There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood is a 2007 American drama film directed, written and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film is loosely based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil! (1927). It tells the story of a silver-miner-turned-oil-man on a ruthless quest for wealth during Southern California's oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano.

The film received significant critical praise and numerous award nominations and victories. It appeared on many critics' "top ten" lists for the year, notably the American Film Institute, the National Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Day-Lewis won Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, NYFCC, and IFTA Best Actor awards for his performance. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, winning Best Actor for Day-Lewis and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit.

In late 2009, it was chosen by Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, and Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and At the Movies as the best film of the '00s.

In 1902 Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a mineral prospector, discovers oil and establishes a small drilling company. Following the death of one of his workers in an accident, Plainview adopts the man's orphaned son (his mother nowhere to be found). The boy, whom he names H. W. (Dillon Freasier), becomes his nominal business "partner".

Nine years later, Plainview is approached by Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) who tells him about the oil deposit under his family's property in Little Boston, California. Plainview attempts to buy the farm at a bargain price but Paul's twin brother Eli (also Dano), wise to Plainview's plan, holds out for $10,000, wanting the money to fund the local church, of which he is the pastor. Plainview has Eli's father agree to the bargain price instead, and goes on to snatch up the available land in the Little Boston area, except for one holdout—William Bandy (Hans Howes). Oil production begins. Later, an on-site accident kills a worker, and later still, a large explosion robs H.W. of his hearing.

One day, a visitor (Kevin J. O'Connor) arrives on Plainview's doorstep claiming to be his half-brother, Henry, and is seeking work. Plainview takes the stranger in, and though H.W. discovers flaws in his story he keeps the news to himself; the boy then attempts to kill Henry by setting his bed linen alight. Angered at his son's behavior, Plainview sends the boy away to a school in San Francisco. A representative from Standard Oil later offers to buy out Plainview's local interests, but Plainview elects to strike a deal with Union Oil instead and construct a pipeline to the Californian coast, though the Bandy ranch remains an impediment. After spending more time with Henry, Plainview also becomes suspicious; Henry finally confesses that he was actually a friend of the real Henry, who has long since died from tuberculosis. Assuming the worst, Plainview kills the fake-Henry and buries his body.

The next morning, Plainview is awakened by Mr. Bandy, who appears to be aware of the previous night's events. Bandy agrees to Plainview's deal but only on the provision that the latter mend his ways and join the Church of the Third Revelation, where Eli humiliates him as part of his initiation. Plainview soon reunites with H.W., and Eli eventually leaves town to perform missionary work.

In 1927, a much older H.W. (Russell Harvard) marries his childhood sweetheart, Mary Sunday (Colleen Foy). By this time his father, now an alcoholic but extremely wealthy, is living in a mansion with only a servant for company. H.W. asks his father (through an interpreter) to dissolve their partnership so he can establish his own business. Betrayed, Plainview mocks his son's deafness and tells him of his true origins, leaving H.W. with no regrets when he finally leaves.

Some time later, Eli, now a radio host and the head of a larger church, visits Plainview, but it becomes clear that Eli is in dire financial straits and desperate, explaining that Mr. Bandy has died and that he offers to broker a deal on his land. Plainview agrees to the deal if Eli confesses, "I am a false prophet; God is a superstition", subjecting Eli to the same humiliation Eli had put him through years earlier. Eli does so after much berating by Plainview. To Eli's horror, Plainview scathingly reveals that he had already drained the oil from the property through surrounding wells. Plainview suddenly goes into a rage, chases Eli about the room, and then beats him to death with a bowling pin. When Plainview's butler comes down to check on him, Plainview simply says "I'm finished."

Originally, Paul Thomas Anderson had been working on a screenplay about two fighting families. He struggled with the script and soon realized it just was not working. Homesick, he purchased a copy of Upton Sinclair's Oil! in London, drawn to its cover illustration of a California oilfield. As he read, Anderson became even more fascinated with the novel and adapted the first 150 pages to a screenplay. He began to get a real sense of where his script was going after making many trips to museums dedicated to early oilmen in Bakersfield. He changed the title from Oil! to There Will Be Blood because, "there's not enough of the book to feel like it's a proper adaptation."

