Short Cuts

tripping over ourselves

While there's no cinematic equivalent to the Mona Lisa, I submit a list of the top ten American movies of the last 50 years in no particular order:

The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Mulholland Drive, Tree of Life, Boyhood, Short Cuts.

Whaaaaaa... Short Cuts? Is it even Altman's best work? Well, everything unique and original in the other movies on this list was done before... by Altman. (Is there anything the man hasn't tried?) And everything Altman achieved in his career can be summed up in Short Cuts.

Five of the entries on my list are genre intact: gangster, war, bio, sci-fi, adventure. Lynch is a genre of his ow...

A huge cast full of familiar names, where each one does their job very well but without commitment, without emotion and under a script so intricate that it leaves anyone lost.

I'm usually very critical of movies with bad or weak scripts. It's a recurring problem in cinema. This film, however, makes the opposite mistake: the script is excessive, it has so many characters and so many interconnected sub-plots that it is almost necessary to make diagrams and schemes on a board to be able to follow what is happening. I got almost halfway through the movie and I didn't really know who was who.

The film begins with a fleet of helicopters spraying something over the skies of Los Angeles. I, who was very young when the film was made, had t...