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And the massive box office of Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, meanwhile, implied that he was on his way, reeling off a run of hits culminating in the triumphal success of Forrest Gump - a positively Spielbergian integration of old-fashioned Americana and state-of-the-art special-effects technology.įorrest Gump was also a sham, of course: that gently spiralling CGI feather - and its symbolic representation of an answer, my friends, that’s blowing in the wind - was a hilariously apt symbol for a movie that crassly advocated passivity as a state of grace. in reverse, with scientist Jodie Foster as the earthling who ends up phoning home.)Īmong the emergent crop of directors amblin’ their way through the early ’80s - Zemeckis, working directly under Spielberg’s tutelage, seemed to be in the best position to challenge his patron’s position. (It’s also possible to look at his 1997 hit Contact as E.T.
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Zemeckis repaid Spielberg by slyly sending up the latter’s career one movie at a time, starting with the pitch-perfect Jaws joke written into his and Bob Gale’s script for Spielberg’s 1941 - in which a surfacing submarine menaces the same blonde skinny dipper previously chomped on by Bruce - and running through Used Cars, which replaced the exhilarating highway chases of The Sugarland Express with the mudslinging of cheapjack automotive salesmen, and Romancing the Stone, a grinning Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-off with Michael Douglas in mock-macho mode as a knockoff Harrison Ford. This act of chutzpah paid significant dividends, with the impressed Spielberg - barely a young tyro himself at this point - signing on to produce the interloper’s first two films, in effect becoming Zemeckis’s mentor. In Tom Shone’s terrific 2004 book Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, Spielberg recalls meeting Zemeckis for the first time when the latter barged into his office on the Universal lot to present his student film. When Zemeckis won the Academy Award for Best Director for Forrest Gump in 1995, he was handed his award by Steven Spielberg - a fortuitous bit of Oscar-telecast stage management that suggested the passing of the torch. Starting with the modest Beatles pastiche I Wanna Hold Your Hand - a 1978 production that tries to recapture the British Invasion excitement of 1964 - Zemeckis has always seemed most comfortable looking back in time, albeit through increasingly state-of-the-art visual prisms: he is, uniquely, a nostalgist and a technocrat. This is a filmmaker whose body of work comprises a rich and significant contradiction between old and new.
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With Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard providing star power, Allied looks like a throwback to an era when spy movies were glamorous, not gritty, which makes it both business as usual and strangely atypical for its director, Robert Zemeckis. It may or may not be a coincidence that the new romantic thriller Allied is set in 1942, the same year of Casablanca’s release, but the early descriptions of the film have a certain play-it-again-Sam quality. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: World War II, a tough guy meets the love of his life behind enemy lines in North Africa - Casablanca, to be exact.