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."

Happy birthday Reese Witherspoon!

 

Happy birthday to the wonderfully talented Reese Witherspoon! 

Happy birthday Gary Oldman

 

Happy birthday Gary Oldman!

The man from London was born on March 21, 1958.

What's your favourite film by this exceptionally talented actor?

Brief bio:

Gary Leonard Oldman (born 21 March 1958) is an English actor and filmmaker. Regarded as one of the greatest actors of his generation, he is known for his versatility and intense acting style. He has received several accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and three British Academy Film Awards. His films have grossed over $11 billion worldwide, making him one of the highest-grossing actors to date.

Oldman began acting in theatre in 1979 and made his film debut in Remembrance (1982). He continued to lead a stage career, during which he performed at London's Royal Court and was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, with credits including Cabaret, Romeo and Juliet, Entertaining Mr Sloane, Saved, The Country Wife and Hamlet. He rose to prominence in British film with his portrayals of Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy (1986), Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears (1987) and Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), while also garnering attention as the leader of a gang of football hooligans in the controversial television film The Firm (1989). Regarded as a member of the "Brit Pack", he achieved greater recognition as a New York gangster in State of Grace (1990), Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK (1991) and Count Dracula in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992).

Oldman went on to portray the villain in films such as True Romance (1993), The Fifth Element (1997), Air Force One (1997) and The Contender (2000); corrupt DEA agent Norman Stansfield, portrayed by Oldman in Léon: The Professional (1994), has been ranked as one of cinema's best villains. He also played Ludwig van Beethoven in Immortal Beloved (1994) and later appeared in franchise roles such as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series, James Gordon in The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005–2012) and a human leader, Dreyfus in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour (2017), and was also nominated for his portrayals of George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) and Herman J. Mankiewicz in Mank (2020).

Oldman has served as executive producer of various films such as The Contender, Plunkett & Macleane (1999) and Nil by Mouth (1997), the latter of which he also wrote and directed. He has also featured in television shows such as Fallen Angels, Tracey Takes On... and Friends, as well as providing the voice of Viktor Reznov in the Call of Duty video games and appearing in music videos for artists such as David Bowie, Guns N' Roses and Annie Lennox.

Discover more: 10 Must See Gary Oldman Films You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

Get Carter is 50 years old

Promotional lobby cards from the original release of Get Carter in 1971.

Top 10 Michael Caine Films

 

Mad Science & Eccentric Invention in 1980s Cinema

Off-screen the 1980s was giving consumers a technological revolution - videotapes, mobile phones, home computers and video game consoles. On-screen we saw this sudden attraction to scientific exploration and life-changing tech characterised by a number of memorable scientists and inventors. Here we check out some of our favourites.

Doc Brown. Seth Brundle. Wayne Szalinski. These guys made science fun (and, at times, quite scary!).

The poster boy for this niche is undoubtedly Back to the Future’s Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), the time machine inventor with the wild white hair who inadvertently sends Marty McFly on a mission into the past to ensure his mother and father fall in love. But he isn’t the only memorable character to dabble with science and similarly get into a bit of bother.

What "mad scientist" springs to mind for you?

Seth Brundle, a narcissistic but brilliant scientist, has developed a transportation device that, after initial tests, appears to only work with inanimate objects. Further development sees him successfully transport a baboon prompting him to consider using the device himself. However, when he does so, a house fly finds its way into the transportation pod with him causing his agonisingly slow transformation into a humanoid-fly crossbreed. Amongst other things, it plays havoc with his love life!

Check out the Top 10 Eccentric Inventors & Mad Scientists In 1980s Film.

Steven Spielberg, Michelle Williams teaming for coming-of-age drama

Extract from article by Borys Kit:

Spielberg wrote the script with frequent collaborator Tony Kushner and will direct the project, which is loosely based on the filmmaker's formative years growing up in Arizona.

Many people have wanted and tried to be the next Steven Spielberg, but now someone may actually be Steven Spielberg… as a teen boy, that is.

According to multiple sources, Spielberg is working on his post-West Side Story movie project, a story rooted in his childhood that he wrote Tony Kushner, a frequent collaborator with whom he worked on films such as Munich and Lincoln, and will direct.

The filmmaking legend is enlisting four-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams as one of the leads and, under the radar, is conducting test screenings for young actors that would star in the modestly-budgeted untitled drama that said to be loosely based by the filmmaker’s formative years and by his relationship with his parents.

[Continue reading at The Hollywood Reporter]