Robert Zemeckis

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knives
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#101 Post by knives » Fri Mar 24, 2017 2:14 pm

Which is something that now costs a million dollars.

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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#102 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Fri Mar 24, 2017 2:32 pm

Really?

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tarpilot
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#103 Post by tarpilot » Sat Mar 25, 2017 2:46 am

Isn't the joke of the Berry scene that a famous black musician steals from an anonymous white guitarist rather than the other way around?

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mfunk9786
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#104 Post by mfunk9786 » Sat Mar 25, 2017 3:32 am

...no, I don't think it is

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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#105 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sat Mar 25, 2017 9:48 am

I can see it, though as a joke it's not very-well telegraphed.

Family Guy did a nice call-back to that scene with Brian playing the Rick Astley song to a 1985 prom, and someone at the end in the crowd saying it sucked.

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whaleallright
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#106 Post by whaleallright » Sat Mar 25, 2017 1:03 pm

To me, more than a joke "about" Chuck Berry, it's a comic riff on the basic idea of paradoxical causality that's at the heart of the film -- a sort of iteration in miniature of the film's plot as a whole. Back to the Future is full of this sort of mise en abyme.

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colinr0380
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#107 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Mar 25, 2017 4:19 pm

flyonthewall2983 wrote:Family Guy did a nice call-back to that scene with Brian playing the Rick Astley song to a 1985 prom, and someone at the end in the crowd saying it sucked.
Here's that parody/most elaborate contribution to the Rick Rolling trend of a decade or so ago.

I agree with whaleallright. There are also another couple of very minor interesting racial undercurrents going through at least the first two Back To The Future films. Not only does Marty seemingly give Chuck Berry his inspiration, he also inspires the clerk at the diner to run for mayor (and he's shown as running for re-election when back in 1985, compared to struggling to even win one election in the original 1985 at the beginning of the film). Then Part II has that whole business of the skewed nightmare 1985 timeline where Biff becomes the de facto mayor of the city and Marty's neighbourhood has been turned into a ghetto. They may not be particularly focusing on that aspect, but there is that sense that in the hands of 'benevolent meddlers' like the Doc and Marty, there actually can be positives from altering events, but they're usually unintended ones tangential to the best laid plans and happen in spite of all of Doc's panic over not interfering with events at all. The best aspects of all the films in the Back To The Future series are the ones where it looks like everything is about to fall apart. Even the trials during the clocktower/prom redux/damsel in distress on the runaway train climaxes all have that aspect of a sudden cropping up, dangerous unplanned occurrence, but that kind of forces the characters to face up to their fears and become truly heroic, making everything not just go back to normal (which would have been the case if the characters just solved everything to plan and left), but actually turns out for the better in the end. They are beautifully optimistic films in that sense.

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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#108 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sat Mar 25, 2017 6:29 pm

^ that's the same episode that spoofs the chalkboard scene that culminates in one of my favorite lines "...where you're married to Molly Ringwald, Quagmire's married to Lois, and for some reason we have a chalkboard in the living room", and they turn on the TV to find out Chevy Chase is hosting the Tonight Show.

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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#109 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Fri Apr 14, 2017 12:48 am

Mr Sausage wrote:
colinr0398 wrote:Wasn't the big issue with Cast Away at the time all of the blatant Fed Ex product placement?
I remember people making a lot out of this, but in the director's commentary Zemeckis explained it wasn't product placement, he just wanted to use a real-world business instead of creating a distracting fake one. I believe him. Product placements are generally throw away moments, but this one, Hanks' job, was central to the character's arc and to the general irony of the narrative (guy over-concerned with small slices of time is granted all the time in the world).
There was a lot of product placement for similar reasons in the first BTTF. To get a feel for the time, they looked to brands which had different logos between '55 and '85 (Pepsi and Texaco being the major ones). I'm recalling this from the DVDs but there is a funny story Gale tells that Universal's recently-appointed product-placement guy managed to get 50 grand from the California Raisin people, with the promise that it would do for raisins what ET did for Resse's Pieces. Gale and Zemeckis didn't want that, thinking a bowl of raisins on film would look like a bowl of dirt. All it got in the end is the advertisement on the park bench the homeless man is sleeping on when Marty comes back.

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hearthesilence
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#110 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Dec 29, 2017 1:53 pm

Michael wrote:I dated a guy who made me drive him to Savannah from NY (that was about 20 hours drive) just to sit on that damn bench Gump sat on yapping away with chocolates.
Stumbled upon this just now - funny, that exact bench (the real prop used for the movie) is currently located in one of Viacom's office buildings in NYC. Assuming they would let him up the elevators, he could've saved himself the 20 hours and just gone to Times Square. HAH!

