Ten Days of Terror!: Images

Films: Images
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I often have issue with the films of Robert Altman. My biggest issue with him is that his movies are so sprawling that they involve massive casts of characters. It’s hard to keep track of everyone when Altman’s typical film looks like it should be a miniseries. At his best, you get a film like M*A*S*H. At his worst (and yes, this is just my opinion), you get long, drawn-out boring films like Gosford Park that I literally never remember is actually a murder mystery until I see the poster. Images is very much a different thing, since the cast has literally only seven people in it; one of those seven is a voice on the phone and another is barely in the film. That, more than anything, got my interested in seeing the film.

Images is, for lack of a better way to explain it, an experience in schizophrenia through the eyes of the character having that psychotic break with reality. While there are a lot of films and stories to which this can be connected, the most obvious connection is Repulsion, to which this bears a great deal of similarity. It’s also worth noting that there is an odd correlation between the names of the actors and the characters in the film. Each of the five main people in the film has a character name that is the actual name of another member of the cast. That had to be planned, didn’t it?

You Get What You Pay For

Film: McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

I have something of a relationship with the films of Robert Altman. I really like some of his films a lot. Others I think are meandering and go nowhere and take too damn long to get to that nowhere. McCabe and Mrs. Miller feels like an odd film for Altman. This is the guy who did Short Cuts, Nashville, The Player and M*A*S*H. What’s he doing making a Western?

The short answer is that he isn’t making a Western. He’s making a film that simply happens to be set in the American Old West. The basic story could easily be set during Prohibition or the 1960s or today. It just happens to be set in the West for whatever reason. As such, this is not a film that defines the Western genre, but is more or less a tangential part of the genre. Fans of the Western will likely find something here to latch onto. Those who dislike Westerns will, should they give it a chance, find that with its trappings removed, it’s not so Western after all.

Soap Opera

Film: Short Cuts
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

I’ve been making a concerted effort for some time to get through the longest films on the list. Specifically, as much as possible, I’ve tried to hit two very long films (at least) every month. This has gotten me to a place where I have only two films of longer than three hours left. One of these is Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. This marks the fourth time I’ve check this film out from the Rockford Library. I just can’t get into it. I’ve seen the opening 10 minutes at least four times now, and I just stumble every time. I’m not exactly sure why this is. It might be that I have issues with Altman sometimes. His films are long and rambling and feature massive casts. Maybe it’s something more specific about this film. I’m not sure. But anyway, there it is. I have long had a mental block when it comes to Altman’s Short Cuts.

Part of the reason is probably that Altman’s films are difficult to summarize, and I’ve put myself in the position of summarizing the films I watch as a matter of course. This film, though, has such a large cast with so many interconnections that to adequately define everything and everyone would take nearly as long as watching the film itself. There’s just too dang much. To put it simply, Short Cuts is based on the writings of Raymond Carver. It is a slice of the lives of a couple of dozen people, all intertwined and interconnected in various ways. In a lot of ways, a film like this is the natural parent of something like Crash or the less well-known 11:14 (you’re welcome, Nick), in that it shows how each live touches others and all of our lives are connected, however tenuously.

Red Herrings

Film: The Long Goodbye
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

It’s no secret that I really like a good film noir, and so it comes as no surprise that I enjoy neo-noir as well. Hell, I watched Blue Velvet yesterday and I made no bones about the fact that I like that film quite a bit. But it was a film I’d seen before multiple times, so I knew what was coming. One of the real joys of a good film noir is when I don’t know all the twists and turns of it, when what’s coming shows up as a surprise. The Long Goodbye is a film I had heard of, but had never seen before today—and today was the perfect day for it. For an American film fan, there’s no better way to celebrate the 4th of July than by watching a film in the most American of styles.

And this is a noir, based on a book from the mid-1950s by author Raymond Chandler and featuring his great gumshoe Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould). Like most noirs, it starts out as something relatively straightforward, even simple, and adds complexity at every turn. Marlowe, who lives across from an apartment filled with young, mostly nude and nubile women, gets a visit from his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton). Terry says that he’s having trouble with his wife, and needs a ride down to Mexico. Having nothing better to do, Marlowe takes him.

