Santa Monica Press | 192 pages | $39.95
By JAMES PARKER | December 3, 2007
The ’60s — if you weren’t there, we’re gonna make you remember them. Isn’t that what they say? Or maybe it’s: The ’60s — if you’ve never remembered them, then you must not have (not) been there. Or: the ’60s — forgive me if I don’t remember you, but I’m not “all there.”
At any rate, it was quite a decade, apparently, and looking through Robert Altman’s beautiful photo book The Sixties I find myself thinking, as I usually do when looking at photos of the ’60s, “Christ. . . . Free love.” Earth mamas and papas feeling groovy on the commune. The politicization of taking your clothes off was a masterstroke for which ’60s ideologues have, I feel, been given insufficient credit. Well, I’m being flippant, of course. But I’d be doing you, the gift-book buyer, a disservice if I neglected to convey the grubby, funky eroticism of Altman’s black-and-white photographs. Even the shots of those damn hippie radicals doing their endless noisy pig-confronting are redolent with a kind of libidinous health. Many of these images originally appeared in Rolling Stone, so I suppose we can excuse the appearance of RS editor and mini-mogul Jann Wenner within Altman’s pages. He’s not half as good-looking as the rest of them, though.
Related:
Robert Altman, Prairie state, Heart Land, More 
- Robert Altman
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I never listened to more than a few minutes of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion .
- Heart Land
One of the highlights of this year’s Oscar ceremony was the Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed on the Academy’s greatest director and biggest pain in the ass, Robert Altman.
- No fooling
Congratulations, Robert Altman.
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Here’s a subject that really could have used a Stanley Kubrick or a John Frankenheimer or a Robert Altman. But are there any great cinematic satirists left, auteurs with the knack for black comedy and cold-blooded irony?
- Feel-bad cinema
This critic's been carping for decades about feel-good cinema, how lousy it makes me feel, and this year I got the misery I begged for.
- Sundance kids?
Phooey on the narrative-film judges at Austin’s 13th South by Southwest Film Festival for bestowing awards on suffocatingly conventional movies.
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It’s not likely, but Judd Apatow’s pitch for Knocked Up might have sounded something like this.
- Seven heaven
Who are the world’s greatest living narrative filmmakers, what I call the Magnificent Seven?
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Hollywood came to Boston last week.
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Look your children in the eye, globetrotter, and tell them the truth: the Golden Age of Air Travel is over.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Robert Altman, Jann Wenner
