Month: August 2005

Robert Altman didn’t see much of Minnesota. During his month-long stay in St. Paul this summer, he ventured beyond the Fitzgerald Theater and his hotel but once or twice. He came, though, and even if he didn’t see much, it seems as if he was out to conquer. He left for Hollywood with footage for a film in which, reportedly, the Fitzgerald Theater gets demolished, at least one character dies, and, most important, our beloved public radio program ceases to be. Who is this guy? And what does he want with A Prairie Home Companion?

For Prairie Home is not just the pride of Minnesota, but a refuge from the anxieties of television and a return to the relaxing pace of radio. For me, the show was a Midwestern haven when I was living in the San Francisco area, where people can’t afford lawns and the leaves never change. After work on Saturdays, I would collapse on my bed and listen to Garrison Keillor’s monologue, which was as soothing as a hot bath and a cold beer. So when I first discovered that Robert Altman was going to direct a movie based on Prairie Home—well, at first I didn’t know what to think.

“No one has ever made a good movie,” Altman has said. “Someday someone will make half a good one.” His own prolific career has certainly yielded some half-good films, such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, and Gosford Park, but I find myself disappointed by most of the others. However, even the worst ones—and Popeye is as awful as anything ever committed to celluloid—trouble me for a long time afterward … and I like to be troubled. Altman has stated repeatedly that he tries to give his audience something to argue about afterward and that he frankly doesn’t care to appease everybody, or even anybody. He also considers his films to be like paintings, which partly explains the distinctively weak plots that irritate many filmgoers, myself included. After producing a litter of small, strange movies—thirty-one in all since 1970’s M.A.S.H.—it’s not as if Altman is suddenly going to change course now. Prairie Home is going to be distinctively a Robert Altman picture, not a Garrison Keillor film (despite his having written the screenplay), and certainly not a Minnesota Public Radio movie.

Curious fans of Keillor and the radio show can examine Altman’s plotless approach by starting with his last release, The Company (2003). The director threw together professional actors (Neve Campbell and Malcolm McDowell) and non-actors (dancers from Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet); filmed the dancing, the squabbling, the parties, the practices; and then draped all this over a story line that, after an hour, was still not entirely discernable. It had something to do with the stress of being in a dance troupe and Campbell finally becoming the star of the company. Fans of ballet loved it; considering its paltry box-office take, I doubt many others jumped on board. But there were moments in that film that lingered with me later on, like a pleasant aftertaste following a bite of bittersweet chocolate.

Such as the sound of feet slapping against a stage. This is but one of myriad sound effects in a single scene of The Company, and it was totally surprising—just some brief, sharp thwacks punctuating the music and the dance. In that same scene, which took place during a performance in a Chicago park during a storm, you hear the zip of hands over fabric as a dancer is lifted; the company’s director whispering to a colleague; the rustle of butts shifting on seats; and, of course, the sounds of wind and rain and umbrellas opening. As is often the case in an Altman film, The Company is aurally confounding; the director places microphones on numerous actors at once, whereas the usual practice is to have a boom mike overhead, or to later dub in dialogue, especially if there’s excess noise. But Altman digs excess noise the way Neil Young hungers for feedback. He likes capturing the background hubbub, forcing us to listen hard and try to figure out who (or what) we’re supposed to be listening to.

With that approach to sound, it’s easy to understand why Altman would be drawn to filming a popular radio show. PHC’s ensemble nature is another attraction. Altman adores the art of acting; he hovers over the shoulder of his performers by utilizing zoom lenses and multiple digital cameras to follow them into every nook and cranny on the set, even if he’s a dozen yards away. This forces actors to remain in character, and in this way Altman captures their spontaneous moments—the gaffes and frustrations and flashes of brilliance, whether accidental or deliberate. In 1992’s The Player, he takes us into a restaurant where Burt Reynolds (playing himself) and a friend chat in the foreground, while the “real” action takes place a good twenty feet behind, at a table with Tim Robbins (playing the fictional Griffin Mill). We can hear and see what’s going on in both places, not to mention the conversations elsewhere in the restaurant.

Almost all of Altman’s movies baffle with this kind of technical innovation. His painting metaphor—the film as picture—is apt: Watching his films, the feeling is not that this is documentary, or a typical Hollywood dynamic in which good guys and bad struggle toward the inevitable climax, but rather a moment in life, captured in sound and light in the way that a painting can capture a moment in oil and light. When we go to a restaurant or a ballet, we are inundated with sights and sounds, and naturally take away more than just the singular experience of food or dance. The moments Altman captures are often as ugly as they are beautiful, with performers opening up like a flower, singing or dancing before moving backstage and flipping someone off. His gallery is made up of these moments, as portrayed in the old West (McCabe), in seventies Nashville (Nashville), in a thirties jazz club (Kansas City), and, coming up, a contemporary weekly radio show.

