 | 映画原題: A Prairie Home Companion [ 映画邦題:ア・プレイリー・ホーム・コンパニオン ] : 話題注目作劇場公開映画 |  | |  |  | |  | A Prairie Home Companion : Hollywood Cinema Director : シネマ作品監督紹介 | | A Prairie Home Companion : Actor [CAST・CREW] : アクター・アクトレス(男優・女優・声優)&ミュージシャン・アーティスト紹介 | | A Prairie Home Companion : 本国映画ライターによる映画の内容 with イングリッシュ : English Description of Story |  |  |  |  | Amazon.com:Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor combine reality and fantasy in this smooth, ebullient take on the long-running Prairie Home Companion radio show. Set during the show's fictitious last broadcast--the host station has been bought--the film has plenty of elements from the real PHC radiocasts, including a live audience and the sensational Shoe band. The onstage program is mostly music numbers, a beguiling mix of standards and old-style country. However, the show's usual comedy sketches are never presented, save for the commercial parodies--this may be a PHC show, but Lake Wobegone is never mentioned. Instead, the sketches are played out as backstage banter that feautres the Johnson Sisters (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin), a harried stage hand (Maya Rudolph), a former listener turned angel (Virginia Madsen), and Keillor himself (a crusty alter-ego named simply G.K.). A few characters from the real PHC are given life: the singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty and gumshoe Guy Noir are embodied by Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, and Kevin Kline, respectively. Old flames are fanned, stories are spun, new talents are found (Lindsay Lohan has a chance to shine as Streep's daughter) and everyone wonders if G.K. will do something to ebb the tide of cancellation (personified by Tommy Lee Jones as the corporate Axeman). All of the actors do right as singers, and seem to be having the time of their life. Keillor's screenplay is perfect fodder for Altman's usual brand of storytelling, as characters babble on with the camera picking them up often in mid-thought. The film appeared a few months after Altman received an honorary Oscar, and the director is still at the top of his game, creating this smile-inducing, song-filled time, ending with an ethereal last musical number. --Doug Thomas |  |  |  |  | | | | | A Prairie Home Companion : 現地ハリウッド市民の評価 : 英語批評版 : Native Evaluation | | | | |  Hey -bop -a-ree-bop- rubarb pie! / 2006-06-23
Prairie Home Companion starts out with a loyal fan base: Older middle agers, people who love live radio & fans of the actual show. The problem with this group is they don't go to the movies much. This will do well in dvd sales & pay for view tv. Anyway, I'm a fan & have seen it. It's behind the scenes look at the radio show, with lots of stars playing the characters of a typical show. Kevin Kline is Guy Noir, the house dick & narrator of the thread-bare plot: closing night of the long running, live radio show. Woody Harrelson is Dusty, a cowboy singing lewd country western. Has Meryl Strepp ever had a bad performance? She's fabulous here at turns funny, sad & can really sing. She is Yolanda, part of a sister act with Lily Tomlin as Rhonda. There are so many more & a few cameos. Even the angel of death, played by a beautiful Virginia Madsen, shows up in a fantasy bit, to claim a cast member. Over it all is Garrison Keilor (GK) with running gags, off-beat songs & commercial spoofs. Robert Altman directed with a light hand & this is much like the original radio show, which is still running. This can be viewed by all ages but kids may get bored. It is funny through-out if you have developed a sense of humor. I look forward to the dvd which I am sure will have lots of extras. | | | | | | | | | | | | An Amiable 'Companion' / 2006-06-21
"A Prairie Home Companion" has no shootouts, car chases, or explosians (although we do hear about one). It seems odd that in the middle of summer, while such movies as "Mission:Impossible:3", "Waist Deep", and "X-Men: The Last Stand" are tossed upon us (although I have seen the first and last two and will see the middle one) that a movie as quiet, thoughtful, and altogether warm as Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Compaion" can riggle it's way in to theaters, let alone a spot in the top ten in it's opening weekend. It seems more like the kind of movie released either in November, preceding all the holiday movies, or on Christmas Day with an onslaught of other action movies and feel good romantic comedies. Leaving this movie, I said to the person I was with that it was the best movie I had seen all summer, and it was true, even though 'The Omen' was right up there in the top three (sarcasm).
