ALTMAN POLL

never realized how many Altman films I haven't seen. still voting The Player.

picking 1 is silly

Many impressive films, but still: MASH.

the last third of MASH is kinda pathetic.

Nashville & The Long Goodbye lead, followed by Thieves Like Us and Gosford Park, then maybe 3 Women, Short Cuts and McCabe.

mash is way overrated in my book

i went long goodbye

Wow, didn't realise he made so many movies! Have always loved MASH and it's probably the one of his I've seen the most but I recently saw The Long Goodbye and I guess that's gonna get my vote for now.

Dr. M: You're right; the last part of MASH is much weaker. Still, I think it was the best example of Altman's chaotic, "everybody talking at once" style. And that style was perfect for a film about a chaotic, morally confused war.

Yes. And it is really funny too.

Nashville. one of my all time faves.

saw Mash recently and it has aged quite poorly. it's good but not great. xp

Jesus christ, I have no idea how to whittle this one down. Probably my favorite director, and I full-on love too many of his movies to choose just one. M.A.S.H., though, is def. overrated and not among my faves. I might have to say The Long Goodbye, maybe, although Nashville, California Split, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Gosford Park rate just as highly. Even a lot of his underrated movies (The Company, Images, Vincent And Theo) are great. The Player, Brewster McCloud, A Prairie Home Companion...all so good. Tanner '88 is one of my all-time faves, although it's a TV miniseries. RIP, BOB.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

I have only seen very few of these but I'm going with Gosford Park.

yeah i thought abt if i should include tanner '88

and then i didnt include it

are we picking worst film ever made? because there are a few contenders here.

Anybody seen Streamers? I don't even think it's available on DVD.

i had Streamers on my hd for like a year, decided one day to watch it only to realize it was a godawful vhs-rip with distorted sound. so no, still haven't seen it

mccabe and mrs miller

^^^ one of my favorite films

also a big short cuts fan

mccabe, long goodbye, 3 women, california split all amazing

mccabe pretty easily for me. as noted in other threads, i think nashville is a long, shallow sneer.

How does Short Cuts hold up now? I remember enjoying it at the time but it's kind of unwieldy at 3hrs. Some great moments though.

are we picking worst film ever made? because there are a few contenders here.

A bit of an exaggeration, but there are definitely a few clunkers. At least I can say, though, that Altman didn't make any stinkers because he was stuck in a rut or trying to make a quick buck. He was an experimenter and he was always trying something different. So I find even his failures interesting on a certain level. Doesn't mean I really ever want to watch Dr. T & The Women again...

I'm not the hugest fan of Short Cuts. It doesn't really come together in the way that Altman seems to want it to. Definitely some good stuff in it, though (love Lyle Lovett's arc).

yeah short cuts has good segments, but not all of them are good and the coming-together of the different strands feels forced.

otoh, it's better than grand canyon. (i assume it's better than crash too, but i'm not going to watch that to find out.)

Spoiler: It's better than Crash. Which is damning it with the faintest of faint praise.

lol yeah. Crash is pretty insipid and manipulative, especially THE scene.

Short Cuts meant so much to teenaged me, at least in part as a window into what I imagined life would be like in middle age. So, that.

gotta go with Nashville

yah short cuts was ~important~ and ~meaningful~ 2 teenage me also because i thought carver was a prophet 4 lyfe its shambolic and forced but i love like a russian novel

ya i voted shortcuts

real talk, mash is boring and dumb and crappy

so is the show

I saw Streamers when it was released -- his most homoerotic film, bcz of the play. Not a great piece of material, but some good acting from Modine and others.

are we picking worst film ever made? because there are a few contenders here.

Hell no, not even O.C. and Stiggs.

Out of the ones I've seen, which is admittedly less than 1/2, I also had to vote Short Cuts. Like Lamp this is partially due to Carver <3.

Voted for McCabe and Mrs Miller.

You know MASH is really amazing as it's all over the place, no more than Porky's-with-bullets in a few parts, sexist and cruel and all the rest of it and the characters don't make any damn sense (how comes hotlips is suddenly smiling and playing poker at the end with a bunch of people she hated for the last 2 hours?) and yet it's a bloody *brilliant *film despite the flaws.
i can never work it out. is it maybe just that it's dated so badly or is it just .. a mess. in a good way?

The Long Goodbye for me. Makes me want to live in L.A.

prob TLG for me. i love N'ville, but if I were going to give one the business for possibly being overrated...

california split.

3 Women is one of the strangest, most fascinating films I've ever seen.

will Jimmy Dean ever become available on DVD?

The Long Goodbye, just ahead of McCabe & Mrs Miller and Short Cuts. Still haven't seen Nashville though.

Voted A Wedding because nobody else offered.

Pragmatically, I'll be voting for Nashville, to stave off a win by MASH or Gosford Park. Otherwise, I'd vote 3 Women, The Long Goodbye or even The Company.

