I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Purely Joyful Movie!

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

When he recorded the incident with a rigorous attitude and turned it into a film work with complex emotions, as a director, Robert Altman's powerful control ability was vividly displayed in the film. The script is rigorous and solid, and the scene scheduling is superb and smooth. When the authorities hide themselves behind the propaganda, the ordinary people have long been forgotten by the mainstream, leaving a noisy world in the middle. Every time when the film is about to enter the cynical, the appropriate music is reminding the audience that the world is more complex than you thought.

My rendezvous with "Nashville" goes back to seven years ago, I could get any movie I wanted but "Nashville" resisted. I needed to see the fifth Best Picture nominee of 1975, this very movie Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael raved about, that topped both Ebert and Siskel's annual top ten, this American Film Institute's Top 100 entry that was a total mystery to me.It took seven years but better late than never… At first, I didn't get what was so brilliant about it but so many story lines and only one viewing? I saw it again. And then, I went like "oh, what the heck", a third time won't hurt. Three times in less than four days, could have been four or five times, as many as the stars in the American flag, that's how good it is. This is one flew over a cuckoo's nest you don't recover from, and the more ordinary people and situations are, the more extraordinary the journey is. Altman should be damned… if he wasn't such a genius.The film spans a period of five days during a country-music festival, coinciding with some populist politician's party rally, this is enough to have a panoramic view across the lives of dozens of characters who, through their considerable differences, reach ever possible dimension of the American spirit of 1975, and in such a way that I guess even a non-American can enjoy it. Well, there's me at least.So, what is "Nashville"? Simply, the Mecca of country music, the reason why everybody came in the first place and were reunited by the end.There are dozens of them but there's no small part in the sense that they're all equally small in the scale of the significance of music, the common thread, the real star. Some sing, some wish they could, some manage or look for singers, some screw or get screwed by them… or just pop up and aimlessly wander, like in real life, no one crosses your path who should necessarily has a significance.I wonder to which extent these fascinating hazards were part of Joan Tewkesbury's script or improvised by the actors… the same way they wrote their own songs.And not any songs, country songs… this is crucial because country music isn't just deeply rooted in American tradition, it is also the most cinematic of all forms of music: it tells stories.I can perhaps tell you the name of four or five country singers but I know a great deal about the way country music affects me, because any song I hear finds a powerful echo in my own memories. It is like this scene from "The Simpsons" where Homer leaves the house after an argument and hears Lurleen Lumpkin singing "Your wife doesn't understand you but I do". You listen to country music because you feel like 'it' has listened to you in the first place.Just compare the upbeat patriotic starting song from Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) "we must have done something right to last 200 years" with the neutral political slogans the loudspeaker keep on hammering all day, which one will reach the hearts first? Compare the obnoxiousness of the character played by Keith Carradine who seemed to have gotten half the female cast on his bed with the melancholic tune of his "I'm Easy" you can't even tell whether he has pride or contempt toward himself, but the gaze of Lilly Tomlin while listening to him says everything.Music is like the only way to arouse genuine emotions, in another powerful scene, a wannabe singer (Glew Welels) of mediocre talent gets booed, she can only indulge to a striptease to provoke the cheers. In another scene, a father doesn't even have the patience to listen to his deaf son's story as if silence was the antithesis of communication, and music its apotheosis.Many people communicate, others don't… some meet, others don't… I remember a girl in high school, we never talked together, never went in the same class, but for some reason, we always met in some place or another. When it became obviously repetitive, we smiled at each other; like a private joke. Just like in "Nashville", the more we meet these people, the more we care for them, as we care for ourselves.Only the New Hollywood period could have made this gem possible, a time where America was still mourning an innocence and where the baby-boomers like today's millennials (count me among them) were cherishing their childhood, a time without the Vietnam War, incarnated by a Wizard-of-Oz-like childhood, Kennedy's dashing smile, the very American Pie Don McLean said bye-bye to.And this end-of-an-era is magnificently captured by the performance of Roney Blakely (Oscar-nominated along with Tolmin) as a fragile and emotionally vulnerable country singer named Barbara Jean. She's a sweet and delicate flower with a ticking bomb of a heart, she faints at her arrival, in her first representation, she interrupts her songs to mumble about her childhood until her husband (Allen Garfield) takes her away, simply overwhelmed, and easily upset like a part of America is.But there's room for every possible identification: capitalists, disillusioned soldiers, drifters, lunatic, has-beens, romantics and losers, this is a microcosm of America, all in characters and emotions, for the sake of laughs, anger, tears, frustration, the spirit of a country in a nutshell and its heart is Barbara Jean, whose "Idaho Home" song awakened again that symptomatic feeling of millennials: being nostalgic over eras we didn't live.And if I could keep one image from these 240 minutes, I'd keep the sight of the American flag gently rippling under the wind while Barbara Jean sings "we were young then, we were together. We could bear floods and fire and bad weather", hell, how can I seriously write a thousand-word review when this image alone speaks for a thousand words.

