not to be trusted on any political issue or movie), they simply deify Native Americans while portraying white settlers as evil scum.

Films such as this “revisionist western” inject their scripts with very generous lashings of “proto white guilt” i.e. early liberal self-loathing, the kind of which experienced a boom in the 90s, then completely massacred American culture and politics in this century, taking over every facet of American life, like a deadly pandemic that attacks the host’s brain and utterly pulverizes it until there is nothing left in it but empty Antifa slogans.

Once America was “fully” colonized, suddenly all these virtue-signaling voices started popping out, becoming loud and louder, moaning increasingly and ever more stupidly about how “America was taken away by evil Europeans from their rightful owners”. A very dubious and useless claim; dubious because almost EVERY NATION in existence today had been “taken away” by force from someone or other, and useless because what do you plan to do about it? Hand the few remaining Indians their lands back? I haven’t noticed Altman, Newman, Lancaster and other Hollywood liberals rushing to gift their ranches and villas to any Native Americans, just as none of them ever got involved in “wealth redistribution” i.e. giving away their many millions of dollars to the “proletariat” that they supposedly love so much…

(On a side-note, there is this great irony of rich liberal celebs i.e. champagne socialists treating the Average Joe in the street with far more rudeness and arrogance than right-wing celebs, often behaving very entitled and not-at-all like “lower-class-loving Communists”, a trend I’d noticed a long time – and which makes perfect sense because the Left attracts lunatics and narcissists far more than the moderate Right does… Narcissists find a great haven in the Far Left, because it acts as a shield to their true nature, i.e. impersonating a do-gooder (when you’re the exact opposite of a good person) is like a wealthy mobster trying to buy himself a positive image by donating money to build hospitals. The same or very similar psychology is behind both these demographics: the wealthy famous celeb and the stinking rich mobster.)

Or do you know of any such examples, of celebs handing out their possessions to Indians, to “even out the injustices”? Not even Brando did, and he was so cringingly vocal about “Native American rights”. Of course, the whole charade was all just an ego trip for him, one of many…

If you were to ask which is more biased, more simplistic, more stupid – the “cowboy hero” westerns or the “noble savage” white-guilt westerns – I would declare it a tie, probably. The western genre anyway bores me tremendously (with just a few rare exceptions), but these heavily biased/simplistic westerns are roughly equally worthless.

Altman doesn’t give three hoots about the truth, historical facts – any of that. This is a huge con, and an obvious one. Altman’s motives are far more nefarious and hidden, and smart people reading this will know what I am referring to, if they can read between the lines…

His anti-capitalism drove him to direct such a movie. His hatred of capitalist democracy motivated him to write this politically-correct garbage. His frustration with the SUCCESS of democracy and capitalism in America (and the West in general) is at the root of movies such as this, these propaganda turds devised to hate on capitalism, history, tradition, white settlers i.e. anything that is rooted in the European Success Story, which later translated itself into the American Success Story. The Kremlin was thrilled about such movies, it was (and still is) as if the Kremlin itself dominated and controlled Hollywood – without actually having to do so.

Far from this movie being a “history lesson”, or even a “clever satire”, it is in fact an abysmally unfunny, staunchly political propagandist, Marxist piece of crap. The humour is too basic and obvious i.e. there is next to nothing clever about it, and it is too awash with barely-disguised Marxist preaching to have the opportunity to be funny.

Altman was as communist as you got, in the Hollywood of the 70s. Not as extremist as Maoists such as Costa-Gavras and Bertolucci, i.e. that whole European gang, but pretty far to the Left. As this movie, among a few others, clearly demonstrates.

The way Altman plays the U.S. national anthem is so full of anti-American sentiment, I’d even go far as to call it pure hatred. I mean, I too hate that damn tune, but I do so for music reasons, coz the tune stinks. Altman hates it because – to him - it represents the sound of success of western capitalism. How on Earth do you turn America communist if the system is workin?!! That’s been the age-old question for American socialists since the 40s. That frustration always seeps into the more overtly political liberal Hollywood films. Despite the fact that this movie isn’t DIRECTLY related to this hatred of capitalism and democracy, these things are very cleatrly linked. “Support” (i.e. virtue-signaling) for American Indians is only a thinly-veiled show of disapproval for the American “way of life”, which is consumerist i.e. capitalistically successful.

Burt Lancaster, the film’s “voice of reason” i.e. voice of liberalism, talks about Bill’s “pack of lies”, which is the typical kind of facepalm irony one gets from these left-wing propaganda films. As a communist, Altman wouldn’t know truth if it fell on his head like a 16-ton weight.

Besides, throwing in this kind of 100% humourless, holier-than-thou cheap preaching only kills the humour even more. And anyway: whenever a film-maker prioritizes political indoctrination over humour in a comedy, then that comedy is doomed to fail, by definition. Many such comedies had failed, pretty much for this exact reason.

If Altman really wanted to make a “revisionist” western i.e. one devoid of political posturing, devoid of bias, and in keeping with the history of humans (as opposed to a history that distinguished between the “goodness” of races), i.e. if he really had wanted to do a properly realistic western, he would have not portrayed Sitting Bull and his friends in such a romanticized way. Buffalo Bill is an egocentric buffoon, with numerous character faults – while Sitting Bull has more dignity than 300 Dalai Lamas. Laughable… Reverse racism, the proto version.

First Viewing: 2023

2/10

This overlong, unfunny mess starts off with a half-hour of pure tedium, in a sort of "Driving Miss Daisy" vein; with an old woman and her loyal black friend. Absolutely nothing happens in this section.