Red Neck, White Truck, Blue Jeans

Film: Nashville
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I think I finally understand Robert Altman’s films. I tend to like Altman’s films when I actually watch them, but I also find them difficult to get myself involved in. There are multiple Altman films that I have seen the first half hour of, but couldn’t quite muscle my way through. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve tried to watch Short Cuts. So I have to brace myself for Altman, despite loving M*A*S*H and The Player.

But now, having watched Nashville, I understand his films, I think. Where he tends to lose me is the massive size of the casts. All of his films seem to have these overwhelming casts and multiple stories that eventually sort of tie up. In this, Nashville is no different from other Altman films. With so many characters and names, I get confused and frustrated and eventually I just walk away from it and watch something else. I’d get lost in the battling stories and not want to continue.

There is, I think, too much going on here to provide anything like an accurate summary of the action (although I’m bound to try eventually). Everything centers on five days in Nashville and the intertwining lives of a couple of dozen people who undergo crises of faith, life-changing events, wake-ups to reality, or the fulfillment of dreams. Many of our characters are successful or wannabee country, folk, or gospel musicians, so there is also quite a bit of singing going on at various events. Additionally, in the background for all the film (and in the foreground for parts) is the political campaign of an independent running for president.

So there’s a lot going on, and many of the stories intermingle, bump into each other, or at least touch each other tangentially. The major theme for a lot of the stories is tragedy, disappointment, or a shattering of hopes. One of the main connecting themes is the creation of the political Replacement Party and the grass-roots presidential campaign of Hal Phillip Walker. This brings in the stories of Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), a country singer who is told to endorse Walker for a return endorsement for the governorship of the state. Hamilton agrees to appear at the rally at the end of the film if Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) also appears. But Barbara Jean is fragile and has suffered a series of breakdowns. It is one of these breakdowns that causes her dominating husband Barnett (Allen Garfield) to commit her to the rally. Following her is Pfc. Glenn Kelly (Scott Glenn), who may have stalkerish ambitions toward the fading singer. Also in the mix is Connie White (Karen Black), who will not appear on stage with Barbara Jean.

While Barbara Jean recuperates in the hospital, she shares a floor with the wife of Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn), who is being visited by his niece, Martha (Shelley Duvall), who really doesn’t want to see her aunt in the hospital and would rather spend her time chasing singers and performing whatever acts a groupie typically performs for singers. He also rents a room to Kenny (David Hayward), who is never seen without his violin case and seems twitchy about anyone else touching it.

And then we have Linnea (Lily Tomlin) who has a depressing marriage with Del (Ned Beatty), who is more interested in furthering his political aspirations with Hal Walker than in his two deaf children. Despite Linnea’s role as a gospel singer, she is tempted into infidelity with Tom (Keith Carradine), part of a folk trio. Of course, Tom is a serial womanizer and is also sleeping with singing partner Mary (Cristina Raines), who is married to the third member of the trio, Bill (Allen Nichols).

And then there’s Winifred (Barbara Harris), who wants to make it as a star, but is constantly pursued by Star (Bert Remsen), her husband, who is against the idea. Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles) also has aspirations as a singer and the body to be a headliner, but has no ability to sing a note and not enough self-awareness to realize her own lack of talent. And through all this, Tricycle Man (Jeff Goldblum) shows up and drives through on his huge three-wheeled chopper and Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), who claims to be a BBC reporter making a documentary on Nashville, inserts herself into conversations and is never seen with a film crew.

Whew!

So what’s the trick to understanding Altman? I’d argue that with a few exceptions, Altman doesn’t really want to tell stories. He wants to cut a slice out of lives and present them on the screen. What we see is messy because real lives are messy. We don’t have specific conclusions that we come to at a given time, and even when something in our lives does end, it doesn’t neatly wrap up into a package. Everything else in our lives continues on, unfolding its own plot as we continue. And that’s what Altman is giving us. In Nashville, we get a five-day slice out of the lives of a couple of dozen characters. A few things happen and time or fate or kismet brings many of those people to the same place at the same time for the end of the film.

That’s sort of the point. It’s not about the individual people or even their specific stories, but about how these stories mesh and blend and intertwine. The film almost becomes allegorical, with each character representing not a specific person in the real world, but a phenotype placed into this specific environment and story. And yet, on a real level, each story works as the story of a real person as well.

Nashville is a difficult movie to dislike completely because it is well made and because a number of the stories are compelling. It’s difficult to love completely because, well, it’s filled with a lot of country music, and a lot of it isn’t the good, classic kind. I have an intense dislike for the sort of redneck country that is frequently in vogue—the “Mom, trucks, God, and America” mentality that tacitly celebrates racism, antebellum values, and lack of education as positive values, and there’s a lot of that here. That it’s true to life isn’t the point.

