Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

classicsoncall Well if random conversations and the meanderings of dysfunctional characters going nowhere is your thing, this might be the film for you. Just be advised that you'll have to be prepared to devote three hours to a movie that essentially doesn't achieve a resolution for most of it's characters. Which may actually be the point of the film because life is like that to a great degree. Things happen, people make wrong choices, there are regrets and recriminations, and after all that, life goes on. As a venue for a lot of celebrated and accomplished actors the film is OK; they move their angst driven characters through a variety of situations skillfully, but just as in that other esteemed Robert Altman picture "Nashville", I felt no connection to any of them or what was going on with them. Perhaps it's my loss, but the director's filming style just doesn't appeal to me, and his story telling even less.

John Holden Ever see someone train a dog by pushing its nose into its feces? This movie is that for 3 hours (oui, you're the dog). You watch depressed/ angry/ unpleasant characters flit and interact. There isn't one redeeming/ uplifting/ positive/ life-affirming moment. OK, wait: In the end, Waits & Tomlin celebrate their poverty and alcoholism in a dreary trailer; Robbins has sex with Stowe and brings the dog back home; MacDowell & Davison eat pastries with baker Lovett after their child dies. Yeah, sorry, all upbeat stuff.Altman was a brilliant creator (3 Women, Nashville, Mash), capturing the American panorama and subconscious like no other director. Amazing in the range of topics he undertook. But over time he relied increasingly on dialogue to move his (lack of) plot forward. For many this skim was the invisible hand of meaning - "What is he trying to say here? It's obscure so it's gravid."Short Cuts has all the Altman signatures: annoying lounge music that permeates everything, overlapping dialogue, characters staring at fish or fixed objects as they think about the meaning of life, overlapping dialogue, near-constant elevator jazz, characters who talk from the script and to the camera but not to each other, overlapping dialogue.It might be a TV show that charms via "lives of idiosyncratic, tortured, neurotic characters intersecting & intertwining in a fictional yet all-too-real city of desire, failed dreams ...." The kind of thing where folks say "OMG, that is SO my family". Except for the bit where Penn beats a girl to death with a rock; or the guy who took pictures of the girl he raped and strangled.Scenes or characters you might care or wonder about are never fully-explored; other scenes (eg. Lemmon's description of boinking his son's aunt) go on and on. And on. You got it, and still it continues. Perhaps this is a mirror that forces us to confront our inner selves while we confront our outer lives, as we reflect on ....There's some nice acting: Robbins, Stowe, Tomlin, Jason-Leigh, McDormand, Davison, Gallagher, Chris Penn, Lili Taylor, more. But almost anyone can get good performances out of these folks.Meryl Streep - sorry, I mean Julianne Moore - does her usual "watch me, I'm REALLY acting" - especially when she is nude from the waist-down in the pre-BBQ scene. Andie MacDowell, as always, squeezes her lack of range into playing herself. Same for Robert Downey Jr. and Lori Singer.Jack Lemmon does the stuttering, mumbling, rolling fingers uh-uh-uh alky-monologue thing that he (incredibly) made a career out of. His understudy Tom Waits does a gravelly-voice version of this. Boy, imagine if Altman had filmed an 8-hour version of an O'Neil play where Waits and Lemmon talk about life as they drink in a bar on a rainy day. Various characters could come and go, talking about the rain as they walk in; the bartender, perhaps a jaded Brian Blessed, would comment as he refilled their glasses .... Whew.Carver seemed to have insight, albeit through a whiskey glass, into the human spirit. But this movie version of his stories seems as contrived as a HS play. Look at the scene where Penn & Jason-Leigh consider having sex; or the photo-mixup scene; or the funeral scene where the dialogue approaches an Ibsen play: Sven opens his front door and a woman outside says "May I come in? I'm yust in town and I want to tell your father's last words as he died from syphilis ... yah, I'm your sister; the maid is your real mother; and the bank president, see the insanity in my left eye ..." Oofta, people do jump in like that in real life.I got to page 3 of the reviews without reading anything negative about Short Cuts. I infer from this that viewers think a stage production where actors tell, but don't show, is good art. There it is.I gave it a 7 and considered an 8. Several parts were so irritating that I winced and squirmed so it's certainly effective.Two sidebars:1. If you think Carver would be difficult to bring to the screen, see the excellent Jindabyne.2. Altman over time became like his protégé Alan Rudolph - vague and insubstantial - whereas Rudolph's quirkiness grew into meatier work.

