Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | June 21, 2005 | | Summary | Outstanding Depiction of Life's Haphazard Interconnectedness | Content
 | Having not read any of Raymond Carver's work, I will not engage the debate surrounding Robert Altman's "accuracy" in depicting these short stories. I will simply comment on this film as a standalone work-something that it both has earned and deserves. SHORT CUTS is a fascinating film, interweaving several different storylines and a heavy-hitting cast of twenty something characters in a way that communicates both the interconnectedness and haphazard nature of life. It is wonderful to watch how pebble-sized events cause ripple effects throughout the entire ensemble, affecting the lives of everyone around them.
And the characters...rarely does a film manage to breathe so much life. SHORT CUTS is a movie that explores our ridiculous lives: the life of a cop who is endlessly pursuing extra-marital sex, all the while his wife laughing away his infidelity and waiting for him to come running back home after a failed affair; the life of a troubled cello player, desperately seeking love & affection from her drunken, jazz-singing mother, only to resort to self-inflicted pain and mock-suicides in a vain attempt to feel something (perhaps attention); and who could forget the life of a mother working as a phone sex operator to bring in extra money, talking dirty to perverts on the phone while she changes her baby's diapers.
SHORT CUTS is an ambitious film...and it is long. At over three hours, you have to be prepared to immerse yourself in these storylines. While some may find trouble with the lack of a central storyline, I found the "God's eye" perspective to be riveting, dropping me in and out of everyone's lives and watching life ripple from the aftershocks. A truly excellent film-I highly recommend it. |
| Rating | | | Date | March 25, 2005 | | Summary | a very nice edition of an unusual film. | Content
| This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.
Robert Altman's film version of "Short Cuts" based loosely on a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver is an interesting film. In the original collection of stories, each one is seperate and unrelated to each other. In this film version they are all presented together and some of the characters form the seperate stories interact with each other.
Some of the events include men who find the body of a murdered woman while on a fishing trip but wait until they finish fishing to tell the police. Another is of a young boy who is hit by a car they day before his birthday. The mother had ordered a cake but the baker was insulted by someone and took his anger out on the parents, not knowing that their son was critically injured.
I don't want to go into further details as it would be considered a spoiler.
The film is very impressive and has some good performances by some well known actors including Tim Robbins, Robert Downey Jr., Fred Ward, Matthew Modine, Lily Tomlin, Peter Gallagher, Julianne Moore, and Jack Lemmon.
In a new move by Criterion the collection of short stories is included with the DVD set in book form, through special arrangement with Vintage Books.
I found the film to be quite good despite the profanity and scene of frontal-below the-waist female nudity. I think that the film is good enough to warrant a secondary release without these scenes in it so a wider range of audiences can see it.
But given the fact that it is directed by Robert Altman, I very likely he put these scenes in the movie deliberately for the sole purpose of the film being given an R rating. Altman often does this to keep children out of the audience because he does believe children are capabale of understanding the complex plots of his films. This can present a problem as it will also keeps away many who would otherwise see the film due to nudity and cursing being offensive them.
The Criterion DVD has some very nice special features also
Dice one contains the film with an optional isloated music track.
Disc two contains a video of a conversation between Altman and Tim Robbins, a feature length film on the production of Short Cuts, A documentary on the life of Raymond Carver which originally aired on PBS, a scene from a BBC TV series that covers the film's production, a 1 hour audio inderview with Raymond Carver from 1983, audio recordings of music from the film, deleted scenes, and look at marketing the film, including theatrical trailers.
Also included is the book the film is based on.
This is one that should not be missed! |
| Rating | | | Date | March 24, 2005 | | Summary | Very Perceptive analysis of......people | Content
| Short Cuts works as a sequel to 'The Player'. Whereas 'The Player' was a scathing satire of Hollywood, Short Cuts moves only a few miles out from Tinseltown to expose the ordinary people of suburban LA.
