Nashville

Rating:
Summary: DON'T BLINK
Review: This captivating film demands your attention. So many things happen, it is a bit hard to follow. Each scene is a vignette; thougtfully sculpted to fit in to the jig saw. One moment you're up, the next you're down. The camera angles are perfect as you at once feel part of the crowd. It's been 25 years since I've seen it, but I recall it as equal parts soap opera, and satire. Bring some kleenex.

Rating:
Summary: Wake up, AFI!
Review: Wake up, AFI! This picture is not only among the best one hundred movies ever made, it is probably the best movie of the 1970's (a decade that included The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Network, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest). It is one of the only American movies I have ever seen that is like painting. The more you watch it, the more you see. What impresses me most is the economy with which the characters are presented. While the picture is almost three hours long, Altman has the difficult task of describing twenty-four distinct characters in this limited time space. He does so masterfully. The smallest details reveal the characters' deepest secrets, regrets, feelings. My favourite scene has to be the one where Keith Carradine's playboy/folk singer character serenades Lily Tomlin with his original composition, "I'm Easy". No dialogue is spoken for the entirety of the song, but Altman's camera captures a million thoughts and desires in the faces of Tomlin and a bevey of other Carradine admirers.

Also: The performances are outstanding! Especially Ronee Blakely and Allen Garfield.

Rating:
Summary: I don't get it...
Review: This has to be one of those occasions where everyone says it's a great film because everyone else said it was.

Or maybe you have to be on drugs.

How else could you possibly not notice that there is NO discernible plot, nothing but HOLES in the storyline, and several events that don't make sense and are not explained. As well as characters that have no place in this film except to fill screen space. Is Jeff Goldblum's character only there to shoot the guy in the end? Couldn't somebody else have done that instead and expressed some motivation as well as saving the studio a salary?

I saw this in a revival house, thinking I was going to be amazed, and, well, I certainly was--I walked out dumbfounded.

I've enjoyed Altman's work in the past: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Player, and M*A*S*H are all excellent films. And whatever you say about Popeye and Prêt-à-Porter, they're at the very least infinitely more entertaining than this mess.

My advice to you--in case you didn't get my drift yet--is to avoid this film at all costs. The only things that save this from being a total disaster are the acting and the songs (and I'm not a country music fan). But don't waste two-and-a-half hours of your life just to hear Keith Carradine sing the Oscar-winning "I'm Easy," because, really, it's a great song, but it's just not worth the price you pay.

Rating:
Summary: You Folks ARE Kidding (Aren't You)
Review: This is the ONLY movie that I have seen where I ACTUALLY ASKED FOR A REFUND when it ended. Someone said that Altman 'wove the plot strands together' - bull. I recall several very THIN story strands ... but they never came together in my mind & certainly could never be added up to qualify as a 'plot'.

And as far as my "One Star" rating goes - it's only because there isn't a negative 5 choice.

Rating:
Summary: Movie a Must! (DVD a mixed bag.)
Review: First, the DVD. Unlike some other viewers, I find the visual clarity, color saturation, and audio presence to be perfectly acceptable (after seeing some horrible 16mm prints ten years ago, I was prepared for the worst). You'll be able to spot Ronee Blakely's eyes tearing up as well as distinguish the multiple dialogues in Altman's polyphonous soundtrack. But of all my DVD's, this is the most temperamental. I cast spells on it, sprinkle it with holy water, pray and wait with bated breath. Sometimes my player recognizes it as a playable disc (after excruciatingly long waits); other times it simply refuses to play it.

The other main downside of the disc is the soundtrack commentary by director Altman (thank goodness, you have the option to ignore this "special feature" altogether). While no author should be trusted as an authority about his own child, the saying goes double for an "intuitive" creative mind such as Altman's. His remarks are banal, fatuous and injurious to his accomplishment. I'm reminded of the time "60 Minutes" devoted a segment to him and he came off as nothing more than a self-indulgent, irresponsible, pot-smoking hippie encouraging his actors to party while he filmed them. Or of his proclamations that his ill-conceived "Ready to Wear" (the only Altman film without any redeeming qualities ) was the highwater mark of his career.

But even the inarticulate (though verbose) Altman can't damage a film as Titanic and Olympian as "Nashville," though he tries his best. During Ronee Blaklely's deeply affecting performance of the song "Dues," he jabbers about how lucky he was to have some "Shriners" in the audience; about the assassin and the film's climactic, shocking scene he brags that only he would have had the clairvoyance to insist on such a scene and then offers such penetrating insights as "assassins are weird" and, despite what other people think, are "really just trying to get attention for themselves."

Altman's film arguably stands with Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" as the two outstanding cinematic achievements of the 1970s (though "Godfather" and "Chinatown" certainly deserve consideration). It is a criticism of life and of the American dream, an exhilarating black comedy, an infectious musical drama, a piece of extraordinary ironic vision, equal parts comedy and tragedy. And despite Altman's obtuse interpretation of his own creation, the final action in retrospect is a fated "convergence of the twain". An earlier scene reveals political posters in the assassin's car that suggest he's come to Nashville and its Parthenon (as bogus as the authenticity of the "country-music rusticity" in what had become by 1975 the media capital of the U.S.) to assassinate the 3rd-party poltical candidate. But in the film's chilling, climactic montage we witness his rage suddenly transfer from his own demanding mother to Barbara Jean's pathetic attempt to create a "mommy and daddy" out of the disconnected fragments of her celebrity-driven past. The shot connects the pieces of the movie, but so does Henry Gibson's mock-heroic response, invoking the patron saints of Nashville in a thoughtless yet curiously admirable way. And then Altman's brilliant tracking shot to the American flag and the skies of America, at once a transcendence of the vanity fair and a Gatsby-like reaching for the original, pure dream.

