Prairie Home Companion at the Heights

[dreamshark]

If there was ever a movie meant to be seen at the Heights Theater, this is it. All warm and nostalgic and clearly intended to be shown on a screen with an old-fashioned curtain that opens and closes. Richard and I loved it, thorintatge was not so impressed. If you're a fan of either PHC or Robert Altman you don't want to miss it. Despite the famous actors and the script and the backstage shenanigans, it somehow works perfectly as a concert film of Prairie Home Companion. An amazing blend of pure artifice with actual cast and crew doing what they really do every week. It's fun to see the amazing sound effects guy actually doing his famous sound effects, and GK smoothly ad-libbing his way through the dropped script, as you know he does from time to time if you are a long-time fan. Spinning off GK's regular characters into individual people was a clever idea with mixed results. Dusty and Lefty were a hoot; Guy Noir didn't really work all that well. I was okay with the Angel of Death concept, but I think the show would have worked just as well without any of the magical realism bits. The heart of the movie was the Johnson family. The best scenes were the ones with Kiellor and Streep together, esp. the duct tape scene.

Hmmm. Artifice intermixed with reality. Is this post-modernism again? If only Barb were on LJ.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I have never liked Guy Noir.

K.