So I've decided to take this blog in a totally new direction: one that is completely superficial and lacking in intellectual depth.
Just kidding.
But now that I've gotten the worst out of the way hopefully it won't sting as bad when I tell you what I'm ACTUALLY going to write about. The truth is this constant theme throughout Altman's movies continually distracted me from enjoying any of them. It bothered me so much, that I cannot come up with anything else to write about (assuming that even that would be worthy of a place on this well-established blog). What I'm getting at is,
Did anybody else notice how damn UGLY each of Altman's leading actors were??
I don't know what Robert Altman did to make Elliot Gould look as bad as he did in The Long Goodbye. He looked like the actor that plays the Geico cavemen. I hardly recognized him because he looked like a pit-bull. There's a picture in my health class that shows what happens to the inside of your body when you smoke and the poster recreates that image on somebody's face. In Elliot Gould's case, the chain smoking clearly killed his face.
I can forgive Altman for all the uggos in Nashville considering the time and place the movie was shot. I wouldn't expect him to hire male models for a movie in which the main setting is the Southern United States (no offense to the hicks). But the thick seventies glasses combined with mullets just don't do anything for me.
Altman tried too hard to create realism in The Player by casting greasy movie executives. Tim Robbins is probably the best-looking man in any of these movies (I mean that in the straighest way possible) and that says a lot for the early 90's. But it bothered me for the entire movie that his eyes seem waaaay too close together and his forehead appears to be plotting the conquest of his rest of Robbins' face (the ratio at the time of the Player seemed to be 1:1 forehead to face).
So maybe I left the superficial part in, but I truly did come up with this while analyzing the films. People will argue that Hollywood is obsessed with pretty movie stars, but clearly Altman is not part of that.