Mr_Mirage Altman, as many have written, had a career that is pretty much evenly divided between hit and miss. While I have always enjoyed his films, to be totally honest and fair, not all of his work qualifies to the magnificent high standard of being Altmanesque.Altman loved jazz, and the best of his best work move like a brilliant jazz performance. To move along with his groove, to truly become part of the experience requires a certain presence of mind. Like the greatest jazz artists, there are those who enter into deep debates over which work is best: is Kind Of Blue better than Bitches Brew? More important? In the end, it does come down to taste and preference, and this would be my second favorite Altman film after the sheer perfection of Nashville. The films are like watching someone make a quilt, "bit by bit, putting it together" (as Sondheim said), with no one particular thread being more important than another, just a simple, glorious collection of threads pulling together to form one majestic piece.The perception that his films are "scattered" or "confusing" or "dull" because of that missing story line is, sadly, understandable: we are being fed a constant stream of Single Story at every turn, being easier to market and exploit. Altman, at his best, had no need of a single narrative line and on those occasions in which there is no semblance whatsoever of a single story arc AND he is moving at his best, he creates films quite unlike any other by any one.Both this and Nashville are invitations, seductive in their own way: there is no fourth wall in these works, while we watch them, it is as if they are watching us.

Rockwell_Cronenberg Another impressive Robert Altman ensemble piece, for the most part. Short Cuts brings us a look into the lives of an extensive number of Los Angeles residents, interconnecting in sometimes loose and sometimes more direct ways. We see doctors, singers, mothers, waitresses and plenty more, all done in the fluid and rhythmic fashion that one would expect from the man who brought us Nashville. Short Cuts feels very much like an L.A. film; there's a controlled chaos to it all that feels frenzied but in a strange way that lets you know that Altman is still behind the wheel.Over the course of the film we delve further into the lives of each individual, focusing on a few and exploring them deeper through Altman's heavy themes of morality and mortality (the film is based on a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver). It's a film that if it hits you right could get you doing a lot of self-reflecting on life and death, which is always a powerful thing to resonate within an audience. The most surprising thing about the film for me was how quickly it went by. Coming in at a running time of over 180 minutes, I was always quite intimidated by it and was expecting at least part of it to drag no matter how good the overall product was, but it flew by.Altman has this indescribable way to pace these epic ensemble pieces that make them feel so fluid and complete, keeping the focus on each character just long enough to unfold another layer but moving on to the next before it starts to drag. It's really one of the more impressive things about his capabilities as a director, how magnificently paced they are. For the majority of Short Cuts I was very impressed with everything that he was able to draw out of his cast; the emotions felt so genuine and, as he did in Nashville, the performances were mostly authentic and deeply lived-in.I don't think that it mixes the comedic and dramatic elements as well as it could have, but there was an understated quality to the dark themes that made it feel a lot more natural than if he had poured on the melodrama thick, which he easily could have given the material. Here he works with more established names than he did in something like Nashville, but there was a real lack of vanity from the actors, none of them allowing their prominence to overshadow anything else about the rest of the ensemble. Altman brings all of these characters together in a way that feels alive but not overly cinematic, expertly staged and paced...for the majority of it.There's a scene where Julianne Moore and Matthew Modine's characters get into an argument over a possible infidelity of hers, and it's around this scene that the film takes a bizarre turn for the worse. The performances that used to feel so genuine were all of a sudden desperately forced, the understated emotions that were allowed to build were now coming to the surface and were so melodramatic and shoved down the throat of the audience. It was as if Altman and the cast took everything that was working so well about it beforehand and decided to do everything in the completely opposite fashion for the final stretch. I struggle to think of a film that took such a dramatic shift, especially so late in it's game.By the time we reach the heavy-handed climax to bring together the universality of the characters, I wanted to scream at how desperate it all had become. It felt as though Altman had stepped down from his chair and let someone much less skilled than he come in and try to finish it, but they just hacked it to pieces. Short Cuts is a very good film for 150 minutes that is almost derailed by it's final 30.