Forrest Gump (Movie)

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    Tom Hanks and Robin Wright on ‘Forrest Gump,’ ‘Here’ and De-aging

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    It’s not exactly a “Forrest Gump” sequel, but the new movie “Here” does reunite the stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and the filmmakers — the director Robert Zemeckis, screenwriter Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri — of that 1994 Oscar-winning favorite. Like the earlier film, the new one also travels across decades, with an unheard-of perspective.In this case, though, the viewpoint is the camera’s: “Here” is filmed almost entirely from one locked-off shot, with a camera positioned in what becomes the living room of a century-old New England home. There are no cutaways or traditional close-ups; no montages or wide-angle transitions. It’s an experiment in cinematic formalism, inspired by Richard McGuire’s ambitious, genre-expanding 2014 graphic novel of the same name.Though the story starts with the dinosaurs and travels all the way through the present day with different characters, it focuses mostly on Hanks and Wright’s boomer couple, Richard and Margaret, whose lives are, by turns, mundane and historicized in that single setting. The furniture and styles change, and with the help of A.I., the stars were also digitally de-aged.“It really is about, why do we remember the moments that we remember?” Wright said.In a video interview this week from New York, she and Hanks spoke about what attracted them to the film (the answer was largely Zemeckis), the enduring appeal of “Forrest Gump,” and what drives their choices now. The technical challenges of “Here” also energized them: There was no crafting — or saving — a performance in the edit; no way to cut around a missed mark except to redo a whole scene. “Tom and I, we’re so spoiled, we don’t ever want to shoot conventional format again,” Wright said of typical cinematography.Early reviews have been mixed, with some critics balking at the visual conceit, and the de-aging. Wright, 58, was having none of it. “It is so simple and beautiful and real and human,” she said. “We all have experienced something in this movie.”Hanks, 68, pondered why cynicism has become, as he said, “the default.”“I remain driven by this never-ending curiosity I have, about how it is true that good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people,” he said. The response could be cynicism, he said, but only if you’re seeking “the lowest common denominator.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Haley Joel Osment, ‘Sixth Sense’ Star, Is Content 25 Years Later

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      Haley Joel Osment’s childhood memories are not like other people’s. He remembers the kindness with which Tom Hanks treated him, when he was 5 and playing Hanks’s son in “Forrest Gump.” And the time Russell Crowe adjusted his bow tie at an awards show when Osment, not yet 12, was Oscar-nominated for his breakout performance in “The Sixth Sense.” The in-depth conversations he had with Steven Spielberg about the future as they were filming “A.I.” that same year.A phalanx of Osment clones, made for that movie, are still floating around — he heard they might have ended up stockpiled in Peter Jackson’s trove of memorabilia in New Zealand. If the apocalypse happens, Osment jokes, that preteen version of him will survive.It is, in any case, the form in which many fans know him best — especially as the notably named Cole Sear, the teary-eyed center of “The Sixth Sense,” M. Night Shyamalan’s blockbuster supernatural thriller from August 1999. Osment’s indelibly whispered line, “I see dead people,” went from the trailer to the canon of cinema to pop culture infamy long before memes even existed to codify it (though they have now). It was a phrase so potent that, 25 years after its arrival, it is a Kendrick Lamar lyric — on a Drake diss track, no less.With its final-act twist, “The Sixth Sense” also, some cineastes argue, started “spoiler culture” — meaning that mass moviedom as we know it, with entire publicity campaigns and prickly fan bases fiercely safeguarding plotlines, sprang from that moment. A 10-year-old paired with an action star (Bruce Willis), playing against type as a child therapist, spooked audiences into repeat views, and today we scour the screen for Easter eggs and hope for the thrill of a shock.Osment with Bruce Willis in “The Sixth Sense.” When the boy auditioned, M. Night Shyamalan recalled, “I turned to the casting director and said, ‘I don’t think I want to make this without him.’”Buena Vista PicturesOsment is now 36; he has been a working actor for nearly nine-tenths of his life, in drama, comedy, fantasy, animation, period pieces, video games and oddball stuff. He has enough credits that when a cast was made of his arm for the Amazon superhero series “The Boys,” he was able to use it again, seasons later, to beat someone in the FX vampire satire “What We Do in the Shadows.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      When Best Picture Winners Overcome a Release Early in the Year

