MORE ALTMAN. Since I'm having such a good day with pop culture, I figure I'll keep at it. For those of us who went to a lot of movies in the 1970's, the arrival of a new Robert Altman was Christmas morning. Now that he's passed away, there are going to be a lot of justifiable tributes to Nashville and to M*A*S*H, a movie as thoroughly trivialized by its TV version as any movie ever was. But my heart still stays with McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a purely revisionist Western, and everything everyone thought Clint Eastwood had done with Unforgiven, but a lot funnier and a damn sight more quirky. The shootout in the snow with the building aflame is one of my favorite set-pieces ever, and then there's Julie Christie, smoking opium as she passed out of her Carnaby Street phase, and moved into that glorious torrent-of-curls period. Hell, I even liked some of the later, smaller stuff, like Cookie's Fortune, which starred a marvelously batshit Glenn Close. I think I'm going to have me some catfish enchiladas in his memory.
--Charles P. Pierce
