The Player is a Hollywood satire which, as all great satire does, looks less like satire today than it did when it was made.

Tim Robbins plays Griffin Mill, a big studio producer worried about being pushed out of the business by younger talent. He's been receiving death threats via postcards from a writer he snubbed at some indeterminate point in his career. When he thinks he's found a lead, he goes out to investigate and ends up killing a writer. He is forced to cover up his crime while maintaining his position at the studio and juggling his budding romance with—of all people—his victim's widow.

And for the most part, Griffin Mill is a pretty sympathetic guy. We all…

Movies, Now More Than Ever!

This honestly might be my favorite fictional slogan. If I were to rename my podcast, it would probably be that.

Altman hates Hollywood and that’s never been clearer. He weaves this story together so well and makes you despise but root for your protagonist. And Tim Robbins plays the character perfectly. I would put this ahead of Shawshank as my favorite performance of his.

The cameos add a while additional layer to this film. They’re quite fun to spot but they serve a purpose, in giving you a sense of glamor that Tim Robbins is leading. (My absolute favorite is Buck Henry pitching The Graduate 2!)

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

Never has a happy ending been so…

“Twenty-five words or less? Okay. Movie exec calls writer. Writer's girlfriend says he's at the movies. Exec goes to the movies, meets writer, drinks with writer. Writer gets conked and dies in four inches of dirty water. Movie exec is in deep shit. What do you think?”

This film was directed by Robert Altman and stars Tim Robbins, Michael Tolkin, and Greta Scacchi

This film was incredibly unique and that’s probably my biggest takeaway from the whole movie, I really liked it. The performances were really fantastic especially from Tim Robbins, he’s one of my favorite actors and he really nailed it with this role. The story is unlike anything I’ve really seen, it’s about a studio executive who is…

The Player is a 1992 American satirical comedy film directed by Robert Altman and stars Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Gallagher, Brion James and Cynthia Stevenson. The film follows the story of a Hollywood studio executive who kills an aspiring screenwriter he believes is sending him death threats.

For this weeks Film Club Siegels picked 1992’s The Player, a film many of us had never seen and a film that was drastically different to both Tangled and Mommy that had come before. Having never heard of The Player let alone seen it, I had no idea how critical Robert Altman eye would turned out to be. That long opening shot featuring various conversations all building the context…

It's nice to see a film that plays with the usual Hollywood tropes yet at the same time expose something rather truthful about the way the system works, and suddenly the in-joke being presented hits you. Robert Altman, a director who always was searching for a manner to go against the norms amidst the studio influence gives a clear picture of what harm it does to the most valuable thing behind what forms what we come to view; the visions. Amazingly, The Player chooses never to head into the territory where it would highly offend anyone working within the business, but there's a uniqueness to the satire we're finding here that just allows it to stand out from other films…