Ugh. Let's forget what we know about Altman and start from scratch here. This film is banal, wanders endlessly, beats dead horses and has a very amateur visual aesthetic. I dunno, when all those voices are talking on top of each other but the story is dragging, I found it hard to convince myself that this was the same guy that made McCabe and Mrs Miller. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's an eight minute opening tracking shot where everyone's talking about films that had tracking shots. It later shoves your nose in obvious film references, as in:
film poster in the background
cutting soon after to
Ooooooh, a sitting for "Mr M."
This is about one hour, forty five minutes after we see Tim Robbins drown a guy in a puddle. We get it! Altman does make a decent sketch of what jerks resembled circa 1990. Tim Robbins, despite his gangly skinny bod and boyish face, manages to pull enough asshole vibe out of the air to fit the part. Greta Scacchi's character loves to take polaroids and manipulates them. This is hilarious, because it's so nineties and such a lame pseudo craft practiced by bored middle-class, middle-aged women (one notch up from scrapbooking) so not a bad way of indicating that she's a poser, not an artist. I.E.,
Brion James ("what's a tortoise"!) looks like he's been swabbed in orange paint (he's a sun loving movie mogul, get it?). Then there's the sex scene, which is a gut-buster. Scacchi and Robbins are drenched (in what, sweat? hot tub fumes?), lit in hellish reds and the sounds of jungle drums beat erratically in the background while Robbins sputters some cornball dialogue. We had read the running time wrong and had a major debate as to whether this would become a "film he made me turn off" but mercifully it ended at the two hour mark and the remaining minutes were just DVD extras. There is a God!
No comments:
Post a Comment