Latest news with #AmericanGraffiti
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Harrison Ford endorsed Kamala Harris. Now he says the country is ‘on a healthy swing to the right'
Despite endorsing Kamala Harris for president during the runup to the 2024 election, movie legend Harrison Ford seems to be OK with Donald Trump in the White House, saying the country is 'on a healthy swing to the right at the moment.' In a wide-ranging interview with Variety published Wednesday, July 30, the actor famous for playing Han Solo and Indiana Jones said, 'The pendulum doth swing in both directions. … And, as nature dictates, it will swing back.' Ford, who has openly leaned liberal over the years, recorded a video last year for the Harris campaign, in which he said Trump spent his first term 'turning people against each other.' Six months into Trump's second term, though, Ford was more philosophical. 'In politics and in life, you don't always get what you want, but you get what you get and you don't get upset,' Ford told Variety. 'They teach us that in kindergarten, but they also teach you to fight for what you think is right.' He also seemed to suggest that the country needs to move toward the center politically. 'Currently the issue is not who we are, but that we're not who we used to be because we've been purposefully disaggregated into serviceable political units,' Ford observed. 'And that has caused the middle to become frayed and tenuous, and the middle is where we belong. Not because it's banal and safe, but because it's fair. Compromise is fair and honest. 'Now, because we've been disaggregated in this way, we're having a hard time finding commonality. But if you look at the economy, you'll figure out where the commonality is — it's where it always was: Rich get richer, and poor get poorer. And that ain't exactly right.' Ford also talked in the interview about the beginning of his long friendship with George Lucas, which happened during the filming of 'American Graffiti' (1973) in San Rafael, and continued through the ' Star Wars ' and 'Indiana Jones' films. 'I didn't think he could speak. He never spoke,' Ford recalled. 'I remember there was an interview for the part that I was eventually given, and he was the only guy in the room that didn't talk. I later realized he didn't like to talk very much, but he did when necessary.' Ford played bully Bob Falfa in the smash-hit movie about a last night out among car cruising high school seniors in 1962 Modesto. The film was made on a very low budget.
Yahoo
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Harrison Ford gives emotional speech on last day of 'Shrinking' season 3 filming: 'Just f---ing amazing'
Harrison Ford isn't quick to display the ooey-gooey side of his emotional range. So when he does, he really means it. Ford was captured delivering a stirring speech in a state of visible emotion on the day his Apple TV+ series, Shrinking, wrapped its third season. "You guys are the best. The very, very best - at what you do, and how you do it, and how you make people feel is just f---ing amazing," he said in a video shared on Tuesday to the streamer's official Instagram page. The American Graffiti actor, 83, looked around at the assembled cast and crew of the comedy drama during an exterior shot, and continued, "I love this place. I love working with you guys, I hope we can all get back here and do it again." Ford's co-star and one of the series' co-creators, Jason Segel, rapidly snapped Ford back to his usual, comically cantankerous self by remarking, "Yeah buddy." Ford quickly snapped back, "I wasn't talking to you," causing the whole crew to burst into laughter as he walked off his mark. Shrinking has been a major hit for everyone involved: Segel, who co-created the show alongside Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein three years after his previous attempt at helming a series, Dispatching From Elsewhere, stalled after just one season; Ford, who earned the first Emmy nomination of his career for his work on the second season; Lawrence, who's riding high after having created two hit series for Apple TV+, with Ted Lasso; and that streamer, which has been producing a high volume of quality television since its 2017 inception, but has failed to break most series through to the level of audience fervor Shrinking has series follows Segel's Jimmy Laird, a therapist who begins shocking his patients by telling them exactly what he thinks, who in turn shock him by actually implementing (or at least, attempting to implement) meaningful changes into their lives. Ford was at the center of one of the second season's most gripping storylines, as his Dr. Paul Rhoades waged a tragic battle against Parkinson's while falling for his own doctor, Julie (Wendie Malick). Ford will vie against the formidable competition of Colman Domingo (The Four Seasons), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear), his own Shrinking costar, Michael Urie, and more for the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series trophy when the Emmys air September. As for season 3 of Shrinking, while no premiere date has been announced, stars Segel and Jessica Williams did tease what fans can expect to see. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in June, Segel revealed, "Each season we have a word that is our true north for the theme of the season. Season 1 was 'grief,' season 2 was 'forgiveness,' and season 3 — I acknowledge that this is two words — is 'moving forward.'" Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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Malaysia Sun
