Load of rubbish!!

Absolutely Brilliant!

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

After a new born to a new audience with excellent "The Player" and "Short Cuts" and slip down with the weird and unfunny "Prét-à-Porter", the master of the independent cinema Robert Altman gets back with a minor but interesting work in "Kansas City". Here, he reveals the dangerous Kansas City of the 1930's with their corrupt politicians, scary mobsters and people involved with all this world without noticing the danger right ahead.In the 1930's the young and beautiful Blondie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) kidnaps Carolyn (Miranda Richardson) the wife of a powerful politician (Michael Murphy) who can help her to save her boyfriend Johnny (Dermot Mulroney), a little burglar who stole an important big shot in the crime world, and now he's going to be killed by another powerful mob figure, the gangster Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte). The frightened Carolyn is dragged away along with Blondie to several places in town, trying to get along with each other, which doesn't work quite well because of their different backgrounds. Blondie is addicted to the films of Jean Harlow and she keeps annoying her hostage all the way; while Carolyn is an addicted to opium that barely gets out of the house, suffering with her addiction. In the meantime the politician keeps dealing with the case, in a very discreet way to not ruin his future election that its getting ahead and because of his proximity with President Roosevelt. On the other part of town, Johnny has the chance to know more about what the real world of crime really is, listening to Seldom's menacing stories and to lots of jazz that is played in his captivity. Besides these two kidnaps there's a subplot concerning a girl who came to town to get an abortion and a political scandal involving a party which is buying votes to win the election using of deadly tactics. The same team of writers who signed "Short Cuts" tries to unite several characters that follow the same path in several situations having as link the jazz as musical background played in almost every scene. As I said, they tried to unite them but they end up confusing the public by dividing two situations, apparently disconnected, that will meet in the end, and until it get to the final result you keep wondering what's the reason for both kidnaps. When the two parts get together it all makes sense but before some answers appear many will have walked away of the movie because everything is slow, almost tedious. The perfect "Short Cuts" which tells the story of 23 characters crossing the way of each other in a chaotic Los Angeles, in a excellent tragicomedy of the real life, gets way better than "Kansas City" with their 6 main characters. On the other hand this confusion in dividing the film in two situations makes a intriguing film that makes the audience wants to know of what happens next.As favorable points, "Kansas City" has a great period reconstitution, the costumes of the 1930's, the old cars; the music (Altman worked the same musicians who appeared in his documentary "Jazz 34"); and a great performance by Harry Belafonte as the talking gangster who has an answer to everything. Michael Murphy surprises a lot in his short moments in which he appears; the other performances are not so interesting, sometimes they are very annoying, and that is the case of the main pair. Jennifer Jason Leigh's voice is tiring and very debauched for a dramatic film; Miranda Richardson has a very aloof character, a role that she would dominate better in the great "Falling Angels".Robert Altman made a good job despite not being too much impressive as his previous works. 8/10

The music is superb. The movie is so-so. The period sets are perfect and its just like being back in KC during the infamous Pendergast era. Altman made this movie as a paean to his hometown and the music that came out of it. One cannot divorce the music from the movie. Either you are a jazz fan or you're not. If you're not, you won't like this movie. Its that simple. If you are, you are really in for a treat. The film features all of the "new" stars in jazz from the mid-90's (James Carter and Craig Handy on saxes, Mark Whitfield on guitar, Geri Allen and Cyrus Chestnut on piano....the list goes on and on. They all play the legends of jazz that came out of Kansas City-people like Count Basie, Joe Williams, Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. A veritable treat for the in-the-know jazz fan but probably a bore for anyone else. Altman stays on the music longer than most directors would because this is a film about the music as much as it is about the plot. And here's the real irony. Movie buffs will say they wished Altman wouldn't have devoted so much time to the music and jazz buffs will say they wished Altman would have done away with the ridiculous, annoying plot and grating performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh and focused entirely on the music. How to please everyone? The end result is uneven but there's enough here to keep all parties interested.If any actor should be singled out, it should be Harry Belafonte. His turn as the underworld kingpin, Seldom Seen, is fantastic. He speaks in a low, gruff rasp but his dialogue is truly worth the effort to understand. When he goes off on the Marcus Garvey speech, its worth the price of admission. Of course, it helps to know who Marcus Garvey was. Jazz fans (and reggae fans, too) will get it. After all, this is a movie for them/us.

