Film Review: Short Cuts (dir by Robert Altman)

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Opening with a swarm of helicopters spaying for medflies and ending with an earthquake, 1993’s Short Cuts is a film about life in Los Angeles.

An ensemble piece, it follows several different characters as they go through their own personal dramas. Some of them are married and some of them are destined to be forever single but they’re all living in varying states of desperation. Occasionally, the actions of one character will effect the actions of another character in a different story but, for the most part, Short Cuts is a portrait of people who are connected only by the fact that they all live in the same city. There are 22 principal characters in Short Cuts and each one thinks that they are the star of the story.

Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn) cleans the pools of rich people while, at home, his wife, Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh), takes care of their baby and works as a phone sex operator. Jerry’s best friend is a makeup artist named Bill (Robert Downey, Jr.) who enjoys making his wife, Honey (Lili Taylor), looks like a corpse so that he can take her picture. One of her photographs is seen by a fisherman (Buck Henry) who has already discovered one actual corpse that weekend. He and his buddies, Vern (Huey Lewis) and Stuart (Fred Ward), discovered a dead girl floating in a river and didn’t report it until after they were finished fishing. (The sight of Vern unknowingly pissing on the dead body is one of the strongest in director Robert Altman’s filmography.)

Stuart’s wife, Claire (Anne Archer), is haunted by Stuart’s delay in reporting the dead body. A chance meeting Dr. Ralph Wyman (Matthew Modine) and his wife, artist Marian (Julianne Moore), leads to an awkward dinner between the two couples. Claire works as a professional clown and Ralph ends up wearing her clown makeup while his marriage falls apart.

Earlier, Claire was stopped and hit on by a smarmy policeman named Gene Shepard (Tim Robbins), who just happens to be married to Marian’s sister, Sherri (Madeleine Stowe). Gene is already having an affair with Betty Weathers (Frances McDormand), the wife of a helicopter pilot named Stormy (Peter Gallagher). When Stormy discovers that Betty has been cheating, he takes a creative revenge on her house.

Doreen Pigott (Lily Tomlin) lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic husband, Earl (Tom Waits). Driving home from her waitressing job, Doreen hits a young boy. The boy says he’s okay but when he gets home, he passes out. His parents, news anchorman Howard Finnegan (Bruce Davison) and his wife, Anne (Andie MacDowell), rush him to the hospital, where his doctor is Ralph Wyman. As Howard waits for his son to wake up, he has a revealing conversation with his long-estranged father (Jack Lemmon, showing up for one scene and delivering an amazing monologue). Meanwhile, a baker named Andy (Lyle Lovett) repeatedly calls the Finnegan household, wanting to know when they’re going to pick up their son’s birthday cake.

Based on the short stories of Raymond Carver and directed by Robert Altman, Short Cuts can sometimes feel like a spiritual descendent of Altman’s Nashville. The difference between this film and Nashville is that Short Cuts doesn’t have the previous film’s satiric bite. As good as Nashville is, it’s a film that can be rather snarky towards it character and the town in which it is set. Nashville is used as a metaphor for America coming apart at the seams. Short Cuts, on the other hand, is a far more humanistic film, featuring characters who are flawed but, with a few very notable exceptions, well-intentioned. If Nashville seem to be a portrait of a society on the verge of collapse, Short Cuts is a film about how that society ended up surviving.

It’s not a perfect film. There’s an entire storyline featuring Annie Ross and Lori Singer that I didn’t talk about because I just found it to be annoying to waste much time with. (The Ross/Singer storyline was the only one not to be based on a Carver short story.) The conclusion of Chris Penn’s storyline wasn’t quite as shocking as it was obviously meant to be. But, flaws and all, Altman and Carver’s portrait of humanity does hold our attention and it leaves us thinking about connections made and sometimes lost. Seen today, Short Cuts is a portrait of life before social media and iPhones and before humanity started living online. It’s a time capsule of a world that once was.

Musical Film Review: Heartbeat (dir by John Nicolella)

Posted on April 1, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1987’s Heartbeat opens with Don Johnson in an unidentified Central American country.

