Abbigail Bush
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Aneesa Wardle
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Ariella Broughton
It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.
Isbel
A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
rdoyle29
Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) works at a spa for elderly folks. Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek) is a new employee that Millie is assigned to show the ropes. Pinky is childlike and naive and almost instantly becomes completely enamored with MIllie. She moves in with her and slowly starts to become her. Millie is extremely talkative and organizes her life around what she reads in women's magazines. She talks to everyone constantly, but most of them are never listening, and those that do openly ridicule her. Altman is clearly very inspired by "Persona", so much so that, like that film, the action here is halted by a violent action and the entire film is restructured from that point on. The third titular woman is Willie Hart (Janice Rule), the pregnant wife of the man who owns the building they live in. She is an artist who paints murals in various places including the pool at the apartment complex. She almost never speaks, but is obviously aware that her husband is a drunken philanderer. There's another climactic scene that splits the film and rearranges the three into a unit that seems to complete these three fragmented personalities. Altman said this film came to him in a dream and it certainly feels like a dream. It has an internal logic that works on its own terms, and I personally think it's one of his better films. Duvall and Spacek have never been better.
tcmaniac-258-559153
The two main characters, both named Mildred have emigrated from Texas to a small dusty Californian town off the highway that could pass for Texas -- the younger Mildred remarks, "Sure does look like Texas". The attention- seeking, loquacious Mildred #1, alias "Millie" (Shelley Duvall) struts around like a yellow canary on stage reminding me of Norma Desmond from Sunset Blvd with the same lack of self awareness. Obviously imitating what she's sees in the glamor magazines she reads. The clumsy naive Mildred #2, alias "Pinky" (Sissy Spacek) who's even more clueless mistakes Millie's bravado as confidence immediately becoming her sycophant says she is "the most perfect person I've met" until an unexpected turn of events challenges their fan-idol relationship and their identities. It is a final crisis that resolves their "identity crisis" in the end involving a third women, Willie (Janice Rule), an artist that paints a mural with groupings of reptilian anthropomorphic beasts that include a pregnant female (like herself) and an alpha male standing erect with his huge "cock" (maybe blurred in some copies) which I presume represents her cock sure husband and possibly lover to the pair of Mildreds. This very surreal film some what of a black tragicomedy (if you can force it into a genre at all) evolved from a dream director, Robert Altman had, so don't expect a nice neat traditional Hollywood ending. I loved the film! One of his best IMO. It explores the female psyche so well, its hard for me to believe a male developed this from his own dream. The film is also a time capsule from the 70s. Millie loves the color yellow, drives a "French" mustard colored Pinto ( not to be confused with English mustard, she corrects the cops as they look for her stolen car) and has an apartment decorated in a combination of slick mod and lacy kitschy furnishing, all in yellow. Lots of double knit halters and peasant blouses fill her closet, all in yellow, of course. This cult classic is worth viewing just for the trip back to the groovy years. Would someone please comment about the reptilian art? Who was actual the artist?
gavin6942
Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek) is an awkward adolescent who starts work at a spa in the California desert. She becomes overly attached to fellow spa attendant, Millie (Shelley Duvall), when she becomes Millie's room-mate.Roger Ebert named this the best film of 1977, but despite the praise, for twenty-seven years, the film was unavailable on home video. Thank you, Criterion, for finding these lost gems and giving them the proper treatment they deserve! What we actually have are two women, both named Mildred (though neither goes by it). Yes, there is a third, but the relationship between Pinky and Millie is the core here. And it is odd. Not only are these two actresses very unconventional in appearance, but they are just so strange. While Robert Altman deserves a great deal of credit, the real stars of this production are Spacek and Duvall, who transformed this from a script into a film.
gudpaljoey-677-715384
This is one of those pictures that offers viewers something to argue about ad infinitum, and everyone could be right. None can argue, however, about the quality of the performances given by Ms. Spacek and Ms. Duvall. I watched it for the first time last night, and read some of the user reviews today. I see the movie as a mural (there was a nagging use of murals painted on the bottom of swimming pools) that depicts the personality of three different characters common to the psychic development and desires of all women: that of being mothered and nurtured, that of being accepted socially and sexually, and that of being creative. A kind of Three Faces of Eve but not in one body and soul if you will. At the end, all of these desires are met by finding role reversals within the circle of three that satisfy their desires. If anything, the film also paints in the mural an unfavorable inset picture of the male, a barrier that a woman must face and overcome before achieving her completeness. This is a picture that shocks one into thinking, something Robert Altman movies usually do.