Best of Robert Zemeckis

 

What's Robert Zemeckis' best movie?

Top 10 Films Of Ivan Reitman

Ivan Reitman - the director of comedy classics like Ghostbusters and Stripes - died on February 12, 2022. 

To celebrate his life and work, we check out his 10 best movies. 

Writes Dan Stephens on Top 10 Films: "When I think of Ivan Reitman, I think of films populated by characters that I’d want to invite to a dinner party. The sorts of people who would be my ideal BFF. Lovable, larger-than-life, funny – these characters, thanks to their performers and Reitman’s skill at allowing actors to embrace their comic tendencies and spontaneity, jump off the screen and into our hearts."

Ivan Reitman's Best Films

Will Smith Wins Best Actor At The 2022 Golden Globes

Will Smith won his first award from the Golden Globes on Sunday for his moving portrayal of Venus and Serena Williams' father Richard Williams in King Richard.

The 53-year-old rapper-turned-actor was honored with Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Drama after previously being nominated five times by the award ceremony, which was not televised or live-streamed this year.

Smith's victory comes against an impressive array of male talent, including Mahershala Ali (Swan Song), Javier Bardem (Being the Ricardos), Benedict Cumberbatch (The Power of the Dog) and Denzel Washington (The Tragedy of Macbeth).

Smith was first nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Television Series Musical or Comedy in 1993 and again in 1994 for her starring role on the hit comedy series The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air.

However, he lost the first year to John Goodman for Roseanne, and Jerry Seinfeld bested him in 1994 for his eponymous NBC comedy series. 

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which puts on the Globes, also recognized the actor's transition into more serious roles with a nomination in 2002 for his Muhammad Ali biopic Ali, which was directed by Michael Mann.

However, he lost to Russell Crowe for A Beautiful Mind. 

The Men In Black star was nominated again in 2007 for The Pursuit Of Happyness, which he starred in with his son Jaden, and then in 2016 for Concussion, but he lost both of those awards too.

Smith followed suit with many other stars and didn't appear to comment on his win.

The Golden Globes are still being held at the Beverly Hilton as usual, but without an audience.

NBC announced last year that it would no longer be broadcast the ceremony in 2022, though it left the possibility of returning the show to the air in 2023.

An expose by the a Los Angeles Times revealed that there were no Black members of the HFPA, and the organization's members have also been accused of corruption in the past.

'We continue to believe that the HFPA is committed to meaningful reform. However, change of this magnitude takes time and work, and we feel strongly that the HFPA needs time to do it right,' NBC said in a statement after several celebrities returned their past awards. 

'As such, NBC will not air the 2022 Golden Globes. Assuming the organization executes on its plan, we are hopeful we will be in a position to air the show in January 2023.' 

Despite the audience- and broadcast-free ceremony, the Globes still announced nominations in December and announced the winners via Instagram on Sunday. 

King Richard, which is directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and produced by Venus and Serena Williams, details Richard Williams plan to make his daughters Tennis pros starting when they were just children.

The film currently boasts an impressive 90 percent fresh rating from critics surveyed by Rotten Tomatoes, most of whom have commended Smith's moving performance.

The movie, which was released simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max, has emerged as an early Oscars frontrunner, and Smith's win among a crowded field may make him a favorite to win the Best Actor prize at the upcoming ceremony.

Nominees for the Academy Awards will be announced on February 8. 

Source: Daily Mail

Why Will Smith Didn't Return For Independence Day: Resurgence

Independence Day, released in 1996, is a stone-cold classic of rollicking, big-budget, action-packed tentpole cinema. Part of a wave of disaster movies that swept the box office in the '90s, it finds a fleet of city-sized alien spaceships suddenly appearing over several locales around the world. As it turns out, they don't want to share a really excellent recipe for chocolate chip cookies, or even to be taken to our leader. No, they intend to raze our planet and everything on it, and several destroyed cities and one miserably failed counterattack later, it falls to a select few unlikely heroes to find a way to take down the alien invaders and save the Earth. 

The film's all-star cast included Will Smith as fighter pilot Steven Hiller; Jeff Goldblum as tech expert David Levinson; Randy Quaid as Russell Casse, a Vietnam vet whose crazy stories of alien abduction suddenly stop seeming so crazy; and Bill Pullman as President Thomas Whitmore, himself a former combat pilot, who rallies the human resistance by giving one of the single most stirring speeches in film history during Independence Day's third act.

In 2016, we got the belated sequel Independence Day: Resurgence, which brought back most of the original film's cast — but not Smith. Captain Hiller's off-screen death was explained as being the result of a test flight gone wrong, with his stepson Dylan (Jesse Usher) following in his wisecracking shoes. In an interview with Hey U Guys shortly before the flick's release, director Roland Emmerich chalked Smith's absence up to a creative decision. "The first script, which included Will Smith, was a totally different story," he said. "It was a father-son story. And when that didn't work, I said, 'Let's explore other possibilities'... I hired two young writers, and they said, 'This has to be the hand-off to a younger generation,' and that was actually... the real trick to [making the movie] work."

