So back in college, for reasons I forget, we rented a copy of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, this sprawling thing about a whole bunch of characters in LA who interact with each other in a bunch of peripheral ways while doing not a whole lot of anything.

I hated it, and have refused to watch anything by Altman since. But here we are, with Altman’s Nashville, a sprawling thing about a whole bunch of characters in 1975 Nashville who interact with each other in a bunch of peripheral ways while doing not a whole lot of anything but oh btw ps there’s an hour of country music singing over the course of this movie. It’s like everything I hated about Short Cuts except so much worse.

But… I’m older now and plus my standards for what it takes for a movie to be “boring” have been totally rewritten over the course of this project, so it’s possible that maybe I’d actually like this movie, right?

Enh, not exactly. So what I’ll say is, I can appreciate some things about it. I do like how each character is drawn as a fully realized person not through any big scenes or dramatic speeches, but just through their small actions over the course of a bunch of scenes. I do like how it’s a sort of portrait of its time and place (which btw, man, cars in 1975 sucked a lot). I think, in short, I’m a lot more open to Altman’s thing than I was twenty years ago.

But at the end of the day, I give zero shits about the world of country music, and have no desire at all to hear so goddamn much of it. Strip out all the singing, and I might have actually liked this, but as is, it’s just too damn country.