Short Cuts

2/4/2015

**tripping over ourselves** While there's no cinematic equivalent to the Mona Lisa, I submit a list of the top ten American movies of the last 50 years in no particular order: The _Godfather_, _Apocalypse Now_, _Raging Bull_, _Pulp Fiction_, _Blade Runner_, _Raiders of the Lost Ark_, _Mulholland Drive_, _Tree of Life_, _Boyhood_, _Short Cuts_. Whaaaaaa... _Short Cuts_? Is it even Altman's best work? Well, everything unique and original in the other movies on this list was done before... by Altman. (Is there anything the man hasn't tried?) And everything Altman achieved in his career can be summed up in _Short Cuts_. Five of the entries on my list are genre intact: gangster, war, bio, sci-fi, adventure. Lynch is a genre of his own (a master of hook and subvert), _Pulp Fiction_ i

8/31/2022

**A huge cast full of familiar names, where each one does their job very well… but without commitment, without emotion and under a script so intricate that it leaves anyone lost.** I'm usually very critical of movies with bad or weak scripts. It's a recurring problem in cinema. This film, however, makes the opposite mistake: the script is excessive, it has so many characters and so many interconnected sub-plots that it is almost necessary to make diagrams and schemes on a board to be able to follow what is happening. I got almost halfway through the movie and I didn't really know who was who. The film begins with a fleet of helicopters spraying something over the skies of Los Angeles. I, who was very young when the film was made, had to do some research to realize what they're doing:

6/15/2026

Robert Altman's Short Cuts is a lovely polyptych of interconnected stories, inspired by Raymond Carver's short stories and his poem "Lemonade," which asks: what if this had happened, rather than that? What then? It's the question we all ask ourselves at some point in life, the endless branching paths of possibility, the sliding doors moment that changes everything or nothing. Altman weaves together lives in Los Angeles, letting stories brush against each other, intersect, diverge. A child is hit by a car; a baker calls with increasingly angry messages about an uncollected birthday cake; a woman discovers her husband's infidelity while a helicopter sprays for medflies overhead. The connections are sometimes direct, sometimes tangential, sometimes purely atmospheric. What matters is the a