I wish it had stayed that way, because once things start happening that is when the movie really gets annoying. (Like Sting's famous song-line: "Life was easy when it was boring", i.e. "This film was easier when it was boring".)

The overly familiar plot – already milked dry by the self-replicating Hitchcock - of an innocent man accused of murder is just too stupid. It also sinks any chance that the gags and the humour might work; yet the jokes are mostly mediocre so it doesn't really matter.

The other major problem with the movie is the rather bad female cast: Julianne Moore, Glenn Close, O'Donnell, that "country" singer, and worst of all - Liv Tyler. (Sorry, I meant worst of all - Richard "Close" Harris.) While Moore may be convincing as a semi-wetarded woman, Close is her typical annoying nepotist self in yet another wicked-witch-from-the-South role. O'Donnell is typically bland, while Tyler is not only very badly miscast but a wooden actress with not an iota of intelligence about her. (Her mother is a former groupie, the father a former junkie, so it's not really her fault.) For Altman to cast her as some white-trash Southern girl is insane. She may fit the bill intellectually, but visually it's preposterous. Has Altman never been to a trailer-park? Stupid question... He doesn't even go to supermarkets.

Charles Dutton has a very cliché role: he is ultra-kind, pure goodness and is intellectually superior to just about everyone - without feeling that way. And what an annoying plot-point in the kid's father not wanting to listen to what the kid had witnessed. Such a dumb cliche.

Plus, there is that annoying sporadic schmaltziness that any movie can do without. What a waste of time.

First Viewing: 2001

The "big reveal" aka Karen Black's identity will have you in stitches.

1/10

"The way he and the two of you [girls] danced, it was a scandal, he should have male friends not you girls, so Sydney was right, praise the Lord, for kicking him out before the boy turns into a communist!... Sydney and me are upstanding, good, Bible-believing Christians!"

As subtle as a sledgehammer crushing tiny defenseless hamsters. This anti-Christian, anti-conservative BS is what Altman considered "clever intelligent satire" of the Bible Belt, a region which film's Reds have hated since the dawn of cinema. The boy in question is a gay character - and of course conservatives are all nasty, hateful, anti-gay lunatics who obsess over communists and who draw these kinds of ridiculous conclusions, in their usual - very common - attacks of political hysteria.

Ain't that the pot and the kettle. Antifa screamers, anyone? Nobody is more overemotional, intolerant or zealous than SJW snowflakes.

To make things even more pathetically obvious - which actually insults the audience - this Bible-thumping Juanita character is defined early on as a devious miser who recycles leftover drinks by pouring them back into the juice can. Because obviously right-wingers do that kind of evil, sneaky stuff - whereas liberals are all very refined, wonderful people.

That's how propaganda works: it reduces everything to banal demonization and glorification, and of course peppers everything with fallacies and lies.

It is a mark of very poor writing whenever "satire" is carried out by such black-and-white, bludgeoning bouts of uninspired simplification and extreme bias. By exposing such vitriolic hatred for the Bible Belt (or whoever happens to be the target of your demented hatred) the writer cheapens his message, because the message is being relayed from the perspective of a zealot, not a rational observer of society. Altman was very far from an "intellectual" director as many consider him to be, he was in fact far from it: his strengths were in stylish directorial decisions i.e. a great sense of aesthetics, not intellectual content. The proof is in so many bad and even downright horrible scripts that he'd given his thumbs up to. I mean, he actually received this trash of a script one day, and not only liked it - but decided to film it!

Of course, this movie has neither aesthetics nor intellectual content, it is completely devoid of anything redeemable. It isn't about fan-clubs nor is it about James Dean either. It's a thinly-veiled attack on Middle America, yet again, because Altman HATED them with a passion that rivaled the Kremlin.

But on to a lighter subject... When Altman tries to convince us that Karen Black is really a MAN! This big reveal i.e. notoriously cretinous twist is one of THE dumbest moments in all of 80s cinema, and one of the most ridiculous B-movie scenes in any standard Hollywood studio film of any era.

Must I spell it out, all ye politically-correct "progressives"?

The very notion that a man can be transformed into a woman looking like Karen Black is preposterous, having literally zero connection with reality. Ever hear of a "male fantasy"? Well, this must be a "trans fantasy". Or rather, "trans sci-fi". Perhaps in 50000 years this sort of conversion will be doable, but until then it will remain a very goofy fantasy. I've seen many transvestites (hard to avoid them these days: we're bombarded with this political agenda) and not one of them was even remotely convincing. Certainly even the "least obvious" cases are nothing close to turning a man into a very obvious, attractive woman.

Don't get me wrong, Black is no beauty, but she looked fairly decent back then, certainly not in the least masculine, and in fact I am amazed that she wasn't INSULTED to be offered this absurd role. After all, KATHY BATES - who is in this movie playing a woman - would have been a much more convincing choice: I'd be the first to accept her as a realistic former man.

Kathy gets to play a woman, yet Black plays a man??? What Bolivian veggies was Bobby sniffing?

Another unsuccessful aspect of this terrible flick are the many past-to-present transitions. None of these women appear to have aged, despite the 20 years difference. But hey: Karen Black used to be a man, so how bad is this screw-up? Comparatively tiny.

You'd think a bunch of James Dean fanatics would have reacted more dramatically to the news of his accident. Instead, that scene is very flat, unrealistic and decidedly undramatic.

And then there's Cher's fake and very stupid-sounding southern drawl. I don't buy it for a second.