Director Robert Altman checked out of this world last November at age 81, and he was working right up till the end. His last film, "A Prairie Home Companion," is a cinematic spinoff of the popular show on American public radio, and while it's not up there with Altman's best -- "Short Cuts" or "Nashville" -- neither is it one of his occasional misfires, like "Popeye" or "Pret-a-Porter."
The film starts beautifully, with a radio tower set against the twilight, as the soundtrack spins through the radio dial of Middle America -- country and western, religious preachers, a baseball game -- before landing on the somewhat tongue-in-cheek nostalgia of the "Prairie Home Companion," hosted by Garrison Keillor. As the voiceover tells us, "it was a live radio variety show, the kind that died 50 years ago, but somebody forgot to tell them."
Typically for Altman, the film features more name actors than you can shake a stick at. In the dressing rooms of the Fitzgerald Theater, singing sisters Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin) laconically trade tall tales while Yolanda's daughter Lola (Lindsay Lohan) has heard it all before. Keillor makes his entrance (playing himself) in his boxers, telling an endless shaggy-dog story, as stage manager Molly (Maya Rudolph) frets.