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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#111 Post by bearcuborg » Thu Mar 21, 2019 2:47 am


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Big Ben
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#112 Post by Big Ben » Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:12 am

Eric Roth wrote:“Forrest Gump” movie would have followed Forrest Jr.’s struggles with living with AIDS in addition to following through on the Zelig-like nature of the 1994 original.
Eric Roth wrote:“I had him in the back of OJ [Simpson]’s Bronco, and that he would look up occasionally and they didn’t see him in the rear-view mirror,” Roth said. “I had him as a ballroom dancer, and eventually as a charity thing he danced with Princess Diana.”
Eric Roth wrote:The film would have culminated in Forrest’s new partner dying in the Oklahoma City federal building explosion that killed over 160 people in the largest single act of domestic terrorism in American history.
I really honestly don't know what to say. And he turned the screenplay in on September 10th, 2001. Can you imagine if this thing had been committed to film?

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domino harvey
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#113 Post by domino harvey » Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:22 am

I suspect Zemeckis and Hanks used 9/11 as a way to not hurt Roth’s feelings after reading the script.

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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#114 Post by beamish14 » Thu Mar 21, 2019 9:47 am

I doubt they could've procured the rights to make a sequel, anyway, as novelist Winston Groom was famously screwed out of profits from the first film due to
Hollywood accounting practices, and refused to sell his follow-up to Paramount.

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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#115 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Mar 21, 2019 10:47 am

domino harvey wrote:
Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:22 am
I suspect Zemeckis and Hanks used 9/11 as a way to not hurt Roth’s feelings after reading the script.
This is a very good theory.

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swo17
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#116 Post by swo17 » Thu Mar 21, 2019 10:50 am

Assuming "used" = "orchestrated"

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Roscoe
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#117 Post by Roscoe » Thu Mar 21, 2019 11:54 am

Doesn't sound much less tasteless than most of what made it to the screen in the original. And let's not forget that Roth just a little bit later basically re-wrote GUMP and called it BUTTON.

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Monterey Jack
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#118 Post by Monterey Jack » Thu Mar 21, 2019 9:53 pm

Doesn't sound that much worse than Welcome To Marwen.

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Brian C
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#119 Post by Brian C » Thu Mar 21, 2019 11:20 pm

Well of course not, MARWEN was a hideous failure so it’s a meaningless comparison. Whatever one thinks of the original GUMP, it at least was phenomenally successful and remains beloved by many.

I mean, I know you’re just trying to pile on. But you’re doing it wrong.

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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#120 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Fri Mar 22, 2019 7:41 pm

Brian C wrote:
Thu Mar 21, 2019 11:20 pm
Whatever one thinks of the original GUMP, it at least was phenomenally successful and remains beloved by many.
I have a real soft spot for that one. Not to the point of vigorously defending it against it's detractors, whose agenda against it is more part of a larger beef which I can understand. But it really works in ways a lot of Oscar-bait could ever barely rise up to. Mostly because Tom Hanks was the only actor alive to ever pull off what the script demanded of him.

And just personally it came at a time when some of the themes were starting to affect me as a very young man, and is really the first time I had the proper theatrical experience of something that visually grand as the running sequence was.

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Big Ben
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#121 Post by Big Ben » Fri Mar 22, 2019 10:16 pm

Brian is absolutely correct about Gump. Forrest Gump is what I like to call a "High School Movie." It covers enough history in a broad and accessible enough manner that you can show it to just about anyone and they "get it". You could show it in a History Class without much hubbub and without much controversy. While I think it's rather milquetoast in execution I have never doubted it's sincerity which is what I think most people like about it.

However of note is that it's depiction of Vietnam is apparently far more realistic than other films. I know how stupid that sounds but I read a piece by a vet talking about how it was mostly long range fire and not brutal hand to hand stuff. It's a surprisingly accurate set piece in what I would call an otherwise aloof picture.

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domino harvey
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#122 Post by domino harvey » Fri Mar 22, 2019 10:23 pm

I liked Forrest Gump a lot more than I expected when I revisited it for the Alt Oscars project. You can read my long piece on the film here


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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#124 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Thu Mar 11, 2021 8:35 pm

Cast Away hits a lot different being 37 as opposed to 17, maybe more so within the context of the last year. I was in a fairly quaint hotel room last summer when I happened upon Tom Hanks and the volleyball channel-surfing and thought briefly about the present circumstances compared to being excited for the latest Zemeckis adventure. I thought it was fairly profound back then and it's remained maybe my 2nd favorite of his work next to the BTTF movies, but now my appreciation has morphed into realizing that this may be the very polar opposite of his more fantastical work. It's still very much a big, bold Hollywood production but a lot of what benefits from his visual acuity went into making things as realistic as possible. It takes an easy out at the very end, but it does feel earned for what we see Chuck go through, seeing how his life completely passed him by when all logic pointed to him being dead.

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Maltic
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Re: Robert Zemeckis

#125 Post by Maltic » Fri Mar 12, 2021 11:03 am

The Blank Check podcast took a film-by-film deep dive into Zemeckis' body of work last year. 20 or so episodes, including a thoughtful discussion of Forrest Gump with NYT's Jamelle Bouie. They're perfect for this kind of pop auteur.

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