I went to see this film while in grad school. Three of us went together, but could only get separate seats otherwise we would have left after an hour. While being bored to death, I kept wondering if I was the only one. Suddenly a man jumped up and screamed " I cannot take any more of this F**king sh*t" and ran up the aisle of the theater. The audience applauded so I have to guess they thought it was awful as well.

Robert Altman's insightful dissection about Nashville, the cradle of American country music, astutely captures the zeitgeist of 1970s and deploys a kaleidoscope of motley characters. A red hot country superstar (Blakley) who is plagued by her feeble health condition and the straining relationship with her agent-husband (Garfield), who has to cater to another country diva (Black) who comes to supplant his ailing wife for a public concert; a pompous and loudmouth BBC journalist (Chaplin) who comes to shoot a documentary about Nashville; an uprising folk trio TOM, MARY & BILL (Carradine, Raines, Nicholls) with their chauffeur (Arkin) while Tom is the sleaze-bag philanderer and the married Mary and Bill undergo some connubial crisis; A housewife and gospel singer (Tomlin) whose husband (Beatty) is an agent who tenaciously introduces a politician lobbyist (Murphy) to the music moguls in order to get some big names to sing publicly for the presidential candidate and his main target is a honorific but over-the-hill country star (Gibson) with an astringent wife (Baxley) and an unworldly son (Peel), and fellow musicians (Brown, for example) as wellThere is also a glut of ordinary people, two young singers-wanna-be, one is a runaway wife (Harris) seeking for an opportunity to sing in front of a large audience, another is a southern beauty (Welles) who optionally chooses to ignore her unmusical voice and insists on carrying her pipe dream at all hazards (a striptease in a local bar is just the beginning for the poor dim gal) albeit the eloquent persuasion from her friend (DoQui); two young lad, one is a reticent pfd. soldier (Scott) who is obsessed with Blakley, the other one is a self-claimed musician (Hayward) totes his guitar box where conceals a dangerous weapon will later trigger the awesome finale; the last pair is a local old man (Wynn) and his vampy niece (Duvall), who flirts with every young man she meets including a weirdo-looking tricycle rider (Goldblum), never care too much about her dying auntie in the hospital.To engineer and channel a huge cast like this is Altman's strongest suit, the assemblage of hustle and bustle inducts audiences into a multivalent prism which bravely refracts an ideological society status, with whimsical banters abound and of course the music renditions. Despite that I have no honky-tonk root and my upbringing is immune to the genre, and from a standpoint of now, its traditional sense of worth oozing from the songs is grating and behind the times, the live-performances never cease to purvey vim and vigor to be appreciated. Notably from Blakley and Black, not to mention Carradine's Oscar enthroned folksy I'M EASY, magnificently stipulates the high bar of music's sex appeal. Performance wise, Oscar-nominated Blakley is also in the top-tier, whose sensitivity is so authentic and whose aftermath could not be more shocking (god bless Loretta Lynn); Tomlin (owns her Oscar nomination simply by her gaze towards Carradine during his solo show), Chaplin (so obnoxious is the character but she is superb in presenting her into a wacky laughing-stock) and Wynn (savings the gratuitous nude scene, she manages to squeeze a veritable sense of mettle out of her levity and shallowness) are all great in their respective terrains; Gibson and Garfield are my picks for male counterpart, but it is indeed a female's spectacle. I cannot say it is my favorite Altman's work (GOSFORD PARK 2001, 9/10 still holds the slot), but no doubt it is a monumental achievement at its time and in Altman's career path, the cogent political messages are being propagated from stem to stern, obviously it has a broader insinuation which even today one can hardly pass over.