Ragtime: Paramount Presents (Blu-ray) by Justin Remer The Movie: E.L. Doctorow's classic novel of early 20th Century New York, Ragtime, is famously a patchwork of numerous different story threads, many featuring historical figures. Robert Altman was an early candidate to direct a film version of the novel, and one envisions that he might have tried to include as much of the patchwork feeling from the book as he could. Instead, director Milos Forman and his Hair screenwriter Michael Weller fashion their 1981 take on the novel into a more focused, if still quite sprawling and lush, film.The story is anchored around a middle-class family in New Rochelle, twenty-some miles outside the city. They are good and decent, in a nondescript way, whi...Read the entire review »