Robert Altman
167 connections found
Filmography
Nashville 1975 
The Player 1992 
M*A*S*H 1970 
Brewster McCloud 1971 
3 Women 1977 
The Long Goodbye 1973 
A Prairie Home Companion 2006 
Gosford Park 2001 
California Split 1974 
McCabe & Mrs. Miller 1971 
Short Cuts 1993 
Popeye 1980 
Fool for Love 1985 
The Company 2003 
Images 1972 
Prêt-à-Porter 1994 
Thieves Like Us 1974 
Streamers 1983 
HealtH 1980 
Secret Honor 1984 
Vincent & Theo 1990 
Countdown 1967 
A Wedding 1978 
Kansas City 1996 
A Perfect Couple 1979 
Quintet 1979 
Cookie's Fortune 1999 View:
Connections, in both directions
Inherent Vice (2014)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by The Long Goodbye (1973), Brewster McCloud (1971), A Prairie Home Companion (2006)
Plot Themes Characters
Not only does it continue Anderson’s impossible-to-predict genre shifting, but it feels like a particularly heightened variation on Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), which had the radical notion of planting Raymond Chandler’s hardened private dick Philip Marlowe smack in the middle of Southern California hippie culture and having Elliott Gould play him as a languid dolt (one of ’70s Hollywood’s most memorable deconstructions of heroism).
The slow disgust, the moral apathy, the hippie princesses and the louts who victimized them — it was all there first in "The Long Goodbye."
Joaquin Phoenix resists the urge to take the easy way out and plays Doc not as Shaggy from "Scooby-Doo" but as a sadder, scruffier Philip Marlowe from Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye," the movie Anderson uses as a touchstone.
It’s already a cliché to describe the film as a combination of the Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski” and Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” and while that doesn’t capture everything it’s close enough to be irresistible.
It’s true bones lie more in accordance with Robert Altman’s elegiac “The Long Goodbye” and Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.”
Freely but faithfully adapted by Anderson from Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 detective novel — the first of the legendary author’s works to reach the screen — Anderson’s seventh feature film is a groovy, richly funny stoner romp that has less in common with “The Big Lebowski” than with the strain of fatalistic, ’70s-era California noirs (“Chinatown,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Night Moves”) in which the question of “whodunit?”
The film plays like an homage to those old Altman ’70s movies like The Long Goodbye without feeling stuck in the past.
Because this is set in Los Angeles in the 1970s, we're supposed to think back to Chinatown and The Long Goodbye and excuse the opaque plot, around which Black's eccentric gags float like seasoned croutons in bland soup.
It clearly recalls such 1970s fare as The Long Goodbye (1973)and Chinatown (1974), as well as such largely forgotten titles as Busting (1974) and 1978’s The Big Fix, which featured Richard Dreyfuss as a stoner private eye with a cast on his arm just like Gosling has here — something unlikely to be coincidental.
With The Nice Guys, his wildly entertaining new detective comedy, Black visits the smog-choked, libertine Los Angeles of the mid- to late 1970s, a few years and a few miles removed from private eyes like Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye or Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice.
On one level, the film offers a sleazy 70s comic riposte to the 30 intrigues of Polanski’s epochal Chinatown, with the merest whiff of Altman’s The Long Goodbye and inevitable casting echoes of LA Confidential.
Taking a page from his 2005 feature debut "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," writer-director Shane Black has made a tonally spry escapade with undeniable parallels to Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye" (1973), Ridley Scott's " Matchstick Men " (2003), and Paul Thomas Anderson's " Inherent Vice " (2014).
Queen of Earth (2015)
Directed by Alex Ross Perry
influenced by 3 Women (1977), Images (1972)
Themes
Perry tears shamelessly from the pages of the hysterical women canon, keying into Polanski's "Repulsion" and "The Tenant," Altman's "Images" starring Susannah York, a sort of proto-"3 Women" about a splintering female psyche, with shades of Bergman and, yes, Woody Allen's own strained Bergman homage "Interiors."
