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the L..O..N..G AND short OF IT Dearly Departed....... Have you heard this one!?.......What do you call Demi Moore dead?......Demi no more......Uh,Yeah....And if that one didn't knock you dead then this movie surely will....Yeah,3 deadly hours of it!! I have to be totally honest here and admit that I couldn't tolerate watching this movie in its' entirety. I couldn't. I'd say I watched,in total,about 1 hour. And that was all accomplished while using ff & rwd so much with the remote that I friggin' got dizzy and finally had to give it up. Short Cuts just seemed so dragged out and predictable that after awhile I wanted to pull my hair out by the roots. I don't see how anyone could possibly sit thru' 3 hours of this stuff unless they were stoned, or drunk,or braindead,or all of the above. The fault behind this falls squarely on Altman's shoulders. He's a mediocre director at best. I'm sorry,but that's the biggest compliment that I can pay this guy after what I've seen of his directing. To begin with, Altman tries in vain to juggle way too many actors in one movie and then on top of this he attempts to make everyone's character interesting. And,of course,this is his first big mistake. If he had at least cut things down to about half (both with cast and time) I think he might have been more successful with the finished product. But,Altman,being too self-assured of his own abilities,didn't. Altman's second and most irritating mistake is that he's a big,fat,lazy bugger of a director. What I mean by this accusation is that he rarely takes close-ups of the actors' faces. He just plunks the camera down in one spot(ok,maybe 2 spots) and shoots the entire movie from one or two boring angles. Altman usually shoots his actors from about pelvis up. Far too often he tries to get their entire body into the shot and then shoots a whole scene this way. Talk about making me crazy. I'm a real fan of close-ups. I wanna see the actors' faces fill the entire screen. I wanna see up close all that emotion that's written across their faces. Knowing when to take a close-up and finding as many opportunities to do so,in my opinion,is the sign of good directing. Of course,too many close-ups can have a bad affect on a movie,too. But I've rarely seen this happen. Yeah,close-ups are great. I truly enjoy looking directly into an actor's eyes. Don't you!? But with an Altman film this sort of intimacy between actor/camera/spectator is rarely ever present. Altman seems to be more interested in showing us the actor's shoes rather than the emotion on his/her face. So,for me,Short Cuts was a long shot for Altman and it seems he fell short of his mark. Yeah,3 long hours short. email this review to a friend
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