If he'd only died after...

[Alex]

Just a morbid way of saying "I wish so and so had stopped when they were at the top of their game." Which is a very common wish.

With Altman, I would probably make that wish around 1980, but while I don't like most of his stuff after that he did still have a couple quality efforts in him. Are 16 stinkers an acceptable price for Gosford Park? Is most of the crap (by his standards) Scorcese has produced since Goodfellas worth the price of getting The Departed?

The problem is, you never know if the person has another classic in them that makes sitting through the intervening pablum worth the wait.

I wonder if the directorial equivelant of Jim Brown (for those who don't know, one of the best football players of all time who walked away from the game while still at his peak) may be James Cameron.

He has been promising to direct a fiction movie for years now but something always seems to distract him. I can easily see him taking his massive wealth and playing with submarines for the rest of his life. Hard to believe it has already been a decade since his last non-documentary directorial effort.