Joining the esteemed company of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" (1965), Ingmar Begman's "Persona" (1966), Robert Altman's "3 Women" (1977), David Lynch's " Mulholland Drive " (2001), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" as the latest artistic watermark delving into potentially shifting identities and ultimate madness, the film mesmerizes on an unshakable level from its volatile opening sob to its diabolical closing cackle.
Perhaps that's why this dual character study, featuring a balls out performance from Moss and an eerie one from Waterston feels like so many other movies, everything from "3 Women" to "Your Sister's Sister" to "Rosemary's Baby" and "Repulsion," yet defies coming into its own focus.
The scenes of conflict between two women in a confined setting recall several other movies, including Robert Altman’s 3 Women, Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female (a more melodramatic variant on the same theme), and even Ingmar Bergman’s classic Persona.
Queen of Earth nods to everything from Persona and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s nervous breakdown melodramas to Robert Altman’s Images and 3 Women (though Roman Polanski’s absurdly funny, apartment-confined thrillers loom largest).
This small, nuanced story evokes art film classics like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Robert Altman’s 3 Women with its story of two women who love and hate (and sometimes become) each other near water, but Perry also draws a lot on the mood, pacing, music and look of 1970s horror cinema.
Under the Silver Lake (2018)
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
influenced by The Long Goodbye (1973)
Themes Music
Also casting his eye back to the 1970s—an early vision of a topless apartment dweller pointedly alludes to Robert Altman’s ’73 classic, The Long Goodbye—Mitchell is aiming for no less than to make the great modern noir and the great modern film about Hollywood.
Much like Robert Altman’s sarcastic take on Philip Marlowe, The Long Goodbye, Mitchell’s movie is a surreal, stoned portrait of L.A. that doubles as an oddball mystery.
The Long Goodbye or Inherent Vice , but blurs its edges with a vaguely unsettling surrealism, goosed by a terrific throwback score.
Mitchell has now tried his hand at an L.A. noir with Under the Silver Lake, which owes as big a debt to The Long Goodbye, Mulholland Drive, and Inherent Vice (to mention but three of the most conspicuous referents) as it does Thomas Pynchon’s labyrinthine, paranoia-laden narratives.
To a list of films about Los Angeles that includes “Inherent Vice,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Chinatown,” “Mulholland Drive” and “L.A. Confidential,” we can add “Under the Silver Lake,” which is available on VOD and has its area premiere Friday at the Brattle Theatre.
“Under the Silver Lake” unfolds in the same cinematic wheelhouse as Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” “Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s Pynchon adaptation, “Inherent Vice,” and David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” — films in which mysteries lead only to further mysteries and the rot runs deep under sunny California skies.
Rachel Getting Married (2008)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
influenced by A Wedding (1978), Nashville (1975), Gosford Park (2001)
Themes Plot Visuals
Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, from a screenplay by Jenny Lumet, is said to have been inspired by Robert Altman’s satirically free-wheeling A Wedding (1978), and probably by Ms. Lumet’s own experiences in an interracial family.
Though clearly modeled on Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978) (in fact, Altman is acknowledged in the credits), Demme’s film is at bottom a pretty basic dysfunctional-family movie—a subgenre of which there’s never been any shortage.
Like real marriages, marriage-themed films, all the way from Robert Altman’s quirky, star-infested A Wedding to the recent indie clunker Margot at the Wedding, can be an iffy thing.
Director Jonathan Demme acknowledges his admiration for Robert Altman's film A Wedding , and we see evidence of that in the free-floating cinematic style of the drama along with the playfulness of so many musical interludes.
Director Jonathan Demme stylistically, and in the credits, salutes Altman in Rachel Getting Married, but instead of Altman�s class-conscious A Wedding, Demme focuses on family as the place where, when you have no where else to go, they have to take you in.
With its rambling plot carved from the minutiae of details, its overpopulated landscape of neurotic characters, its speeded-up handheld camera tricks and its overlapping music and dialogue, Rachel Getting Married cannot fail to remind you of every Altman, from Nashville to A Wedding, but I didn’t find it as annoying and self-indulgent as those films, and to my taste, it’s a great deal more engaging.