Anderson, who had previously stated that he would like to work with Daniel Day-Lewis, wrote the screenplay with Day-Lewis in mind and approached the actor when the script was nearly complete. Anderson had heard that Daniel Day-Lewis liked his earlier film Punch-Drunk Love, which gave him the confidence to hand Day-Lewis a copy of the incomplete script. According to Day-Lewis, simply being asked to do the film was enough to convince him. In an interview with the The New York Observer, the actor elaborated on what drew him to the project. It was "the understanding that [Anderson] had already entered into that world. [He] wasn't observing it — [he'd] entered into it — and indeed [he'd] populated it with characters who [he] felt had lives of their own."

The line in the final scene, "I drink your milkshake!", is paraphrased from a quote by New Mexico Senator Albert Fall speaking before a Congressional investigation into the 1920s oil-related Teapot Dome scandal. Anderson was enamored of the fact that a term like "milkshake" found its way into such official testimony, to explain the complicated technical process of oil drainage to senators.

According to JoAnne Sellar, one of the film's producers, it was a hard film to finance because "the studios didn't think it had the scope of a major picture." It took two years to acquire financing for the film.

For the role of Plainview's son, Anderson looked at people in Los Angeles and New York City, but he realized that they needed someone from Texas who knew how to shoot shotguns and "live in that world." The filmmakers asked around at a school and the principal recommended Dillon Freasier. They did not have him read any scenes and instead talked to him, realizing that he was the perfect person for the role.

To start building his character, Day-Lewis started with the voice. Anderson sent him recordings from the late 19th century to 1927 and a copy of the 1948 film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, including documentaries on its director, John Huston, an important influence on Anderson's film. According to Anderson, he was inspired by the fact that Sierra Madre is "about greed and ambition and paranoia and looking at the worst parts of yourself." While writing the script, he would put the film on before he went to bed at night. To research for the role, Day-Lewis read letters from laborers and studied photographs from the time period. He also read up on oil tycoon Edward Doheny, upon whom Sinclair's book is loosely based.

Filming started in June 2006 on a ranch in Marfa, Texas, and took three months. Other location shooting took place in Los Angeles. Anderson tried to shoot the script in sequence with most of the sets on the ranch. Two weeks into the 60-day shoot, Anderson replaced the actor playing Eli Sunday with Paul Dano, who had originally only been cast in the much smaller role of Paul Sunday, the brother who tipped off Plainview about the oil on the Sunday ranch. A profile of Day-Lewis in The New York Times Magazine suggested that the original actor (Kel O'Neill) had been intimidated by Day-Lewis's intensity and habit of staying in character on and off the set. Both Anderson and Day-Lewis deny this claim, and Day-Lewis stated, "I absolutely don't believe that it was because he was intimidated by me. I happen to believe that — and I hope I'm right."

Anderson first saw Dano in The Ballad of Jack and Rose (in which Dano co-starred with Day-Lewis) and thought that he would be perfect to play Paul Sunday, a role he originally envisioned to be a 12 or 13-year-old boy. Dano only had four days to prepare for the much larger role of Eli Sunday, but he researched the time period that the film is set in as well as evangelical preachers. Three weeks of scenes with Sunday and Plainview had to be re-shot with Dano instead of O'Neill. The interior mansion scenes were filmed at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, the former real-life home of Edward Doheny Jr., a gift from his father Edward Doheny. Scenes filmed at Greystone involved the careful renovation of the basement's two lane bowling alley.

Anderson dedicated the film to Robert Altman, who died while Anderson was editing it.

This film was the second co-production of Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films to be released in as many months, after No Country for Old Men (which won the Academy Award for Best Picture).

There Will Be Blood was shot using Panavision XL 35 mm cameras outfitted primarily with Panavision C series and high-speed anamorphic lenses.

Anderson had been a fan of Radiohead's music and was impressed with Jonny Greenwood's scoring of the film Bodysong. While writing the script for There Will Be Blood, Anderson heard Greenwood's orchestral piece Popcorn Superhet Receiver, which prompted him to ask Greenwood to work with him. After initially agreeing to score the film, Greenwood had doubts and thought about backing out, but Anderson's reassurance and enthusiasm for the film convinced the musician to stick with the project. Anderson gave Greenwood a copy of the film and three weeks later he came back with two hours of music recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London. Concerning his approach to composing the soundtrack, Greenwood said to Entertainment Weekly:

I think it was about not necessarily just making period music, which very traditionally you would do. But because they were traditional orchestral sounds, I suppose that's what we hoped was a little unsettling, even though you know all the sounds you're hearing are coming from very old technology. You can just do things with the classical orchestra that do unsettle you, that are sort of slightly wrong, that have some kind of undercurrent that's slightly sinister.

