All is Link

Village Voice great piece on BAM's retrospective of Karen Black (happening right now!) by Stephanie Zacharek
Vulture All is Lost, Robert Redford and taking stardom for granted
AV Club "100 Episodes" takes on Homestar Runner - great piece about the evolution of Web TV. 
Guardian talks to Chris Hemsworth about Thor consuming his life and what he learns from film to film

 

My New Plaid Pants begins "The 13 Snakes of Halloween" festivities with The Witches and Anaconda. Oooh, what comes next? 
Coming Soon Avatar sequels start filming in one year's time. Happy Halloween so don't throw away your blue body paint just yet.
i09 on 11 misanthropic horror movies from Cabin in the Woods to Frankenstein
LA Times Scarlett Johansson, winning fresh raves for her voice work in Her, is mystified by the awards process.

I don't even know how it works. And I'm an Academy member!" 

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Here's our first image of Reese Witherspoon from Wild which she tweeted herself...

Here's first pic of me as Cheryl Strayed in WILD. So excited to play @cherylstrayed in a movie! http://t.co/t00BFeR5nX

— Reese Witherspoon (@RWitherspoon) October 18, 2013

Her very own less grim Into the 127 Hours sorta one-man kinda show about a actress who hiked 1000 miles after losing her mojo. No I kid I kid, it's the true story of a woman who did that after her divorce and her mother's death. It started filming last week. I sincerely hope Reese packed her Oscar in that napsack just to remind herself about ACTING. It's unwise to share the screen with Laura Dern if you haven't reminded yourself of that.

Yes, in the oddest casting news for this movie Laura Dern who is but 9 years older than Reese will be playing her mother. 

LFF: All is Lost

David reports from the London Film Festival on his first voyage to meet Robert Redford, lost at sea... (This film is also playing at NYFF)

Since Kanye West just brought The Truman Show and its climatic sailing sequence into public parlance again, it’s perfectly appropriate for me to refer to All is Lost as an enlarged version of that scene. The manipulator of the heavens here is not a flatcapped Ed Harris, but writer-director J. C. Chandor, fleeing from the immensely talkative boardroom of Margin Call to the vast sea of a practically wordless one-man-show. ‘Our Man’ (as the credits call him) is Robert Redford, in an Oscar-buzzed performance that is certainly his most remarkable in many years. Not only for the physical commitment - the rough winds of the sea buffet the sailor every which way - but for the restraint with which he crafts a stolid and complex man who barely says a word.

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There is No Frontrunner For Best Actor

By and large pundits seem to have narrowed down the Best Actress category, sadly before all the films have even premiered, to about 6 or 7 women... but many of them won't be able to win for their roles (when you've already won it's more difficult to build a "more" case - this ain't the Emmys) so the fight for the actual statue will probably not be bloody at all. Here you go, Cate! The supporting categories (both male and female) are still hugely competitive as far as nominations go but again the winning could well be set in stone as soon as the nominations are facts rather than assumptions.

Will Oscar feel sentimental about Dern or Redford?

But Best Actor just can't be narrowed down. Not yet at least. [more...]

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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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Best Shot: Butch & Sundance & Their Girl

It figures. I try to throw a curveball in our often actress-centric blogging by choosing a guy's guy movie, a buddy Western for Hit Me With Your Best Shot and the most frequent face that pops up in your choices is the momentary it girl of the late 60s Katharine Ross. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) she plays the school teacher Etta Place, essentially "the girl" of the narrative (and not much more complex a role than that) and twice over, too, since she's shacked up with The Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) but also in 'what if?' love with Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) as evidenced in the Oscar-winning "Raindrops Keep Fallin On My Head" interlude early in the film. Redford & Newman? Lucky girl.

Which leads me to this very scientific poll for TFE readers (as suggested by forever1267 in the comments). Butch and Sundance are a pair in the movie but unlike Katharine Ross you can only have one. Make your choice based on '69 only!  

poll by twiigs.com

Now that that's out of our systems, let's choose a best shot. And good God (God = Conrad L Hall) there was much to choose from)

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