Junk Journal Week 39

Still feeling a bit under the weather with this virus, but I’m caught up on the junk journals now.

I finally read Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love after planning to read it off and on since 1991. This story of a family of circus freaks will live in my memory for a long time.

The Criterion Channel is having a Robert Altman festival and I am working my way through most of his pictures about half a movie per night. Last night I watched Nashville — for at least the third time.

Here is a bit of what the late Roger Ebert said about the picture in 2000:

“What is this story about?” I wrote. The film may be great because you can’t really answer that question.

‘It is a musical; Robert Altman observes in his commentary on the new DVD re-release that it contains more than an hour of music. It is a docudrama about the Nashville scene. It is a political parable, written and directed in the immediate aftermath of Watergate (the scenes in the Grand Ole Opry were shot on the day Richard M. Nixon resigned). It tells interlocking stories of love and sex, of hearts broken and mended. And it is a wicked satire of American smarminess (“Welcome to Nashville and to my lovely home,” a country star gushes to Elliott Gould).

But more than anything else, it is a tender poem to the wounded and the sad. The most unforgettable characters in the movie are the best ones: Lily Tomlin’s housewife, who loves her deaf sons. The lonely soldier who stands guard over the country singer his mother saved from a fire. The old man grieving for his wife, who has just died. Barbara Harris’ runaway wife, who rises to the occasion when she is handed the microphone after a shooting. And even that smarmy country singer (Henry Gibson), who when the chips are down acts in the right way. Kael writes: “Who watching the pious Haven Hamilton sing the evangelical `Keep a’ Goin,’ his eyes flashing with a paranoid gleam as he keeps the audience under surveillance, would guess that the song represented his true spirit, and that when injured he would think of the audience before himself?”’

Are you a Robert Altman fan?