the audience applauded

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Blistering performances.

Good gawd, that's Margaret Hamilton, trying to sing the Star Spangled Banner at the opening... she keeps stopping and starting, and changing octave, and key. doesn't end well for her here, but they do give her a Wizard of Oz salute. Brewster (Bud Cort, from Harold and Maude) lives under the Astrodome, and just wants to fly. He had been a driver for a wacky old crazy rich guy. its silly, its fun. so irreverant. Sally Kellerman driving a red Gremlin. Rene Auberjonois, Shelley Duvall, John Schuck, probably best known for MacMillan and Wife. Michael Murphy is Detective Shaft, but he doesn't really play much of a part in this. The story is all over the place, but we follow Brewster around when he meets up with Suzanne (Duvall). and Louise (Kellerman). Zany. Fun. a caper. will Brewster ever get to fly? and what an ending. took a minute to figure out what was going on. Directed by Robert Altman (M*A*S*H). If you like zany, offbeat films, then this one is for you!

Altman's Brewster McCloud is somewhere between allegory and surreal, a whole trash can full of symbols,which are offered as untrue, with an urbane cynicism like Mephisto in Goethe's Faust. There's something inauthentic about everything, the color of falseness in our world, in our eyes, in our dreams. Altman is always exploring the inauthentic. There are so many levels to Brewster McCloud. I think we should begin that it's about innocence. Our hero is a pure innocent boy who has a guardian angel, and she guides him and protects him. The boy has a very pure aspiration. "through difficulty to the stars:" "Per aspera ad astra," as the Latin motto often reads. Like any good guardian angel, Brewster's keeps him from going astray. Central imagery is the fact that "Astrodome" means "dome of the stars," Of course, the name of the Astrodome refers to the Houston Space Center, but in the language of dream, it is very recognizably the Celestial Sphere(s), Heaven. This is all very good stuff. We also might find room for the Aeschylus symbol of a young man who put on wings his father made him and aspired to fly. Having flown too high, Aeschylus's wings melted and he crashed to Earth. Fortunately, within the gates of Surrealism, one can use symbols for unrelated purposes and never have to resolve the conflict, although it's likely that these Christian and Greek symbols aren't at all in conflict.Standing in Brewster's way are the police/guards, each of whom manifests, I suspect, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Gremlin (a car offered here for the value of its name), the vanity of the contact lenses, and the sloth of the morbidly obese guard waddling around, all making it clear that the forces against McCloud are evil, not in a grand way, but with a tongue in cheek, with an urbane wit, and an urbane doubt. They aren't terror but banality, a failure to hit the mark.The way these elements play out is tinny and false as we expect everyday life to be. There is no grand evil nor does innocence seem very heroic. Are we supposed to believe this is true, somehow expressing something? Is it only a mockery? Well, probably both, like the mock "suicide" scene staged with and for the dentist everyone knows as "Painless" in Altman's "M.A.S.H." I've not touched on the birds, but they make sense in the tradition of Greek epic and tragedy, that the fates speak through birds; somehow birds are closer to fate than we. And what connection does an angel have to do with birds? the pure freedom of the skies, I suppose, and angel's wings always have feathers, whereas the denizens of the dark realms usually have leathery wings.Our Lecturer is some kind of seer, a Tiresias, who expresses his sensitivity to the fates by his affinity to the birds. He is so fascinated with all things avian, he seems to be morphing into one of them.

This is one of my Top 10 Movies! It was when I saw it and it still is. It is the story of Sally Kellerman teaching Bud Cort how to fly in the Houston Astrodome. The humor is incredible, probably the best piece is when the servant tries to describe how tall a person was to a detective. The juxtaposition of the participants positions and the spoken words make it memorably funny. And when Rene A. starts out as a person and slowly evolves into a bird is just a wonderful thing to watch and a great acting feat. One of Robert Altman's best, it is a master of comedy and staging. I recommend this movie highly and I wish that it was available on DVD. I would buy it tomorrow.

You can tell this movie is from the early 70s from a mile away. Experimental, cynical, satirical, and overtly left-wing: cops are dumb, Capitalism stinks, and subtle preaching against anti-Communism and racism being scattered all over. Actually, to be fair, considering when it was made – and by whom (Altman is one of those deluded leftists) – it isn't even that political or critical of (Western) society.The movie has rather wild, quick editing, which aids the timing of the gags – of which quite a few are funny. The unpredictability and zaniness of the fast-paced and fun first half unfortunately is followed by a weaker second half, which gets bogged down in weak/unfunny resolutions (like Murphy committing suicide – what was that???). Even the very funny bird-dropping gags started to wear a bit thin. Toward the end, there is even a car-chase in which Duvall – for some strange reason – decides to have a cat-and-mouse game with the cops. This was stupid. Even dumber was Duvall suddenly informing the police of Cort. The obligatory (for this movie) end-of-movie flying sequence looks pretty good, but ultimately only the first half remains in good memory.I consider Altman to be one of the best directors of all time, in spite of him being a silly little hypocritical leftist. He has made a number of crappy movies, but there are also some that are terrific, like "3 Women", "Images", "M*A*S*H", "Vincent & Theo", and even "Short Cuts". "B.M." belongs to neither category. Overall, it's solid.