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Reviews
Quintet (1979)
The elements are there but the execution doesn't work!
Altman's Quintet has to be considered more than just flawed: As so many other reviewers have pointed out, the ideas behind the film, even some of the choices in depicting those ideas, ought to work--and yet very little in this difficult film does. The partially fogged camera lens--I remarked to my wife that it has to be the most distracting directorial conceit I've ever seen--never allowed me to get "into" the film's world.
In general there are serious problems with the mise-en-scene employed here. It's clear that no small amount of thought went into factors like costume and production design, but neither is very effective in evoking a believable world. Perhaps it is a matter of scale; the film is so stage-bound that I laughed out loud once it was mentioned that "five million" people lived in the city. (Yes I understand the constraints of the film's budget. Matte paintings here and there might have helped.) In all the most disappointing Altman film I've ever seen. Great ideas and grand metaphors do not always come through in art--it's just part of the game.
Wild at Heart (1990)
Pop culture satire
Wild At Heart, which I hadn't seen since first run, came across as much less than the sum of its parts, and I remembered why it didn't grab my imagination the way Blue Velvet a few years earlier. That being said, I admired Lynch's daring in deciding to take on the whole of American pop culture with this project. The Elvis and Wizard of Oz references, as well as the overt violence and sexuality, are not all that subtle, which is part of the reason I think that overall the picture misses the mark. Thinking about it from this angle, the picture ends up seeming like a lighter-weight, low intensity Natural Born Killers in one sense, Oliver Stone's brilliant, excessive, shiv-to-the-ribs of Americans and what entertains them.
This picture is entertaining, interesting, even offensive at times, but all in all, far from Lynch's best work.