Review of Short Cuts (1993) by Ricardo V — 30 Oct 2007

This film is one of the altman films that lost me partly due to it's ending where everything seems to implode (in terms of their personal lives) and because of it's reeeeally long running time.

it just lost steam for me halfway through it. though there are aspects I love about the film, the story line with jack lemmon was fantastic, it made me uncomfortable and did everything that you'd hope that scene would do for an audience.

the marriage problems of julianne moore was very interesting, as well as tim robbins' troubled marriage. the phone sex operator aspect was interesting but i'll tell you the part that almost single handedly ruined the movie.

(spoiler ahead). I want storylines to follow and stay true to the characters, that's my main gripe in movies. if you make a film (and most films I watch) have characters who make decisions that seem in their character.

i've seen characters do outrageous or surprising things but if done in the spirit of the character I follow it and support it's presence in the film. when a character does something that is completely out of left field, there isn't a warning of it at all in the film, it's done just for surprises's sake and I don't like that.

when chris penn goes ape on some random girl in the movie and decides to 'off her' that came out of NOWHERE! if you had a few scenes where he had reaaally bad headaches and that was it and you'd have him have one of those THEN kill the girl fine, i'd get it somehow because you planted something earlier in the film but altman threw that in there and it made no sense and I immediately (at least mentally) rejected the film because I felt betrayed.

especially after asking me to sit down 3 hours watching it, to have that scene come in the film, it shook me and I was extremely displeased because it didn't seem to follow.