But, it’s worth getting over that for this film. Nashville was difficult for me to get into, but once I got past the first half hour, I’m glad I stuck it out.

Why to watch Nashville: The stories all feel real.
Why not to watch: Have you heard country music?

Suicide is Painless

Film: M*A*S*H
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I wasn’t that conscious of movies when I was two or three years old, which is how old I was when M*A*S*H was released. As a kid, the most relevant thing with that name was the television show, the one that ran for three times longer than the war upon which it was based. I spent a lot of evenings watching the show, and as I got older and the show was eventually retired, I watched a lot of reruns. What that means is that I have a particular view of M*A*S*H, and it’s a view that doesn’t really jibe with the film.

This isn’t to say that the film isn’t great, though, because it is. It’s a very unusual film, though, for a number of reasons. It’s also very much an Altman film in that the cast is freakin’ huge and there are tons of characters to keep track of during the course of the film. However, as a person who is so familiar with the television versions of many of these characters, it’s impossible for me to tell if the film is difficult to follow. I know almost all of the main characters, so in a real sense, I know what to expect of them.

Essentially, we have a group of doctors in a mobile Army surgical hospital (hence the initials) a few miles from the front in Korea. They patch up soldiers when they come in wounded, and otherwise spend their time trying to forget that they are in Korea. They drink, play pranks on each other, and chase nurses with reckless abandon.

The doctors that we become acquainted with first are Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Duke Forrest (Tom Skerrit, almost unrecognizable without the trademark mustache). They are the new surgeons at the 4077th hospital, and the minute they arrive, they begin to turn the camp upside down, getting things running the way they like them. This task is made easier because their commander, Henry Blake (Roger Bowen), is a pushover. It’s made more difficult because their bunkmate, Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), is a by-the-book officer and deeply religious. Things are compounded in both directions with the arrival of Trapper John McIntyre (Elliott Gould), who sides with our degenerate doctor heroes, and a new head nurse named “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman).

Essentially, M*A*S*H is completely without a plot. There are events that happen, and we see the camp personnel deal with these issues. We deal with the issues of the doctors not being up to military muster, with the fact that the camp dentist, “Painless” Waldowski (immediately recognizable character actor John Schuck) wants to commit suicide because he believes he has turned gay, and a surprise trip for Trapper and Hawkeye to Japan. Everything eventually culminates in a football game with another military outfit, complemented on the 4077th’s side with a ringer—an ex-professional football player-turned-neurosurgeon named Oliver “Spearchucker” Jones (Fred Williamson), given that nickname not because of his skin color, but because he used to throw the javelin.

M*A*S*H isn’t about a story, or getting through a particular plot or series of events. Instead, it’s about surviving the insanity of war, and the irony of being a medical doctor in a place of death and destruction. In fact, one of the reasons that there is so much humor in the film is because it is a natural contrast to the pain and misery of war. The other reason is that extreme situations like war often bring this sort of behavior and attitude out in the people trapped in the middle of it. We laugh so that we are not sickened by it. This is also why a lot of the humor here is so dark and so cruel. That’s the only reason for the broadcasting of Frank’s tryst with Hot Lips, and why the shower is rigged to collapse when Hot Lips enters it.

The film also works because the operating room scenes are both brutal and banal. Men are on the table with horrible wounds, and while we don’t specifically see any body parts or grue (or at least not too much), there’s an ocean of blood, and the doctors and nurses are up to their elbows in it. At the same time, the doctors and nurses discuss average, everyday topics, almost as if they are fixing toasters.

Altman is a difficult director for me to get behind, often because there is so much to pay attention to in his films. There are often so many characters that it can be tough to keep everyone straight. M*A*S*H does not suffer from this though, although that may only be because I know these characters so well. This is a hell of a film, and one that has aged surprisingly well, a fact that may be due to the influence of television as well.

Why to watch M*A*S*H: It spawned a true American cultural landmark.
Why not to watch: There really isn’t much of a plot.

Hollywood and Vain

Film: The Player
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.

