Touches You

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Fantastic!

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Robert Altman is one seriously unpredictable filmmaker. He can make light-hearted, comedy of the mainstream like Popeye and Dr. T and Women, but then out of left field, he gives you something like this. A masterful art film. His versatility is worshiped in the film industry. Watching this film, you can see his extraordinary talent. It's one the most carefully prepared and well edited thrillers I've ever seen. The story is very common to film, it's execution is what makes it so fresh and entertaining. The film drones with it's repetitious soundtrack. It cuts back and forth to symbolic images. The performances from Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spackek are abnormal, and so is the environment they live in. How it compares to his other works, I don't know. But, to those who are avid Art-house film-goers, or fans of the modern day Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, cannot miss out on seeing this.

Robert Altman's 3 WOMEN (1977) with Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek & Janice Rule, has remained my all-time favourite picture since I accidentally caught in on the Z-channel at 3 in the morning back when I was like 13... It remains Altman's least trademark work, filled with lots of non-sequitors, a very dream-like logic and structure, hints of surrealism, absurdism & devastating tragedy, one of the most original motion picture musical scores of all time (by Gerald Busby) and unquestionably Shelley Duvall's strongest, most moving and engaging performance of her entire career, it is also her single starring role... and the films ending segment, which ends in the strictly impressionistic, ambivalent surprise of Altman quietly 'pulling the rug out from underneath you', for my money perfectly compliments the rest of the film by slyly leaving everything you have just seen (and any of it's possible vague inflections about the human experience, and how and whatever any of the film intended to represent or comment on) completely and 100% up to your own personal interpretation... just as Donald Cammell's equally brilliant PERFORMANCE (1970) also succeeded in portraying and also shares practically the exact same deus-ex-machina of it's last final frames of film as does this largely unheralded, bona- fide Altman masterpiece, which has only managed to gain an incredible amount of momentum and word-of-mouth acceptance as the grand old dame of 1970's art house cinema of which it truly is.

Went into watching this movie without knowing a thing about it. Predicted more or less how it was going to end very early on. Did not find it funny, clever, or cute despite someone calling this a 'black comedy' there is nothing comedic about it, and I find it to be disgusting because it is a waste of time and has weird ugly looking women all throughout it whom I find to be very annoying to listen to talk and they have nothing good to say. This movie is rubbish. If you want to watch something equally as engrossing why not go to a home that has weird and whacky ugly men and women and listen to them talk- you might get just as much out of them if not more than you would from watching this piece of a crap film.

This is one of those pictures that offers viewers something to argue about ad infinitum, and everyone could be right. None can argue, however, about the quality of the performances given by Ms. Spacek and Ms. Duvall. I watched it for the first time last night, and read some of the user reviews today. I see the movie as a mural (there was a nagging use of murals painted on the bottom of swimming pools) that depicts the personality of three different characters common to the psychic development and desires of all women: that of being mothered and nurtured, that of being accepted socially and sexually, and that of being creative. A kind of Three Faces of Eve but not in one body and soul if you will. At the end, all of these desires are met by finding role reversals within the circle of three that satisfy their desires. If anything, the film also paints in the mural an unfavorable inset picture of the male, a barrier that a woman must face and overcome before achieving her completeness. This is a picture that shocks one into thinking, something Robert Altman movies usually do.