I have never listened to the 'A Prairie Home Companion' radio show on NPR, but I understand that it comes on every Saturday night, and have heard from others that it is either great or pretensious, fitting in with everything else on NPR. This movie, from what I can tell, provides a look at not only what happens backstage (drawing many similarities to Altman's "Nashville"), but how the show goes. If you have never listened to the show, like me, you get a good idea of what it's like. Commercials are incorporated into the show, like a song about rhubarb pie and an improv about duct tape, done so that the stage manager (played by an extremely pregnant Maya Rudolph) can give the host (Garrison Keillor, playing himself) a schedule for the show. The sequence is very funny, and peaks when Lily Tomlin (as one half of a singing duo) starts talking about how you can use duct tape to repair a door that a dog has chainsawed through. Oh, wait, I take back the fact that I never saw the show. I listened to it once driving back from San Franciso (I live in Sacramento) around Thanksgiving. It was Keillor talking about basting a turkey ("I like to baste it with a brown baster, and sometimes I like to spread it with a wooden spoon" is the line I remember) and I became so angry at the fact that everyone in the audience was laughing at something so unfunny that I had to turn the radio off completely. | | | | | | | | | | | |  The trouble with Hollywood movie stars pretending to be real singers. / 2006-06-21
As Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle said, "'The Prairie Home Companion' is like a Hollywood karaoke movie." Truer words were never spoken. I'd rather watch "American Idol" over this movie. At least it's free. | | | | | | | | | | | | Funeral for a Tuxedoed Penguin / 2006-06-19
No movie has packed more punch than Robert Altman's "Nashville" as a criticism of life, a chilling yet exhilarating dissection of a culture incapable of living the examined life. Altman was in control with that film, seizing upon a "real" place as a microcosmic landscape of mid-1970's America, then orchestrating the actions of characters who ironically have lost their place. But Garrison Keillor is himself the personification of control, a highly skilled literary and dramatic artist not the least of whose creations is the wise and witty persona serving as host of his faux-retro radio show, which is his own criticism of life.
Altman captures Keillor's cosmos, but nowhere does it acquire the life-like authenticity of "Nashville," "The Player," or "Gosford Park." The ironies that Altman's camera normally exposes have already been attended to by another ironist of undeniable brilliance. This is Keillor country, ordered exactly as its creator writes, acts, narrates, and sings it. I've attended a broadcast of "Prairie Home Companion" and found it curiously distant and unengaging, my presence and that of the rest of the audience serving as props, or a bit of window dressing, for the purpose of establishing the show's credibility for a home audience. In fact, the entire premise of the movie is absurd--the last broadcast of a folksy variety radio show that was never more than a contrived simulation from the start. As a place, Nashville took itself seriously. By contrast, Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion" has the feeling of those small town renovations with anachronistic gas lanterns, pricey soda fountains and quaint antique shops. It's clever, even artful, kitsch, yet Keillor makes it work, often putting his finger on what is most genuine and real, the repressed stuff of consciousness suddenly taking on a welcome familiarity.
One of the throwaway jokes in the film turns out to be a matter of life and death: One penguin asks another, "Why do you appear to be wearing a tuxedo?" The other penguin answers,"Why would you think I'm not?" No matter that the joke was responsible for the angel of death who shadows the characters in the show; it's also a reminder that there's no reason we shouldn't trust Keillor's sleight of hand. "Reality radio show" or not, "Prairie Home Companion" becomes the stage for a strangely compelling essay on time and change, chance and paradox, scatology and eschatology. The final scene of the film is lifted from Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," when the angel of death walks in on the diners, assembled this time not at a Knight's castle at Elsinore but at Mickey's Cafe in St. Paul. It's a deeply affecting moment, one that moreover has the effect of bringing the audience in on Keillor's literary conceit--an inclusion I missed when I attended the actual production. Keillor shares with Altman cynicism about many features of the present mediascape as well as an elegiac attitude toward a gentler, more cohesive American community. Like the reader who's finished James Joyce's "The Dead," the spectator at the end of this film is at one with a human community of equals, embraced by the ties that bind.
As a movie "A Prairie Home Companion" is at once more lively, colorful and honest than it is as a variety show. Altman serves Keillor well, no less than Meryl Streep serves the director, enabling him to compose shots that are too warm and glowing to be forgettable images merely. In fact, in her second appearance on the show within the show, Streep's singing a song about her childhood past reprises and nearly equals the soulful, heart-stirring moment in "Nashville" when Ronee Blakey performs the song "Dues."
