Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on October 24, 2004 at 12:17:04

Filmmaker finds the fantastic in real life

By Wesley Morris, Boston Globe Staff | October 24, 2004

Time was, a filmgoer could trust a filmmaker -- one working closer to Hollywood's center than to its margins -- to challenge a crowd simply by holding up a mirror to the world just outside the movie theater, the world that begins when the director's farce-satire-commentary ends. That time was about 25 to 30 years ago, and the filmmakers were men like Hal Ashby and Paddy Chayefsky and Robert Towne. Then the 1980s and money and the approach of a global market ruined everything, those men disappeared, and movies started to seem a lot like Happy Meals. (This of course is the quick-and-easy, TV-dinner version of this story.)

Before the end of the mythologized 1970s, the movies looked a lot more like the world -- the people imperfect, the situations lacking heroes, the mood arch and two-toned, and the aforementioned mirror increasingly like the one in a fun house. These are the properties of an Alexander Payne picture, which is to say they reflect, with some distortion (for emphasis), life in America. Payne is the first director since Robert Altman in the 1970s and the 1990s to attempt this with any consistency.

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