everything you have heard about this movie is true.

best movie i've ever seen.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Altman's Brewster McCloud is somewhere between allegory and surreal, a whole trash can full of symbols,which are offered as untrue, with an urbane cynicism like Mephisto in Goethe's Faust. There's something inauthentic about everything, the color of falseness in our world, in our eyes, in our dreams. Altman is always exploring the inauthentic. There are so many levels to Brewster McCloud. I think we should begin that it's about innocence. Our hero is a pure innocent boy who has a guardian angel, and she guides him and protects him. The boy has a very pure aspiration. "through difficulty to the stars:" "Per aspera ad astra," as the Latin motto often reads. Like any good guardian angel, Brewster's keeps him from going astray. Central imagery is the fact that "Astrodome" means "dome of the stars," Of course, the name of the Astrodome refers to the Houston Space Center, but in the language of dream, it is very recognizably the Celestial Sphere(s), Heaven. This is all very good stuff. We also might find room for the Aeschylus symbol of a young man who put on wings his father made him and aspired to fly. Having flown too high, Aeschylus's wings melted and he crashed to Earth. Fortunately, within the gates of Surrealism, one can use symbols for unrelated purposes and never have to resolve the conflict, although it's likely that these Christian and Greek symbols aren't at all in conflict.Standing in Brewster's way are the police/guards, each of whom manifests, I suspect, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Gremlin (a car offered here for the value of its name), the vanity of the contact lenses, and the sloth of the morbidly obese guard waddling around, all making it clear that the forces against McCloud are evil, not in a grand way, but with a tongue in cheek, with an urbane wit, and an urbane doubt. They aren't terror but banality, a failure to hit the mark.The way these elements play out is tinny and false as we expect everyday life to be. There is no grand evil nor does innocence seem very heroic. Are we supposed to believe this is true, somehow expressing something? Is it only a mockery? Well, probably both, like the mock "suicide" scene staged with and for the dentist everyone knows as "Painless" in Altman's "M.A.S.H." I've not touched on the birds, but they make sense in the tradition of Greek epic and tragedy, that the fates speak through birds; somehow birds are closer to fate than we. And what connection does an angel have to do with birds? the pure freedom of the skies, I suppose, and angel's wings always have feathers, whereas the denizens of the dark realms usually have leathery wings.Our Lecturer is some kind of seer, a Tiresias, who expresses his sensitivity to the fates by his affinity to the birds. He is so fascinated with all things avian, he seems to be morphing into one of them.

Brewster McCloud was the kind of picture I could imagine having being written over many (count *many*) joints and after not getting a career going as an ornithologist (I might add, the screenwriter only had two or three other projects produced, and nowhere near as seen as this one is in comparison). It's as nutty as a Clark bar: a kid with the title name (Bud Cort, in an immediate precursor-type performance to his Harold in Harold and Maude as an awkward, shy outsider who has a some kind of desire behind his geeky exterior) is at the task of building wings so he can fly, and he builds it in the basement/boiler room of the Houstin Astrodome. Some mysterious woman played by Sally Kellerman is, I think, killing people that seem to end up really pestering Brewster, which include a craggy Mr. Burns figure (Stacy Keach, hilariously one-note), a narc, and a random dude with a chain. I'd guess she's the killer- there's a whole sub-plot, by the way, with a police investigation headed by Shaft (no, not talking about that one, Michael Murphy plays him here, that's right), who's more interested in the bird dung that keeps showing up on the deceased instead of regular police work.Meanwhile, Jennifer Salt gets off on the vibes of a half-nude Brewster doing chin-ups, Shelly Duvall with over-extended eye-lashes falls for Brewster one moment and then rats on him the next, and then there's still Kellerman doing her thing thwarting off, and...did I mention there's a professor/narrator who seems like a mental patient with a lot of facts about fowl? So much of this is hard to take, and towards the end it becomes very frustrating trying to put *any* sense to it (how is Duvall so good at evading the police, how is that one cop such a buffoon to read Captain America while on a stake-out, why does Jennifer Salt keep popping up and giving Brewster food/orgasms, and how much symbolic "ah, I'm a blonde angel" can we take from Kellerman?) But then again, why bother? Altman is after the sly humor of the quirky as opposed to real common sense, and it's in his dedication and intelligence in following through with these characters, no matter how strange or subtle or inexplicably charming or demented they are, that makes the film work up to the point that it does.And despite a sort of unsatisfying last twenty minutes with Brewster and some of the supporting characters (the whole sex angle is a little weak and too dated for me to buy), there's some experimentation for the director that would probably not come again. There's a car chase, for example, through the roads of Houston, and while it's not exciting on a Bullit type of level, it's fascinating to see when the sudden twists and turns pop up, unexpectedly (where did the little red car come from?), and there's even a remarkable slow-motion shot where, as part of a theme of the film, the cars fly above their intended plane. I also liked how Altman worked in an overly Felliniesque ending, as uncomfortable a catharsis it seems to be, with the Astrodome suddenly being flooded with carnival figures, and the main characters donned in costumes and wigs and such. Brewster McCloud is a funny bird, no pun intended, of a early 70s obscurity, a film that likely got a hundredth of the public attention that MASH got, but is probably just as strong in what it wants to deliver to its eclectic audience (albeit, personally, I think MASH is maybe Altman's most overrated). And it's probably the weirdest stoner movie that the director ever conceived, portentous cloud shots included!

