In Which Georgia Unveils 21 Short Essays About McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Things Thought While Watching McCabe and Mrs. Miller

by GEORGIA HARDSTARK

This is a comedy right?

God my nails look like shit. I’m going to give myself a manicure while I watch this.

Whoa…Warren Beatty was hot. Another tick on my “all dudes look better with a beard” tally.

I wonder if those “background actors” smell as bad as they look.

Why has it been so long since I've had a Pop Tart?

want

Why did I wait till after every other This Recording writer had picked an Altman movie to decide to participate in this? Popeye would have been awesome. I could have used those photos of myself dressed as Olive Oyl from the past, like, four Halloweens. Or The Long Goodbye…I love that movie! Damn Molly Young for being less of a procrastinator than me!

...and damn her for her perfect hair, while we're at it.

For real though, who knew Warren Beatty was so damn hot?

whoa

I don’t think this is a comedy. Damn. I love whorehouse comedies.

I had my whorehouse movies confused, turns out

I wonder what whiskey tasted like back then.

I’d like a glass of whiskey.

Glass of whiskey

I wonder what the Hipster Grifter is doing right now.

Being a whore back then must have been the WORST. Not like it’s any better now, from what I can tell…but dude, those guys look smelly with a capital "gonorrhea."

Don't look up the word "gonorrhea" on Google Images...just don't. Oh hey, there’s Shelly Duvall.

Shelly Duvall...or is it? there's really just no way to tell

It's really hard for me to suspend my disbelief and enjoy this movie when all I can think about is how bad everyone's junk probably smelt back then.

I wonder who would win in a fight between McCabe and Daniel Plainview.

Leonard Cohen probably needed some Welbutrin, or at least a hug. Man that guy's depressing.

Have you hugged an influential folk musician today?

"Julie Christie"...I bet she hated her real last name, whatever it was.

Turns out it was "Christie"...or was it?

I wonder who would win in a fight: Leonard Cohen or John Locke.

My money's on Locke.

God this movie is depressing.

Georgia Hardstark is a writer and a whiskey drinker living in Los Angeles. You can bet on her in a fight at her blog or her tumblr.

THE POPEYE POST THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

"Sisters of Mercy" — Leonard Cohen (mp3)

"Master Song" — Leonard Cohen (mp3)

"Winter Lady" — Leonard Cohen (mp3)

"Stranger Song" — Leonard Cohen (mp3)

In Which We Bet The Farm On A Long Shot

I Love You Men

by MOLLY LAMBERT

California Split

1974

Robert Altman liked to make genre movies. It probably kept him interested. I always pictured a notebook with boxes he could check off. Western? Check. Biopic? Check. Sci-Fi? Check. Film noir? Check. Some of his experiments are total failures or outright bores. But the ones that work are all the more interesting for occupying a specific genre and then ripping it up from the inside.

California Split fan art by Molly Lambert (courtesy of the Estate Of Molly Lambert)

California Split is a few things. It's about gambling and addiction, it's kind of a road movie, but first and foremost it is a buddy comedy. Buddy films, which have been mostly referred to as "bromances" of late, are almost always about men. Men loving each other in a deep but non-sexual way.

A buddy film, according to The Complete Film Dictionary, is "a film that features the friendship of two males as the major relationship." Ira Konigsberg, author of the dictionary, further defines the genre: "Such films extol the virtues of male comradeship and relegate male-female relationships to a subsidiary position. Male relationships have always been a significant element in our popular culture, from the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper to television beer commercials."

Bromances, and their military cousin the war movie, are about the romance of camaraderie. The best relationships are about camaraderie. Perhaps that is why the love stories in bromances often unfold more realistically than in romantic comedies, where the friendship between two people in love is rarely depicted well. 

Women also enjoy bromances for the same reasons straight men like lesbian porn. The term in Japanese is "Yaoi" and mainly applies to comic books. It could just as easily apply to Brokeback Mountain, where Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger made good on the sexual tension between Rock Hudson and James Dean in Giant.

In recent years the bromance has gotten, not gayer, but at least significantly more openly conscious of how gay it is. It is only a matter of time until Harold Does Kumar. In fact Lynn Shelton's new comedy Humpday supposedly tackles the topic head on, with two straight best friends making a pact to record an amateur gay porn video together as a dare. I'm sure there's Cheech/Chong and Wayne/Garth slash somewhere.

In 1948 American literary critic Leslie Fiedler wrote a famous essay called "Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!" Fiedler argued that the major recurrent theme in American literature was an unspoken or implied homoerotic relationship between men, famously using Huckleberry Finn and Jim as examples. Pairs of men flee for wilderness rather than remain in the civilizing and domesticated world of women. To look at Pineapple Express, you'd think nothing had changed in fifty years. 

I'm not telling you much about California Split. One of the reasons I love Altman's work is how he allows for so many digressions from the main narrative. It often seems like he barely gives a fuck about the storyline, being much more interested in the characters and settings and background noise. The point is, I also like to digress. 