The characters in this wonderfully complex and intriguing fly on the wall drama are rich and various enough to command complete attention throughout it's considerable (3 hours) length. Altman takes great delight in toying with the viewers expectations of the characters he arrays in front of them. Take the Sex-phone operator's husband (played by Chris Penn), we are invited to sympathise with his frustrations (and secretly applaud him for his tolerance) as he accepts his wifes XXX-rated day job and even tolerates the withdrawal of sex (which bores her). When he is revealed as a far more sinister deviant at the end, the irony is astonishing. Then there is the self-centred and emotionally shallow old man (Jack Lemmon)who is callous, cold and unfeeling towards his son (Lemmons' grandson is in intensive care in hospital after a hit and run), who is more interested in his son's famous career as a TV personality and who abandons his son at the hospital when his grandson dies rather than share his son's feelings. The many ways in which the characters in the film are horrible to each other appear partly as accidental and partly stemming from deep character flaws.
The title..'Short Cuts' is very apt, the characters each take shortcuts in their lives with usually disastrous consequences, the old geezer takes an easy short cut when he walks away from his grieving son in the hospital, the Woman driver takes one when she leaves the kid to his own devices after knocking him down, the fishermen take one when they postpone the hassle of reporting the drowned corpse, the bar singer takes one when she dismisses her...'disturbed?' daughters grief over the dead child, the violinist daughter takes many...ignoring her mothers attempts to get closer to her.... then committing suicide. I secretly applauded the scene were there is a mixup at the photo-collection booth, and two characters accidentally get the other's photos, both photos depict shocking violence but as ever nothing is as it seems, their righteous indignation over what they see as they assume the worst is such a simple commendable expression of human truth.
Altman takes a group of characters and lays bare their imperfections and shortcomings, he cleverly links their stories together in a way that recalls the theory of 'six degrees of separation' as opposed to implying a special meaning to those links. There is an ambiguity to all their deeds, nothing is really good or evil, even the brutal slaying at the end has a tone of ambiguity as we are left wondering if we actually saw correctly what we think we did. |
| Rating | | | Date | February 18, 2005 | | Summary | A masterpiece | Content
| If you want an interpretation of Carver's stories, you may be disapointed. The film is "based" on the stories, it does not intend to follow them.
The result is a collage or mosaic without beginning or end, without either favorable or negative judgements on the lives and actions of its 22 characters.
All participants do an amazing acting job. If it were only for that, this movie would be great. There is much more. You will see greatness, human good and evil, innocence, and greatness. There are human emotions portrayed like in no other movie.
If for no other reason, it's worth renting it.
Jack Lemon's 9 minute monologue is so good, acted in such a masterly way, that should prompt you to buy this DVD.
Criterion did a superb job with presentation and an additional DVD full of fascinating extras. |
| Rating | | | Date | February 02, 2005 | | Summary | The Ultimate Edition of Short Cuts... | Content
| This Criterion Collection edition of Short Cuts has everything anyone could possibly want about the movie and more...much more. Disc One contains the movie itself, which is strangely without a commentary track. Disc Two has all the extras - eight of them. Instead of the Director's Track, there is a new conversation with Altman and Tim Robbins, and two additional documentaries on the making of the film. The most valuable extras are those on Raymond Carver himself: there is a PBS documentary on his life and works, and an audio interview from 1983.
The most random extra included in this package is a paperback copy of the book Short Cuts, which is the collection of Carver's stories that Altman selected as the basis for the screenplay. I was a little put-out by this as I all ready owned the book. However, if you have not read the collection yet, I HIGHLY recommend. It is incredibly illuminating to read the short stories and compare them to the finished product of the movie. For one thing, it takes less time to read the book than it does to watch the movie. This is a LONG film - three hours. Ultimately, the film is more Altman's than Carver's. It is ironic that Carver - the master of the tightly crafted short story - should be the springboard for such a digressive film.
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