A strange youth wants nothing more than to take wing in the Astrodome. He is hampered by a host of eccentric, weird characters that are avenged by his "real" guardian angel and her raven. While this film makes virtually no sense at all on a literal level, Brewster McCloud is a fairly inventive, wholly original, gigantic misfire from acclaimed director Robert Altman. Altman even said that of all his pictures this was his favorite. Why? I have to assume it is partly due to his complete control of the film. That, unfortunately, does not necessarily make for a good or even great film, and while I admire much of the inventiveness of this film - I do not crave to see the film over and over again. It made me laugh a few times, but subsequent viewings would lessen that laughter. Altman has a unique body of work to absorb, but he has never been one of my favorite directors. His stories always seem to blend to the point of mild confusion. His characters seem to be so unique as to be unrealistic. Brewster McCloud has all that. I rather enjoyed the narration by Rene Auberjonois as he intimated each character being akin to some species of bird. I also liked the formidable acting talents of Stacy Keach in a bizarre, hilarious role as a rich moneylender, Margaret Hamilton in an all too brief role(though Altman DOES cash in on her Wizard of Oz fame), Michael Murphy as a policeman, John Schuck as a beat cop, William Windom as some creepy political guy, and the beautiful talents of Sally Kellerman and Shelley Duvall. Bud Cort has a strange, almost fascinating screen presence. He also knows a bit about acting. Yet, with all this obvious talent in acting, directing, writing, etc..., Brewster McCloud for me was just too unique, too eccentric, too avant-garde if you like(or don't). It is Altman's movie all the way, and I resolutely commend him for making it his way and doing it his way, and being the only moving force - the will - of the film. Again, none of those things necessarily make this a great film.

Having read many tributes to the late Robert Altman, I was fascinated by one that mentioned Brewster McCloud was on YouTube. So I clicked the movie there and marveled at seeing Rene Auberjonois (whom I loved in the TV series "Benson") talking about birds and humans and then Margeret Hamilton singing the National Anthem as the credits roll but stopping to correct the key before she sings again with the credits starting again! Bud Cort is mesmerizing in the title role and Sally Kellerman is luminous as his guardian. Newcomer Shelley Duvall is appealing as Cort's sometime girlfriend but I'm really fascinated by Jennifer Salt's performance as a health store worker who delivers goods to Cort's place in the Astrodome and gets off just thinking of him while he does pull-ups in his underwear! Perhaps the funniest and sexiest performance in the movie. She and Auberjonois are the best parts in the film. So by all means, if you love Altman, watch Brewster McCloud and be stunned by the tragicomic ending!