Source: Looper.com

An interview With Robert Pattinson

Source: The Guardian - Dec 2019 | Written by Alex Moshakis

Do you want to hear a funny thing about Robert Pattinson? Robert Pattinson is convinced he doesn’t know how to act. Willem Dafoe can act, Pattinson thinks. Willem Dafoe can act the socks off anyone in the business. And Joaquin Phoenix. Joaquin Phoenix could tie his shoelaces on film and be nominated for an award. And Bruce Willis – Bruce Willis! – now there’s a leading man. But Robert Pattinson? Nope. “I only know how to play scenes, like, three ways,” he says. Three! That’s all. Despite more than a decade in the industry. “I’m nervous on, like, every single movie.”

Pattinson, who is 33, is sitting in a booth in a low-lit restaurant in Notting Hill, west London, dunking table bread into a pot of something. It’s the early evening, dark and cold outside. He has arrived from rehearsals for The Batman, which started not long ago and which are taking place, to his delight, in the studio in which he filmed Harry Potter in the mid-aughts. The Batman is the first time he’s worked in a studio in “like, forever,” and his first mainstream leading role since he retired his best-known character, Twilight’s Edward Cullen, sexy vampire. That was in 2012.

Maybe he’s tired now. Or maybe he’s had a bad day. Maybe he’s arriving at the studio every morning and not quite getting Batman’s vibe. Maybe he’ll never get Batman’s vibe, and people will finally agree he really can’t act, and his career will come screeching to its inevitable end, and the whole world will fold in on itself.

Which are the kind of thoughts Robert Pattinson has.

“I’m a catastrophist,” he says, laughing. Pattinson laughs a lot and goes for it: closes his eyes, throws back his head, reveals the square jaw and the fine stubble and the underside of the slightly skew-whiff nose, and lets out a loud, unfiltered giggle. “I’m always thinking that the worst-case scenario is actually going to happen. So when it does happen, I’m like: ‘Gah! OK! I’m prepared!’”

Other actors suffer from bouts of false modesty. But Pattinson is wholeheartedly committed to the concept of his ordinariness. He is not “totemic,” he says, like other traditional leading men. And he tends not to work hard in the lead-up to filming, because what if he somehow conjures some very good acting before an actual take, and can’t reproduce whatever spontaneous fluke that created it when the cameras roll? “If I show it in rehearsals,” he says, “then it’s doomed to failure immediately.”

It’s strange to hear, all this worry and self-doubt, because over the past six or seven years Pattinson has been slowly, forcefully, making fine films with very good directors. He has worked with David Cronenberg on Cosmopolis and Claire Denis on High Life, Werner Herzog on Queen of the Desert and the Safdie Brothers on Good Time. In The King, David Michôd’s kind of retelling of Shakespeare’s Henriad, which came out on Netflix earlier this year, Pattinson plays a French prince so brilliantly camp it was reported that his co-stars burst into laughter the first time they heard his accent. This kind of thing thrills Pattinson, because at least he got a reaction. “If I’m doing a scene and I see that the other actor is expecting me to do it the way I’m doing it, if I can just see that it hasn’t surprised them, I immediately feel stupid,” he says. Timothée Chalamet plays The King’s titular monarch, but it’s Pattinson scenes you remember: long blond hair; accent as thick as a block of beurre.

Next month, Pattinson will star in The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’s two-hander about lighthouse keepers descending into madness on a remote and craggy island. He appears alongside Willem Dafoe, the actual actor, which was nerve-wracking, of course. “He’s got a tonne of energy,” Pattinson says, “and it’s intimidating.” Before scenes, Pattinson would punch himself in the face, or twirl around to create dizziness, or drink mud from puddles, or force himself to gag. He explains the process as necessary – a wild attempt to maximise creativity – because, you remember, he’s just so bad at acting. “Because I don’t really know how to act, I kind of wanted to somehow make it real, and one of the ways I’ve always thought makes that a little bit easier is if you shake up your physical state just before action. You end up walking into a scene having a different” – pause – “feeling.”

Read the full article at The Guardian. 

What are Robert Pattinson's best movies?

The Movie Sex Scenes You Didn't See Coming

Robert De Niro and Bridget Fonda get it on...

Mechaphilia with Cameron Diaz...

When scary movies hit the bedroom... Don't Look Now:

The Truth Behind One Of Cinema's Greatest Sex Scenes

"It’s not the scenes of the supernatural that remain notorious today. Midway through the film, the [protagonists] have sex, in a sequence Roeg intercuts with quiet images of them calmly getting dressed for dinner.

"The scene is raw, sensitive and was controversial at the time for its frank depiction of a married couple being intimate with each other in a way that was seldom showcased on the big screen at the time. Indeed, it remains rare today.

