Robert Altman's NASHVILLE

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 1/6/07 at 11:52pm

I just finally saw this after putting it off for a very long time for whatever reason. (Strange, considering that Altman is one of my favorite directors. The American equivalent of Godard in my eyes.) What an amazingly brilliant masterpiece. A truly layered satire that works simultaneously as a comedy of manners, a powerful psychological drama, and a dissection of the politics of the era. This is one of the few that I actually hesitate to call a "movie" because the word seems to be so small for such a grand epic. It's more like an "experience".

We must be doin' somethin' right to last 200 years.

Posted: 1/7/07 at 12:01am

be sure to read Stinky Lulu's essays on Lily Tomlin's & Ronee Blakely's performances in NASHVILLE!

http://stinkylulu.blogspot.com/2006/12/lily-tomlin-in-nashville-1975.html

http://stinkylulu.blogspot.com/2006/12/ronee-blakley-in-nashville-1975.html

[StageManager2]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 12:01am

Finally, a movie I've heard of, but alas never seen.

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 12:06am

You know what kind of sucks? Had NASHVILLE been made today, it would have been universally derided and considered a "pretentious piece of shazbucket." It's hard to imagine a movie this unique and genre-bending coming out today in a Opening Weekend/Oscars obsessed world. Just try to create a modern trailer for it. Just try.

Posted: 1/7/07 at 12:09am

i love NASHVILLE & as i grow older, i find more things to love in it.

its a movie thats built to last.

[Jane2]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 12:20am

My favorite Altman film and one of my favorite all time films.

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 1:12am

The ending is hair-raisingly powerful.

[Jane2]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 1:26am

yes indeed, it is! Now I'm in the mood to see it!

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 1:51am

And you may say that I ain't free,
but it don't worry me.

Posted: 1/7/07 at 2:26am

^suleen, i love that avatar!

[jimnysf]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 2:50am

For those in or near San Francisco, the Castro Theatre is showing "Nashville" on February 25th. Also showing that day is another Altman film, "Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bulls History Lesson".

Other Altman films at the Castro in the coming months:

"The Long Goodbye" and "California Split" on Jan 23
"Thieves Like Us' and "That Cold Day in the Park" on Jan 24
"The Player" and "Short Cuts" on 2/11
"McCabe and Mrs Miller" and "3 Women" on 3/7
"M*A*S*H" and "Brewster McCloud" on 3/8

In non-Altman related news, "GREASE 2" is showing at the Castro on Sat, 2/10.

[bschneid76]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 11:23am

Robert Altman was a master in the Film World. I was so upset to hear of his passing. One of the greatest! Like Hitchcock I find it difficult to criticize his work.

Nashville is one of my favorite films, and it needs a nice re-release with special edition format. Would be awesome to have a retrospect.

other faves:
Gosfrod Park
The Player
Short Cuts
MASH
Images

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 12:44pm

The country music world is such a great metaphor for American life. This is one of the most layered satires I've ever seen.

'Cause I'm easy...

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 1:26pm

You might want to check out the book The Nashville Chronicles by Jan Stuart. It is a great behind the scenes making of.

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 1:29pm

It's a shame movies of this scope and ambition are rarely made these days. Although CODE NAME: THE CLEANER is a step in the right direction. :)

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 1/7/07 at 2:26pm

Plus, I found it particularly fascinating since I was not around in the 1970s. This is probably as close as I'm going to get to actual time travel.

And it holds up so well today. As both a sign of times to come and a sign of what it was. A true masterpiece.

Posted: 1/8/07 at 6:28am

posted to the Ronee Blakley group this morning:

***
Los Angeles Times - Dec. 10, 1978

BLAKLEY: DILEMMA IN A MINOR KEY
by Mitch Tuchman

Ronee Blakley sings hunched over her piano, playing muscularly and
within a yard's breadth of keys, eyes forward, unfocused. Her songs
are microphone melodramas, doleful, unresolved dilemmas: "I'm asking
you to leave but wanting you to stay" ... "It's fun to be a working
woman but hard to be alone." Each has the character of drama, because
there is a stark conflict at its core. Then she turns for the first
time to her audience and smiles brightly. If she can smile so, whose
sad songs are these?

They are hers; they are not hers. Like "The Child With the Mirror," a
favorite passage in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (she pressed a copy into
a visitor's hand inscribed, "With love. and thanks for even noticing
the dichotomy"). Blakley said she is filled with love that "overflows
in torrents down towards morning and evening," love "plunging into
impassable and pathless places," "wildest horses," "spears thrown to
enemies," "Iaughter-peals of lightning," "happiness and freedom that
come like a storm."

Perhaps because her best-known f1lm role, Barbara Jean in "Nashville," was improvised and her club act and albums contain
only her own songs, each a heartfelt "confession," there is some
confusion about who she is.

"The flrst time I did 'The Mike Douglas Show,'" she recalls, "this
was my flrst time on national TV - I had to wear my Barbara Jean
outfit. Bob Altman had done so much for me, needless to say, so I
said OK, because that's the way he wanted it."

"It was to promote the movie and I understood that it was like a
scene out of 'Nashville.' I thought I might be introduced as 'Ronee
BIakley playing the character of Barbara Jean in "Nashville."'
Instead it was 'Here's Ronee Blakley' and there I was in that outfit.
I was introduced as her. She was introduced as me."

