It's a cold film that some people may always find too cold. But I think it's heartbreaking. If it helps, I think it's about a bunch of people who can't communicate but desperately want to (see Taylor trying to woo a girl with cicada facts). It's also about how totally empty machismo is and how satisfactions are never…

But GTO hates himself for it

Easy Rider does provide the opportunity to mention Two-Lane Blacktop, which is the better road movie about the death of the sixties in just about every way.

Ha. To each their own Woody.

IMO, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is easily his worst film; every one of his worst tendencies come to a head there. However, Celebrity only wins out because its at least pretty. I don't get the September hate—it's not good, but I've never understood why it's the go-to lowpoint for most Allen fans.

Celebrity is pretty dire. Some of the late (ish) films are pretty underrated though. I'd vote for Deconstructing Harry and Sweet and Lowdown.

I see Caine as a Woody foil more than a Woody stand-in, like Landau in Crimes or Pollack in Husbands and Wives. They're similar, but less neurotic (which sometimes means less of a conscience).

You mean who first tried to be a Woody Allen stand-in? That's probably John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway, who's sadly done the best job so far of copying Allen's neurotic tics without falling into bald imitation. Branagh is the inverse of that, and he's terrible.

I'm pretty sure if Christopher Nolan wanted to make a fantasy set in the 1930s, Warner would throw a bunch of money at him. It would be composed solely of dull browns grays and blues, have tineared dialgoue, repeat one anachronistic literature reference every 4 minutes, and get a 9.0 imdb rating before premiering, but…

It turned out to be haunted by the ghost of Paul Hogan's career.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at by describing Altman's "intelligent" approach to race—in that he was consistently able to give small but decent parts to black actors and expand the palette of otherwise very white films (like McCabe) in ways that feel like natural extensions of their worlds and not empty pandering.

I actually think OC and Stiggs finds a better balance than MASH with the way it regards its protagonists. The film clearly thinks they're awful, but it's also easier to give them a pass for being teenagers (and Altman finds enough soft spots to suggest that they might be human underneath it all).

He's weirdest in Klute, where he's playing the most whitebread, boring detective you could buy, yet still comes off as someone who might slip Jane Fonda's character a roofie. (NOTE: Klute is fantastic and must be seen, in spite of Sutherland somehow being the titular character when it is all Fonda's film.)

Reducing Birth of a Nation's politics to "Klan" is a bit reductive. Americans certainly weren't all flocking to join the KKK, but the film's broader ideology, mainly the idea of Reconstruction as a period where white southerners were disenfranchised by Northerners and incompetent/corrupt black officials, was more…

I think that last point is really important to understanding the development of Altman and 70s cinema in general. You had an explosion of fresh talent that was pretty progressive on many issues, but mostly ignored women. Altman in particular regularly handled racial issues with intelligence (even though he never made…

The problem is that she's repeatedly humiliated sexually, i.e. using her sex against her, rather than just plain humiliated like Frank. Frank gets goaded into attacking the other doctors, but he doesn't get a nickname like "hot lips."

Yeah, I think the character in the book's function is the same (ringer pulled in to win a football game), but he's just an average grunt soldier and his nickname is clearly not related to his javelin skills. Altman made him a star neurosurgeon (it's great that the character actually does show up later in the surgery…

Brewster McCloud is definitely worth a watch. It's crazy and slapdash, but far more grounded and with a better hit ratio, than say, Southland Tales. But like MASH, there's a very dark, almost misanthropic tone running under its zaniness, and sometimes it resolves in very unsettling ways.

To me, the best joke in MASH is the final scene, where the PA recasts the very bitter, ugly movie we just watched as a hilarious wartime comedy about surgeons "cutting and stitching their way through the front lines."

Salo: 100 Days and Still-Counting-George! of King's Landing