Originally Posted by mja345
Great post, oildude. Altman is a polarizing director. I have a buddy who absolutely hates his films and he and I get in arguments all the time. My dad is a huge Altman fan and showed me his most well-known films (Nashville, Long Goodbye, MASH) when I was just 13 or 14 years old. And, as a kid, I didn't get Altman's films at all. There just seemed to be no rhyme or reason to them.
But, in my early 20s, I started re-discovering a lot of Altman films and discovering many of them for the first time. What blew me away is how comfortably he worked in so many different genres. He could do outright comedy (A Wedding, MASH, Brewster McCloud), sprawling ensemble pieces (Nashville, Short Cuts), revisionist Westerns (McCabe, Buffalo Bill), surreal mindf**ks (3 Women, Quintet). The scope of the guy's talent blew me away. I think there are certain stylistic choices he made that can take time to get used to. The overlapping dialogue, the frequent zooming, as well as "the vaseline over the camera lens" look, as Quentin Tarantino put it in his assessment of "McCabe and Mrs. Miller".
When Altman was off his game, he could be way, way off, i.e. "Ready to Wear", "OC and Stiggs", "Dr. T and the Women", "The Gingerbread Man". But, to me, he's one of the more singularly talented American directors of the last 40 years along with names like Scorsese and Kubrick. Albeit less consistent than Kubrick or Scorsese. I break Altman's films into five tiers, outside of "Health" and "Countdown", which I haven't seen...
Masterpieces
Nashville
McCabe and Mrs Miller
Long Goodbye
3 Women
Short Cuts
Great
MASH
Images
California Split
Secret Honor
A Wedding
Thieves Like Us
The Player
Gosford Park
Buffalo Bill
Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean
Streamers
Kansas City
Brewster McCloud
Good
Vincent and Theo
Popeye
Cookie's Fortune
That Cold Day in the Park
Beyond Therapy
Quintet
A Perfect Couple
Average
The Company
Prairie Home Companion
Fool For Love
OC and Stiggs
Bad
The Gingerbread Man
Ready to Wear
Dr. T and the Women
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