Blake Peterson I feel bad for brilliant directors. They make one movie that isn't as great as their many other masterpieces and BAM! — it's thrown into the trash heap, classified as a miserable pile of dookie. Some (critics) like to designate a less successful film as an interesting mess; what they really mean, though, is that they can't decide if they liked the film or not — but one thing is for sure: it wasn't as good as (insert Oscar adored movie from a multiple-award winning director here). It's unavoidable — everyone wants an Orson Welles to have a career full of Citizen Kanes, nothing experimental, nothing tricky. Sigh. People are human, you know. It's hard to make a masterpiece! As an admirer of Robert Altman's work (Nashville, Short Cuts), even the slightest of a failure remains watchable to me. Is it the overlapping dialogue? The devastatingly star-studded casts? The magnificent giganticness of the plot, the characters, the script? Not all of Altman's films are equally chatty — he is capable of going gloomy and dry (Thieves Like Us, The Long Goodbye) — but when he wants to go all out he goes all out. The Player, a Hollywood satire, featured nearly sixty celebrities making random cameos for the sake of making a cameo. Nashville had twenty-four main characters, all of them somehow as well-characterized as the last. Ready to Wear, a fashion week parody, comes directly after The Player and Short Cuts — Altman's biggest successes of the 1990s — and it continues the trend of a large cast and cheerfully rambling dialogue. But arriving in the shadow of these terror twins can only be described as a sort of curse. Three is hardly a magic number, and Ready to Wear learned that all too soon, considering the critical destruction it faced upon its release. Altman died in 2006, his legacy coming in the form of the films I mentioned earlier; Ready to Wear, in the meantime, got filed away in the reject folder.I've spoiled myself these last few years. I have only sat through Altman movies Ebert promised I would like — and I have yet to see one that I haven't admired in some way or another. Ready to Wear is my first wild card (it currently holds a 26% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, panned for "not being mean enough", "not being focused enough", etc). 133 minutes later, I can confidently say that I don't understand the lack of love for Ready to Wear.Fine, the humor isn't as sharp as it could be (this is supposed to be a satire, after all). Okay, Altman and his co-screenwriter, Barbara Shulgasser, aren't decisive enough to really make consistent characters out of the massive ensemble. But I like Ready to Wear, along with its hiccups. Things to like include the setting, Paris, of all places; how extensive this fictional fashion week is, loaded with brilliantly timed cameos and dynamic catwalk sequences (soundtracked with Salt-N-Peppa, Björk, more); and, most significantly, the cast, which is possibly too ravishing to resist, including Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Lauren Bacall, (a scene-stealing) Kim Basinger, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Forest Whitaker, Tracey Ullman, Sally Kellerman, Lili Taylor, Teri Garr and Lyle Lovett. Some portray insiders, some out, all compelling.Problematic and sprawling as it is, Ready to Wear keeps us busy and keeps things charming — finding ourselves entertained is accidental. There's so much going on, so much to enjoy. So stop, please stop, thinking and comparing and underrating Ready to Wear because of Nashville and Short Cuts and M*A*S*H and The Player. You'll have a better time that way. There's much to savor. Altman pays homage to 1963's Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow by recreating its striptease scene with its now senior stars, Loren and Mastroianni, and the final sequence, featuring a scad of gorgeous (and nude) models, cements the film's carefree approach to do whatever the hell it wants. Sure, you should watch one of the Altman greats first (I won't name them again), but Ready to Wear acts as a smart pastime. You can't get all this from the September issue anyway.Read more reviews at petersonreviews.com

Lee Eisenberg Robert Altman's death three days ago brings to mind not only his movies, but his unique style: letting people develop the characters themselves, and overlapping dialogue. In that sense, "Pret-a-Porter/Ready to Wear" is possibly the best example of his movies. One really gets the feeling that they just filmed whatever happened here. This story of a murder in the midst of a Paris fashion show pretty much does whatever it wants, and does a worthwhile job with it. Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, and a too-long-to-name list of other people.So, in conclusion: thanks for everything, Mr. Altman! You were one of the greatest directors of all time!