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Malaysia Sun
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (4K UHD) [Blu-Ray]
In the span of only three years, from 1984 to 1987, John Hughes directed and/or wrote six movies, which resulted in his becoming known as the reigning king of the Hollywood teen movie, a genre that had seen a massive resurgence in the 1980s after being largely dormant since the "teenpics" of the 1950s and '60s (George Lucas's American Graffiti in 1973 notwithstanding). However, unlike other filmmakers who saw the world of teenagers as an excuse to exploit the adolescent obsessions with booze, drugs, and sex, Hughes was fascinated by the complex social and emotional terrain of middle-class teenagerdom, and he treated his characters with a degree of sympathy and good-natured humor that was largely absent from a genre glutted with movies like Private Lesson (1981), Porky's (1981), and Zapped! (1982). Beginning as a writer for National Lampoon in the 1970s, Hughes entered Hollywood as a screenwriter, scoring two hits in 1983 with the comedies Mr. Mom and National Lampoon's Vacation. He made his directorial debut in 1984 with Sixteen Candles, an often absurdly funny, but ultimately poignant comedy about a girl whose crucial 16th birthday is ignored by her family (among other indignities). Hughes followed that film with The Breakfast Club (1985), which was one of the first serious teen dramas of the decade and probably his most influential film. He subsequently wrote and produced two other teen dramas, Pretty in Pink (1986) and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), both of which were directed by Howard Deutch, and he also wrote and directed Weird Science (1985), the closest he ever came to making a deliberately crude teen comedy. Yet, if one had to pick the quintessential John Hughes teen movie, it would have to be Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which was also the last teen movie he both wrote and directed. Ferris Bueller stands out for a number of reasons, particularly in the way it so perfectly evokes teenage fantasies of absolute autonomy and subversion of adult power (which, from this perspective, can only be seen as moronic and buffoonish). While his previous films had centered around misfit protagonists who didn't fit in, the titular character in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is the teenager all teenagers want to be: confident, secure, and so individualistically cool that he transcends the traditionally rigid boundaries of adolescent cliques (as Edie McClurg's otherwise clueless secretary Grace famously notes in the film, "The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheadsâ€'they all adore him. They think he's a righteous dude"). Hughes has great fun taking the concept of teen popularity to its absurd zenith throughout the film, with the entire city of Chicago rallying around the mistaken belief that Ferris is dying, when in fact he is simply faking a stomach flu to skip school for the tenth time that semester. "Popular" characters in teen movies are traditionally the villains (possibly because it's the nerds who end up going to Hollywood and becoming writers and directors), but Hughes pulls a coup in making the most popular kid in school also the most likable and the most sympathetic. This is largely due to the casting of Matthew Broderick, who at the time had appeared in only a handful of films, including Max Dugan Returns (1983) and War Games (1983), although he was well known for his stage roles as Neil Simon's alter ego in Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues. In all of those roles Broderick had played smart and thoughtful, but somewhat awkward and unsure charactersâ€'quite the opposite of Ferris Bueller. Youthful in appearance and not conventionally handsome in the manner of most popular teens, Broderick perfectly embodied Ferris's unrivaled individuality without being unreachable. He was, in a sense, the cool kid that any kid could potentially be or be friends with. As the title suggests, the story in Ferris Bueller's Day Off follows Ferris as he ditches school by faking illness, a performance that his gentle, well-meaning, and utterly loving parents (Cindy Pickett and Lyman Ward) swallow hook, line, and sinker (the fact that Ferris can so blatantly manipulate his parents' affections without coming across as a cad is a small miracle in and of itself). Ferris brings along his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck), the latter of whom is crucial to further establishing his uniqueness of character. The fact that his longtime best friend is a chronic worrier who is usually home from school because he's literally sick due to being browbeaten by cold and distant parents contrasts and therefore accentuates Ferris's supreme self-confidence while also showing Ferris's loyalty to an unlikely friend. Having Sloane as a girlfriend simply cements the fantasy of Ferris having everything, which is a constant source of tension with his sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey), whose resentment toward Ferris borders on the pathological. However, when it comes to being anti-Ferris, Jeanie has nothing on Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), the school principal who knows that Ferris is making him look like a fool, but has so far failed to catch him in the act. If Ferris is the ultimate fantasy teen hero, then Rooney is the ultimate villain, the