Spatially, Altman’s films eschew large, open settings, retreating instead to the confines of dressing rooms, recording studios, domestic interiors. There are no expansive valleys in McCabe, but rather everything takes place in the cramped saloons, tents, and whorehouses in the town of Presbyterian Church, which is itself wedged into a high mountain gorge. Prairie will be no different, with its cozy set ensconced within the Fitzgerald Theater, both on and off stage.

In all, the nature and circumstances surrounding Prairie Home seem perfectly suited to Altman’s oeuvre. According to the film’s producer Joshua Astrachan, about three years ago Altman and Keillor met through a mutual lawyer friend, hit it off, and began to discuss the possibility of working together. Altman’s wife Kathryn was a fan of Prairie Home, and after he met the man behind it, the thought of filming this little subculture began to intrigue him. One can see why: As the last of the great radio shows, Prairie Home is a relic and a haven for dreamers, whether they’re performers or listeners. But its dark side suits Altman as well. Though I haven’t read Keillor’s novels (it’s been said that his listeners and his readers are two quite separate audiences), friends have been surprised by the edginess of their prose and the not-so-subtle desire of their author to shake things up in Lake Wobegon. The characters are looking back on wasted lives, dull marriages, probable affairs.

At first, Keillor was working on a screenplay about Lake Wobegon, but it was Altman who persuaded him to shift the focus from the fictional hamlet to the machinations behind the curtains at the radio show, thus drawing the story into the enclosed setting and focusing on the performers. And perhaps in Keillor’s case, this change—offering a glimpse of fictional characters playing fictional characters, mingling with the actual show’s regulars—allowed him to reveal to his fans the darker side of the show we love.

Robert Altman is eighty years old, a Midwesterner, and a World War II veteran who would probably cringe at being called one of the Greatest Generation. After a number of minor projects (a James Dean documentary, a sci-fi flick, a twelve-year stint directing TV shows, and a couple features that flopped), he was chosen—and this would be the last time he would ever be chosen—to direct M.A.S.H. The swinging sixties, the anti-war sentiment, and a hunger for things new made M.A.S.H. his most commercially successful film. It gave him the power and the confidence to demand complete control over the content of his work in ways that few other directors can.

Altman has since become known as one of the last of the Hollywood mavericks. At various times, he has talked openly about his penchants for booze, pot, and gambling; he can be cantankerous with screenwriters and anyone else involved in a film—except for actors, whom he indulges shamelessly; and he seems delighted when his esoteric, utterly personal films alienate audiences and studio heads alike. Actors flock to Altman because he is famous for giving them free rein to interpret their characters, while he watches with few comments or suggestions. This can be heaven for performers used to being treated as meat, but a pain to the viewer who has to watch Lily Tomlin’s brilliance mingle with Keith Carradine’s overcooked ham (in Nashville), Stephen Fry’s juvenile slapstick amongst a well-oiled ensemble machine (in Gosford Park); or Harry Belafonte’s jazzy screed to a vacuous Dermot Mulroney (in Kansas City).

Keillor, on the other hand, has never tasted such freedom. Usually he is, in his own words, handcuffed by “the restrictions of good taste.” Giving himself over to Altman, Keillor suddenly becomes both a limitless performer and a screenwriter who expects—working with this director—that spontaneity is the rule, damn the written word. Now that the film’s in the can, rumors abound that Keillor might soon draw the curtains permanently on his radio show; it is thirty years old, and the film concerns the last broadcast of a radio show after the same. Considering Keillor’s growing pessimism, as interviews and his own fiction can attest, this could be an ideal occasion. What better swan song than a collaboration with one of the greatest directors in American cinema?

Whaazzzaahhp?! It erupted from my niece with as much guttural bass as a five-year-old could muster, accompanied by a grin and a vigorous shake of the head. When asked if she heard that at school, she began hopping around the living room. “Everyone’s saying it!” she said. “The big kids are saying it, the little kids are saying it—everyone!”

