The best work of cinematographer Robert Richardson

 Celebrating the work of three-time Oscar winner Robert Richardson. 

Robert Bridge Richardson, ASC (born August 27, 1955) is an American cinematographer.^[1] He has won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography three times, for his work on JFK, The Aviator,^[2] and Hugo. Richardson is and has been a frequent collaborator for several directors, including Oliver Stone, John Sayles, Errol Morris, Quentin Tarantino, and Martin Scorsese. He is one of three living persons who has won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography three times, the others being Vittorio Storaro and Emmanuel Lubezki.

Richard Dreyfuss pictured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind

 Why Are There Different Versions Of “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind”?

What is the best version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

Close Encounters of the Third was released in 1977. Since then, writer-director Steven Spielberg has re-released the film twice in slightly altered versions. 

To find out how the three versions of the film differ, check out this comprehensive lowdown. 

Now, as we look at Close Encounters of the Third Kind, what version of the film is the best one to watch? Top 10 Films finds out here. 

Tell me more about Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 American science fiction film written and directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey, and François Truffaut. It tells the story of Roy Neary, an everyday blue-collar worker in Indiana, whose life changes after an encounter with an unidentified flying object (UFO).

Close Encounters was a long-cherished project for Spielberg. In late 1973, he developed a deal with Columbia Pictures for a science-fiction film. Though Spielberg received sole credit for the script, he was assisted by Paul Schrader, John Hill, David Giler, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, and Jerry Belson, all of whom contributed to the screenplay in varying degrees. The title is derived from Ufologist J. Allen Hynek's classification of close encounters with extraterrestrials, in which the third kind denotes human observations of extraterrestrials or "animate beings". Douglas Trumbull served as the visual effects supervisor, while Carlo Rambaldi designed the extraterrestrials.

Made on a production budget of $19.4 million, Close Encounters was released in a limited number of cities on November 16, 1977 and November 23, 1977 before expanding into wide release the following month. It was a critical and financial success, eventually grossing over $300 million worldwide. The film received numerous awards and nominations at the 50th Academy Awards, 32nd British Academy Film Awards, the 35th Golden Globe Awards and the 5th Saturn Awards, and has been widely acclaimed by the American Film Institute.

In December 2007, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. A Special Edition of the film, featuring both shortened and newly added scenes, was released theatrically in 1980. Spielberg agreed to do the special edition to add more scenes that they were unable to include in the original release, with the studio demanding a controversial scene depicting the interior of the extraterrestrial mothership. Spielberg's dissatisfaction with the altered ending scene led to a third version of the film, referred to as the Director's Cut, that was issued on VHS and LaserDisc in 1998 (and later DVD and Blu-ray). The director's cut is the longest version of the film, combining Spielberg's favorite elements from both previous editions but removing the scenes inside the extraterrestrial mothership. The film was later remastered in 4K and re-released in theatres on September 1, 2017 for its 40th anniversary.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind review from Siskel and Ebert.

A great film is one that can take even the most jaded of moviegoers and fill them with a sense of anticipation, wonder and sheer exhilaration. Cynicism falls away as they witness all the different creative aspects that go into making a film come together to show them sights they have never seen and tell them stories that are able to surprise while still resonating on the deepest of emotional levels. A truly great film—the kind that one can call a classic without the slightest hesitation—is one that still has the power to do that to viewers decades after it was originally released, no matter how many times they may have seen it over the years. Steven Spielberg’s 1977 masterpiece “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which is returning to theaters for a one-week engagement to mark its 40th anniversary, is the epitome of a truly great film. Having seen it countless times over the past four decades, I went into the screening planning to devote most of my attention to how the new 4K restoration looked and found myself getting sucked as deeply into the story, the performances and the stunning visual effects as I was when I first saw it as a wee lad during its original release. [read more].

Happy birthday Dennis Quaid!

 

Top 10 Dennis Quaid Films

Happy birthday to the wonderfully talented Kristen Stewart!

 

What is the best Michael Douglas film?

What's the best Michael Douglas film? Is it the one pictured above?

Michael Douglas bio (from Wikipedia):

Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944)^[2] is an American actor and producer. He has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and the AFI Life Achievement Award.^[3]

The elder son of Kirk Douglas and Diana Dill, Douglas received his Bachelor of Arts in Drama from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His early acting roles included film, stage, and television productions. Douglas first achieved prominence for his performance in the ABC police procedural television series The Streets of San Francisco, for which he received three consecutive Emmy Award nominations. In 1975, Douglas produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, having acquired the rights to the Ken Kesey novel from his father. The film received critical and popular acclaim, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture, earning Douglas his first Oscar as one of the film's producers. After leaving The Streets of San Francisco in 1976, Douglas went on to produce films including The China Syndrome (1979) and Romancing the Stone (1984). He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for Romancing the Stone, in which he also starred, thus reintroducing himself to audiences as a capable leading man.

After reprising his Romancing the Stone role as Jack Colton in the 1985 sequel The Jewel of the Nile, which he also produced, and along with appearing in the musical A Chorus Line (1985) and the psychological thriller Fatal Attraction (1987), Douglas received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He reprised the role in the sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010).

