one of the greats. and an excuse to post more pictures of elliot gould
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14 comments:
He's the third:
1. Ed Bradley
2. Jack Palance
3. Robert Altman
Love,
Frank Burns
Robert Altman Top Five:
1. Nashville
2. The Player
3. MASH
4. McCabe and Mrs. Miller
5. Short Cuts
Pretty basic list.
1)Nashville
2)3 women (these first two might be tied it's too hard for me to pick one)
3)The Long Goodbye
4)Short Cuts
5)I hate to say it's hard for me to pick a fifth that I like enough to make the list. I know, sacrilege. I need to rewatch the Player. I think McCabe and Mrs. Miller and MASH are both pretty flawed. But I love the first two so much that it's no dis on him.
1) McCabe and Mrs. Miller
2) Nashville
3) MASH
4) The Player
5) Short Cuts
6) The Long Goodbye
7) Gosford Park
8) California Split
9) HEALTH
10) Brewster McCloud
The saddest thing is that his last film was "A Prairie Home Companion", and not "Gosford Park". You just couldn't stop that man from working.
I saw GOSFORD twice when I was working at the theater and he really perfected those long, tracking zoom shots in that film. And he executed them so naturally--if there were a worth criticism of EYES WIDE SHUT, it would be that Kubrick's camera never really moved through rooms and in and around actors with the ease of a film like GOSFORD. But I think Altman's camerawork was less calculated and focused more on sound and dialogue than spot-points and composition. Such a master.
sound guy nerd comments on Altman:
he almost never "looped" (i.e., re-recorded) dialog. most filmmakers often have the actors basically lip-synch dialog to filmed scenes, to get better sound or a different performance. Altman believed in using the "production" track, the recording made as it was filmed. Also, he required actors in the background of scenes to stay in character and ad lib dialog; he had mics everywhere and on everyone at all times. Then he'd use that background stuff instead of general "walla", and if there were particularly good bits he'd turn them up as part of the dialog track.
OK, for what it's worth, in my opinion:
1. Nashville
2. McCabe and Mrs. Miller
3. The Player
4. The Long Goodbye
5. Short Cuts
6. 3 Women
7. Gosford Park
8. M*A*S*H
9. Brewster McCloud
10. California Split
He made many forgettable films as well, but today isn't for that; it's for remembering the scene in "Nashville" where you have to listen to three overlapping conversations at once, or a slient Julie Christie looking melancholy in the swirling snow toward the sad end of "McCabe" or Griffin Mill both killing American culture and literally getting away with murder in "The Player." Or the zoom lenses, the long takes and the improvisation. Or the fact that he came back from his Hollywood career being dead in the mid-80s to working hard on a second wave of heralded pictures and being recognized as one of the greatest American filmmakers over the past four decades. Or the fact that he said in an interview last year that he "never, ever made a film that he didn't want to make."
RIP Robert Altman...
http://cache.defamer.com/hollywood/altman-lohan.jpg
Love,
Frank Burns
darin,
i liked that info about the sound engineering. it really, really bothers me when directors use overdubbing because they fucked up a scene. it just seems sloppy.
Succinctly, this remembrance says very much:
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2006/11/22/altman/
The majority of mainstream films use ADR. It's not really about being sloppy, it's just how it is. You can't really tell 99 percent of the time, anyway.
Yeah, it's no big deal, just an artistic choice. Welles almost never recorded live sound, and he wasn't too shabby of a filmmaker.
ADR is an artistic choice, but it seems that non-ADR fits much better with more naturalistic filmaking; I believe it plays a much bigger role in the "feel" of a movie than most would think. But Terminator movies are like 90% ADR because of all the effects & such, for example, and some directors like to be able to focus entirely on the visuals & be able to yell directions while filming a take. Personally I prefer slightly less pristine visuals & sound, kind of like how I prefer more natural-sounding music recordings. But of course context matters: under-produced dance pop is as bad as over-produced garage rock. Non-ADR dialog with slick visuals would be as weird as slick dialog with gritty visuals. It's just a bummer that most directors today don't even seem to consider using mostly production tracks to be a realistic option. It's just part of how most contemporary movies are amazing technically, but mediocre otherwise.
I think all films should be filmed MOS.
Love,
Super8
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