To sum it up, Elliott Gould is beyond charming as the charismatic Jew teaming up with George Segal as the uptight cream-colored cable-knit turtleneck wearing Jew. There is gambling and there are hookers but mostly there is talking. An endless stream of back and forth banter between two drunk gamblers on a winning streak, often buried under the sounds of the horse racing track or the casino. 

It's up there with my other favorite bromance My Dinner With Andre, for movies I can watch an indefinite number of times. There's something very comforting about watching two people act who are obviously very comfortable with each other. It mimics the feelings of an actual friendship. You know the person well enough to anticipate their vocal tics and arguing methods. Of course women have friendships like these too. There just still aren't nearly as many movies about it yet.

Robert Altman interview with Reverse Shot

an interview with Joseph Walsh, the screenwriter of California Split in the always excellent Stop Smiling magazine.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording

In Which We Are All Nashvillains

A City On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

by TYLER COATES

There's a trend in independent film in which every young self-described auteur sets out to put together an ambitious tapestry of a film made up of multiple narratives. There are the good ones (like PT Anderson's Magnolia, although Molly Lambert would disagree), and there are the bad ones (such as Paul Haggis' Crash, although your "socially-conscious" mother would disagree).

It's a distinctly American form — these themes often take place within the urban landscapes one can only find in the United States, which provide the excellent setting for a few handful of distinctive complex characters to crash (sorry!) into each other.

Robert Altman perfected this in Short Cuts, but he practically invented the genre with 1975's Nashville. Following twenty-four characters as they make their way through the capital of country music. It depicts a group of Americans (and one daffy British reporter) on the cusp of the bicentennial, in the shadows of Vietnam, and on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Altman's film is not a cinematic love letter to Nashville. The city is a madhouse, filled with kooks with the desire and the delusion that they will make it. There are the actual celebrities, too, fleeting in and out of honky-tonks and the Grand Ole Opry.

None of it is very romantic; the tagline to the film was, "The damndest thing you ever saw." Essentially, it's a Blue State examination of Red State America. The Nashville community hated it, and with good reason: they were reduced to bumbling lunatics and occasional musical talents.

The centerpiece of the film is Hal Phillip Walker, the faceless voice that drives through town delivering down-home political agendas over a loudspeaker. His "Replacement Party" platform predates the lunacy of Ross Perot's Reform Party twenty-some years later. Walker's voice delivers political zingers like, "When you pay more for an automobile than it cost for Columbus to make his first voyage to America, that's politics."

Walker's ideas are in direct opposition to the sentiment of the film's opening number, in which Haven Hamilton (played by Laugh-In cast member Henry Gibson) sings, "We must be doing something right to last two-hundred years." Hamilton, who so perfectly represents the self-righteousness of '70s-era country music (and is partially inspired by titans like Porter Wagoner), is easily swayed to join Walker's political machine as he looks out for his own agenda. After all, Nashville in 1975 is a time of ideological confusion and gray areas.

One of the underrated stars of the film is Ronee Blakeley. As Barbara Jean, Blakeley (who was herself a semi-accomplished folk singer and wrote the songs for her character) beats Sissy Spacek by nearly five years as the first actress to, basically, portray Loretta Lynn on screen.

She plays the familiar star character: tired, confused, pushed to contribute to a profession she doesn't particularly enjoy by her manager-husband. In the climactic scene of the film, she performs what is probably the most symbolic song in Nashville, the autobiographical "My Idaho Home."

As Altman pans across the lawn in front of the Parthenon, the impressive and stoic Greek sculpture oddly planted in the Tennessee capital, Barbara Jean sings about her parents' upbringing in rural Middle America. And then he focuses his lens on an American flag for several solid seconds, just in case you weren't paying attention.

There are plenty of other important characters in Nashville, including Lily Tomlin as a bored housewife, Barbara Harris as ambitious and imbecilic singer, Michael Murphy as a fish-out-of-water political consultant, and KeithCarradine (who won an Academy Award for his song "I'm Easy") as the misogynistic folk-singer. Much like it was impossible for Altman to squeeze his masterpiece under two hours, it's difficult for this writer to explain the entire film, with its intricate plots and characters, in less than eight-hundred words.

But what makes it such an important film, even by today's standards, is that it subtly changed the way films were made, as well as how they examined their subjects. And thirty years later, Americans are still riding a fence between the comforts of tradition and the concept of radical change. We're all the characters in Nashville, patiently waiting for Mr. Altman's direction.

Tyler Coates is the contributing editor to This Recording. He lives in Chicago and blogs here.

"My Idaho Home" — Ronee Blakeley (mp3)

"Dues" — Ronee Blakeley (mp3)

"It Don't Worry Me" — Barbara Harris & Keith Carradine (mp3)

"I'm Easy" — Keith Carradine (mp3)