Perhaps too extemporaneously "scripted" and too much of a "period piece" to ever enjoy the lasting canonical hold of Welles' Xanadu, Altman's "Nashville" nevertheless exploits the potential of the medium like few other films, capturing life "as it is lived" while viscerally and indelibly altering the consciousness of its viewer.

Rating:
Summary: Wow
Review: This movie is smarter than any person I've ever met. It's no doubt smarter than the individuals who made it. (I don't mean this in a snide way; this film is an example of how collaboration can produce wonders.)

An amazing movie.

Rating:
Summary: Always something new... a joy to watch!!
Review: There are a few movies that I will always hold close, and this is one of them. There's so much to love about "Nashville". I don't know where to begin.

I won't rehash the plot, because there isn't just one. There are twenty-four -- one for each character -- and Altman obviously loves them all. Every character is given (more or less) equal screen time and a moment to shine. It's really the most democratic of film structures, and Altman juggles the multiple storylines with aplomb.

It appears from other reviews that "Nashville" viewers are divided into two camps -- those who "get" it, and those who don't. I'm not a critic, I just picked it up off the shelf about 15 years ago because it sounded interesting. I wasn't prepared for such a funny and moving experience. The ending... WOW... I can't really describe how I felt. All I can say is that "Nashville" is worth every ounce of concentration it requires.

And it gets better with multiple viewings. There's so much to absorb, and so much to identify with, that it's nearly impossible to catch everything the first time around. It's really amazing.

I can only reccommend seeing this movie in widescreen. Pan and scan doesn't do "Nashville" justice, as Altman requires a very large canvas to tell his stories. A great deal of impact is lost in cropped format. Did I mention the music? Simply out-of-this-world.

Rating:
Summary: The most over-rated movie in history
Review: It will baffle me forever why this movie has been enshrined as a classic. Robert Altman's "expose" of the phonies of Nashville is so self-satisfied and phony itself as it picks off its manufactured targets. The type of people he's ridiculing in this movie have a lot more intelligence and soul than he would even know about he's so busy championing his tired late-60's cynicism about America. His much-vaunted "realism" seems, with the benefit of hindsight, excruciatingly artificial. And the songs, of course, are meant to make country singers look like morons. I think it took a lot of nerve to title a movie "Nashville" when clearly the only time Mr. Altman ever spent there was during the making of this awful film. Bonus negative points for Jeff Goldblum's ridiculous character. Rent it if you must, buy it at your own risk.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting movie, but somewhat disjointed.
Review: This 1975 film tells the story of a political campaign and 24 people whose individual stories somewhat mesh with the campaign. Also, all 24 of the main characters are in some way connected to the country music industry. Nashville garnered 5 Academy Award nominations.

While the film is undoubtedly good, it is somewhat disjointed as too little time is devoted to each character to properly flesh each one out. Obviously, this is because the movie revolves around 24 personalities, so there is little time available to devote to each one. Regardless, the way that the characters all are intertwined in one way or another is brilliant. And, the film is a case study of American life in the 1970's. In both of these respects, the film has many similarities to Boogie Nights.

The audio and video quality of this film are excellent, especially considering the 1975 vintage. While somewhat enlightening, the extra features are relatively sparse, except for the feature-length director commentary.

Rating:
Summary: I stand alone (or do I?)
Review: An old friend rented "Nashville" recently, then wrote me to ask if she was missing something. This is what I wrote her:

<< The peer pressure among film reviewers to laud "Nashville" began before the film even came out, when Pauline Kael took the highly unorthodox and ethically dubious step of raving in The New Yorker over a rough cut that Altman screened especially for her. But more than even this, I think the reason "Nashville" got a free ride was that it passed itself off as "an epic canvas of American life." Reviewers are suckers for hype like that. That "Nashville" is exactly like every other Altman movie, in which the director expresses his thinly veiled contempt for his freaky characters, seems not to have occurred to any of them. (Altman particularly enjoys seeing women humiliated with nudity - i.e. "MASH", "Ready to Wear", "Short Cuts", etc.) He also manages to express contempt for the audience by making his soundtrack an incomprehensible muddle of overlapping dialogue - a pretentious little trick that the reviewers also eat up with a spoon. And "Nashville" lingers painfully in my memory as perhaps the visually ugliest film I've ever seen. >>

Of the 34 comments posted before mine, only 1 dared to suggest that Bobby A.'s chef-d'oeuvre might be something less than a supreme masterpiece of American cinema. On behalf of my friend and those like her who lack the courage to speak out, let me state for the record that not only is "Nashville" not on par with the great films of the 70s, it is, like most of the rest of Altman's oeuvre, an amateurish piece of garbage. It is inferior in conception, execution, and artistic insight to many hundreds of other movies from that decade including, say, "Can't Stop The Music".

If there is a more glaring case of the Emperor's New Clothes than the continuing deference... ...by the film community, I don't know about it.