Experiencing an emotional lower point in the last few days, I was looking for something different to try and jolt me back to life. Going through my usual process of selection, my eyes caught a glimpse of The Player, a movie that I had always heard about but never got around to sit down and watch, just like the rest of Robert Altman's work. Betting on its reputation of being smart and innovative, I decided to give it a shot. Did it do the trick? The short answer would be 'no'. Even so, I can see why this movie gets so much praise: it's not every day we see a production that takes a jab at its own industry, especially…

The Player is both brilliant satire of Hollywood and a impassioned love letter to movies. Robert Altman takes the sleazy nature of Hollywood and turns it into one of the finest neo-noirs. Crafting a world of greed and moral repression with visual mastery and a great script - written by Michael Tolkin, an adaptation of his novel of the same name - that has an affectionate knowledge of the language. Altman returns to studio filmmaking by taking good-natured stabs at it. While he is criticizing the factory style in which films are churned out, he is also embracing a long history of great movies that have been made under the one basic principle that Hollywood has lived by since the…

Take this for a scenario, a movie executive and his new love interest have a conversation at a secluded resort. The woman has recently lost her boyfriend in a killing because he was sending death-threatening postcards to the hot-shot exec who rejected this man's story pitch. Both men's situation escalated to boiling point and it got out of hand. On the couple's escapade, she asks what required elements are needed to market a film successfully. He responds with "suspense, laughter, violence, hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings." This is just one of the brilliantly clever moments in Altman's The Player which embraces Hollywood stereotypes by treating artists poorly and sacrificing quality for commercial success. This film is not only a…

Experiencing an emotional lower point in the last few days, I was looking for something different to try and jolt me back to life. Going through my usual process of selection, my eyes caught a glimpse of The Player, a movie that I had always heard about but never got around to sit down and watch, just like the rest of Robert Altman's work. Betting on its reputation of being smart and innovative, I decided to give it a shot. Did it do the trick? The short answer would be 'no'. Even so, I can see why this movie gets so much praise: it's not every day we see a production that takes a jab at its own industry, especially…