Robert Altman was a master director and it is great that with the advent of the internet the new generation can know and watch films of his that they would never have gotten an opportunity otherwise. Short cuts, much like most of his films is an ensemble piece featuring top notch actors playing distinct characters in the city of Los Angeles. All are connected- some literally, all thematically. This is a great piece by a master and it inspired many filmmakers, among others PT Anderson. Go watch it now.

"Short Cuts" is one of my all-time favorite movies. Essentially soap-opera material, if you think about it, elevated by superior craftsmanship, ingenious structuring, and an unbeatable cast of established and emerging talent (it is probably the movie that launched the career of Julianne Moore). There is laugh-out-loud comedy and heart-breaking drama, but mostly there is understated observation of nothing less than life itself. In Altman's hands, even a small incident like two sisters bursting out in laughter is a wonderful moment. And don't worry about the three-hour running time, the film flows at a perfect pace and carries you along. ***1/2 out of 4.

Ever see someone train a dog by pushing its nose into its feces? This movie is that for 3 hours (oui, you're the dog). You watch depressed/ angry/ unpleasant characters flit and interact. There isn't one redeeming/ uplifting/ positive/ life-affirming moment. OK, wait: In the end, Waits & Tomlin celebrate their poverty and alcoholism in a dreary trailer; Robbins has sex with Stowe and brings the dog back home; MacDowell & Davison eat pastries with baker Lovett after their child dies. Yeah, sorry, all upbeat stuff.Altman was a brilliant creator (3 Women, Nashville, Mash), capturing the American panorama and subconscious like no other director. Amazing in the range of topics he undertook. But over time he relied increasingly on dialogue to move his (lack of) plot forward. For many this skim was the invisible hand of meaning - "What is he trying to say here? It's obscure so it's gravid."Short Cuts has all the Altman signatures: annoying lounge music that permeates everything, overlapping dialogue, characters staring at fish or fixed objects as they think about the meaning of life, overlapping dialogue, near-constant elevator jazz, characters who talk from the script and to the camera but not to each other, overlapping dialogue.It might be a TV show that charms via "lives of idiosyncratic, tortured, neurotic characters intersecting & intertwining in a fictional yet all-too-real city of desire, failed dreams ...." The kind of thing where folks say "OMG, that is SO my family". Except for the bit where Penn beats a girl to death with a rock; or the guy who took pictures of the girl he raped and strangled.Scenes or characters you might care or wonder about are never fully-explored; other scenes (eg. Lemmon's description of boinking his son's aunt) go on and on. And on. You got it, and still it continues. Perhaps this is a mirror that forces us to confront our inner selves while we confront our outer lives, as we reflect on ....There's some nice acting: Robbins, Stowe, Tomlin, Jason-Leigh, McDormand, Davison, Gallagher, Chris Penn, Lili Taylor, more. But almost anyone can get good performances out of these folks.Meryl Streep - sorry, I mean Julianne Moore - does her usual "watch me, I'm REALLY acting" - especially when she is nude from the waist-down in the pre-BBQ scene. Andie MacDowell, as always, squeezes her lack of range into playing herself. Same for Robert Downey Jr. and Lori Singer.Jack Lemmon does the stuttering, mumbling, rolling fingers uh-uh-uh alky-monologue thing that he (incredibly) made a career out of. His understudy Tom Waits does a gravelly-voice version of this. Boy, imagine if Altman had filmed an 8-hour version of an O'Neil play where Waits and Lemmon talk about life as they drink in a bar on a rainy day. Various characters could come and go, talking about the rain as they walk in; the bartender, perhaps a jaded Brian Blessed, would comment as he refilled their glasses .... Whew.Carver seemed to have insight, albeit through a whiskey glass, into the human spirit. But this movie version of his stories seems as contrived as a HS play. Look at the scene where Penn & Jason-Leigh consider having sex; or the photo-mixup scene; or the funeral scene where the dialogue approaches an Ibsen play: Sven opens his front door and a woman outside says "May I come in? I'm yust in town and I want to tell your father's last words as he died from syphilis ... yah, I'm your sister; the maid is your real mother; and the bank president, see the insanity in my left eye ..." Oofta, people do jump in like that in real life.I got to page 3 of the reviews without reading anything negative about Short Cuts. I infer from this that viewers think a stage production where actors tell, but don't show, is good art. There it is.I gave it a 7 and considered an 8. Several parts were so irritating that I winced and squirmed so it's certainly effective.Two sidebars:1. If you think Carver would be difficult to bring to the screen, see the excellent Jindabyne.2. Altman over time became like his protégé Alan Rudolph - vague and insubstantial - whereas Rudolph's quirkiness grew into meatier work.

I saw this movie again last night and, like an old friend with which you had a bit of disagreement long ago but you are happy to see again, I found it most enjoyable. Well, enjoyable by an artistic, cinematic point of view. Certainly not by a human point of view since at the end, the shallowness and downright ugliness of some of the characters, came back to make me feel again that lingering subtle sense of depression at life being sometimes so unpalatable. That same bitterness at the back of your mouth after a not-so-honorable spree the night before. And yet the movie is one that you will never say: I've had enough of this. You do want to follow the different personas, their briefly brushing of self-contained lives, hoping a new story will develop, a redeeming character will appear. But no one enters from the left to shed light. Everyone is self-absorbed.I looked at the some of the other reviews to see if someone else had my same hunch and did not find any reference to what I think is Altman's inspiration for this canvas of American lives: Federico Fellini. Where La Dolce vita was a large fresco of a certain society at a certain point in time, here Altman wants to represent on a large, spread out mural a number of characters loosely connected or separated by their own materialism, hoping that, in the end, what the viewer sees is the colors and shape of a bustling city that can only be L.A. Where Fellini had a Ulysses-like character (Mastroianni) representing himself and his awe at the confusing life of a cynical old city on the verge of modern materialism, Altman does not have an himself watching and connecting the stories but tries to be more objective, more detached, letting the individual stories develop kind of casually. This is because the script does not come from him, from his own experiences ( as I understand the aging singer character is his only contribution to the plot) but from a number of short stories written by someone else. So, where Fellini is telling us of his own fears, surprises and expectations Altman is recounting someone's else story, a story that he is trying to tell not interpret, hoping that it will speak to the viewers by itself. So, if Fellini's fresco reminds me of The Triumph of Death in the cemetery of Pisa, scary, bigger than life and never to be forgotten, Altman's work reminds me of those many , beautiful murals one can see all over the world: busy, colorful, confusing and devoid of perspective but which one goes away from with a bit of bitter aftertaste for not having told a more decisive, clear message. An 8 nonetheless.