Robert Redford is "The Candidate"

Team Experience is looking at key Robert Redford films as we approach the release of his lauded Oscar-buzzing comeback "All is Lost". Here's Tim Brayton on one of his milestone films.

 In addition to being one of the great timeless sex symbols in Western culture, Robert Redford is noted for the passion of his activism: for art, as in the creation of the Sundance Film Festival and the exposure it gave to American independent filmmaking; and for politics, as seen in the joylessly obvious message movie Lions for Lambs. But let us try as hard as we possibly can not to hold that against him, and instead rewind all the way back to 1972. For it was in that election year that Redford acted in the first of many explicitly political movies of his career, The Candidate.

The title says it all: there’s a Senate campaign to wage, and a candidate to flog, and that candidate, Democrat Bill McKay, is embodied by the most photogenic, blondest, whitest actor of the early ‘70s. Which is as much to say that the casting alone goes a long way towards explaining why the movie works, will all apologies to Redford’s skill. [more...]

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Vote for the National Film Registry!

Hi, it's Tim, looking to rope y'all into a little bit of cinematic democracy in action. The National Film Preservation Board, you perhaps know, is the advisory council that suggests to the Librarian of Congress which American-produced films should be admitted to the National Film Registry. And surely you know what that is! The list of films deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”, and worthy of being kept safe and preserved as a result (though unfortunately, being on the Registry doesn’t automatically mean a film is guaranteed preservation dollars, only the imprimatur of the Library of Congress saying, “Hey, people with film preservation dollars! Take a look at these, won’t you?”).

Now, the point of my bringing this up is that, while the Board advises the Librarian, it’s the public that advises the Board – any citizen is welcome to submit a list of nominees up to 50 films long that they believe to be worthy candidates for inclusion on the Registry. This nomination period, for this year’s inductees, closes on September 13, just over a week from now. And so I write this piece in the spirit of an exhortation: I don’t just want you to share a list of movies that you think should be inducted to the National Film Registry here in the comments section of this fine website, I want you to share that list with the National Film Board itself. For we are all well-educated cinephiles here, and I think our voices deserve to be heard. Information about nominating films can be found here, with links to a list of all films currently on the Registry, as well as some prominent films missing from it.

Here’s the list of movies that I’m going to submit after the jump from silents to absurdist cartoons to the Coen Bros...

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Little movies we're looking forward to

Hi, it's Tim. Such a great time to be a cinephile, the end of summer. Venice is in full bloom, Toronto is so close you can almost taste it, and we can finally start talking about awards hopefuls in categories other than Visual Effects and Sound Editing.

But not right now. We all know the upcoming films that we’re supposed to be excited about for their artistry (Her), their awards prospects (August: Osage County) or both (Gravity). And we all know the movies that we’re probably going to end up seeing even though there’s no reason to be excited at all (The Hobbit: Get Your Smaug On). What I’d like to talk about for the moment is all the little stuff that nobody cares about, or at least not very loudly: films that aren’t going to make much of a ripple at the awards shows, on the critics’ lists, or at the box-office, but that I, personally, am looking forward to anyway. For the filmgoer cannot live on prestige alone.

September 13: The Family
To be fair, readers of The Film Experience have better reason to be aware of this movie than the population at large, since it stars Michelle Pfeiffer as the wife of a Robert De Niro’s ex-mobster in witness protection. Even so, the film is stuck with such a lousy release date that openly begs for us to overlook it in favor of TV coming back, TIFF wrapping up on the very same weekend. It’s an uncaring date for a movie that looks like it has to deserve more than that: Pfeiffer, De Niro, and Tommy Lee Jones are all three actors worth getting excited about, and the trailers have a broad sense of humor that nevertheless seems playful more than just dumb and hammy. To be fair, nothing in Luc Besson’s career suggests that he’s a good fit for the style of comedy that the film would appear to possess, but as a palate-cleansing lark before awards season starts in earnest, his unsubtle instincts could be just about right.