Clearly modeled after Short Cuts and Magnolia —the latter of which is nakedly aped during a third-act montage of sad characters set to a mournful ballad by Aimee Man-style singer-songwriter Bird York— Crash explores, via interlocking stories, the cultural, racial, and spiritual isolation of Los Angelinos.
“Crash” never reaches the heights of “Short Cuts” or “Magnolia” – two multi-story films that clearly provided inspiration – but it’s a thoughtful road trip well worth taking.
The interlocking stories recall Short Cuts and Magnolia, but they mesh more smoothly into a better-crafted whole.
The difference between Crash and other depressed L.A. films (Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon) is that it focuses entirely on race -- its tensions, its stereotypes, its misunderstandings.
Other cross-cutting Los Angeles stories come to mind, especially Lawrence Kasdan's more optimistic " Grand Canyon " and Robert Altman's more humanistic " Short Cuts ."
Like Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," it's is an all-star fresco, but the stars--none of whom carries the movie--get to play the kind of morally ambivalent, sometimes unlikable parts that big-name actors usually avoid.
He has created a parody of the traditional drawing-room murder mysteries in the Agatha Christie vein and combined it with a lusty, more subversive kind of "Upstairs Downstairs," along with hints of the classic Jean Renoir comedy "The Rules of the Game."
Echoing Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Gosford Park concerns a weekend shooting party for the elite.
There's a murder and obsequious, dull-witted Inspector Thompson (Stephen Fry) investigates, tiptoeing around his suspects like a toady, but the mystery spoof is merely a structure for Altman's empathetic take on Jean Renoir's biting, bitter satire "The Rules of the Game."
"Gosford Park" is "The Rules of the Game" reimagined as an English murder mystery.
Sort of a brain-dead "Short Cuts," this risible film follows an interchangeable collection of empty-headed blonds (of both sexes) who hop from bed to bed and from drug to drug.
Seriously, so many novels and movies have plumbed the presumed moral vacuum that swirls like toilet water around the city - from "The Day of the Locust" to "Crash," with Robert Altman's 1993 "Short Cuts" providing the clearest template for this new film - that goggling at the fauna just isn't enough.
Jordan’s film is comprised of different stories that have been patched together to form some kind of sub-Short Cuts narrative.
But this sprawling, wanna-be "Short Cuts" tale is so over-the-top and so insufferably unpleasant that it makes even his infamous "American Psycho" seem tame by comparison.
Director Gregor Jordan ( Buffalo Soldiers ) has indicated that the movie was inspired by Short Cuts .
If you want to see how to adapt a collection of short stories into a cohesive unit, watch Robert Altman’s 1993 film “Short Cuts,” which is based on numerous stories by Raymond Carver.
It is no mistake that the opening, The Player-esque oner on a movie set, which culminates in a demonstration of Kelly’s talents, is really a show-off move by the director.
…a dramedy that mixes the satirical industry insider aspects of The Player (1992)…
Its Robert Altman-esque opening is reminiscent of The Player, with its overlapping dialogue…
…pasando por títulos como ‘Cantando bajo la lluvia’ (Jay Kelly remite a Gene Kelly) o ‘The Player (El juego de Hollywood)’…
…a final day captured by Sandgren in a virtuoso single take that opens the movie — perhaps an homage to Robert Altman’s epic oner at the start of The Player…
…it’s a riff on the kind of oner that opens films like “The Player”…
Uncut Gems (2019)
Directed by Josh Safdie
influenced by California Split (1974)
Music Themes Visuals
Ratner is every bit as secular as the gambling duo Elliott Gould and George Segal in Robert Altman’s California Split (1974)—a movie to which Uncut Gems seems somewhat indebted, not least in the Safdies’ Altman-esque love for the sound of all-American clatter and chatter.
Two 1974 classics: “California Split” and “The Gambler.”
Y en Diamantes en bruto , de nuevo con Martin Scorsese, esta vez con el de Malas calles y su cine de rabia desbocada, a borbotones, con desequilibrios de guion pero con inusitada fuerza visual y sonora; y también con el Robert Altman de la insólita y ludópata California Split, y esas secuencias con cuatro o cinco personajes hablando a la vez, sin apenas profundidad de campo, turbadoras y conmovedoras.
