Brewster McCloud
This week we are showing Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud (1970) on Wednesday, February 18th, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’ll start the show at 7:10! Now that the From Below has firmly entered our third year of programming and weekly screenings, your diligent curators spent a moment to tabulate which directors we’ve shown at least once a year thus far, with a mind to what film of theirs we would pick for their third annual visit to the Microcinema. Chief among those auteurs is Robert Altman, who has made an aestival appearance with Three Women and Popeye in years previous. I knew from the get-go that Brewster McCloud would be my pick for the next Altman extravaganza, but with the passing of Bud Cort, it only felt right to expedite McCloud to this week.
Even more than his most famous turn as the titular Harold in Hal Ashby’s cult classic, Bud Cort’s starring role in Brewster McCloud is perhaps the best display of the true depths of his weirdo charms and anticharms, as a boy living in a fallout shelter under the Houston Astrodome who dreams of flying, set against a backdrop of a string of bird-related murders that has authorities suspecting McCloud’s involvement. This film is pure, unfettered Altman: bizarre, cataclysmic, hilarious, and overwhelmed by dialogue and noise, it takes a ridiculous arrow straight to the inanities and excess of late 20th century America. For some, it may push over the edge of bad taste (in some ways, it may be the grossest movie we’ve shown in the From Below, measured in pure volume of bird shit), but for the true heads, it’s one of the best sources to tap of unadulterated Altman chaos.
Watching the skies, Charlie, Stefan, Stark