Change Your Image
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Reviews
A Prairie Home Companion (2006)
GK's Hackneyed Death Wish / Fluff Piece
This is not a Robert Altman film. It's Garrison Keiller's vanity film--and he hired one of our most talented directors to make it look great.
The Altman skill carries the film. But the content is vacuous. The singing is bad. The plot devices hackneyed. (Angel of Death as a beautiful blonde--Come on!)
On the plus side, Meryl and Lily give beautifully nuanced performances, showing (not telling) the complex relationship between two singing sisters.
On the minus side, how many fake commercials do we have to listen to before they lose their cuteness value? One.
I have never been a fan of PHC or GK. I was hoping for Altman's gentle deconstruction of this dull weekly appeal to sentimentality. Instead, bumbling GK is glorified, even mystified.
The film looks like GK's death wish and in that sense, it's like watching a train wreck. The premise of last performance of the show, conjuring imagined enemies, sets up PHC as an embattled good cause. But PHC is NPR mainstream. No Texas mogul's gonna put it out of business.
God Wears My Underwear (2005)
Effective Surrealism
This short surrealistic work uses manipulated images and dance to evoke the "banal tragedy" of war---and how its effects cross cultural and national boundaries. I found that evocation very effective. There are certainly plenty of movies about Nazi Germany, and a fair number about Tibeten Buddhism, but God Wears My Underwear provides a new historical and emotional perspective that I found valuable and powerful.
Surrealism is an underutilized form these days, which is a shame, given the technological capacity we have now. The manipulated images in this film, mixed effectively with historical footage, are an example of of the possibilities, within a short narrative work.
I hope to see more work by Streit and McCain.