Rebels are moving through the jungles. Helicopters are flying over villages and firing off missiles. In the middle of it all is Don Johnson, playing a character identified as being “The Documentary Filmmaker.” Johnson carries a large movie camera with him, recording all of the violence and the carnage. Is Johnson trying to expose the evils of the government? Is he trying to expose the rebels? Is he just an adrenaline junkie who can’t help but go to the most dangerous places in the world? I have no idea and I’m not sure that the film does either.

A bomb explodes. Johnson is thrown back. Soon, Don Johnson is being carried into a dark room on a stretcher. It appears that he might be dying but, even as his heartbeat is slowing down, his spirit is still hanging around and having flashbacks to the attack on the village, which we just saw less than a minute ago. Eventually, Johnson’s spirit has other flashbacks. He remembers talking to Paul Shaffer. He remembers his strained marriage to an unnamed woman played by Lori Singer. He remembers his youth as the son of a Las Vegas showgirl who is played by Sandahl Bergman. (Bergman also played a showgirl in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz and her scenes in this film often feel as if they’ve been directly lifted from Fosse’s classic film.) David Carradine shows up as someone who might be Johnson’s father or who might just be some random guy rolling dice in the backroom of a strip club. Johnson remembers his friendship with a graffiti artist (Giancarlo Esposito), who has a sister (Angela Alvarado) who was a prostitute. The main message seems to be that the Documentary Filmmaker recorded the dangers of the world while also trying to remain emotionally detached, much like Robert Forster in Medium Cool. Now that he’s dying, he’s left to wonder whether he made the right choice in refusing to get personally involved.

Oh, and did I mention that this film is basically a 65-minute music video? Don Johnson sings through the entire movie, in a style that does its best to imitate the tough growl and soulful yearning of Southern rock and roll but which ultimately only serves to show that Johnson made the right decision in focusing on acting instead of singing?

After I came across this film on Lettrboxd and then watched it on YouTube, I did a bit of research (which is a fancy way of saying that I spent a minute reading a Wikipedia entry) and I discovered that, at the height of his Miami Vice success, Johnson released his debut country rock album, Heartbeat. Heartbeat the film was something that Johnson made in order to promote Heartbeat the album. Directed by frequent Miami Vice director John Nicollela, Heartbeat the film is so self-indulgent and determined to prove that Don Johnson is a soulful artist that it becomes oddly fascinating to watch. Johnson’s Documentary Filmmaker is a bit of a cad but the film seems to argue that 1) it’s not really his fault because women find him to be irresistible, 2) it’s really his mom’s fault for getting a job, and 3) it ultimately doesn’t matter because the Filmmaker is a great artist whose work will live on even after he dies. It’s a vanity film for a vanity album and it’s all so vain that it becomes hard to look away from.

In the end, both the music from the album and the promotional film leave one feeling that, in 1987, Don Johnson might have had an unreasonably high opinion of his musical abilities. That said, as anyone who has seen Cold In July can tell you, Don Johnson eventually did become a very good actor.

18 Days of Paranoia #4: The Falcon and the Snowman (dir by John Schlesinger)

Posted on March 17, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8HE_mHphZk

The 1985 film, The Falcon and the Snowman, tells the story of two friends. They’re both wealthy. They’re both a little bit lost, with one of them dropping out the seminary and the other becoming a drug dealer who is successful enough to have a lot of money but inept enough to still be treated like a joke by all of other dealers.

Chris Boyce (Timothy Hutton) is the son of a former FBI agent (Pat Hingle). He has a tense relationship with his father. It’s obvious that the two have never really been sure how to talk to each other. While his father is sure of both himself and his country, Chris is far more sensitive and quick to question. While his father plays golf and attends outdoor barbecues, Chris becomes an expert in the sport of falconry and spends a lot of time obsessing about the state of the the world. While his father defends Richard Nixon during the Watergate investigation, Chris sees it as evidence that America is a sick and corrupt country. Because his father doesn’t want Chris sitting around the house all day, he pulls some strings to get Chris a job working at the “Black Vault,” where Chris will basically have the ability to learn about all sorts of classified stuff.

