Movie #225 Short Cuts *1993*

If Manhattan is Woody Allen's love letter to New York, then Short Cuts is Robert Altman's drunken 2:00 am text message to Los Angeles.

Altman has a style all his own.  His camera sort of wonders through the lives of people as they carry out their seemingly mundane existences.  His is less of a fictional film maker than a documentarian of fictional events.  In Short Cuts he focuses in on the intertwining lives of about 20 different people living in Los Angeles.  Almost all of these characters are played by well known actors or celebrities of some sorts.  I will attach a link to the IMDB page instead of listing all of the talent involved in the movie.

I can't even begin to imagine the amount of work that must have gone into filming this movie.  Whatever it was, the editing process must have taken 10 times longer.  This movie is brilliantly edited.  Altman has a reputation for being a free spirit and encouraging ad libbing.  I think sometimes that style of film making is confused with or mistaken for lazy and unprepared film making.  I can assure you that this is not the case with Short Cuts.  I can make that assurance not by watching what happens during the scene, but how each scene begins and ends.  Altman might end a scene on an exterior of a door slamming shut on one story line then quick cut to an interior of a door slamming shut on a different story.  He might end a scene with a dog barking at the back door, then open a scene with a dog barking on a TV screen in a totally different plot line.  What happens between "ACTION" and "CUT" may be free form, but the frame work and structure is all there.

I have long held the belief that PT Anderson's Boogie Nights and Scorsese's Goodfellas are films that if placed on top of one another would almost be indistinguishable.  Having seen Short Cuts now I believe that it and Boogie Night actually share some of the same DNA.  There is no way that PT Anderson (an admitted admirer of Altman) didn't use Short Cuts as the groundwork anatomy skeleton inspiration for his own California epic.  Both films are an embodiment of their times and places.  Both films share the same scheme in where people struggling with their identifies almost mystically float through their lives in search of a brass ring to grab a hold of and give them a center or purpose.

This sounds like weightier material than what is presented.  Short Cuts is an ensemble film with terrific performances, a slick jazz soundtrack, insanely well shot and edited camera work and meandering story lines that at times are sometimes asinine and frivolous and other times rooted in true drama with stakes through the roof.  But isn't that life?  I give Short Cuts ****1/2.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108122/