Ready to Wear (Pret-A-porter)

Ready to Wear is no designer item. As is typical of Altman's career path, the director tends to follow up his popular hits with quirky bombs, thus Ready to Wear represents Altman's contretemps in the wake of The Player and Short Cuts. This new movie employs Altman's typical structure of interwoven narrative threads and camerawork that moves fluidly amongst a throng of characters and setups. But none of these situations is terribly remarkable or insightful; some are downright predictable and tedious, and others are painfully misanthropic. In Ready to Wear, Altman's dyspepsia colors his whole field of vision and in case anyone out there is missing his barbs, Altman includes an unpleasant running gag of characters stepping in dogshit to lend visual weight to his humans-equal-turds equation. It hardly seems a challenge to take something like the fashion industry, which is based on superficiality, and then turn around and expose it for its shallowness and superficiality. And, moreover, to expose it without much insight, wit, or precision is a really cheap shot. Ready to Wear is to filmmaking what paper dresses were to fashion -- thin, trendy, and disposable.