6 result(s) tagged “Robert Altman”

It’s not hard to figure out why Robert Altman was the center of attention with last summer’s A Prairie Home Companion — even though we didn’t know at the time of its release that it would be his final movie.

Long before his honorary Oscar in March 2006, Altman was cool — a stubborn, renegade filmmaker whose biggest head-scratcher (Popeye) has somehow been transformed into an indicator of his unconventional greatness. His death in November merely gave Altman permanent ownership of A Prairie Home Companion, concerned as it is with passing, and the proper way to commemorate something that is gone.

But another reason that Altman was the focus — beyond film culture’s oftentimes-ridiculous bias toward directors — was that the alternative would be to talk about quaint, old-fashioned, uncool-even-by-public-radio-standards Garrison Keillor, who wrote the script.

Now that filmmaker Robert Altman has died, we’ll find out how prophetic his 1990 film Vincent and Theo turns out to be. The movie, ostensibly a portrait of the relationship between Vincent van Gogh and his brother, operates most forcefully as a screed against the commercial pressures foisted on artists, and it’s easy to see as a metaphor for Altman’s own career.

The movie’s framing device is blunt yet elegant. It begins with the contemporary auction of a van Gogh painting, and when it jumps to Vincent’s life, the auctioneer’s voice can still be heard, the bids climbing ever higher. That slowly fading audio juxtaposed with an idling Vincent, anxiously adjusting his pipe while sitting on his bed, suggests that the artist had an inkling of his talent, and perhaps even foresaw his destiny: posthumous riches following a life of poverty.

Altman avoided that equivalent fate, barely, kind of. Nominated five times for the best-directing Academy Award, he was given an honorary Oscar this year.

Yet while the gold statuette is the pinnacle of respect in the eyes of the casual movie-going public, it’s an inadequate honor. Martin Scorsese will one day get his own lifetime-achievement Academy Award, but — this week at least — he seems merely a highly respected filmmaker. Altman made a far deeper connection with his audience, as evidenced by the profound grief that has greeted his passing; it’s almost as if a family member died, which is all the more remarkable considering that (1) movie directors are at best secondary celebrities, and (2) he was 81 years old.

Some starting points: Dana Stevens at Slate, assessments and an open thread at The House Next Door, the Robert Altman Blog-a-thon from earlier this year, and Jim Emerson’s Altman moments.

In response to a call for movie-related haiku, I submitted the following on Robert Altman’s The Player:

The pitch, in 10 words:
Griffin Mill kills the writer,
and he steals his girl.

At The House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz collects contributions to the Robert Altman Blog-a-thon Weekend, honoring the lifetime-achievement-Oscar recipient. I shan’t participate with new writing, but offer this appreciation of the director’s The Player excerpted from a longer essay.

I love Jeff Bridges. I love Tim Robbins. I love them equally, and (my gut tells me) in about the same way. We are a ménage à trios, even if they don’t know it yet.

Magnolia breaks through the self-aware emotional vacancy of the decade’s cool movies (both sterile and knowingly clever, epitomized by Quentin Tarantino) without losing its edge; it gets inside its characters’ minds and hearts with dazzling style. It is afraid of neither elaborate tracking shots nor a good, fairly won cry.