Edgar Soberon Torchia Back in 1994, when Robert Altman made "Prêt-à-porter", he was 70 years old. He was one of the few important auteurs of a profession celebrating its first centennial. Again, the wise filmmaker's satirical approach (directed on this opportunity to the fashion world) was misunderstood. This time, the maestro pointed his finger to consumerism on a global scale, by covering a convention of the haute couture circle, in which fashion was the vehicle to expose the dehumanised materialism of contemporary world.Starting with a prologue at Dior's in Moscow (which could be Rome or Paris), Altman described a multinational microcosm defined by its unrestrained marketing of material goods. Altman did not underestimate fashion as a key element in our lives: as a matter of fact, he used fashion as the clue to gain access to the film. As expected, "Prêt-à-porter" was not a paean to designers, models, photographers or fashion magazine editors. After the convention's creator unexpectedly dies, Altman and co-writer Barbara Shulgasser aimed at the surface of the fashion world, searching for its essence, for a trace of humanity, and led us to an unexpected ending, which is a sort of purification, a baring of the bodies and souls. Altman, at 70, knew very well that mankind's main alternative was (and is) the transparent ethics that radiates from pure spirits committed to preserve life on this planet, beyond fabrics and fashions.To tell the story of this garment catharsis, Altman used as his stylistic technique the superficiality that permeates the milieu he's describing (one I know after working in a couple of such events in my youth.) Everything is bright and beautiful, but somehow it seems as if "nothing is happening." The audience is denied all the myths that have led many designers and models to haughtiness, so their attitudes become more vacuous, and their incentive to rapacious consumerism is more obvious. Being unable to speak of art or the "fashion essence" in a contemporary setting where commerce rules, Altman used a fragmented narrative, with overlapped dialogues –often improvised- as in his other reflections on the crisis of communication, a central theme in "Nashville." Altman is one of the few filmmakers who is able to reunite large casts and create characters of high sociological value (mainly in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller", "Nashville", "A Wedding", "Short Cuts" and "Gosford Park", and to a lesser degree in "HealtH" and "The Player"), but he is also averse to psychological realism, that old strategy inherited from the 19th century novel, and that some people still ask for in our post-post-modern world...In this film, Altman relied on famous faces to construct a game of facades with few strokes, choosing among the best of them: those who are able to create a believable character with a few significant details, those who can go from the subtle –as the wine spot on a reporter's sweater- to the pompous, as the dark glasses of the Irish photographer or Sophia Loren's hats. On the other hand, he relied on the audiences' own information, making them interact with the film, adding data or making associations. For example, only those who have seen Vittorio de Sica's "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" and "Sunflower," can enjoy to the full the cinematic homage to Sophia and Marcello Mastroianni. Their story echoes "Sunflower", while there is a reprise of Sophia's strip-tease in "Yesterday…" with a different (and sad) effect on Marcello; or if you have been in an event like the one in the film, you may remember people as the characters played by Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts, two reporters who spend the whole event making love in their hotel rooms."Prêt-à-porter" is a good film, which contains some of the typical Altmanian digressions that some do not enjoy. But, as Andrei Tarkovsky once said: "When you are in front of a really major figure, you have to accept him with all his weaknesses, which become distinctive qualities of his aesthetics."

chrisfrost66 I saw this film at the cinema on release and it was dreadful. The so-called humour was absent without leave, not even close to raising a single laugh in the audience. The same old 'joke' ran through the movie with some guy treading in dog crap in every scene, and that was as funny as it got...There was no plot. You felt no empathy, or even interest, in the shallow, stereotyped characters. It really was cringe worthy. I couldn't believe what I was watching. I recall that this was supposed to be some kind of parody of the fashion industry and perhaps there are lots of in-jokes I have no hope of spotting, or maybe my English sense of humour is too evolved for the obvious, puerile humour.