MONDAY Is a Bad Day to Quit Sniffing Glue 🌘 OT

Whatcha up to? Surviving your early fall allergies? If snot were worth something, I'd make a fortune doing something nasty. Kinda like Jay Gatsby.

Polly was totally in frame when I snapped the camera, wasn't expecting sudden cat yoga.

I'm on a mini-binge of Altman's movies. They were all somewhere between very good and excellent. Here are a few short reviews.

1. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
2. M*A*S*H
3. Nashville
4. 3 Women
5. The Long Goodbye
6. Short Cuts

M*A*S*H has some problems; it has aged poorly. The casual racism and sexism and the colonialist mindset of the protagonists (this is probably one of Altman's points, but still, yuck) There's a direct line from screwball comedies of the Golden Age to M*A*SH to the teenage sex romp, slobs vs snobs films that followed. Justified sexual shaming of a woman for being a stuck up bitch. Calling a Black character "Spear Chucker" because he used to throw the javelin, you see. Derogatory mimicking of Asian speech. Otherwise it is still really funny. Just not as funny  if you're a woman or not white. No, I do know what a black comedy is, so don't even start.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is fantastic. Dirty and ugly "Anti-Western". Plays with all the Western clichés and deflates them all. The big showdown at the end is a sneaky, nasty affair, no standing tall and riding off into the sunset. Leonard Cohen songs. Christie and Beatty are really good. "Money and pain... Pain... Pain... Pain" about sums it up.

Nashville prefigures Short Cuts. A loose bunch of intertwining stories about sad, little people over the course of a few days. All of their stories are a bit depressing, the characters are funny, some of them sympathetic, some are casual monsters. Lily Tomlin's character, for instance, seems ripe for mocking - the very first scene you see her in, she's Florence Foster Jenkinsing in a studio with a group of Black gospel singers. But you see her failing marriage to Ned Beatty and her love for her deaf sons, and then the sadness in her face after she sleeps with another man. Rewards a patient, careful watch. The discursive storytelling influenced Paul Thomas Anderson's films and just when you start wondering what's the point, the point emerges or explodes. Lyle Lovett and Huey Lewis are still distracting to me in Short Cuts. But Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits make up for it.

The Long Goodbye is a nightmare. The movie begins with Hooray for Hollywood by the Benny Goodman Orchestra, and ends with it too. Everything in between is a nightmare for Philip Marlowe. The only other song you hear in the movie is The Long Goodbye by John Williams and Johnny Mercer. You hear six different version of it. It's the only song on the radio in nightmare LA c. 1973. Imagine Bogart, Powell, Montgomery (Robert or George) falling asleep in the late '30s and waking up in LA in 1973. It's intentional. He wakes up in the very beginning of the film; Altman, with Leigh Brackett (who btw, also co-wrote the screenplay to The Big Sleep) created a Marlowe he describes as Rip Van Marlowe - a fundamentally decent man from the past waking up in the decadent future. One can only assume he goes back to his home era at the end, jauntily walking through a tunnel of trees while Benny Goodman plays over the credits. Great film. Definitely one of the biggest influences on The Big Lebowski. Plus Sterling Hayden, who was drunk and stoned in every scene. Every movie improves by at least half a star if he's in it. 

3 Women was my favorite of the bunch, and I loved The Long Goodbye and McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Based on a dream Altman had so make of that what you will. Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall and Janice Rule are the three women. Or are they? They each get to change their roles at some point. Don't want to give too much away, but this one belongs on a short list with a certain Bergman film, an Assayas, a Fassbinder, and at least one Lynch film. This one was not universally loved in 1977 and was never released on VHS. Criterion brought it to DVD in 2004. You should totally watch it.

What's up with you? Have you seen anything worthwhile? Like me, are you reassessing some works you may have misunderstood as an ignorant, youthful dope?