His subsequent film roles included: Black Rain (1989); The War of the Roses (1989); Basic Instinct (1992); Falling Down (1993); The American President (1995); The Game (1997); Traffic and Wonder Boys (both 2000); Solitary Man (2009); Ant-Man (2015), Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019). In 2013, for his portrayal of Liberace in the HBO film Behind the Candelabra, he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. Douglas currently stars as an aging acting coach in Chuck Lorre's comedy series The Kominsky Method, for which he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy, and in the Netflix series Green Eggs and Ham, where he voices Guy-Am-I.

Apart from his acting career, Douglas has received notice for his humanitarian and political activism, as well as media attention for his marriage to Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Amitabh Bachchan and India's battle to preserve its film heritage

From the BBC:

For decades, Amitabh Bachchan preserved some 60 of his films in an air-conditioned room in his bungalow in the western city of Mumbai.

Five years ago, the Bollywood superstar handed over the prints to a temperature-controlled film archive run by a city-based non-profit, which had begun restoring and preserving Indian films. Led by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, an award-winning filmmaker, archivist and restorer, the Film Heritage Foundation has been at the forefront of these efforts. It has "built an international reputation for excellence", according to director Christopher Nolan, and Bachchan is its brand ambassador.

For years he has been tirelessly advocating and actively helping in trying to preserve India's fast-decaying film heritage.

And on Friday, Bachchan was feted for this little-known facet of his work. The 78-year-old actor was conferred this year's International Federation of Film Archives award. Nolan and fellow filmmaker Martin Scorsese gave away the award, whose stellar past recipients include the two acclaimed directors themselves and such auteurs as Ingmar Bergman, Agnes Varda and Jean-Luc-Godard.

Bachchan, Dungarpur says, has "always been deeply invested" in the idea of preserving and archiving cinema. During a conversation, the star once agonised over the fact that he couldn't watch some of the earlier films of the thespian Dilip Kumar because "they were simply lost".

IMAGE COPYRIGHTFILM HERITAGE FOUNDATION

image captionDungarpur found 200 films dumped in a warehouse in Mumbai

India has 10 major film industries - including Bollywood, the world's largest - and produces close to 2,000 films a year in some 36 languages.

But it has only two film archives - a state-run one in the western city of Pune and the non-profit, run by Dungarpur. "This is woefully inadequate given our rich and prolific film history," Dungarpur says.

Not surprisingly, much of India's storied film heritage has been lost and damaged because of spotty conservation and preservation of film.

India's first talkie Alam Ara (1931) and its first locally-made colour film Kisan Kanya (1937) are untraceable. Newer films have fared no better. Original footage of a documentary on freedom heroine Lakhshmi Sahgal made by Sai Paranjpye (1977) and Shyam Benegal's Bharat Ek Khoj (1988) no longer exists. The negative of a 2009 film called Magadheera made by SS Rajamouli "disappeared in just six years", according to the director.

As Dungarpur tells the grim story, only 29 of 1,138 silent films made in India survive. Some 80% of the more than 2,000 films made in Mumbai - then Bombay - between 1931 and 1950 are unavailable for viewing.

Last year, Dungarpur and his team found 200 films languishing in sacks in a warehouse in Mumbai. "They were prints and negatives, and someone had just dumped them," he says.

IMAGE COPYRIGHTFILM HERITAGE FOUNDATION

image captionA still from the 1958 Bollywood drama Night Club, now preserved in the archive

That's not all. According to government auditors 31,000 reels of film held by the state-run film archives have been lost or destroyed.

In 2003, more than 600 films were reportedly damaged in a fire in the state-run archive - among them were original prints of the last few existing reels of the 1913 classic Raja Harishchandra, India's first silent film. "You have to respect your past. To respect your past you need to preserve and restore your films," says director Gautam Ghosh.

Before digital arrived, films were usually preserved as original negatives, duplicates of those negatives and prints that were released for viewing. After most Indian filmmakers stopped shooting on film in 2014, Dungarpur says, many film labs digitised their stock, and threw away the negatives, thinking that they had no use for them. "The original camera negative has a much higher resolution than digital today. That's what they didn't know."

Now, preservationists in India mainly work on prints.

"It's a complete disaster. We had to try create a completely new awareness about celluloid film and its history".

IMAGE COPYRIGHTFILM HERITAGE FOUNDATION

image captionA preserved still of the 1954 film, Sher Dil

Over the last six years, Dungarpur and a faculty comprising of experts from leading film archives and museums around the world have held workshops all over India and trained over 300 people in restoration and preservation of film.

The foundation has collected and preserved more than 500 films of top Indian filmmakers, footage of the independence movement and Indian home movies in its facility in Mumbai. Its collection includes such rarities as two 16mm reels of Oscar-winning director Satyajit Ray in conversation with legendary Italian-American director Frank Capra. Dungarpur also has an impressive collection of Indian film memorabilia: tens of thousands of old photographs, photo negatives and film posters.

Bachchan has always been outspoken about the need to take charge of India's crumbling film heritage. Two years ago, at an international film festival in Kolkta, he said: "Our generation recognises the immense contribution of the legends of Indian cinema, but sadly most of their films have gone up in flames or have been discarded on the scrap heap".

"Very little of our film heritage survives and if we do not take urgent steps to save what remains, in another 100 years there will be no memory of all those who came before us and captured our lives through the moving image."