Robert Redford has died(nytimes.com) |
Robert Redford has died(nytimes.com) |
Do yourself a favor and watch some of his most important movies that represented his ideology "Truth", "Brubaker", "Sneakers" or "Spy Game".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_the_gauntlet https://www.dictionary.com/browse/throw-down-the-gauntlet
Robert Redford is also the founder of the Sundance Film Festival, so getting on his bad-side is strongly career-effecting. People lived in fear of getting on this guy's bad side.
On set, he sounds like the typical Hollywood nightmare with famous clashes with his costars and directors. Arthur Laurents, the writer of The Way We Were, described Redford as an "ego maniac" and control freak for his on-set behaviors.
I say this as a leftist, but "The Truth" is liberal catering-to, and whitewashes Rathers's lack of due diligence in the Bush document, which even to a largely uniformed person like me thought, "Uh isnt that a modern font?" Dan Rather's rush to to this story is not a 'victim' but the failure of basic journalism. I dont think Rather should have resigned, but the idea that's he's this kind-hearted innocent, as the film mostly portrays him as, is just dishonesty. Rather saw money and fame in breaking a big story, and ran with it without much care.
Shrug, I've always seen his PR as very heavily manufactured and played towards the NYTimes and Variety and Sundance crowd in a very targeted way. And it worked, Redford died with an estate worth at least $200m. Capitalism gonna capitalism I guess, but the reality is Redford was quite the vindictive partisan who used his wealth and power against his perceived political enemies and whitewashed some questionable people.
But the carbon footprint of the jetset crowd is significant and worth pointing out. And, yes, how a lot of it is things like protecting wealthy-coded wildlife touristy-type areas in California and such and less effort in cleaning up factories in Alabama or India and such. Or how as a capital owning class person, he negotiated against the working class with his productions, and as such the dynamics that make Alabama and India poor, the capitalistic effect of driving down wages and the political power of these working people who want reform, well, he's part of the problem there too. He can't be both 'the boss' and a worker at the same time.
And the zero effort for him and his cohorts to fly first class instead of private jet or take a regular boat and not a mega yacht or other massive carbon producers.
But his behavior on set, his bias in "The Truth,' and his hiring policies are entirely his choice and can be made nearly entirely meritorious. He simply decided to not act meritorious.
One of my favourites. Great cast.
Kingsley and Redford on the roof: "There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information"
"Jeremiah Johnson" though is still a favorite of mine. Got me into blackpowder.
And surprised later when watching The Twilight Zone and he turned up as "Death": https://youtu.be/9tfyv4BZRug
Also, Lawrence (Larry) Lasker[2] was the writer of Sneakers AND War Games!
/j
It was interesting hearing the names of the locations and bridges that previously meant nothing to me (except the golden gate).
It's free to watch on youtube at the moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy9XYQBBIJ4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36799776 https://github.com/bartobri/no-more-secrets
I hope there are still movies being made today that inspire the next generation of programmers. It feels like it's all Marvel now.
http://bit.ly/3Ip3tr3 link to the shirt if you want to look at it. there is a message encoding in the background.
Incredible performance by Redford, first film that really left an impression on me. There is only one or two lines of dialogue in the entire film.
Edit: Screenplay link! https://thescriptsavant.com/movies/All_Is_Lost.pdf
And it's very intimate. 106 minutes of just you the viewer, and Robert Redford. I might just rewatch it tonight. It feels fitting.
For real life lost at sea stories, there’s “438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea” telling the story of fisherman Salvador Alvarenga that spent more than a year adrift in the Pacific Ocean.
Technically speaking with only one actor in the entire film there can be no dialog. These were couple of expletives. I love the movie -- it is so different.
This is so essential now especially as Hollywood has become more consolidated and corporate.
He also met Terry Gilliam there, and he always recounts this first meeting fondly, so the festival led him into meeting an important mentor.
Outside of Quentin, Paul Thomas Anderson, a lot of people are called the Sundance Generation. Sundance changed cinema.
I'm sad about his passing. I've always been such a huge fan of his.
Being an espionage lover, of course, Spy Game will have a special place; then there's him playing Sundance Kid, but I remember him for Out of Africa and The Way We Were. I know many might say, 'But he was not central in them'; I'd say that he was. And no, not the only central role. That's how I remember him and these films. What masterpieces of films, and how beautifully he played his roles in these; and the things he stood for.
Apparently, as per Reddit, the director kept wanting her to look more scared in her initial scenes; explaining the horror of being kidnapped and imprisoned in her own home by a strange man. She kept pleading "But it's Robert Redford"!
If you like the espionage and unique feel of films of that era though, you can't do much better than Francis Ford Coppola's 'The Conversation', starring a wonderfully morose Gene Hackman. A very worthy Palme D'Or winner in '74.
Fred Zinnemann's 'The Day of the Jackal' in '73 is also a high-point for espionage-thrillers of the decade.
If you've never seen his movies, you can basically pick them at random and you'll find a good one. But All the President's Men is one of my favorite films of all time.
I have seen movies with Redford later, but unfortunately, I just now got info about connection of Redford with War games.
RIP Great man.
RIP RR
I first discovered his acting via a long forgotten torrent site.
I used to go onto Suprnova[0] and sort by "most seeded" and alongside a sea of pornography, up filtered gems like the 1992 cult classes we all know and love. (As well as, at the time, a lot of really got big beat electronic albums, but the uhn tiss tiss is a conversation for another thread.)
I had been a big gamer growing up, but found that folks weren't growing out of toxicity, and migrated to being a film/tv geek. More art galleries, less LAN parties, that sort of thing.
I guess he's jammin' revolvers into Russian dude's backs at the opera in heaven now...
I haven't found another film that captures the feeling of blowing past building security, the front desk, and the CEO's secretary to inform them if you were the guy who'd been threatening their NGO, they'd be dead -- and oh, by the way, here's a list of the systems I could own without setting foot in your building.
Nowadays, you're weird if you socialize offline and eschew social media, but back in the day being a hacker was not considered cool or interesting -- if anything, we were scary.
Truly a film before it's time, truly a loss.
Great movie, great commentary.
RIP Mr. Redford and Sidney Poitier.
(I'm not a film nerd, but perhaps some credit is due to whoever edited that scene as well. The end of the scene hits pretty hard.)
There is a whole sub-genre called Paranoid thrillers of the 70s. Some more:
- Marathon Man
- Klute
- All the president’s men
- The Parallax View
- The China Syndrome
- Capricorn One
- The Boys from Brazil
- Z
- Blow Out
(Also from fuzzy memory) Any then-known Western encryption. The chip was supposedly useless on Soviet/Russian encryption techniques, thus emphasizing who exactly the chip was meant to be used against.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
For me the biggest Hollywood liberty taken is the beautiful ASCII Colourized UIs for federal agencies and ATC that they reveal with the decrypt!
This is one of my favorite things about the movie, and why I always recommended it to my security friends.
The Old Man and the Gun
… another great film by Redford, about an elderly man who leans on his charisma and confidence to rob banks. Based on a true story.
Back when Social Engineering meant wearing a hell of a suit and dodging the 'Bunco Squad'. All the elements are there: Greed, Scarcity, a sense of urgency, all legitimised by the leveraging of Social "proof".
If it was remade today there'd be a good chance Redford would find Newman's character down on his luck running facebook ads for crypto scams featuring AI videos of prominent celebrities.