October 11: Machete Kills
Robert Rodriguez’s Machete, spun out of a one-off joke in Grindhouse, was junk. Absolutely tawdry, tacky junk, with pointless violence and naked Lindsay Lohan and Jessica Alba body doubles and all. It’s also totally hilarious in its over-the-top absurdity, and while there’s certainly not one blessed thing that’s respectable about looking forward to see more of the same cartoon slapstick violence and politically nuts plotting, I am looking forward to it anyway. Few filmmakers can reliably do the “deliberately stupid to be energetic and funny” thing, and Rodriguez has proven through the years to be one of the very best at it, and whatever else is true, his mindless action-comedy should be a nice change of pace surrounded by such deeply serious films as Captain Phillips, All Is Lost, and 12 Years a Slave.

November 15: Faust
A mere two years after winning the Golden Lion at Venice, Aleksandr Sokurov’s take on the famous German legend of a scientist making a deal with the devil finally shows up in North American theaters, though I don’t imagine that anyone living outside of the biggest cities will have any chance in hell of actually seeing it that way. A pity; a most grievous pity. Sokurov (whose best-known film, Russian Ark, is also his least typical) is an unsparingly severe art house kind of filmmaker, but everything he makes is the best kind of ordeal, pushing us right up close to human beings in the grips of intense emotion. Coming off of three stories about real-life men destroyed by their grasp for power, the tetralogy-capping Faust is exactly the kind of unique take on a deliberately clear-cut plot that has made all of the director’s work some of the most brilliant and challenging in current world cinema.

November 27: Oldboy
My initial hope was to pick one movie from each remaining month of the year, but there’s not anything in there that we can plausibly call “little”, unless I want to try and sell you on the idea that I’m some kind of savvy insider for looking forward to Inside Llewyn Davis. Instead, let’s go with the Thanksgiving release of a most peculiar mix of director and subject – so peculiar that it must be worth looking forward to, whether the final results are any good or not. Spike Lee remaking a notoriously dark South Korean action movie? And with Josh Brolin? It’s hard not to have your curiosity at least slightly piqued by that, and for all that he’s prone to getting into self-serving spats that don’t do anybody good, Lee is too gifted a filmmaker to ever write him off in advance. Frankly, if we had to have an American Oldboy, I’m deeply grateful that it was made by somebody with the visual instincts and ambition of Lee, rather than just a talented fanboy who’d undoubtedly make a flavorless carbon copy?

Now it’s your turn. What unheralded fall/winter releases are you looking forward to?

The Worst of The Worst Summer Seasons?

Tim here. Oscar Season is about ready to officially kick off, with the first Gurus of Gold listing landing today, and the massively important Venice, Telluride , and Toronto film festivals all starting within the next week or two, but before we move into the last phase of the movie calendar year, I’d like to spend one more moment eulogizing the year that has been, nodding one last time in the direction of the summer that, just about everybody agrees, has been the absolute pits.

We’ve already gone over that, so instead of belaboring a point, I’d like to ask the question, was summer, 2013, really the worst ever? I’m pretty confident that the answer to that is no, and to prove it, I’d like to offer up three possibilities for the title of Worst Summer Movie Season of All Time that put 2013 to shame. Or, y’know, make it look good. Whichever way you want to put it.

Three terrible summers after the jump

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40 Years a Dragon

Hey all, it's Tim. The twin altars of worship at The Film Experience are Actresses and the Oscars, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I take a moment to go as far as possible in the opposite direction from either of those points, all the way to the land of grind houses and the classic age of chop socky martial arts film. For this weekend marks the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. release of the iconic Bruce Lee vehicle Enter the Dragon, and with the imminent North American debut of Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, the story “of the man who trained Bruce Lee”, as the ads insistently proclaim, it seems the ideal moment to visit a legendary film that, to my shame, I had never seen before.

Stories don’t get a whole lot more basic: Han (Shih Kien) the shadowy crimelord owner of an island just barely grazing the edge of Hong Kong’s territorial waters has proclaimed a martial arts tournament, and among the many fighters in attendance are three whose private reasons for attending are revealed to us: Lee (Bruce Lee) has been sent by the British government, hunting for illegal arms and primed to get revenge for the life of his sister, killed by Han’s goons; Roper (John Saxon) is hoping to scare up a lot of money immediately before the mobsters he’s in debt to break his legs; Willam (Jim Kelly) is on the run from… racism? Anyway, he’s there too, and he’s old war buddies with Roper. In between scenes of the competitors fighting in the tournament, there are scenes of them fighting in the shadow recess of Han’s palace, attempting to take down his empire of evil. [more...]

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