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,…

What is so brilliant about The Player is the way the story is set and displays the mythos of Hollywood while critiquing the business side of the film industry and hiding its own story in Hollywood conventions. On first glance you could take this picture as stated in the synopsis as a Hitchcockian murder mystery with a bunch of Hollywood insider jokes. And while that is true and you would certainly have to be a film connoisseur of sorts in order to understand some of these tidbits; the beauty in layers goes much more beyond than just that.

Almost like a painting on canvas with the murder and love story on the foreground it is in the background that cannot…

What Mullholland Dr would have been like directed by someone who's not David Lynch, basically.

On the one hand, I'm happy to have an Altman film I really like, but there's stuff that gets emphasized here that I just don't really have any interest in. The murder and Hollywood satire part are not really that interesting (and D'Orfino is actually bad. I know he's overacting and supposed to be playing a creep who would never make it, but he's still way too hammy for otherwise naturalistic material). What really interests me in this film is the idea of a person getting trapped within a piece of fiction and its rules. That's a genuinley interesting concept, and I wish it had…