This was several years ago (that catchphrase from a beer ad, you might recall, peaked at the millennium), but while reading Leslie Savan’s new book — Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever — I realized that my niece had defined what Savan calls “pop language.” It wasn’t just that “everyone” was saying “Whaazzzaahhp?!”; it was also her exuberance at being part of a large phenomenon, one that involved “the big kids.” That transcendence is a major factor in making a word or phrase go pop, says Savan. Its usage has to spread like wildfire, crossing boundaries of age, class, race, and ethnicity, until even the naysayers are drawn, almost involuntarily, to say it (probably with a slightly contemptuous inflection).

Having been exiled to the island of cast-off catch phrases, “Whaazzzaahhp?!” now dwells with the likes of “Show me the money!” and “Talk to the hand” (one hopes that “Don’t go there” is en route). But, of course, potential popisms are bubbling continuously into the collective consciousness, auditioning for their moment in the spotlight. They have varying life spans, just like celebrities. So, rather than creating a compendium of zeitgeist-y verbiage, one that would become dated faster than The Preppy Handbook, Savan aimed to give her book a longer shelf life (oops) by examining the whys and wherefores of pop language.

The main characteristic that distinguishes pop language from mere slang or jargon is widespread popularity. The corollary: Pop is often slang or jargon that has jumped out of its niche. Savan devotes a sizable chapter to showing how, from “bogus” to “411,” slang that was coined or popularized by African-Americans is “all over mainstream pop talk like white on rice.” Once it ascends to pop status, a phrase can pass through several stages, according to Savan. The crest of its popularity is inevitably “followed by a period of soft ridicule for overuse.” Then there’s the irony stage—people will say it, but only knowingly. After that, if it’s still around, the phrase becomes “like a Raid-resistant roach—and it sheds the irony and begins to seem as indispensable as, say, Do the math or 24/7.” Not all pop language makes it that far, but if it does (consider “awesome”), then it has attained the status of “a thought—or more accurately, a stand-in for a thought.”

Although that might sound like the definition of “cliché,” pop is also distinct from those linguistic shortcuts. The two can overlap, however; “fifteen minutes of fame” is both pop and cliché, Savan says, though as a “senior pop phrase” it has more “jolt” than its cliché siblings (“by the skin of his teeth”). That jolt is essential to pop language—maybe adults don’t hop around when they say “Fuhgedaboudit,” but it does provide a feeling of power, or at least iconoclasm, in the face of dehumanizing cubicle farms, telephone labyrinths, and big-box retailers. It shows that the speaker is in the know, up to speed, down with things.

Not that you have to be down with the history of a given word, even if Savan’s tracing the evolution of various pop terms, including “Yesss!,” makes for some of the most interesting parts of Slam Dunks. In the real world, etymology is for losers. Like, who cares that “fifteen minutes of fame” comes from one of Andy Warhol’s prophecies, or that pearls come from grains of sand? What matters is their lustrous allure, and what they say about you. Except that pop language doesn’t have to say much of anything—which makes it, like pearls, suitable for just about any occasion.

By way of a long but interesting digression into the structure, forms, and rhythms of sitcoms, Savan makes the point that, just as these shows are designed to flatter and excite audiences rather than challenge them, we translate those forms into pop language to flatter and excite each other. She describes pop phrases as “verbal viruses” with the “ability to flash-freeze thought and stun our imaginations with commercial confetti.”

This season, the Guthrie’s WORLDStage Series has some especially meaty, contemporary takes on classic texts. This Macbeth, for instance, plucked from an ultra-hip niche of London’s theater scene by impresario James Morrison, is recast in a nameless but unmistakably modern African nation. It features an all-black cast with one exception: the character of Lady Macbeth, drawn from the real-life story of a white aid worker who married a Ugandan warlord. Even more interesting: The Three Witches are modeled after the notorious cross-dressing combatants in former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s militia. Their boas and frilly dresses summon mystical powers. 700 First St N.; www.guthrietheater.org

Never mind that this film shares a name with a brand of adult incontinence products. Legions of grad students and pizza delivery people have been joyously anticipating its opening day, perhaps, you might say, to a pants-wetting degree. That’s because Serenity takes up where the short-lived but beloved TV series Firefly, from Joss Whedon, left off. Fans of Whedon, who brought the world Buffy the Vampire Slayer, boast a zombie-like and academic devotion to this writer and director. While he has talked about making a Buffy movie, Serenity is the next best thing. Set in outer space, starring Nathan Fillion (from the TV series), and blessed with a movie-sized special effects budget, these two hours take the Firefly story several steps further. Dark comedy, clever dialogue, and winning characters make this film stand on its own–no TV exposure required.