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Given Robert Altman’s fondness for working with ensemble casts, it comes as no surprise that his films often provide a shambolic cross-section of a particular institution or locale, whether the titular mobile army hospital of M*A*S*H, the indigenous country music scene in the great network narrative Nashville, or the intersecting lives of 20-odd Angelenos in 1993’s Short Cuts. For Short Cuts, Altman and co-screenwriter Frank Barhydt mashed together nine stories and a poem from “dirty realist” writer Raymond Carver, shifting their setting from Carver’s beloved Pacific Northwest to suburban Los Angeles—a place Altman clearly feels much more ambivalent about. Read More »