The film also contains the cello and piano transcription of Fratres by Arvo Pärt, and the third movement from Johannes Brahms's Violin Concerto. The recording is by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter with the Berlin Philharmonic directed by Herbert von Karajan.

The song "Convergence", which can be heard during the tower explosion sequence, was taken straight from the Bodysong soundtrack.

In December 2008, Greenwood's score was nominated for a Grammy in the category of "Best Score Soundtrack Album For Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media" for the 51st Grammy Awards.

The film was on the American Film Institute's 10 Movies of the Year; AFI's jury said:

There Will Be Blood is bravura film-making by one of American film's modern masters. Paul Thomas Anderson's epic poem of savagery, optimism and obsession is a true meditation on America. The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal. In a career defined by transcendent performances, Daniel Day-Lewis creates a character so rich and so towering, that "Daniel Plainview" will haunt the history of film for generations to come.

The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2007.

In November 2009, the critics of Time Out New York chose the film as the second-best of the decade, saying:

As an oblique critique of Bush II’s self-made power brokers and winner-take-all capitalism, There Will Be Blood cuts to the bone. As the work of a visionary artist, it’s truly sui generis.

In December 2009, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone chose the film as the #1 best movie of the decade, saying:

Two years after first seeing There Will Be Blood, I am convinced that Paul Thomas Anderson's profound portrait of an American primitive—take that, Citizen Kane—deserves pride of place among the decade's finest. Daniel Day-Lewis gave the best and ballsiest performance of the past 10 years. As Daniel Plainview, a prospector who loots the land of its natural resources in silver and oil to fill his pockets and gargantuan ego, he showed us a man draining his humanity for power. And Anderson, having extended Plainview's rage from Earth to heaven in the form of a corrupt preacher (Paul Dano), managed to "drink the milkshake" of other risk-taking directors. If I had to stake the future of film in the next decade on one filmmaker, I'd go with PTA. Even more than Boogie Nights and Magnolia—his rebel cries from the 1990s—Blood let Anderson put technology at the service of character. The score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood was a sonic explosion that reinvented what film music could be. And the images captured by Robert Elswit, a genius of camera and lighting, made visual poetry out of an oil well consumed by flame. For the final word on Blood, I'll quote Plainview: "It was one goddamn hell of a show."

Chicago Tribune and At the Movies critic Michael Phillips named There Will Be Blood the decade’s best film. Phillips stated:

This most eccentric and haunting of modern epics is driven by oilman Daniel Plainview, who, in the hands of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, becomes a Horatio Alger story gone horrible wrong. Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s camera is as crucial to the films hypnotic pull as the performance at its center. For its evocation of the early 1900’s, its relentless focus on one man’s fascinating obsessions, and for its inspiring example of how to freely adapt a novel--plus, what I think is the performance of the new century--There Will Be Blood stands alone. The more I see it, the sadder, and stranger, and more visually astounding it grows--and the more it seems to say about the best and worst in the American ethos of rugged individualism. Awfully good!

Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum named There Will Be Blood the decade's best film as well. In her original review, Schwarzbaum stated:

Anyhow, a fierce story meshing big exterior-oriented themes of American character with an interior-oriented portrait of an impenetrable man (two men, really, including the false prophet Sunday) is only half Anderson's quest, and his exciting achievement. The other half lies in the innovation applied to the telling itself. For a huge picture, There Will Be Blood is exquisitely intimate, almost a collection of sketches. For a long, slow movie, it speeds. For a story set in the fabled bad-old-days past, it's got the terrors of modernity in its DNA. Leaps of romantic chordal grandeur from Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major announce the launch of a fortune-changing oil well down the road from Eli Sunday's church — and then, much later, announce a kind of end of the world. For bleakness, the movie can't be beat — nor for brilliance.

In December 2009, the website Gawker.com determined that There Will Be Blood is film critics' consensus best film of the decade when aggregating all Best of the Decade lists, stating: "And when the votes were all in, by a nose, There Will Be Blood stood alone at the top of the decade, its straw in the whole damn cinema's milkshake."

They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? ranks There Will Be Blood number 7 in their January 2010 list of The 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films.