Daulton Lee (Sean Penn) was Chris’s best friend in school. Daulton’s entire life revolves around cocaine. He both sells and uses it. He’s managed to make a lot of money but his addiction has also left him an erratic mess. Daulton’s father wants to kick him out of the house. Daulton’s mother continually babies him. Chris and Daulton may seem like an odd pair of friends but they’re both wealthy, directionless, and have a difficult time relating to their fathers. It somehow seems inevitable that these two would end up as partners.

Chris Boyce and Daulton Lee, together …. THEY SOLVE CRIMES!

No, actually, they don’t. Instead, they end up betraying their country. (Boooo! Hiss! This guy’s a commie, traitor to our nation!) After Chris discovers that the CIA has been interfering in the elections of America’s allies (in this case, Australia), he decides to give information to the Russians. Since Daulton already has experience smuggling drugs over the southern border, Boyce asks Lee to contact the KGB the next time that he’s in Mexico. Despite being a neurotic and paranoid mess, Lee manages to do just that.

Of course, as Chris soon comes to discover, betraying your country while working with a greedy drug addict is not as easy as it seems. While Chris wants to eventually get out of the treason game, marry his girlfriend (Lori Singer), and finish up college, Daulton wants to be James Bond. The Russians, meanwhile, soon grow tired of having to deal with Lee and start pressuring Chris to deal with them directly….

And it all goes even further downhill from there.

Based on a true story, The Falcon and the Snowman tells the story of how two seemingly very different young men managed to basically ruin their lives. Boyce’s naive idealism and Lee’s drug-fueled greed briefly makes them a powerful duo but they both quickly discover that betraying your country isn’t as a simple as they assumed. For one thing, once you’ve done it once, it’s impossible to go back to your normal life. As played by Hutton and Penn, Chris and Daulton are two very interesting characters. Boyce is full of righteous indignation and sees himself as being a hero but the film hints that he’s mostly just pissed off at his Dad for never understanding him or caring that much about falconry. Daulton, meanwhile, is a lunatic but he seems to be aware that he’s a lunatic and that makes his oddly likable. At times, it seems like even he can’t believe that Chris was stupid enough to depend on him. The film provides a convincing portrait of two men who, because of several impulsive decisions, find themselves in over their heads with no possibility of escape.

The Falcon and the Snowman is an entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking time capsule of a different age. If the film took place in 2020, Daulton would be hanging out with the Kardashians and Chris would probably be too busy working for the Warren campaign to spy for America’s enemies. If only the two of them had been born a few decades later, all of this could have been of avoided.

Previous Entries In The 18 Days of Paranoia:

A Movie A Day #84: Made In U.S.A. (1987, directed by Ken Friedman)

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

Dar (Adrian Pasdar) and Tuck (Chris Penn) are two losers. Dar is angry. Tuck is a moron. They live in a dying Pennsylvania industrial town, where they have no future. Dar is worried that the air has been poisoned by the nearby coal mine. He and Tuck decide to go to California so that they can look for a woman whose picture they’ve seen in a magazine. Since Dar and Tucker have no money and no one is willing to pick up two hitchhikers who look like they are on sabbatical from the Manson Family, they end up having to steal cars and hold up convenience stores. They also pick up a mentally unstable woman named Annie (Lori Singer). Annie may be dying because of all the pollution in the world. Dar and Tuck take the time to transport a Native American runaway back to her reservation, where they both get scalped. Mostly, Dar and Tuck just drive through some of the ugliest parts of America and talk about how, because of pollution, everything is all messed up.

In the 1990s, Made In U.S.A. used to show up frequently on HBO. It’s a lousy movie, featuring one of the worst performances of Chris Penn’s career. (Adrian Pasdar is also pretty bad but more is expected from Chris Penn than from Adrian Pasdar.) Made in U.S.A. does provide a contrast to the relentlessly pro-American films that dominated the box office in the 1980s but it’s really only noteworthy for the soundtrack, which features songs by Sonic Youth and Timbuk3.

Whatever you do, do not mistake this Made In U.S.A. for Jean-Luc Godard’s.