very personification of repressive adult culture and its envy of youth. With his starched suits, impeccable grooming, and shifty eyes, Rooney embodies official power, the enemy of adolescent freedom, and the primary pleasure of Ferris Bueller's Day Off is not so much in watching Ferris and his friends get away with everything, but in watching Rooney humiliate himself (and, by proxy, all stuffy adults) while trying and failing to stop them. Re-watching the film for the first time in many years, I was struck by how often Ferris is off-screen in lieu of Rooney's slapstick antics in trying to break into the Bueller home and thereby prove that Ferris is truant, an absurd strategy that develops into a litany of physical and personal humiliations involving mud, a garden hose, an angry Rottweiler, and a rapid-fire series of head kicks worthy of Bruce Lee. It is no surprise that Hughes has the final credits running over Rooney's last indignity: having to ride the school bus home because his car has been towed. Perhaps because he only directed eight films in his career while writing or co-writing more than 30, Hughes has typically been undervalued as a director. However, Ferris Bueller's Day Off provides ample evidence of his visual sophistication and willingness to experiment in a genre that typically deploys the look of a made-for-TV movie. Throughout the film Hughes plays freely with form and aesthetics, allowing Ferris to break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience, a move that also contributes to our connection with him. The film's editing patterns are reminiscent of music videos, which at the time were still a new and evolving form, and Hughes deploys pop music in consistently interesting ways, never more so than in his evocative use of Yello's instantly memorable "Oh Yeah" when Ferris cajoles Cameron into allowing him to take out his father's prized 1961 Ferrari (which is simultaneously the symbol of ultimate freedom and ultimate repression). The film is also replete with all means of vaguely surreal detours and oddball moments of humor, particularly a sequence in the Art Institute of Chicago that has literally no narrative purpose. There are, of course, also the big set pieces, such as when Ferris commandeers a float in a downtown Chicago parade and has the whole city dancing along while he belts out "Twist and Shout." And, while those moments have their place, it is the film's overall sense of abandon, its willingness to break convention and throw us into the fantastical, but strangely believable world of its characters, that makes Ferris Bueller not only Hughes's best teen films, but one of the best teen films ever made. Ferris Bueller's Day Off 4K UHD + Digital Code Steelbook Aspect Ratio 2.35:1 Audio English Dolby Atmos English Dolby TrueHD 7.1 surround German Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo French Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo Subtitles English, English SDH, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish Supplements Audio commentary by director John Hughes "Getting the Class Together: The Cast of Ferris Bueller's Day Off" featurette "The Making of Ferris Bueller's Day Off" featurette "Who is Ferris Bueller?" featurette "The World According to Ben Stein" featurette "Vintage Ferris Bueller: The Lost Tapes" featurette Distributor Paramount Home Entertainment Release Date August 1, 2023 COMMENTS The same Blu-ray of Ferris Bueller's Day Off has been packaged and repackaged since 2009, so it is wonderful to have this remastered 4K Ultra HD release with Dolby Vision and HDR-10 in hand, especially since there had been some minor grumbling about the earlier transfer, specifically that the print used was dirtier than expected and some of the images seem too dark. That is definitely not a problem here. The 4K presentation is a solid, even revelatory improvement, as colors, clarity, and detail are all significantly boosted. There is still a slight softness to the image that is typical of 1980s movies shot on celluloid, and I'm glad that Paramount didn't try to artificially enhance the sharpness to bring it more in line with the contemporary movie look. The Dolby Vision grading has the colors looking better than I've ever seen, with Cameron's red jersey (Detroit Red Wings right winger Gordie Howe, who was Hughes's favorite hockey player when he was a kid) really popping off the screen, and black levels being nice and stable. This release also gives the soundtrack a bump with a new Dolby Atmos mix and a Dolby Digital TrueHD 7.1-channel soundtrack. This gives the disc some notable improvement in the sound department, with good separation on the musical sequences and strong clarity throughout. In terms of a supplements, the big news hereâ€'and it is bigâ€'is that John Hughes's original director's commentary, which has not been included on any Ferris Bueller release since the initial DVD all the way back in 1999, has been included! (I have no idea why it was left off all subsequent releases for the past 24 years, and I imagine there is an interesting story there.) This is especially good news for long-time fans of the film and Hughes's work in general, since it is the only audio commentary Hughes, who passed away in 2009, ever recorded. It is definitely worth the listen, especially the ways Hughes expands on our understanding of the characters and shows how, despite his legendary status for churning out screenplays in very short periods of time, he really thinks through the characters he writes. Otherwise, the supplements are all familiar, having appeared previously on numerous releases going back to the "Bueller ... Bueller … Edition" DVD that was first released back in 2005. They consist primarily of featurettes that include then-new interviews with Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, and Ben Stein and archival interviews with Mia Sara, Broderick and Ruck, and John Hughes looking like a lost member of a-ha. Copyright © 2023 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © Paramount Home Entertainment
