No Michael Ritchie Thread? Ok, let's have a poll!

Fletch is kinda fun. pretty sure the best movie here is The Bad News Bears though.

Yeah, I didn't want to show my hand in the OP, but this is so The Bad News Bears.

I was going to create this poll, exclusively for Downhill Racer thru Semi-Tough. cuz fuck the rest. (i like Fletch but it's no auteur work.)

this is so The Candidate btw

Downhill Racer, The Candidate, Semi-Tough, all good journeyman movies with smart scripts and good casts.

I liked The Candidate, btw. Kind of hard for me not to see numerous parallels with Justin Trudeau here in Canada--a young, good looking liberal with a famous father and lots of skepticism being thrown at him about his inexperience and idealism upsetting a conservative blowhard--but I'm guessing the fans of the film are often reading it against this or that politician. But the words that Alfred uses--"good journeyman movies with smart scripts and good casts"--apply almost all too well. Like, its a solid, intelligent, well made and entertaining movie that never achieves greatness because it never bothers reaching for greatness. Essentially, for the circumstances under which I just watched it today--a Wednesday morning where I woke up feeling a little too groggy and lazy to focus on doing work just yet--it was kinda perfect.

prob is rarely a poll where id vote against fletch tbh. haven't ever seen bad news bears or the candidate for that matter though. diggstown is fun and very rewatchable

my #2 would likely be "Smile", then BNB and DhillR. Prime Cut as the sleeper.

yes, Diggstown was respectable fun, the one time i saw it, and not a patch on his prime.

see I found 'smile' 100% unwatchable but a lot of these seem to hit/miss based on what age you were when you first saw them

Smile vs. Prime Cut for me! Texas Cheerleader mom was pretty good too.

I like Smile and Bad News Bears a lot, but still an easy vote for The Candidate. I remember Semi-Tough as being okay, but not nearly as good as North Dallas Forty. I believe Prime Cut has a bit of a cult following, but I thought it was ugly and not especially interesting. Haven't seen anything else--I know Kael liked a couple of the '80s comedies.

Always loved the political groupie in The Candidate, especially when she passes Peter Boyle in the hotel hallway.

http://images.sodahead.com/polls/004739824/4347237130_0_answer_5_xlarge.jpeg

And Allen Garfield's appraisal of the welfare-office footage--"Grim scene, baby, grim scene...You look uptight--nobody's listening, and nobody is digging you"--kills me every time.

I remember being a bit disappointed by The Candidate, in that I felt there were a number of other films from that era that did similar cultural critique and satire in a more engaging way. Smile is definitely a period piece, but that period and place was when & where I grew up (more or less), so I am definitely biased.

Allen Garfield almost always killer

Kael's Candidate pan is looney tunez

sarahell, examples? i think of The Candidate as Bulworth 1.0. (praise)

Which 80s comedies did Kael like? I'm hoping that one of them wasn't The Golden Child, which even the eight-year-old me hated (a rarity at the time). At the very least, it inspired a pretty great Forgotbusters piece.

Sacrilegious as it may sound, Fletch and its sequel pretty much blend together in my mind. They were both cable staples when I was a kid, and the thing I remember most clearly now was the bizarre Song of the South homage in the second one.

she liked The Survivors (haven't seen it.

An exception to the negative critical tide was the review that Pauline Kael gave the film in The New Yorker:

The banner line on the ad says ' Once they declare war on each other, watch out. You could die laughing.' The Survivors isn't about two men declaring war on each other; it's about two New Yorkers without anything in common who become friends. The advertisers probably didn't know what to do with it because it's a comedy for grownups. There's a lot of unconventional humour in the writing by Michael Leeson. Robin Williams' work transcends the film's flaws. He acts with an emotional purity that I can't pretend to understand. A lot of the comedy comes from his being a grownup with this ranting little kid inside him. Walter Matthau gives a quiet, old pro's performance.

with a few exceptions like Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom, stuff after An Almost Perfect Affair (b.o. flop) were paycheck movies. Why he got such a short leash when BNB and Semi-Tough were sizable hits, ya got me. The Blockbuster Factor, i guess.

Cryptsicko: The Survivors and (I think) The Couch Trip--I'd have to check on the second.

Smile makes a good companion piece for Nashville--I'd normally say it was clearly influenced by the Altman film (the structure if not the exact tone), but they came out the same year, so probably impossible, unless Ritchie saw that earlier rough cut.

She liked Club Paradise.

she liked Robin Williams almost as much as she loathed Redford

supporting players are terrific in The Candidate: Boyle, Garfield, Melvyn Douglas (as Pat Brown, sort of), guy who plays Crocker Jarman. No signif female roles, but hey '71ish politics.

a solid, intelligent, well made and entertaining movie that never achieves greatness because it never bothers reaching for greatness.

Name some truly GREAT American films about politics... because most that 'reach', as you put it, wind up being the kind of 2nd-rate self-congratulatory shit that Clooney is involved with.

The Candidate by a country mile. It's hilarious and terrifying, and that also makes it true.

The Survivors suffers from uneven pacing.

it's astonishing to me that The Candidate actually won the screenwriting Oscar... what went right?

direct model for Redford's character:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_V._Tunney

Diggstown was released as Midnight Sting in the UK - an old VHS favourite. Smile has never been released DVD in Europe as far as I can tell.

Just as cryptosicko thought he directed Slap Shot and Funny Farm, I thought Ritchie might've made The Hard Way too, but no, that was John Badham

No signif female roles, but hey '71ish politics.

Sally Field made this very complaint when her and Robert Osborne were introducing the film on TCM. In fact, while Field praised Redford for getting this film made when he did, she seemed to spend most of the discussion dancing around the fact that she didn't think that highly of the film itself.

