At the Movies II

“The Player” is too cool to be the ultimate Hollywood movie. Its insider jokes are largely fatuous, Altman’s outlaw persona never asserts itself, and by using that one-year-later device, the film sacrifices immediacy and its own “pitch.”

“The Player” doesn’t attack corporate Hollywood, it embraces it. The old Hollywood movies decried duplicity, this one enshrines it. We do see movie-making, albeit at a low level. The sound techniques are hollow because no one’s really saying anything, and the script is highly variable. The beautiful people are tonily superficial, the famous faces a colorless blur.

Altman digs no deeper than most. He just has more glitz to back him up, more successes to give us pause.

Good films are still being made, but “The Player” does not call us to any action. It’s reflexive and redundantly self-satisfied. “The Player” is about making a movie and not liking the movie you ended up making.

But I liked it.

BRAD S. BARNES

Lakewood