Or Short Cuts or McCabe.

wtf w/ The Company, Eric? Is it just the dance milieu? is there some open-heart surgery scene I missed?

Vincent and Theo

wtf w/ The Company

OK, yeah, the movie doesn't gel as "properly" as does Gosford, and it doesn't make for a neat, self-aware summation like Prairie Home, but The Company is the only one of his last stretch that fully achieves of-the-moment perspective. Maybe because it doesn't seem to ever aim for the major epiphanies, aside from "My Funny Valentine," which is absolutely one of the most thrilling scenes I've seen all decade (and manages it in spite of Neve's clearly limited skills as a dancer). So yeah, you can keep your Gosford Park.

OK, I will! (as I don't even remember "My Funny Valentine.")

YES. That scene was amazing. It's the outdoor performance, during the lightning storm. I was just agog the first time I watched that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n37R4o1WTM

Def need to see Kansas City now

yeah popeye wld be top 10 for me

(tbf i am borderline insane)

extremely weird to do a top 20 list for a guy who directed 35-ish movies. Why not just rank them all as in the clickbait trend these days?

Anyway, this is my confession that I spent the whole time getting increasingly mad that they had ranked Dr. T and the Women so high before realizing it wasn't even on the list at all. Also, Popeye rules.

there are several great Altman films, and a lot of good ones, but I thought Popeye was mediocre.

I haven't seen a lot of what might be regarded as second-string Altman. There's something laborious about watching his movies that means that if they are not actively enjoyable, it's hard for me to step back and take the good with the bad.
The odd exception for me is Quintet, usually seen as the bottom-of-the-barrel, which I actually found quite watchable. Literally watchable, because the sets, costumes and cinematography outclass the script so completely.

Best film not on that Guardian list is Buffalo Bill and the Indians, it is an semi-interesting semi-failure.

it was a very odd film but I enjoyed it

I hated Popeye and never looked at it a second time; thought Buffalo Bill was pretty good, better than some of the films on that list.

extremely weird to do a top 20 list for a guy who directed 35-ish movies. Why not just rank them all as in the clickbait trend these days?

they do these top 20 lists every week, this one is presumably to tie in with the Altman season at the BFI

I saw Popeye at the cinema when I was about 7 and can barely remember anything about it other than it seemed visually quite unusual to me at the time and for some reason I have a much clearer memory of seeing trashy but extremely fun sci-fi b-movies of that era like The Black Hole and Battle Beyond The Stars.

I was probably the same age when I saw Popeye and my main memory of it was my dad complaining about it as we were leaving the theater.

Bad news for fans with multi-region players:

Some followers of the INDICATOR label may be aware that, some years back, we teased Robert Altman’s CALIFORNIA SPLIT for a future release. Sadly, and despite a great deal of time and effort, legal complications have proven too much of a hurdle and we can now confirm that this release will not be happening. We are, of course, as upset with this news as you are, but hope to make up for it with many exciting releases of other great films to come.

For all its raging misogyny, MASH still holds up well.

XP Some good chat about that with a poster who works with the label over at criterionforum (starts at post #32)

https://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=752664#p752645

TL;DR version is it came down to budgetary reasons that weren't obvious when Indicator initially licensed the title, and they can't fulfill now.

A friend was telling me about Ann Prentiss from California Split (and Paula's younger sister--you'd swear they were identical twins). God, what a story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Prentiss

Prentiss was convicted in a California court of a 1996 assault against her father, and a subsequent threat against members of her family. The district attorney claimed that Prentiss, while incarcerated on the assault charge, had attempted to hire another inmate to kill three people, including her father and actor-director Richard Benjamin, her brother-in-law. On July 23, 1997, the court sentenced her to 19 years in prison.

She was still there when she died in 2010.

For some reason the second sentence of that wikipedia article is: "Her father was of Sicilian descent." hmmm.

It was between the sisters, Aimless. He had nothing to do with it.

Whoa, that story's a trip. We watched The Out of Towners over the holidays and were like 'why is Paula Prentiss in this tiny little walk-on role?' which is when we learned of the wholly separate existence of Ann Prentiss.

They have the same voice too, which is freaky

Very much so. I saw the Out of Towners a few times as a kid--no recollection of her in that (she plays a stewardess).

Bad news for fans with multi-region players:

Some followers of the INDICATOR label may be aware that, some years back, we teased Robert Altman’s CALIFORNIA SPLIT for a future release. Sadly, and despite a great deal of time and effort, legal complications have proven too much of a hurdle and we can now confirm that this release will not be happening. We are, of course, as upset with this news as you are, but hope to make up for it with many exciting releases of other great films to come.
― Max Hamburgers (Eric H.), Thursday, 17 February 2022 14:59 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just noticed last night that Amazon Prime (in the UK) have California Split in the correct aspect ratio and with all music cues intact, no cuts. It's leaving in 30 days. Even by Altman's standards, it's a wonderfully woozy film - sometimes the camera seems to just drift away from the action and there are whole scenes where the main actors are shot virtually out of frame. Laughed at the Aaron Spelling producer credit - he must have been DELIGHTED when he saw the finished film.