I am an unabashed admirer of the personal in film. I suppose cinematic personality can be expressed in a variety of ways, but I value it most when its from a filmmaker, and it affects the cinematic vocabulary. I like Altman. Yes, I like certain films of his: these stand on their own outside of the long term dialog I've had with him.But I like the dialog as well, that long languid experience of punctuated experiments in his worlds and then mine.What he does, where his core experiments are rooted is in the rhythm of how he puts his films together. Its unlike anything else that could be considered competently relevant in film. His interest is in the notion of discovered pace.To understand why this is so weird, and sometimes so unsettling, you have to understand that there are very strict conventions in the business about what viewers will accept in terms of the pace, arc and rhythm of a film. Editors and filmmakers learn these conventions either through understanding the theory, through intuition or experience, depending on their approach. Its very, very narrow, what these allow.Regular readers of my comment know I believe that TeeVee is one of the worst evils we face. It is because it forces this vocabulary to be ever more narrow, constriction the visual imagination of a whole planet.Altman is a sort of Moses in this environment, trying every escape he can imagine. He tries to let actors surprise the camaraman and editor. He tries strange overlaps in scenes. He tries all sorts of parallel narratives. He particularly likes to juggle several layers of the narrative at once with contradictory, even warring cadences.Here what he does is work with three rhythms. The first is the obvious one, jazz, and particularly the style originating in Kansas City.The style can be directly attributable to the type of political corruption that dominated the town, extreme even when compared to Chicago and St Louis. The corruption is based on a sort of lie that pretends to be the truth but is bent. You can see it here in the voting. In Chicago at this time there would be no pretense: dead people's ballots would simply appear in the ballot box without the show of hiring bodies to cast them. Blacks would simply be ignored at best without the church performing nominal help (and then lynching). (This church-influenced near-truth politics still dominates the town, even famously to the court system. You do not want a trial in Kansas City.)So we have the jazz playing, and influencing the action while political power and "helping" a 14 year old pregnant black girl are suspended. Its a particular trading of phrases that if you listen you can see reflected in the structure: particularly the twisted flash-forwards of the narrative arrangement.Then you have the characters of the two women, each with their own world-rhythms. The character played by Jason Leigh is typical of what she can do personality-wise. Here it actually matters because of the way she pushes the future with the way she shapes words with an aggressive mouth. There's much to say here in the story about how this is folded into a similar character-induced pacing devised by Jean Harlow, who Leigh's character emulates. Harlow was in fact from Kansas City and her style was self-consciously KC jazz- influenced.The other character is played by Miranda Richardson, who (unlike her sister) had at the time a reputation for stiff English types. Here she plays something like that, one of those third generation frontier types with corn aristocracy, now turned vapid from drugs. Its a pretty layered performance, every big as complex as Leigh's. She also has a sort of nonlinear time based on rewriting and scrambling.Its an amazing construction, a thrilling experiment. By design, it lacks the sort of pace you come to expect. That's the point. Anyone who complains that it doesn't do well pacewise, just doesn't get it and if they were in the movie, would be disemboweled and then shot by a bullet through your girlfriend.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I basically concur with sws-3 from Albany, though I don't give it a 10-star rating. 'Kansas City' is a period piece from Altman's childhood. Having said that, don't expect it to brim with nostalgia. The director's trademark gentle cynicism is very much in evidence. Of course there is no 'message' but the depiction of race relations is certainly of interest. The whole film is inspired by jazz and could even be viewed as a kind of visual jazz, (with some nasty wallpaper). The ensemble cast is wonderful. Some reviewers complained that the Jason Leigh and Richardson characters did not develop a rapport, but I disagree. People who have liked other Altman films should consider giving this one a chance.