Emphasis On The "P" In The Acronym "R.I.P."

There's nothing quite like Thanksgiving to end a pretty ugly week of racial tensions in the media. Besides the post below regarding numbskull Mark Fuhrman's comments adding to the latest sad attempt by "The Juice" to profit off his ex-wife's death, we also got treated to Kramer going slightly postal at a comedy club and then making us further uncomfortable by trying to explain how he's somehow not a racist on Letterman. Oh, and in a slower media week, maybe somebody might have been a little more upset about what the typically asinine Michael Irvin had to say about the ancestry of a certain white athlete in Dallas.

I was thinking how we might need Rodney King to come out and ask for us to all get along again, the way a motion picture director would when dealing with a cast of out-of-line celebrities.

And that's when I woke up this morning, picked up the paper, and saw that the man who built a reputation getting the best of his large ensemble casts had died.

Anybody who watched this past year's Academy Awards telecast would likely remember that one of the night's bigger surprises (besides the show being trumped up as a celebration of how "courageous" Hollywood is every year right before naming a faux controversial piece of cinematic swill like "Crash" Best Picture) was Robert Altman accepting an honorary award and revealing that he had undergone a heart transplant years earlier.

It was sometime around the mid-90s (1996, I believe) when I discovered that video cassettes of older pictures were available for free rental at the public library. And I went through most of the classics quite quickly before becoming so consumed with taking in all of the older fare I'd heard so often but had never actually viewed. On one occasion, I watched all three of the "Godfather" films in a single day.

I don't really tend to lean toward any particular director as a "favorite," partly because there's too many good ones to choose from and partly because nobody can have that kind of remarkable consistency—the greatest directors can let us down on occasion, not with a particularly bad film, just a disappointment.

But going over the obits for Mr. Altman today, I was struck by just how many very enjoyable films he had made. Ask me my list of favorite directors yesterday, and I might've likely forgotten to include him. But from "M.A.S.H." to "Nashville" to "Short Cuts," his work always stood out in the singular way that you imagine any great artist's would: Only he could have pulled that off.

Of course, 1992's "The Player" remains my favorite of his. But just to make sure I've seen the entire scope of his beautiful career, I did the only thing I could think to do today and went out to rent his final film, "A Prairie Home Companion." I'm not especially fond of Garrison Kiellor, but with Altman at the helm, I'll trust that perhaps one last movie of his might make me believe that we can all still get along.

UPDATE: Okay, career gone for Michael Richards.