Aaron Spelling also has a producing credit on another favourite of mine, Three O’Clock High (1987).

I’m amazed that JAZZ ‘34 want included in the original poll

That's a favorite of mine, and I didn't even like Kansas City very much.

Not the best visual quality but here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48gZLCft9ak

Aaron spelling produced house of yes; i had forgotten this due to being enamored w parker

Happy birthday, Bob!

The only filmmaker I can think of whose death made me actually tear up, although others made me proudly sad (Nagisa Oshima, Seijun Suzuki, Bigas Luna, Suzan Pitt, etc.)

One anecdote about Altman, I was unaware of how much the man loved marijuana. Generally not surprising, but apparently the guy loved to smoke really, REALLY strong weed and more than a few collaborators have recalled others warning them not to smoke anything he offered them because if you do, you wouldn't be able to work or think straight for the rest of the day.

A short that he made in the mid-60’s, POT-AU-FOU, is about his love of reefer

Re: California Split & streaming & the cancelled Indicator Blu...This was just posted over at the Criterion Forum by a user who works with many UK labels, including Indicator:

I'm often told that "surely [insert title] must be available because there's clearly an HD master out there" - but that master may have been created primarily for TV/streaming, which means that certain rights won't necessarily have been cleared. A good example being California Split, which exists in two versions: the full version as signed off by Robert Altman, whose theatrical and broadcast rights were cleared at the time but whose home video rights weren't (since this wasn't an issue in 1974), and a shorter version created by Sony in the mid-2000s for DVD release that removed a couple of tracks after they turned out to be too expensive to license the home video rights for retrospectively.

It appears that broadcasting rights automatically encompass streaming rights, hence the uncut version of California Split being made available for streaming - but, as Indicator found out the hard way, releasing the full version on home video requires shelling out what turned out to be an unrealistically huge sum (and unrealistically huge for Sony, never mind a small British boutique label). And while they could have released the shorter version, they reckoned - no doubt wholly accurately - that people would loudly protest not only because it was a cut version but also because the uncut version is easy enough to see on other platforms, so surely the label must be full of utter blithering incompetents who don't know what they're doing (and so on for several more ranty paragraphs).

And there's no easy way round this, which is why so many wishlists are full of titles that, realistically, are very unlikely ever to be made available on home video.

This goes before the first paragraph:

Part of the problem is that people think that sub-licensing is simply a case of the rightsholder handing over a master and wishing the project well - but in fact in order to get that master into a commercially releasable state there may be a ton of legal work involved, especially if the film dates from before the home video era when third-party rights may not have been fully cleared.

okay so I watched Dr. T and the Women and.....what the FUCK was that ending, honestly jawdropping

I didn't mind the movie overall

Vinegar Syndrome with a new version of Thieves Like Us:

https://vinegarsyndrome.com/collections/frontpage/products/thieves-like-us

Additional info:

Region Free UHD / Region A Blu-ray
New audio commentary with film historian Nathaniel Thompson
New interview with screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury
Archival commentary with director Robert Altman
Archival interview with actor Keith Carradine
Theatrical trailer
New written essays by film critics Mitchell Beaupre, Marya E. Gates and Carlos Valladares

Should add this is a 4K as well.

Warner Archive is upgrading A Prairie Home Companion to Blu in September as well.

Was reading a little on Criterion Forum, and I hadn't realized just how many boutique label versions of TLU on Blu were out there: Twilight Time and Kino Lorber both handled it stateside, and Radiance did it in R2.

saw CALIFORNIA SPLIT last night. maybe the best film I’ve seen that captures the beauty, the innate schizophrenia, the genuine duality of being a junkie. the ending is so unnerving

I love it. It might be my favourite of his but I love so many of his movies so much.

That friendship seems so intense and then it just evaporates. Haunting.

gould is incredible in that movie

Yeah, great watch for sure, also saw it for the first time the other day.

its on my list for viewing soon after i caught a clip of a real hazy bar conversation that i loved the look of

That 4K of Thieves Like Us from last year can be had for the next twelve hours for $18:

https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/thieves-like-us?variant=42906757398570

Revisited Nashville and 3 Women on Criterion over the weekend, films I saw once in the 80s when I was likely stoned so I didn’t remember much of either.

I find the former overlong and meandering but still excellent, but the latter is absolutely fascinating on second watch, bumped up in my mind to best Altman and one of my favorite films ever.

3 women blew me away so much the first time I watched it I’ve been afraid to rewatch it

Just saw it last weekend and it blew my mind. Thought about rewatching on Criterion but didn't get around to it and don't think I will before it vanishes at 12AM Pacific. Actually thought about watching with the commentary track.

I did read Eric's awesome article about it, which I can link.

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/3-women/