Hello, my name's Justin the Kluer, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today, we're going to be talking about anti-Hollywood himself, Robert Altman.

Hell yeah, the Maverick, Popeye himself.

It's weird that the Maverick is what he's described as everywhere. Like you cannot find any article without someone going, this Maverick director, Altman, just doing it his own way. And so now we're going to do the revisionist take, right? We're going to say he's not. Yeah, he's a studio hack. Yeah, the whole time. Altman is a director that everywhere I look, Altman seems to be the director that people go,

I want to explore his entire filmography.

Really?

That's not the perception I get.

No?

What I hear is people saying, half of them are great, but the other half, you better stay away from those.

And were you a big Altman fan?

Oh, yeah, I'm an Altman fan, but I have to say that I have a somewhat skewed perspective on Altman, because I feel like I've seen most or perhaps all of the ones that are considered good or great, and I've seen only a couple of the bad ones. So I, like, I think he's great. I think he's made at least two movies that I consider among the very best ever made, Nashville and

McCabe and Mrs. Miller. That was a problem that I had when I started doing research for this podcast, is that I looked at his filmography and I went, oh, man, I've seen almost all of the good ones, but there's all these other movies that I haven't seen. Yeah. And about like halfway through that list, I was like, huh, no, I'm good. I get it. So you didn't watch Quintat. I did not watch

quintet. The, uh, I was like, huh, no, I'm good. I get it. So you didn't watch Quintet. I did not watch Quintet.

Which for a long time, my parents said was the worst movie they'd ever seen. Did they see it in theaters? Yes, they did. Were they like, you were conceived during a screening of Quintet and we feel... Lord, I hope not.

Perhaps they were so bored.

I mean, Quintet came out ten years before I was born, so probably not.

Well, your probably not.

Well, your lost brother, Bill Sloane.

One thing about Altman that I think is perhaps Jermaine is that he was often considered this kind of countercultural director, this kind of rambunctious spirit.

But he was also a late bloomer.

Yeah.

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