The Safdies clearly idolize Robert Altman (and have openly cited his gambling romp “California Split” as inspiration here), but they’re more precisely operating within the grimy New York milieu that Martin Scorsese made famous in the ‘70s (Scorsese serves as an executive producer).
Like the late director Robert Altman’s movies (see 1974’s “California Split”), the audio track contains an earthy mix of constant background noise and chatter.
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by Popeye (1980), A Perfect Couple (1979), The Long Goodbye (1973)
Themes Music
I still have the soundtrack on vinyl somewhere around here, but other than "He Needs Me" � so good Paul Thomas Anderson stole it for Punch-Drunk Love � I wish the songs still held any charm for me.
The surface simplicity also masks the complexity and absurdity of Anderson's vision, from Barry's electric blue suit and the starkness and size of his warehouse workplace to the propulsive percussion of Jon Brion's score and the loopy use of an off-key ditty from Robert Altman's infamous movie musical of Popeye as the central love theme.
Throughout most of this sequence, draped like a ratty, comfy bathrobe over a rumpled bed, Anderson weaves a song called "He Needs Me," which was recorded by Shelley Duvall for Robert Altman's 1980 Popeye movie, of which I am a lonely admirer.
Robert Altman re-imagined Popeye for his 1980 movie, attempting to contextualize frustration and pent-up aggression, showing us that underneath that old cartoon lay very real anger brought about by very real problems.
The film looks good and has its funny moments, but too often one senses Anderson straining to impress, whether by purloining (and misusing) a Harry Nilsson song from Altman's Popeye, or by tossing in yet another surreal, surprising or seemingly inexplicable narrative idiosyncrasy.
And Anderson must be credited with at least one stroke of pure genius -- digging up a Shelley Duvall-sung Harry Nilsson song from Robert Altman's Popeye and using it to far greater effect than that original movie ever did.
Leign Brackett adapted Chandler's novel, she previously having worked on the author's classic "The Big Sleep" (1946) with William Faulkner.
Counterculture über-schlep Elliot Gould transforms the detective from a tough-talking, fast-acting gumshoe into a sloppy, reactive dreamer, but the brilliance of Altman’s film is that it nonetheless maintains the essential essence of its lead character – as in Chandler’s novels, Gould’s Marlowe is a defiant idealist and altruist (whether it’s helping a pal in need or going out to the store at 3 a.m. to buy his hungry cat some food) disgusted by corruption and convinced that there’s some goodness left in sleazy, lousy L.A. Written by The Big Sleep scribe Leigh Brackett, The Long Goodbye is chockablock with plot twists and turns involving a blustery Ernest Hemmingway-type writer (Sterling Hayden), his alluring young wife (Nina Van Pallandt), a loan shark (Mark Rydell), and Marlowe’s friend Terry Lennox (former major leaguer and Ball Four author Jim Bouton) who’s accused of murdering his wife and then killing himself.
The screenplay by Leigh Brackett, who also scripted the Bogart adaptation of Chandler's The Big Sleep, streamlines a lot of detail out of what might be Chandler's densest tome, and not only the material that would draw attention away from the anachronism of a 1970s Marlowe.
Altman cleverly hired Leigh Brackett, who had co-scripted "The Big Sleep" (still Chandler's definitive screen moment), and she helped Altman layer a picture that is as much a crisp comment on contemporary LA (and its full-on egotism) as a tale delineating Marlowe's crime-busting pursuits.
The feline in question wakes up its owner—Philip Marlowe, formerly embodied by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep but now portrayed by a decidedly less self-assured Elliott Gould—at 3:30 in the morning so that it may be fed.
You just don’t mess with The Big Sleep .