I can’t say that I dislike Robert Altman, but I often have trouble getting into his films. I think a part of that is that often he has these massive casts and films with multiple dozens of characters. I frequently feel overwhelmed by him. It’s been years since I’ve watched M*A*S*H, but I think part of the reason I can follow that film easily is because I used to watch the television show it was based on, so I knew the characters going in. I’ve tried and failed to watch both Short Cuts and Nashville and just haven’t gotten through them yet. So it was with some trepidation that I dropped The Player into the spinner today.

The Player is satire, and it’s self-referential satire. This is the story of a studio executive named Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) who discovers that he has wronged someone, or at least that someone thinks he’s been wronged. He begins getting threatening postcards from a disgruntled screenwriter, someone that he promised he would call and never did. Simultaneously, he’s under the impression that he’s on the outs at his current studio, because he keeps hearing about Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), who is an up-and-comer.

A little investigative work leads him to a screenwriter named David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio, who was thin once). Griffin tries to get Kahane to re-pitch the script to him, but Kahane balks, and essentially calls Griffin out for being a complete bastard. Push leads to shove, and Griffin kills Kahane, then makes it look like a robbery gone bad and flees the scene.

Now, on top of all of his other problems, he has a murder he needs to cover up. At the same time, he starts to become involved with Kahane’s pseudo-girlfriend, June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), much to the irritation of his current girlfriend and scriptreader, Bonnie (Cynthia Stevenson). So, for the rest of the film, Griffin Mill needs to stay one step ahead of the police (Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett), keep tabs on Larry Levy, split his time between Bonnie and June, and rescue his own career.

One of the sells of this film is the incredible number of cameos. In terms of others playing actors, Fred Ward plays the head of studio security and B-movie mainstay Brion James plays the head of the studio. But throughout the rest of the film, there are quick appearances from about a third of Hollywood playing themselves. People show up at parties, appear in restaurants, make quick movie pitches or exchange pointless small talk. The list of extras reads like a Who’s Who in southern California circa 1992.

The Player succeeds on nearly every level. One way that it is truly successful is not in the strange threats against Griffin Mill (at one point, a rattlesnake is left in his car), but in his reaction to all of this. With his livelihood threatened, his relationship on the rocks, a murder to cover up, and the police tailing him, he exists in a world that for all intents and purposes seems like the inside of an opaque sphere. Mill continually and continuously acts as if nothing can touch him, like these situations that would concern others are beyond him. He puts a plan in place to keep his job, and this is far more important to him than the fact that he murdered a man in an alley in Pasadena.

And so, there are no heroes to cheer for in this film, and for once that doesn’t bother me. In fact, watching a couple of potential heroes’ story arc is, for me, one of the true highlights of this film. However, since this resolves very near the end and it’s worth seeing, I’d rather put this under a spoiler tag than simply talk about it.

*** PRIVATE PITCH MEETING ***

Two screenwriters (played by Dean Stockwell and Richard E. Grant) appear in the second act to pitch a film called Habeus Corpus. They want the film to play with no known actors and to have an extremely downbeat ending. This is the film that Mill uses as his way to get back in with his studio—when Larry Levy screws things up, he’ll come in with the solution and save the picture. The two writers are adamant that they want the extremely downbeat end and that there should be no one recognizable in the film.

At the end, we see the latest rushes of the new ending. In the background we see Peter Falk and Susan Sarandon. Then we catch a glimpse of the stars, Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis. And we get a happy ending. Bonnie complains about the ending, and the two screenwriters, who earlier had been so set on having a realistic, serious ending, chime in that they’re fine with the ending as it is, because the sad ending tested so poorly.

In this moment, we see the depth and the price of the Hollywood machine. Integrity and artistic vision, regardless of all the speechifying throughout the film, goes by the wayside when it comes down to how much money the film will make at the box office. While it’s almost certainly an exaggeration, it’s also almost certainly very reflective of the truth. In my more cynical moments, I’d guess that if anything, Altman softened this moment from the reality.

*** PITCH MEETING OVER ***

The Player succeeds not despite the overwhelming smarm and palpable soullessness of all of the principle characters, but because of it. This is a film that would buckle under its own weight of pretentiousness if it tried to paint the characters as anything other than avaricious, vain, shallow, and awful. Tim Robbins is especially hateful, and because of it, especially good.

In short, it looks like I should give Altman more of a shot.

Why to watch The Player: The greatest skewering of Hollywood ever filmed.
Why not to watch: If you try to keep track of the cameos, you'll miss the movie.