Buzz Feed
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
13 Facts That Will Forever Change How You See 'Jaws'
Director Steven Spielberg got hold of an advanced copy of the 1974 novel Jaws by Peter Benchley before it was published and knew right away that he wanted to shoot it for the screen. But there was a problem. A pair of producers already owned the film rights and had a different director in mind. Then, one day, Spielberg got a call that Benchley wanted to meet with him. In an interview from the book Spielberg: The First Ten Years, the director explained, "They sat me down and announced, 'We want you to direct Jaws.' I said, 'Whatever happened to the director?' And they explained, 'We had the meeting with him, but he kept referring to the shark in front of Peter Benchley as "the white whale." And Peter became very disinterested in having his shark called a whale.' And that's how the project finally came to me." The film version of Jaws cut out several subplots from the novel, including one where Ellen Brody has an affair with Matt Hooper. In the book, Ellen dated Matt's older brother when they were younger and, when they met again as adults, succumbed to the rugged marine biologist's charms. Martin Brody finds out about their liaison, but instead of wrapping up the plot with a confrontation or closure, he just stews in his bitterness, leading to a much less happy ending. The book also features a subplot about Mayor Larry Vaughn being under the mafia's thumb, as if his character could be any sleazier. Both subplots were cut because they took focus away from the real heart of the movie, the hunt for the deadly shark. Jaws author Peter Benchley appears briefly in the movie as a TV news reporter giving updates from the beach. Benchley had previously worked as an actual TV news reporter, so the role was a natural fit. After Jaws, Benchley became a shark expert and conservationist. He said, "Knowing what I know today, I couldn't write the same book. ... I couldn't possibly demonize an animal the way I did." Richard Dreyfuss, who played Matt Hooper, wasn't Spielberg's first choice for the part. The director first went to Jon Voight, Timothy Bottoms, and Jeff Bridges before George Lucas suggested Dreyfuss, having just worked with him on American Graffiti. Dreyfuss wasn't initially interested in doing the movie, but after meeting with Spielberg a second time, he agreed to join the cast. Before his breakout role in American Graffiti, Dreyfuss had played small parts in various TV shows like Gunsmoke and That Girl. He would go on to work with Spielberg again in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Always. Before he started shooting Jaws, Spielberg hired the Australian filmmakers Ron and Valerie Taylor to shoot some underwater film with a real great white shark. The Taylors shot footage of a stuntman confronting the shark from within a cage, which was used in the tense scene in the movie where Hooper comes face to jaws with the shark. But despite the Taylors' experience working in the water, it didn't go as planned. The stuntman wasn't a trained diver, so he became overwhelmed with fear at the point of being submerged. During a take when he wasn't in the cage, the shark down below got caught in the wires attached to the cage. In its struggle to break free, the shark severed the wires and the cage sank into the sea. Spielberg had originally intended to have Dreyfuss's character killed by the shark during the cage scene, but he loved the happy accident of the Taylors' footage so much that he rewrote the script to have Hooper escape. Valerie Taylor went on to work as a conservationist and advocate for sharks, and the subject of the National Geographic documentary Playing with Sharks. She believes that sharks have distinct personalities and has said, "Some are shy, some are bullies, some are brave." Martha's Vineyard stood in for the town of Amity, but Spielberg chose the location for more than its quaint New England charm. To capture shots of the shark hunters out on the open ocean, Spielberg needed a location with shallow enough water to install and run the mechanical shark. He said, "It was the only place on the East Coast where I could go twelve miles out to sea and avoid any sighting of land but still have a sandy ocean bottom only thirty feet below the surface, where we could install our shark sled." Spielberg felt that shooting on the water without any land visible made these scenes more suspenseful. "I wanted the audience to think the boat couldn't just simply turn around and go back to shore. I literally needed a 360-degree stage at sea." Three mechanical sharks were built for the movie and were nicknamed Bruce, after Spielberg's lawyer. They were constructed by special effects wizard Bob Mattey, who also built the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The sharks cost $250,000 to build and were even more expensive to use in the water. Working with Bruce in the open ocean turned out to be a filmmaker's nightmare. The water rusted its