Knives Out (2019)
Directed by Rian Johnson
influenced by Gosford Park (2001), The Long Goodbye (1973)
Plot Themes
Writer-director Rian Johnson, still being nerd-roasted for his smash-hit Star Wars installment, The Last Jedi , happily acknowledges his influences in constructing Knives Out —primarily Agatha Christie novels and the movies made from them ( Death on the Nile , Evil Under the Sun ), as well as pictures like Gosford Park and the super-tricky Deathtrap .
Beyond dependable Christie fare like Death on the Nile (1978) and Murder on the Orient Express (2017), there’s Clue (1985), Gosford Park (2001) and now, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out.
A true blue “cozy mystery,” Knives Out is an entertaining, if harmless, examination of class warfare, not dissimilar to Gosford Park .
It’s the best film of its kind since 2001’s Gosford Park.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Clue , Gosford Park , Murder by Death , all the Murder on the Orient Express es and The Last of Sheila , which I read about in a Rian Johnson tweet (and then actually watched; it’s a gem).
Murder mysteries in this vein (“Murder on the Orient Express,” “Gosford Park”) rely on a large cast of eccentrics to keep us engaged and guessing.
As anyone who has read Carver or seen “Short Cuts,” Robert Altman’s brilliant adaptation of several Carver stories, knows, that in a nutshell is the author’s overriding theme.
When Robert Altman did it, he was a veteran director, well-revered himself, and he used nine Carver stories and one poem as the basis for Short Cuts (1993).
Everything Must Go was based on a short story by the prolific American writer Raymond Carver, whose lean, mean stories don’t really lend themselves to feature films (Robert Altman assembled a dozen of them into his mosaic 1993 film Short Cuts).
“Everything Must Go” is based on Carver’s short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” His work was also used in Robert Altman’s 1993’s film “Short Cuts.”
Boogie Nights (1997)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by Nashville (1975), The Player (1992)
Visuals Themes Plot
The sense of homage/pastiche goes further still: if the rambling ensemble construction derives from Nashville , the swooping long takes and whiplash pans come courtesy of Scorsese.
With its emphasis on pornography's people and period not, as will be assumed, the process the film is strongly reminiscent of the distinctly American sagas Nashville, GoodFellas, City of Hope and Pulp Fiction (big, complicated yet personal movies all, as this one very much is).
The film's unofficial family group is immersed in exploitation movies, which becomes the same collective eccentricity that country music was for "Nashville."
The sweep and variety of the characters have brought the movie comparisons to Robert Altman's " Nashville " and " The Player ."
Writer-director Anderson's second film, Boogie Nights has been often enough cited for its similarities to Robert Altman's Nashville.
Anderson’s filming of two separate parties at the Horner house is boundless and reminiscent of Altman’s opening scene in The Player as well as Scorcese’s casino scenes in Casino.
Hotshot detective Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy), clearly inspired by Steve McQueen in Bullitt, is called in to investigate.
Shaft is a good cop who runs on instinct and bucks the system; in the way he wears his shoulder holsters and turtlenecks, he's clearly meant to echo Steve McQueen in Bullitt.
(It was choreographed by the same guy who did "Bullitt.")
