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,…

To end 2018 I decided I'd watch my first Robert Altman feature. He's a director you don't really hear much about in the popular discourse despite having quite an impressive resume and extensive list of accolades. I don't know if "The Player" would be considered the best entry point to his filmography, but I was very much impressed with his biting satire of the Hollywood machine.

I actually had heard about the opening shot of "The Player" and had maybe seen a snippet of it, but it's absolutely fantastic. Going from character to character it establishes everything you need to know about the environment of this story in a masterfully choreographed single take. Generally speaking when you have a film…