Short Cuts (1993)

I've never seen this movie but I love the fact that I was in Chemistry class in high school with the kid who got run over by the car in that movie.

I've always been bemused by the fact that there is a near-constant game of soggy cracker over Magnolia when Altman's thematically similar but FAR superior masterpiece tends to get overlooked.

Um, that's wrong. Almost every discussion on this board about Magnolia EVER has brought up Short Cuts.

Usually by me.

I love Short Cuts, and it really is like a bunch of great movies rolled into one. I love how they interweave with each other, and it's just one great performance after the other. I have to add this to my Netflix queue - I haven't seen this since it was in the theaters.

I'd say it's about four great movies, two okay ones, and one not so great one. But there has never been a purer on screen expression of Robert Altman, so it doesn't matter that the hot tub stuff (and most of those threads) aren't great.

God I still need to get my hands on this one, I've heard only good things.

It's an amazing movie. I like Nashville more when it comes to my favorite Altman movies, but Short Cuts is no slouch.

Short Cuts is my favorite Altman film. It contains every theme Altman cared about, and explored each theme fully. It also balanced drama, comedy and tragedy better than any other Altman IMO. Criterion has an excellant DVD release.

Just saw this tonight, and during the first half of it I guess I misunderstood the point of the movie, and was expecting something more along the lines of Magnolia, in which all of the stories connect and there's some kind of common ground. Don't get me wrong, there were many intertwining bits in this one, I just didn't see the film as basically several short stories until later in the film, and that's when the greatness of it all dawned on me. Superb film.

I think that's the fundamental difference between Magnolia and Short Cuts; the setup seems the same, but, ultimately, they're doing very different things. Short Cuts is a bunch of Carver short stories that were never intended to be connected, plot-wise or even thematically, and Altman had them cross over to justify including them in the same movie. Magnolia is a more unified work that uses the basic framework of Short Cuts to put across a more consistent theme of emotional disconnection (which works in neat contrast to how ultra-connected the characters are, physically) and coincidence.

I don't think Magnolia's nearly as much of a ripoff as an obvious homage with a different point to make. Saying it's just imitation is like saying that Far From Heaven is just an imitation of All That Heaven Allows.

I first saw this the same day I first saw Glengarry Glen Ross. I was 15. That was a good day.

This just totally blew my mind. I think the Chris Penn stuff goes a bit overboard, but its the shortest 3 hour film I've ever seen, if that makes sense. I need to see it again, cos I haven't for years.

I love when Tim Robbins pulls Ann Archer over in her clown get-up.

"How many clowns can you fit into this car?"

After about three tries/rentals from Netflix, I finally mustered up the discipline to watch this from beginning to end. Pretty amazing. I think I'm more of a Nashville guy, but this definitely reminded me why I love Altman so much. One of the things that really got me about this one was his use of the camera, the push ins and pull outs on not just faces, but objects, like the glass of milk as Andi MacDowell is trying to wake her son up, or the phone on the counter.

It's one of those movies that I think is going to stay with me, because of the way it creeps up on you. It's a long piece that doesn't feel epic, doesn't bash you over the head with the cry of "Pay Attention! This Is An Important Movie!", but over the three hours, the ordinary lives of the people come to mean a great deal. What that all means, I'm still trying to figure out.

I need to hit this one up again. All I seem to remember is full frontal Huey Lewis and his News.

One of my favorite movies, flaws and all. And there certainly are flaws, but the great movies are the ones that have flaws that you not only forgive but fall in love with.

Like Matthew Modine.

"JESUS CHRIST MARIAN, YOU DON'T HAVE ANY PANTIES ON!" Best worst line reading ever.

It's interesting how different the stories are from the actual Carver stories. The only one I can remember that stays almost fully intact is the Andie McDowell/Lyle Lovett dead kid/baker story based on "A Small, Good Thing." It's clearly inspired by Carver's writings, but a lot of stuff is completely original, or veers far from the source material.

I watched this last night and although it's a tired comparison, I was surprised to see how much Anderson took from this film not just in terms of structure but also in visual style. That said, Short Cuts was a really great film, the real star of this film was the editor Geraldine Peroni, she cut this film to a fine line. Some storylines were stronger than others, I actually thought Chris Penn had killed that girl at the end, his performance as the emasculated husband was so good and it's a damn shame he died too soon.

 

I agree on Modine's line reading of "You have no panties on", that made me laugh so much.

 

For those interested, one of the stories adapted for this film was also adapted into a film called 'Jindabyne' with Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney, it was the dead body in the water story.

Had a little Altman discovery session (The Long Goodbye, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts all in one marathon session) and whilst I think The Long Goodbye is my favourite, just because it feels more consistent than the others. I kind of appreciated the scope and breadth of both Nashville and Short Cuts, but whilst I really loved individual moments in Nashville I found Short Cuts to be just be more thematically consistent overall.

 

I'm a massive fan of Magnolia and I've always heard that it owed a debt to this film and whilst the structure definitely feels similar I think they're definitely trying to achieve different things. Magnolia has a certain rhythm which connects the stories and makes their overall intertwinement at the end work amazingly, Short Cuts rhythm is far more deliberate and sets out to establish all seven stories as their own separate beasts. Magnolia is essentially one super-story with a bunch of strands, Short Cuts is seven seperate stories which happen to be taking place within the same basic place.

 

The cast in this is incredible, some great performances by pretty much everyone of the 'leads' I also think the film uses it's characters just enough so that you get a sense of them, but don't get overwhelmed or sick of them. Jack Lemmon as the grandfather trying to reconnect with his family is a prime example of this, his two or three scenes really sell his entire character and it makes his flight from the hospital all the more powerful.

 

I actually found the Waits/Tomlin plotline to be the sweetest, even though I think the strongest overall narrative (or the narrative which had the largest number of parts that worked) was the Tim Robbins metaplot which kind of connects two or three separate plots. Robbins is such an amazing asshole when working with Altman and he's such a believable dick in this, in fact the only part of the film I really didn't like was Julianne Moore's stuff. She just across as kind of ethereal and not there, which is guess is the entire point but it makes her entire plotline feel kind of malformed. It doesn't help that Matthew Modine seems to be really out of his depth alongside her.

 

But yeah, loved this.