A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Search This Blog

Showing posts with label Shelley Long. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shelley Long. Show all posts

Thursday, November 27, 2025

Dr. T and the Women (Robert Altman, 2000)

Shelley Long and Richard Gere in Dr. T and the Women

Cast: Richard Gere, Helen Hunt, Farrah Fawcett, Shelley Long, Laura Dern, Tara Reid, Kate Hudson, Liv Tyler, Robert Hays, Matt Malloy, Andy Richter, Lee Grant, Janine Turner. Screenplay: Anne Rapp. Cinematography: Jan Kiesser. Production design: Stephen Altman. Film editing: Geraldine Peroni. Music: Lyle Lovett. 

More noisy than funny, Robert Altman's Dr. T and the Women has his characteristic generous casting and overlapping dialogue, but it also displays the limitations of both. We want to see more of some of the performers, like Lee Grant and Laura Dern, than we do, and we want them to say cleverer things than they do. Richard Gere plays a Dallas gynecologist whose office is crowded with eager patients and whose family is full of women demanding his attention. Though Altman's movie was scripted by a woman, Altman portrays women as so foolishly self-obsessed that when he delivers a baby at the end of the film, his proclamation, "It's a boy," is made to sound like a cry of relief.