Monday, November 27, 2006

In Memoriam/Last Post

I have made the decision to finally pull the plug on this site but before I go, I want to recognize Robert Altman and the immeasurable influence he's had on film. While he was never as commercially viable as his contemporaries, Altman had just a big an influence on younger directors as Scorsese or Spielberg. His fluid camera, zooms, and overlapping dialogue are all hugely significant stylistic marks that made him one of the true innovative directors of the last forty years. It's hard to imagine what kind of films Paul Thomas Anderson would be making without the influence of Altman.

Personally, my favorites of his are The Long Goodbye (one of his most underrated and forgotten) and Short Cuts, but M*A*S*H* and Nashville are still solid and could probably stand up to another viewing. Robert Altman was an auteur in the truest sense of the word, when it was coined by theorists in the '60s. There aren't that many of those type of filmmakers left. The one thing that can always be said about Robert Altman was that his films were always true expressions of himself.