In A Prairie Home Companion, the lines are less distinct. In classic musicals, the characters sing and dance as themselves offstage, but assume the guise of new characters under the lights.
#I will hasten to him movie
In classic movie musicals, there is a definitive contrast between offstage singing (think Gene Kelly dancing with lampposts) and onstage singing (think the interstitial “Between The Devil” musical numbers in The Band Wagon ). Like Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon or Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain, A Prairie Home Companion is a backstage story, where offstage intrigue, drama, and hijinks often find their climax and conclusion onstage. Devoid of closure from their host, the company reminisces about the early days of radio and their time on the stage. It’s a brutal end for a tender relic of old-fashioned show business, but Garrison Keillor-who wrote the film’s screenplay in addition to playing himself-is determined not to acknowledge the show is over. The theater is set to be demolished and replaced with a parking garage directly after the final curtain. In A Prairie Home Companion, the company is gathered for an ending: the final broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion” at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. As he explained it, both movies played on one of his favorite themes : Hey we’ve got some old costumes up in the barn, let’s put on a show! In Nashville, the company is assembled to help start something-playing a campaign rally for a third-party presidential candidate. It is this quality that led Altman to see A Prairie Home Companion as Nashville’ s natural successor. Nashville, on the other hand, is a movie about performing-far from distracting from the action, music is the action. The fault was not necessarily in the music itself, but in the fact that the music seemed to be compensating for thin scripts and poor concepts. Other pseudo-musicals like 1979’s A Perfect Couple, 1980’s Popeye, and 1996’s Kansas City -which Altman counseled should be considered “a sort of jazz” in its entirety-worked less well. His 1975 film Nashville, largely considered his opus, boasts more songs than performers. Musicals occupy a small but important corner of Altman’s filmography.
In his Oscar speech, Altman said that he considered that his 60-year career had really been “one long film.” For its final act, he made a musical. – Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion (2006)
It is a tender meditation on music, memory and death that holds Altman’s final goodbye inside it like a fly in amber, preserved for all who will listen. But 15 years after its premiere, and Altman’s passing, A Prairie Home Companion remains his consummate farewell. A Prairie Home Companion would be his final film.Īt the time of the film’s premiere, critics questioned why Altman, whose career was characterized by expansive, genre-defying films, was attracted to a story about “A Prairie Home Companion.” It was, after all, a live radio variety show-a mode of entertainment that had its heyday in Altman’s childhood-that featured jingles for canned beans and songs that seem more at home at a church picnic than on the big screen. A Prairie Home Companion premiered in June of 2006, while he was in the midst of treatments for the leukemia that would claim his life in November of the same year. “By my calculation,” he says “I’ve got about 40 years left on it and I intend to use it!”ĭespite what he told the Academy that night, Altman knew he did not have 40 years left. Altman had undergone a heart transplant 10 years earlier, he explained, and because his donor heart was from a woman in her 30s, he felt that the award had come too early. He concluded his speech by assuring the audience that the award was a fluke anyway. He couldn’t remember all of their names, so instead, he thanked his doctor, Jodie Kaplan.
“I always thought this type of award meant that it was over,” he said, “ I was doing an interview for my new film that I just finished, A Prairie Home Companion, which will come out in the summer…And I realized that it’s not over.” Altman went on to thank the hundreds of cast and crew members who supported him over his 60-year career. When Robert Altman accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006, he didn’t want to talk about endings.
0 kommentar(er)
