If you enjoy listening to Prarie Home Companion on NPR, this movie is a MUST! Meryl Streep & Lilly Tomlin are amazing. In fact, all the "high profile" actors are really good in the movie (i.e: Virginia Madson, Kevin Klein, Woody Harrelson). I'm not a Lindsey Lohan fan, but she is exceptional & her performance at the end of the movie is nothing short of show stopping, incedible!!!
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Simply wonderful
Added 11/21/2009
The pacing, the dry humor, the music, and the cast all make this a movie I've now seen three times, rather than the usual one time. I've given it as a gift to family and friends. No one has been disappointed. I've had two 'rainy day' movies (Out of Africa and The English Patient), and now I have a third.
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Wow that was bad.
Added 6/6/2009
How can so many talented people make a movie this bad? Given all of the positive reviews it had received, I was really looking forward to seeing this film. What a waste of time! It tries to be some deep meditation on death and the passage of time but what it succeeds in doing is drain all of the charm from the Prairie Home Companion radio show. All of the actors are playing caricatures but Kevin Klein takes home the ham for over-acting. On top of that, the performances were so loose that at times I thought Altman turned on the camera, threw out the script, and just let the actors goof off. If you like Garrison Keillor, buy his audio recordings of the real PHC. If you like Robert Altman, buy MASH or Nashville or Gosford Park. Just stay away from this muddled mess.
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Robert Altman's final work!!!
Added 3/2/2009
This was the final film Robert Altman directed!!! Like usual it has a large ensemble cast!!! R.I.P. Robert Altman,we'll miss ya,your were a ground breaking director!!!
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A style that works better over radio
Added 1/25/2009
I watched this partly out of an impulse to revisit my Minnesota roots. But I guess everyone carries around their personal vision of where they grew up, and it won't necessarily coincide with someone else's. I didn't see much Minnesota in this film - GK is still very much GK, and his humor sometimes hits me right, sometimes not so much.
I think what I liked best about this movie was the singing. All of the singers were truly excellent. I had no idea Meryl Streep could sing so well and so expressively. Or that GK could, for that matter. He has an understated and relaxed style, but is a warm, solid bass, and seems to really enjoy their signature genres - bluegrass, gospel, folksy satire - which in fact I do too.
Streep's ability to imitate accents is legendary, but if she was trying to sound Minnesotan, she overshot her mark this time - her "meenly" for "mainly" was quite off. And I found her portrayal of a wishy-washy mom less than inspiring, though I'm something of a Streep fan. Lindsay Lohan did a better job on the rebellious suicidal daughter, which I enjoyed more once I stopped being distracted by her too-thick and prominent eyebrow job. Her singing was also top notch. I think Lily Tomlin provided some of the best acting in the whole picture.
Guy Noir was supposed to play a pathetic detective, and Kline's performance was admirable, but I found the character itself weakly conceived and underdeveloped. The "Angel" also set off a lot of ambivalence in me. The characters in this film tend to hover between stereotype and bumbling humanity, which can be charming, but in my view the combination fell short in several instances.
The opening with the risqué jokes - which did make me laugh out loud - made me wonder if it was setting the tone for the whole movie. The answer is partly yes. I think GK got some kind of exhibitionist thrill out of appearing in his shorts in one scene.
One of the lines that made me feel I was finally seeing through to the real Garrison Keillor was his reply upon being asked what he planned to do now that his show was being forcibly terminated. He deadpanned, "I want a job where I don't have to talk at all." expressing, I guess, his weariness at constantly trying to come up with a smooth clever retort to everything. The movie overall seemed to ooze with opportunistic cynicism. I couldn't see where it was leading beyond a feeling of being fed up with everything.
I started watching the movie on my pc, but stopped in the middle planning to finish it later. The software packaged with the DVD failed completely when I tried to find my original place with fast forward, and the movie wouldn't open with my usual DVD software either, so I ended up taking it to a library to finish on a DVD player, which we don't have at home. I could view the rest of the movie OK, but then was unable to access the "Extras" at the end, since that part is formatted only for pc's. At that point I didn't feel like trying it on yet another machine and just let those go. So beware of possible technical problems if you plan to watch this on a computer.
If you're a GK or APHC fan, do by all means see this movie. I did enjoy it overall. Others will probably be hit or miss. It does have certain psychological interest if the prospect of analyzing GK and GK types in further depth intrigues you.
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