5.0 out of 5 stars
no surprises, Nov 7 2011
This review is from: Nashville (Widescreen) (DVD)
This hard to find film arrived before the estimated ship date and looked exactly as the seller described it. The disc is pristine and plays perfectly.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Altman's great mosaic of the USA, April 21 2011
This review is from: Nashville (Widescreen) (DVD)
Brilliant, funny, sad and epic look at 1970s U.S., following 24
characters over a few key days in Nashville. An amazing combination of
political satire, hysterical send up of the country music business
and touching and moving character studies.
If one wants to quibble there are minor flaws; overstated performances
at moments, ironies that are a bit too easy, but the overall sweep,
power, the great performances and the sheer number of moments that make
you want to laugh and cry simultaneously, are overwhelming.
Certainly one of the great films of the 70s, and arguably among the
greatest North American films ever made.
How can it be that films like this and 'Annie Hall', parts
of the great film legacy of the last 50 years,
are currently out of print?!?
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Flawed Masterpiece - Defined, Feb 27 2007
This review is from: Nashville (Widescreen) (DVD)
A filmmaker is asking for a pretty sizeable leap of faith from his/her audience when over one hour of their 2'40" movie consists of sung performances (FULL songs, too - that would never happen today), and just about nobody in the cast (save Keith Carradine, and Ronee Blakely - and even she only about 90% of the time) can actually sing. When Lily Tomlin opened her mouth with the gospel choir at the beginning, I nearly ditched the film, thinking "had to be there" about all those praising critics...
Luckily, I stayed with it, and Nashville, as a pure movie, is a masterful work. The dense layers of dialogue, the wide-screen panoramas, the set pieces (the car pileup "happening" being especially effective and awesome), the tossed-off one-liner/payoff ironies which are more a documenting of what everyone in the audience is already thinking than a redundancy - all of it, top-shelf and brilliant.
Also found it intriguing that Ronee Blakely, when singing, is the only character in the entire film I can recall that gets a true close-up - I guess Altman was trying to make her semi-deified, cult of personality status stand out even more.
Altman hits a bull's-eye everywhere else - how could he miss with regard to the actual singing? (The songs, themselves are pretty good for what they are.) I guess if you're going to have the actors write their own lyrics (which he did) then you're kind of commited to go all the way with it. But it doesn't make most of those performances any easier to hear...
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