Perhaps this film, which is at once archetypal and particular, allegorical and human, will be the octogenarian filmmaker's farewell. Deep down, however, I hope that a film we might regard as Keillor's film-directing debut doesn't wind up being Altman's swan song. There's got to be another "Nashville" in the protean imagination of the great director--perhaps like Shakespeare's "The Tempest" a film allowing him a fitting valediction to his cinematic magic while ushering us into a brave new world. | | | | | | | | | | | |  Dull and Occasionally Sharp / 2006-06-19
I can remember an old Simpsons episode from years ago when Homer was watching a television installment of A Prairie Home Companion. Garrison Keillor was droning on about one of his many stories and the audience was in hysterics. Homer Simpson, for some reason, didn't find it funny and thought his TV was busted, so he went up to his television and started banging on it, telling it to "BE FUNNY, BE FUNNY". The show never got funny. That Simpsons episode echoes my sentiment exactly on the general way I hear the radio program on NPR of A Prairie Home Companion. The film ,A Prairie Home Companion, written entirely by Garrison Keillor himself conveys a lot of his original ideas and feeling of the radio play and fortunately transcends (here and there) to a level that actually made me smile every now and then. Thank God Robert Altman decided to resort to his old tricks, and thank God the film is stocked with a fine mix of great actors that also successfully make it a relatively tolerable and sometimes funny experience.
I went in with my anti-Prairie Home Companion feeling: Fans of Garrison Keillor's enduring, literally "comfort-food" show are pre-programmed to warm to the movie immediately, whereas it bored me. (If you'd like a handy barometer, the old folks behind me thought that the farting corpse was an absolute scream.) The main problem with the whole concept of Prairie Home Companion is that it is always riddled with bad jokes, accompanied by a wink and a nod (with a nudge to the ribs added for good measure). This film is so very conscious of its bad jokes and obvious punch-lines that it actually pokes fun at its own expense. This, I found to be rather redeeming in a somewhat tired old story.
The cast is a typical Altman congregation of major-league talent: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, Virginia Madsen and Lindsay Lohan. Kline plays Guy Noir, Keillor's softheaded, hardboiled detective serving as the program's head of security. If you think that naming a private eye `Guy Noir', who talks like Bogart is funny, then you will love A Prairie Home Companion. Madsen is a mysterious woman in a white trench coat who wanders the theater with Noir on her tail, Chandleresque metaphors swirling in his head. The cowpoke comedy act of Lefty (John C. Reilly) and Dusty (Woody Harrelson) busts each other's chops, and an overworked assistant stage manager, Molly (Maya Rudolph), rides herd on everyone and keeps the show up and running.
"A Prairie Home Companion" is such a tough movie to apply criticism to. Not only does it exist somewhere between a documentary and fiction - with a touch of Christopher Guest's playful mockumentary style - but it's less of a movie than it is a voyeuristic look into the lives of some hard luck Midwesterners trying to keep the dream alive for just another day.
"A Prairie Home Companion" is a funny and compelling, slow-paced swagger through the park, a testament to Altman's direction and Garrison Keillor's quirky sentimentality. All the characters are the type you would love to sit down and share a lazy breakfast with at the local pancake house.
Two of the film's best scenes occur onstage during the performance of the show itself. In one, Yolanda, a former lover of Keillor's, has a meltdown during one of his commercials for a fictitious product (duct tape, in this case). In the other, Lefty and Dusty perform a song devoted to bad jokes and tell quite a few of them in the course of it. The musicians are cracking up, and Harrelson and Reilly frequently seem on the verge of laughing themselves. Both scenes are testaments to jovial, carefully orchestrated comedy.
The rest of the movie is characteristic of Altman -- which is either good or bad, depending on your history with the director. Characters' conversations overlap as in real life, and there is a de-emphasis on plot that causes the film to flirt precariously with dullness. It never quite succumbs, though; the "Prairie Home Companion" broadcast itself is harmlessly diverting enough, with its down-home music and gospel tunes, to keep a viewer's interest. Keillor's fans will probably consider the film a masterwork, while Altman's people will file it away as one of the director's average efforts, better than "The Gingerbread Man" but worse than "The Player." One thing's for sure, it ain't no "Nashville."
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[PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)]
テレビ時代を生き残ってきたミネソタ州セント・ポール市の長寿ラジオ・バラエティ番組 『A Prairie Home Companion』 がついに迎えた最終回の舞台裏を、群像劇の名手ロバート・アルトマン監督がコメディ・タッチで描く。注目はオールスター・キャストで、司会役にガリソン・ケイラー、カントリーのデュエット歌手 "ヨーランダとローンダ" にメリル・ストリープとリリー・トムリン、ヨーランダの娘で歌詞を忘れてしまう新人歌手ローラにリンジー・ローハン、楽屋の門衛にケビン・クライン、歌うカウボーイ・コンビ "Old Trailhead" にウディ・ハレルソンとジョン・C・ライリーが扮するほか、トミー・リー・ジョーンズ、バージニア・マドセンら芸達者な俳優が共演する。
