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…

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…

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…

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…

Rewatching The Player, I actually find myself thinking about Chef, and specifically, what Robert Altman's film does better than Favreau's. Both are Hollywood satires made by men who felt they had been sleighted, but Chef takes a more naive approach where Favreau's stand-in is likable, charming, and talented, and it's the world around him which has failed. Comparatively, while Altman portrays the Hollywood executives of The Player as insufferable boobs, the artists they often crush are not depicted much better. Characters like Vincent D'Onofrio's screenwriter or Richard Grant's director are pretentious shits whose stories don't seem that good to begin with. It would have been easy for Altman, a man who had dealt with all manor of bullshit from Hollywood…