"In the midst of concerns from the censors, Roeg was able to earn an R rating from the MPAA by cutting just nine frames of footage, while the BBFC in the UK judged the scene to be “tasteful and integral to the plot” and gave it an adults-only X certificate.

"But the most persistent factor that has kept the scene in the public conversation is a simple question: did Sutherland and Christie have sex for real?

"Speculation that the scene was unsimulated was rife for years, but it was reignited in 2011 when producer Peter Bart described his account of the filming in his memoir Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob (and Sex).

"He wrote: “My gaze shifted to the actors, and I was riveted. By their shifting positions, it was clear to me they were no longer simply acting: they were f***ing on camera.”

"This account sparked swift denials from the parties involved, with Sutherland issuing a statement denying that Bart was even in the room when the scene was shot. He said the only people present were himself, Christie, Roeg and cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond.

"Richmond, quoted in the production notes for the new release, agrees with Sutherland’s take.

"“There was already a great deal of trust between Julie and Nic, who'd done four movies together,” he says. “And the other thing is that in the script the love scene is an integral part of the movie, it's not just put in gratuitously."

"He adds: “We did a good job, it's very real. People still say they actually made love, but they didn't."" [Source: Yahoo]

Sex in Nazi Germany, Tarantino Style...

Stop the out of control action train, let's have sex...

I'll have what she's having...

Bestiality...

Getting wood...

I didn't see that coming!

 

Harry Potter Reunion: What Are The Actors Best Movies Since The Wizarding Franchise Ended?

 

The 10 Best Movies From The Stars Of Harry Potter

What is Harry Potter?

Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. The novels chronicle the lives of a young wizard, Harry Potter, and his friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The main story arc concerns Harry's struggle against Lord Voldemort, a dark wizard who intends to become immortal, overthrow the wizard governing body known as the Ministry of Magic and subjugate all wizards and Muggles (non-magical people).

Since the release of the first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, on 26 June 1997, the books have found immense popularity, positive reviews, and commercial success worldwide. They have attracted a wide adult audience as well as younger readers and are often considered cornerstones of modern young adult literature.^[2] As of February 2018, the books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, making them the best-selling book series in history, and have been translated into eighty languages.^[3] The last four books consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history, with the final instalment selling roughly 2.7 million copies in the United Kingdom and 8.3 million copies in the United States within twenty-four hours of its release.

The series was originally published in English by two major publishers, Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom and Scholastic Press in the United States. All versions around the world are printed by Grafica Veneta in Italy.^[4]

A play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, based on a story co-written by Rowling, premiered in London on 30 July 2016 at the Palace Theatre, and its script was published by Little, Brown. The original seven books were adapted into an eight-part namesake film series by Warner Bros. Pictures, which is the third-highest-grossing film series of all time as of February 2020. In 2016, the total value of the Harry Potter franchise was estimated at $25 billion,^[5] making Harry Potter one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.

A series of many genres, including fantasy, drama, coming of age, and the British school story (which includes elements of mystery, thriller, adventure, horror, and romance), the world of Harry Potter explores numerous themes and includes many cultural meanings and references.^[6] According to Rowling, the main theme is death.^[7] Other major themes in the series include prejudice, corruption, and madness.^[8]

The success of the books and films has allowed the Harry Potter franchise to expand with numerous derivative works, a travelling exhibition that premiered in Chicago in 2009, a studio tour in London that opened in 2012, a digital platform on which J. K. Rowling updates the series with new information and insight, and a pentalogy of spin-off films premiering in November 2016 with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, among many other developments. Most recently, themed attractions, collectively known as The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, have been built at several Universal Parks & Resorts amusement parks around the world.

How to watch the Harry Potter reunion

Emma Watson says she felt "quite overwhelmed" before reuniting with members of the original cast of the Harry Potter movies for a one-off TV special.

But the actress, who played bookworm Hermione Granger, ended up being "pleasantly surprised" to relive the years spent making the eight-film series.

The movies, which took 10 years to film while Watson and her co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint were mostly teenagers, propelled the youngsters to international fame.

In a clip released by HBO Max, which produced the special, she said: " Some of us haven't seen each other for years.

"It's just been a joy, an unexpected joy. I really didn't know how it would feel.

She added: "I felt quite overwhelmed this morning and I've just been quite pleasantly surprised by just getting to relive it all.

In an earlier clip, she said: "It feels like no time has passed and loads of time has passed." 

When is the programme on?

In Return to Hogwarts, which airs on Sky and streaming service Now TV from New Years Day, Watson is filmed being reunited with Radcliffe, Grint and a host of other famous faces on the 20th anniversary of the release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the first film in the series.

They joined the director of the first two films, Chris Columbus, to discuss the beloved movies and explore their creation.

Since the films were released, the author of the books on which they are based, JK Rowling, has attracted controversy over her comments on transgender identity, including from stars Watson, Radcliffe and Grint.