Altman

Altman's life merits a 10-hour documentary. This is only 1½ hours, but we are treated to a decent selection of Altman trivia.

Gosford Park, M.A.S.H., Nashville, Short Cuts, The Player. Just wow.

The downside of cutting it down to a feature length documentary is that you are forced to skim through many great films. First of all, he made so many movies it's hard to keep track of them. Second of all, his movies are so dense that they require multiple viewings, and more than two minutes of exposition, to fully appreciate.

Nonetheless, I think the film is well-made and never boring.

Family videos and photos, and on-location footage, provide access to a rarely-seen Altman, such as Altman-the-father.

But don't expect great revelations. There is nothing truly shocking here, no skeletons in the closet. Altman is painted as a suspiciously lovable, but subversive, Santa Claus figure. Perhaps that's just the way he was.

But one would have liked a few rough edges to be explored a bit more - like his family troubles, financial worries and personal addictions to gambling and booze. The movies gets too close to hagiography at times. But if one is to pick Saints for canonization, you could do much worse than go with Robert Altman!

In 2014, a documentary about one of my favourite filmmakers was finally released. This is by no means a perfect documentary, but any film lover or fan of his work absolutely needs to see this.

Robert Altman started from the bottom of showbiz then worked his way up to directing tv shows. How? He did lots of lying. Then in 1970, he started the boom of new up and coming directors trying to make names for themselves. These new directors included Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas, and the movement came to be known as "The New Wave of American Cinema". The year was 1970 and Altman created the well-liked 'Brewster McCloud' and the highly acclaimed anti-war film 'M*A*S*H'. Altman's desire to explore unconventional takes for his films led to making "anti-" films. 'M*A*S*H' had no violence making it anti-war. Some of these other "anti" film included anti-western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, my personal favourite of his), and anti-friendship (3 Women).

By the late 70s, Altman was falling into a slump when his film 'Quintet' didn't live up to expectations of his earlier masterpieces. But it was the his live action take on 'Popeye' in 1980 that ruined his film career throughout the rest of the decade. Barely getting film offers anymore, he tried directing theatre. He loved theatre just as much.

Things were looking up when he made the darkly comical satire 'The Player' in 1992. He was back on top again. Everything about that film is pitch perfect. A year later he does 'Short Cuts', one of the best epics with multiple stories ever made. The remainder of his career saw some back and forth hits with his Agatha Christie inspired 'Gosford Park' and final film project 'A Prairie Home Companion' being notable highs.

It felt to me that this documentary moved a little too fast. Rather than gliding along everything, it tried to fit into some kind of allotted time. And I also felt that they should have gone into more detail on what made Robert Altman an auteur.

So this may not be perfect, but it is definitely a movie-lover's dream come alive.

3.5/4

I am fascinated by the artistic process, how things are created, what motivates the artist, what obstacles are encountered and how they are overcome. In this documentary, I think Ron Mann has succinctly put together the various factors that motivated Robert Altman and made his career so long and successful. I felt I learned a lot more about the movie making process and artistic creation in general.

Simple things we now take for granted are important. For instance, putting together a team of people that work well together, giving people a break and letting them shine. These were radical ideas in the era of C2C Command and Control studio structures, where the word was passed down from on high. How about two people arguing, both speaking at the same time. Adds to the emotion and conflict right? Altman pioneered the use of multiple soundtracks to get right into a dialogue.

What I found particularly interesting was how Altman dealt with career setbacks. Each time things did not seem to be going his way (at least by the standards of others), he simply reinvented himself by turning to a different genre of film or theatre or production. When confronted by harsh critics, he simply shrugged it off and kept on working with undiminished enthusiasm. What a wonderful role model for young people starting off on a career. Bravo, great doc!!

This movie gets a 10 from me because it accomplished what it set out to do: be a career retrospective of Robert Altman, including lots of relevant voices, film clips, home movie footage and words of wisdom from the subject himself. It was heart-felt, and made me tear up a couple times.

I didn't realize I had seen so many of this man's films: The Player (back when the '90's were so fresh and slick), MASH, Popeye. Each one I've seen, I've liked. Now, to check out Gosford Park and McCabe.

I found this documentary a comprehensive review of Robert Altman's life's work, highlighting the director's determination to be independent of Hollywood conventions. Even though he was born in 1925, Altman was totally in sync with the following generation, the post-war baby boomers who first came of age in the 1960's. His anti-establishment stance never wavers as he thumbs his nose at the military, President Nixon, commercialism, and the election process. One of the most erudite talk show hosts Dick Cavett, a cultural icon of the youth generation, appears in the documentary, a nice touch.

Beginning as a writer of television scripts in the 1940's Altman eventually graduated to being a movie director. The movie MASH is one of the classic anti-war movies that treats it with a large dose of humour. Actors like Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland seemed to fit the temper of those times. "Nashville" seems to reflect an unease with American culture under the silent majority of Richard Nixon who pandered to the culture of working class white people and their love of country music.

Later, Michael Murphy was tapped for the role of Jack Tanner in Tanner '88, a television show that Altman believes changed television as an entertainment medium. He also had worked with some of the best comediennes such as Carol Burnett and Lilly Tomlin. Altman cast Robin Williams as Popeye in the movie of the same name. It bombed and we are treated to Gene Shalit's review of the debacle. This movie highlighted Altman's belief that the major studios were only interested in blockbusters like Superman and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

One of his most critically acclaimed movies was Gosford Park, with some of the finest British talent available at the time. This movie went beyond the stage-like production of the Upstairs, Downstairs television show and presented a more biting picture of the British class system in a lavish production that also prefigured the success of a much later TV show Downton Abbey.

Among these and other films, we see home movies of Altman, his wife Kathryn and their children. We also see some trenchant comments from Altman himself about his career and work. The documentary gives us a great view of this highly creative American director and his work.