As well as playing tricks with film, Altman packs Brewster McCloud with many references to other movies – when Daphne Heap is killed, she’s wearing ruby-encrusted slippers in reference to actress Margaret Hamilton’s most famous role as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939) – it’s one of several references to Victor Fleming’s film; the name of Michael Murphy’s cop foreshadows the better known Shaft first played by Richard Roundtree the following year but his look, right down to the piercing blue eyes achieved by contact lenses, is based on Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968); there are a couple of references for Fellini and perhaps to Hitchcock – Brewster McCloud is an unruly and wayward distant cousin of The Birds (1963), with the avian population of Houston seemingly carrying out a quiet, covert war on the human race, acting intelligently and with a collective purpose; the first three lines of the cast list is briefly visible on the Astrodome display screens at the end; and Alt…
Mientras Brewster asesina a diversos personajes vía estrangulaciones que nunca vemos e hilarantes cagadas de pájaros que embadurnan los cadáveres, como la susodicha Heap, Abraham Wright (Stacy Keach), un anciano mezquino, homofóbico y dueño de varias residencias geriátricas para el que trabajaba de chófer, Douglas Breen (Bert Remsen), un oficial de narcóticos corrupto, racista y abusador de su esposa (Angelin Johnson), y hasta un hombre que intentó violar a Suzanne, desencadenando que ésta le pegue con una barra de hierro y se lleve el coche que ahora conduce, por su parte una figura prominente de la alta burguesía de Houston y con gran peso político, Haskell Weeks (William Windom), manda a traer a un investigador de la policía de San Francisco, Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy), para que ayude a los bobos uniformados de Texas considerando que el forastero resolvió solito un caso similar de California con mucha cobertura mediática, el del apodado “Estrangulador de Santa Bárbara”, pero el tal S…
Licorice Pizza (2021)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by Nashville (1975), The Long Goodbye (1973), Popeye (1980), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Short Cuts (1993), The Player (1992)
Visuals Themes Music
The influence of Robert Altman remains strong with Anderson (who served as a “backup director” on the then-octogenarian master’s “Prairie Home Companion”), to the extent that this feels like his most direct attempt at channeling the “Nashville” helmer’s semi-improvisatory approach — a bold tack for someone working with two inexperienced actors in their first lead roles.
The last act of the movie is set in and around the mayoral campaign of a young, skilled, ostensibly progressive Valley politician (played by Uncut Gems codirector Benny Safdie) and evokes period political dramas like The Candidate , with a little bit of Taxi Driver and Nashville sprinkled in.
The sprawling, pinwheeling world that surrounds Alana and Gary as they barrel around the Valley making sometimes regrettable choices recalls, in particular, the prismatic early-’70s L.A. of Altman’s The Long Goodbye , a place full of larger-than-life characters and enigmatic encounters.
Soon, you’re just placed under a hazy, romantic spell of all the sincere, heartfelt, and very loose vibing (sometimes it feels like it features the rich, idling, and consorting languidness of Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” minus the detective story).
The song “He Needs Me” from 1980’s Popeye — with its title phrase, artless and plangent, repeated over and over by Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl — has become something of a career-defining refrain for Paul Thomas Anderson, who made it a motif in 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love and whose films, again and again, are structured around unlikely couples who complement and complete each other.
Just as plot summaries fail to capture the magic of McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Shampoo*, the magic is not in the mechanics of Licorice Pizza, but in the moments.
The result combines elements of "There's Something About Mary ...," "The Player" and "Team America: World Police," and yet almost nothing in "Tropic Thunder" is predictable or cliched.
It plays like a melding of Robert Altman's "The Player" (1992) and Wes Craven's "Scream" (1996).
Not since The Player has the American film industry endured such vicious caricature.
As a jab at the movie business, “Tropic Thunder” is flailing and unfocussed, hardly in the league of “The Player,” and if you want an exposé of the combat movie, strewn with compromise and creative sacrifice, watch “Hearts of Darkness” (1991), about the making of “Apocalypse Now.”
In the ensemble style of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts or Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth or Paul Haggis’s recent Third Person, Anesthesia examines how a tragic event can, for better or worse, be a jolt that throws aftershocks into the lives that it touches.
It’s a copycat formula that was perfected in radically superior films like Alejandro Iñárritu’s Babel and Altman’s Short Cuts.
Masked and Anonymous (2003)
Directed by Larry Charles
influenced by The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), The Player (1992)
Visuals
Like Cassavetes' Shadows or Altman's The Long Goodbye, Masked and Anonymous feels a little ramshackle in conception, but the more powerful impression made by the movie, at least for me, is that its bold inconsistency as a total work simultaneously frees the movie to shape flamboyant, libidinous characters and vivid, isolated anecdotes that would necessarily be dulled by any movie that needed to wrest them into a generic format.
It plays a little like Altman's Nashville as directed by Spike Jonze from a script by Amy Goodman, or some other National Public Radio hard-lefty.
Her complete indifference as to whom is being "benefitted" would be even more scandalous if it didn't seem like such a refreshingly honest testimony—one of several moments where Masked and Anonymous feels like a corporate-Hollywood satire at least on the level of The Player.