150 Word Review: 'Popeye' (1980)
Come sail away
Robert Altman's imaginative 1980 slapstick musical comedy Popeye was a Titanic-sized disaster, a Hollywood blockbuster that combined a beloved cartoon character with one of 70s cinema’s most slyly cynical directors.
Throw in hotshot Robin Williams—his first starring role—and you have a movie that didn't float. But watch it now: Popeye cruises; it's charming and silly. Altman respects cartoonist E.C. Segar's world of sailors, brutes, and broke cheeseburger aficionados. Singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson's quirky songs have only sweetened with time; they're catchy and sad and sung by actors who can't sing.
But this movie would capsize if it weren't for the balanced talents of Shelley Duvall as lanky, willful damsel-in-distress Olive Oyl, a human spring, wide-eyed and cheeky. Duvall pulls off a trick: she holds on to her humanity while playing a clown and upstages Williams in every scene. Six months earlier, she screamed for her life in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
I love it. Very underrated. Altman was truer to the funny pages than any filmmaker ever has been with this movie--and in the best possible sense. It's not on the same level as Three Women, California Split, Nashville, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, of course, but it's very good at what it does.
Quintet, however, was exactly the huge fucking bomb that people thought it was at the time.
It's just so hard for me to get past Altman's flat, dead camerawork (with the backs of actors' heads when they're talking, leaden cutting, and constant zooms in and out), in every one of his movies. I acknowledge that Nashville is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece — a truly magnificent achievement — but that's the only time his cloddish style has been bearable to me.