A quick story about the first time I saw this. I was a Freshman at NYU Film and reading a lot about Altman. I’d seen M*A*S*H and The Player and I think that’s about it. I’d read about his genre-spinning send-up of detective movies and really wanted to check it out. I headed over to the Bobst Library’s Avery Fischer Center – where I spent most of that first year devouring films of every stripe. Imagine banks of tiny TV screens & headphones and access to the world’s largest Netflix queue.
Anyway, I got there & immediately forgot the name of the movie I wanted to see (it was, of course, The Long Goodbye) but someone piped up and said Brewster McCloud! Because, yes, there is a detective character in that movie. It took me until I got back home & to my reference books (no Internet!) to realize I watched the wrong flick.
All that aside, hot damned, what a picture!
Imagine Peter Greenaway’s The Falls or A Zed and Two Naughts on laughing gas.
It is one of the more successful counter-culture pictures because it doesn’t try to describe the counter-culture, like, say, Easy Rider – it simply IS counter-culture. (<--please add "man" to the end of that sentence.) It is also really funny. Odo turns into a fucking bird for Christ's sake.
hey.. I m a big fan of Bob and i accidently found this site searching things about Brewster. Like the old cliche says, it’s really top-notch and yes it is THE counter culture. I can’t take my mind out of this thing. I have seen it 4 times and i keep on counting. There’s a sense of flow and liberty, quite incomparable to anything else, a fairy transition to a paradisial reality, something above the values of any cinema. A rare communication form.
Quite possibly, the scene with the wheeling chair on the highway is my all time favourite. I treasure this on my all time favourite list
thanks for posting this