The film does offer a couple of fleeting gestures towards the potential shakiness of Redford's marriage, but never really devotes any time to his wife, so point taken.

Name some truly GREAT American films about politics... because most that 'reach', as you put it, wind up being the kind of 2nd-rate self-congratulatory shit that Clooney is involved with.

Does Election count?

We're gay -- all movies are political.

Election is cute and vastly overrated; Perrotta's book is much more challenging.

def recommend Downhill Racer's Criterion supps for insight on who Ritchie was (ambitious hippie TV director) and his methods. Pretty good Redford commentary on 'discovering' him and getting it made too.

xpost

Perotta's novel meant far less to me than the film, though I suspect that may be at least partially because I saw the film first.

Smile is so much fun :) 'You want to see something that will develop even faster than the film?'

I will be the only person voting for Fletch Lives

You sure are.

sorry, no one who hasnt seen the first 6 is 'lowed to vote for any others

Watched Fletch just now for what I'm gonna say is the first time, since nothing it about it struck me as familiar; maybe I only ever saw the sequel? A lot of fun--not only do the jokes work more often than not (though enough with the gay jokes, please), the thriller plot was actually clever and involving. Good use of a solid supporting cast, too--I miss the days when guys like Joe Don Baker and M. Emmett Walsh were always on hand for these kind of things.

Next up: Fletch Lives, Downhill Racer

even Kael liked Fletch. I rewatched it a decade ago and thought it flat idk

the Fletches are not real Ritchie films

Kael's Candidate pan is looney tunez

I can't find this. She makes reference to it in her reviews of Savage Messiah and The Last American Hero, but I can't find a full review.

I will never understand ILX's collective hard-on for Pauline Kael.

her beautiful eyes

(xxpost) No official review--those backhanded references are it. She did review Smile. Stanley Kauffmann's review of The Candidate is really good. He thought it was too pat, told us stuff we already knew--disagree, or at least think it's so well done that that's not a big problem. And things still happen in campaigns that make me think of The Candidate. McCain's first ad in 2008 was weirdly reminiscent of Crocker Jarmon's ad.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

low turnout

sure everyone's too busy watching tv shows on Netflix

i watched the candidate, found it sortof a snooze tbh tho can see it in its day being a bigger deal; its style really endears redfords character to the audience; the incumbents name is great, crocker jarmon

saw a nice 35mm print of The Candidate last weekend. forgot how great Allen Garfield is as the media guy, breaking up his lollipop bag with a hammer.

also young Michael Lerner!

Found Downhill Racer interesting but never compelling. Reminded me of The Rain People and That Cold Day in the Park--an attempt at a European art film, but still very studied, before all the great American films that comes along a few years later and are much looser and (usually) more in love with the way people talk (Altman, Ashby, Mazurksy, etc.).

And when they talks, they often talks grammatically.

https://crimereads.com/lee-marvin-gene-hackman-prime-cut/

Smile makes a good companion piece for Nashville--I'd normally say it was clearly influenced by the Altman film (the structure if not the exact tone), but they came out the same year, so probably impossible, unless Ritchie saw that earlier rough cut.

Finally sat down with the Smile blu yesterday. There's a featurette with Bruce Dern where he mentions it was shot "during the Nixon impeachment hearings", which was also when Nashville was being filmed, so it just looks like there was something in the air at the time. It looks like it premiered shortly before the Altman, but received a pretty perfunctory theatrical release (Dern mentions that United Artists treated it as kind of a write-off, made to honor a deal with the producer, a former UA executive).

Smile itself seems to get better every time I see it. I get the feeling Richard Linklater is a huge fan.

Started reading Charles Taylor's Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You. Similar to the Tarantino book--lesser-known American films from the '70s--but published a couple of years earlier. As with Cinema Speculation, I'm going to stop and watch (or rewatch) all the films before starting each chapter.

Same as I posted above eight years ago: the regard for Prime Cut escapes me. It looks good--sharp colour cinematography from Gene Polito--but besides being ugly and creepy, it's so far-fetched. I don't mean this or that detail, but rather the entire situation. And the last 15 minutes is about as by-the-numbers an imitation of Peckinpah as you'll see. Hackman's having fun, as always, but not nearly as good as Ritchie's other '70s work.

There is so much to love in Prime Cut, and I saw it in an IB Technicooor 35mm print screening that coincided with the release of that book. The white slave trade market and chase through the wheat field are incredible. I see nothing of Peckinpah in it

The whole last (endless) shootout seemed right out of Peckinpah to me--even a body falling from a loft in slow-motion. As I said, it looks good. To what purpose, I don't know.

Just about to read the chapter in Taylor's book, curious as to what he'll say.

besides being ugly and creepy, it's so far-fetched. I don't mean this or that detail, but rather the entire situation.

It's a pretty satirical of hardman pulp. I dunno if that's what the studio had in mind, but that's what Ritchie delivered.

Also, I'm not sure they could have gotten away in 1972 with such unwhitewashed depictions of human trafficking without counterbalancing it with the goofy stuff and OTT action bits.

Read the Taylor chapter last night. He tied it all into Nixon and Vietnam--obvious reading of any film from that era, but the stuff he wrote makes sense. Didn't really make me like the film any better, though.

Another reason some of it feels like a Peckinpah imitation to me is that it's so against the grain of what Ritchie does really well. He's a lot like Frederick Wiseman in that preoccupation in the '70s was American institutions: the beauty pageant, Little League, a political campaign, the NFL. You get a little of that in Prime Cut with the county fair, but when people start shooting at each other, it felt like he'd just seen Straw Dogs and thought "Hey, I can do that too."

Prime Cut is closer to John Frankenheimer’s wonderfully insane 99 and 44/100% Dead than Peckinpah