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      “Everything Everywhere All at Once” isn’t the first top film to have its debut long before awards season. But it is one of the few to go the distance.When “Everything Everywhere All at Once” made its debut last March at the South by Southwest film festival, followed by a nationwide release the next month, expectations were modest.Maybe the quirky A24 film about a multiverse-jumping mother striving to finally connect with her daughter — and busting some martial arts moves along the way — would make some money. And then “hot dog fingers” mania happened. Seemingly overnight, TikTokers glommed on to the prompt “If the multiverse is real, I hope there’s one where …” and imagined alternate timelines for their lives. Moviegoers across the country flocked to see the film once, twice, nine times. But back in spring 2022, no one could have anticipated the movie’s best picture triumph at the Oscars on Sunday night.Conventional wisdom has it that films released in the fall make stronger contenders. So when “Everything Everywhere” won, it joined a select group of films that were similarly released early — or early-ish — in a previous year, and that went on to capture the most coveted prize in Hollywood.Here are nine times a release in spring or summer — or, once, even in January — has gone on to win big.January 1943‘Casablanca’A release early in the year was not viewed as a competitive disadvantage until the early 1990s, when the former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s guerrilla-style efforts on behalf of smaller indie films like “The Crying Game” (1992) and “Il Postino” (1995) kicked off the modern era of Oscar campaigning. The World War II-set romantic drama “Casablanca” was actually in good company among the 10 best picture contenders: All but three were released between January and August.May 1952‘The Greatest Show on Earth’In the 1950s, it was common for best picture winners to also be box-office behemoths. “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Cecil B. DeMille’s 152-minute circus extravaganza, became the highest-grossing film of the year in 1952, thanks to its extended stay in theaters.March 1965‘The Sound of Music’David Lean’s epic romance “Doctor Zhivago,” a December release, was the favorite after he won best director for his previous two movies (“The Bridge on the River Kwai” from 1957 and “Lawrence of Arabia” from 1962). But audiences loved Maria — “The Sound of Music” became the highest-grossing film of 1965 — and the film won five statuettes, including best picture.May 1969‘Midnight Cowboy’The only X-rated film to ever win best picture hit theaters long before the four other best picture contenders. The idea of releasing awards contenders as close as possible to the date of the ceremony — just before the eligibility cutoff at the end of the previous year — so they’d be top of mind for voters was just beginning to take hold and would become common in the 1980s.March 1972‘The Godfather’ Paramount brass locked horns with the director Francis Ford Coppola on every major decision, and the studio chief at the time, Robert Evans, fought to push the film’s original Christmas 1971 release to the spring to force Coppola to do another edit. (That made the film, which runs nearly three hours, even longer!) To be fair, “The Godfather” would have been Oscars catnip no matter when it was released.February 1991‘The Silence of the Lambs’Like “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “The Silence of the Lambs” was bolstered by huge word of mouth and strong reviews. The cannibalistic thriller — still the only horror movie to win best picture — topped the box office for five consecutive weeks after it was released in February 1991. Then it hit VHS just before Halloween, vaulting it back onto voters’ radar.July 1994‘Forrest Gump’This crowd-pleasing baby boomer tale was up against a stacked lineup of best picture nominees that included “Pulp Fiction” and “The Shawshank Redemption.” But moviegoers had embraced the tale of Tom Hanks’s kindhearted Alabamian, and it spent the summer hovering at or near the top of the box office, a run that Oscar voters surely noted.May 2005‘Crash’The divisive, Los Angeles-set race-relations drama pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history. The gay western “Brokeback Mountain” was an early front-runner and theories abound about why voters gave its filmmaker, Ang Lee, the best director Oscar but the top prize to Paul Haggis’s urban drama. In hindsight the win wasn’t exactly definitive. In 2012, Film Comment named “Crash” the worst best-picture winner of all time.June 2009‘The Hurt Locker’“The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s low-budget American war thriller, had a slow rollout in theaters, going from four to 535 by the end of July. But it racked up strong performances at precursor award shows leading into the Oscars. More

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      ‘Laal Singh Chaddha’ Review: Forrest Gump in India

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      This Indian adaptation of “Forrest Gump” doubles down on its Pollyanna hero, substituting different historical touchstones.“Forrest Gump” has been called many things: a feel-good crowd-pleaser, a maddening piece of pap, and America’s version of Voltaire’s “Candide” (per the film scholar Dave Kehr). “Laal Singh Chaddha” offers up a fresh look: a luxuriantly produced Indian adaptation that doubles down on the story’s simpleton hero, with new historical touchstones.In the film’s framing device, Laal (Aamir Khan, the star of the 2001 crossover hit “Lagaan”) recounts his life story to passengers on a train. He grows up bullied because of his leg braces, despite his protective mother (Mona Singh), but he befriends a classmate, Rupa (Kareena Kapoor Khan), and later pines for her.The Gumpian formula of comical serendipity plays out as Laal accidentally becomes a track-and-field star, inspires a signature dance, rescues friend and foe during a mountain skirmish, and earns millions manufacturing underwear. The famous box of chocolates is reimagined, sweetly so: life is now like a golgappa (a crisp fried treat).In Advait Chandan’s film, traumatic national history gets a therapeutic recap: the military conflict in which Laal shows the power of compassion is the Kargil war, while the assassination of Indira Gandhi and sectarian riots also figure into the plot. (Laal is Sikh but only barely grasps these violent events.)Though treated as noble, Laal’s naïve optimism doesn’t rise to much more than the notion of having a good attitude. Khan’s portrayal suggests a cross between a lesser Farrelly Brothers comedy and “Being There,” and seems ill-suited to Rupa’s grim later experiences married to an abusive producer. The movie’s charms are limited by what comes to feel like a coddling conceit.Laal Singh ChaddhaRated PG-13 for some violent content, thematic elements and suggestive material. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 39 minutes. In theaters. More