machinery, and it frequently malfunctioned or refused to work at all. The movie had been scheduled to shoot in 55 days, but the trouble with Bruce and the unpredictable nature of shooting in the ocean inflated the shoot to 159 days. Ultimately, Spielberg ended up finding creative ways to shoot around Bruce's limitations. The movie also shows the shark sparingly, with its first appearance coming an hour and 21 minutes into the film. Production designer Joe Alves worried that Bruce wouldn't be frightening enough for audiences. "I thought people would laugh at the shark because it would make all of these funny noises before the music was added and the crew would laugh." He went on to say, "But when I saw the first screening, nobody laughed. They started screaming. Then I realized, 'Oh, I think we've got a big success here.'" Composer John Williams wrote the iconic "Jaws Theme" on the piano, using low, rhythmic notes to build a primal sense of dread. But when Spielberg first heard the composition, he thought it was "too simple." Williams would later recall that when he first played it for the director, Spielberg said, "You can't be serious." "At that time, I had no idea that it would have that kind of impact on people," Williams said. "Steven and I had a little laugh about it." Williams's score for Jaws won his second Academy Award. He has scored 26 films for Spielberg, including the Indiana Jones trilogy, E.T., and Jurassic Park. The grizzled seaman Quint's mannerisms and lines were partly inspired by a Martha's Vineyard selectman named Craig Kingsbury, who showed up to an open audition. Spielberg ended up casting Kingsbury as Ben Gardner after nearly choosing him for the role of Quint, which went to Robert Shaw. Kingsbury ad-libbed lines like, "They'll wish their fathers had never met their mothers, when they start takin' their bottoms out and slammin' into them rocks, boy." Spielberg loved the local color Kingsbury brought to the movie so much that he kept making his part bigger. A scene was cut from Jaws because of actor Gregory Peck. Originally, the movie introduced Quint disrupting a screening of Moby Dick in an Amity cinema. However, Peck owned the rights to the 1956 movie and didn't allow it to be shown in Jaws. Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss didn't get along on set. Shaw thought Dreyfuss was arrogant and inexperienced, and in turn, Dreyfuss was frustrated with the older actor's habit of drinking to excess. One day, Shaw reportedly asked Dreyfuss to help him out, and Dreyfuss responded by grabbing and throwing his costar's glass of bourbon out the window. Later that day, Dreyfuss said that Shaw sprayed him with a fire extinguisher mid-take. In later years, Dreyfuss would speak fondly of his costar, saying, "In private, he was the kindest, gentlest, funniest guy you ever met." Finally, the line, "You're gonna need a bigger boat," is probably the most famous bit of dialogue in Jaws, and it was ad-libbed by actor Roy Scheider. The line came from an inside joke among the crew who were often frustrated by the difficulties of loading all the equipment and amenities of a working film set onto a boat. Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb explained, "It became a catchphrase for any time anything went wrong—if lunch was late or the swells were rocking the camera, someone would say, 'You're gonna need a bigger boat.'"Scheider had a habit of slipping the line into his scenes, and the moment when he deadpans it after the movie's first shark sighting was just too good to cut.
Wall Street Journal
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Hollywood High' Review: How Teens Took Over the Screen
Reality shapes the movies, and the movies reshape reality, which makes its way back into film. In the 1950s, for instance, widespread dismay, sensational media coverage and even congressional hearings revolved around the crisis of juvenile delinquency, which yielded a spate of what's-wrong-with-young-people features, many of them cheesy and laughable. Among the few that gained a hold on the public imagination was 'Rebel Without a Cause' (1955), a fairly terrible teen soap that became iconic because its point of view was sympathetic to its desperate youth and because its charismatic young lead, James Dean, had died in a car wreck less than a month before it was released. The car Dean's character drove, a Mercury, became the hot-rodders' 'vehicle of choice through most of the 1950s,' writes Bruce Handy in 'Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies.' A hoodlum in 'American Graffiti' (1973), another defining movie about youth, made a generation later, also drove a Mercury. That film takes place over a single night in 1962, and the choice of car was a joke on its driver, an illustration of a comical urge to cling to a faded past even among young people. 'Rock and roll has been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died,' the film's gearhead hero, John, observes; 1973 looked back to 1962, when everyone was sighing about 1959. Most of the songs on the celebrated soundtrack were already oldies on the night it takes place. The movie harbored a droll sensitivity for early-onset nostalgia. Mr. Handy's teen-mag title and his book's colorful packaging belie the author's seriousness about his subject. A veteran magazine journalist whose credits include a stint at Vanity Fair, he writes with the lively appreciation of a fan rather than with condescension or academic pedantry, combining astute cultural analysis with fascinating trivia.