"I sang a song, and I was nervous. I'd had some kind of sordid
experience the night before. I don't know what. I mean I had to have
had a sordid experience to be able to put that dress and that wig
back on. She died, do you know what I mean? She died. Talk about
Dracula. I thought I was putting on a dead person's clothes."

Blakley has had no movie success to match her success in "Nashville"
and no record success whatsoever. "Welcome," her Warner Bros. album
following "Nashville" - and including songs from it - was "deleted"
when Warners dropped her. So BIakley has hired a manager - is "working with" a manager - Joyce Selznick ("I am responsible for
Faye Dunaway...I put a boy by the name of George C. Scott in the part
of Dancer in 'Anatomy of a Murder'...Shall I go on?") and, with
Selznick, came a publicist, John Oldman, who was "responsible"
for "The Buddy Holly Story." Oldman was relieved that the reviews
of "The Driver" generally ignored Blakley, but even she is
incredulous when he states that "we're moving in a Linda Ronstadt
direction."

What could tbat mean?

"I don't know," she says, puzzled. "That's the kind of statement
you've got to refer back to the speaker."

"I mean," he means, "you want to move more in a country-westem-pop
cormmercial sound, to come up with an album that would be more
successful than in the past."

Primarily a poet born of the late 1960s, Blakley lacks Bob Dylan's
ease of making lyrics of the times and Joan Baez's vocal facility.
Notebooks of lyrics await her musical composition as she herself
awaits her lyrics. "I write when it hits me. I wait for it to hit me.
I try to get in the line of fire."

Her first songs were laments for a shattered world, a feeling now
untimely, expressed in a style sheidentifies as "rock/country...slightly classical...and a little bit bluesy."
Maybe only she would try to set to music a line like, "Ronee, you
know your good friend, Tom? He's been working for the CIA." Cellos,
steel guitars, and the CIA: These elements she melded with the
eclecticism of a dilettante pursuing an MFA.

Her first album (after Juilliard), "Ronee Blakley" (1972), is a
compendium or sorrows - political, sexual reflective suffering,
spontaneous suffering, student blues, Christian blues. even barmaid
blues: "I've shoved a hundred million quarters in the jukebox. I've
served a barrelful of beers."

In "Welcome," the lyrics show less social concern and the singing is
less endearing. but the selection shows what Blakley could accomplish
concentrating on one theme, love, and one style, country. No excuse
need be offered for "Tapedeck", which she sang in "Nashville," or
for "Need a New Sun Rising," a turbulent, romantic song still
included in her act. "Welcome" saw the beginning of those central
dilemmas: "Lord. she loves her tenderness, but her bitterness won't
be denied." Discipline might make her next record great.

Epilogue: Blakley called with good news. She had found a band, David
Busey's Old Dog Band with a hard-edge country-rock sound. They're now
on a minitour. They did the Old Waldorf in San Francisco last week,
will do the Palomino Club here Thursday and then the next week move
on to the Lone Star Club in New York. Oldman figures the combination
of Blakley and the band will make a commercial recording contract
easier to come by.

In February, Blakley stars with James Coburn and Bruce Boxleitner in
a feature, "The Baltimore Bullet," again as a toughie, a cowgirl pool
hustler. The theme song will be one of her own compositions.

***

Posted: 1/8/07 at 4:53pm

official Ronee Blakley myspace

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 2/9/07 at 2:18am

Bumpage.

Posted: 2/9/07 at 7:05am

i've added Ronee Blakely's version of JUST LIKE A WOMAN
to my myspace page, if anyone would care to hear it!


norn's myspace

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 2/9/07 at 9:06am

I'm still devastated over Altman's death. How long will it be before the industry coughs up another true original who made movies NO MATTER WHAT. Not this David O. Russell/David Fincher/Darren Aronhacksky/P.T. Anderson/Kimberly Pierce sh*t of putting a movie out when they finally get over themselves and quit being so indecisive and spoiled.

Altman had moviemaking fever old-school style, he couldn't not do it...when Hollywood would have nothing to do with him, he picked up a Super-8 and spent the next ten years doing some unbelievably good films of plays. Even in his old age he was putting out a new movie every 1-2 years. Unbelievable. God, I miss him!

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 2/9/07 at 9:55am

Amen, BorstalBoy.

How many OTHER 80 year olds could you see directing a film?

[broadway86]

Posted: 2/9/07 at 10:20am

One of my favorite films. Absolutely stunning, with a slew of fierce female performances: Ronee Blakey + Lily Tomlin (both Oscar-worthy), Geraldine Chaplin, Gwen Welles, Shelley Duvall, Barbara Harris, and Karen Black.

[NiteOwl]

Posted: 2/9/07 at 2:32pm

I've never heard of this movie.
But it sounds interesting. I'm going to rent it this week and check it out.

[tazber]

Posted: 2/9/07 at 3:13pm

Altman was a true visionary.
Borstalboy-I agree that all those young directors you mentioned work a sluggish pace, but my god they do AMAZING films!!
Requiem For A Dream is one of my favorite movies - it was so brutal I don't think I could watch it again.