The Player is a Hollywood satire which, as all great satire does, looks less like satire today than it did when it was made.

Tim Robbins plays Griffin Mill, a big studio producer worried about being pushed out of the business by younger talent. He's been receiving death threats via postcards from a writer he snubbed at some indeterminate point in his career. When he thinks he's found a lead, he goes out to investigate and ends up killing a writer. He is forced to cover up his crime while maintaining his position at the studio and juggling his budding romance with—of all people—his victim's widow.

And for the most part, Griffin Mill is a pretty sympathetic guy. We all…

It's nice to see a film that plays with the usual Hollywood tropes yet at the same time expose something rather truthful about the way the system works, and suddenly the in-joke being presented hits you. Robert Altman, a director who always was searching for a manner to go against the norms amidst the studio influence gives a clear picture of what harm it does to the most valuable thing behind what forms what we come to view; the visions. Amazingly, The Player chooses never to head into the territory where it would highly offend anyone working within the business, but there's a uniqueness to the satire we're finding here that just allows it to stand out from other films…

Criterion Collection Spine #812

You really have to know what your doing to go full Meta!

The deeper I go down the Robert Altman rabbit whole, the better it gets. And is was great to listen to the Altman documentary right after seeing The Player, just to gain some prospective on where this filmmaking rebel was coming from with this poignant satire.

Altman is know for his large cast movies, but this film flips that concept on its head by delivering countless A list actors. But in The Player, they are mostly cameo appearances of themselves. Some of the celebrities that dropped by for a day of shooting included Cher, John Cusack, Bruce Willis, Anjelica Huston, Marlee Matlin, Malcolm McDowell,…

Robert Altman is a master that I just haven’t seen enough of; only a handful of his prodigious catalogue. Even with these few films, the one thing that I’ve been able to deduce that puts him in the lofty club auteur is that you can tell it’s an Altman film, but the film you’re watching bears no or little resemblance to others in his oeuvre.

I was introduced to Altman with Brewster McCloud by a friend who took me to see it at a rep theatre when I was a teen. It was completely new and refreshing, and really an intro class on how you could pull off sarcastic sociological commentary with the most bizarre of premises.

Then came California…

Probably my favorite film from Robert Altman, The Player is a film I never feel gets overwhelmed by a massive collection of characters with overlapping dialogue. My other favorite Altman is The Long Goodbye, so I think I just have a problem with Altman's most prominent stylistic choices. Altman, when he focuses on one individual lost in an environment, is far more compelling to me than throwing in a bunch of characters and letting the audience piece it all together.

The Player feels knowledgable about how the film industry works, and yet this seems like a version of the industry that had long since passed. If The Player was set in the 1950s, I feel like all the studio business…