If Monty Python’s “Summarize Proust Competition” had been real, it would be a cakewalk (“A man reminisces a lot, goes to a party, and decides to write the book you’re reading”). A far harder version would take aim at a much shorter book: Chandler’s The Big Sleep.
Robert Altman strikes again. This will be the last one for a while, I promise.
As in his previous Song for a Sunday entries McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Popeye, Altman’s neo-noir The Long Goodbye leans so heavily on its idiosyncratic score for mood and meaning(s) that it’s hard to imagine the film without it.