The list of critics who lauded There Will Be Blood in their assessments of films from the past decade include:

The film received very positive reviews from critics. As of February 8, 2009, on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 91% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 195 reviews. On Metacritic, the film has an average score of 92 out of 100, based on 39 reviews.

Andrew Sarris called the film "an impressive achievement in its confident expertness in rendering the simulated realities of a bygone time and place, largely with an inspired use of regional amateur actors and extras with all the right moves and sounds." In Premiere magazine, Glenn Kenny praised Day-Lewis's performance: "Once his Plainview takes wing, the relentless focus of the performance makes the character unique." Manohla Dargis wrote, in her review for The New York Times, "the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic." Esquire magazine also praised Day-Lewis's performance: "what's most fun, albeit in a frightening way, is watching this greedmeister become more and more unhinged as he locks horns with Eli Sunday ... both Anderson and Day-Lewis go for broke. But it's a pleasure to be reminded, if only once every four years, that subtlety can be overrated." Richard Schickel in Time magazine praised There Will Be Blood as "one of the most wholly original American movies ever made." Critic Tom Charity, writing about CNN's ten-best films list, calls the film the only "flat-out masterpiece" of 2007.

Schickel also named the film one of the Top 10 Movies of 2007, ranking it at #9, calling Daniel Day Lewis' performance "astonishing", and calling the film "a mesmerizing meditation on the American spirit in all its maddening ambiguities: mean and noble, angry and secretive, hypocritical and more than a little insane in its aspirations."

The Times chief film critic, James Christopher, published a list in April 2008 of the Top 100 films of all time, placing There Will Be Blood at #2, behind Casablanca.

However some critics were more negative. In particular, Armond White, of the New York Press, has taken numerous opportunities to criticize the film. In his original review of There Will Be Blood, White suggested that the "musical wit disguises the story's incoherence—its meaningless siblings, silences and opportunistic sadism", feeling that the film's finale was "confusing and slapdash" and "comes across as just secular-progressive prejudice and loopy, unconvincing drama". In 2008, White would explicitly reference There Will Be Blood as an example of "unpleasurable" film-making in his reviews of at least five other films. In 2009, White criticized the "toothless Robert Altman gumming" of director Paul Thomas Anderson, adding that Blood was a "symptom of everything wrong with the American experience." Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle shot out at the film's praises by saying "there should be no need to pretend There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece just because Anderson sincerely tried to make it one." Several months after his initial review of the film, LaSalle reiterated that while he felt it was "clear" that There Will Be Blood was not a masterpiece, he wondered if its "style, an approach, an attitude... might become important in the future." Carla Meyer, of the Sacramento Bee, gave the film three and a half out of four stars, calling it a "masterpiece", she said that the final confrontation between Daniel and Eli marked when There Will Be Blood "stops being a masterpiece and becomes a really good movie. What was grand becomes petty, then overwrought."

The first public screening of There Will Be Blood was on September 29, 2007, at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. The film was released on December 26, 2007, in New York and Los Angeles where it grossed US$190,739 on its opening weekend. The film then opened in 885 theaters in selected markets on January 25, 2008, grossing $4.8 million on its opening weekend. The film went on to make $40.2 million in North America and $35.9 million in the rest of the world, with a worldwide total of $76.1 million, well above its $25 million budget. But the prints and advertising cost for this film's United States release was about $40 million.[1]

The film was released on DVD on April 8, 2008. It was released with one and two disc editions, both are packaged in a cardboard case. Anderson has refused to record a commentary for the film. A HD DVD release was confirmed, but later canceled due to the death of the format. A Blu-ray edition was released on June 3, 2008. The film has grossed $23,604,823 through DVD sales.

The Directors Guild of America nominated Paul Thomas Anderson for the DGA Award.

Daniel Day-Lewis won Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role at the 14th Screen Actors Guild Awards held in 2008.

Anderson was also nominated by the Writers Guild of America for "Best Adapted Screenplay".

The film also garnered a "Producer of the Year Award" nomination from the Producers Guild of America.

Director of photography Robert Elswit won the American Society of Cinematographers' award for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography.

The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year for 2007.

In the media, there have been multiple uses of the title/phrase "There will be blood" to describe themes or subjects that have no immediate relation to the film itself. "Oh Yes... There Will Be Blood" was the tagline for the 2005 film Saw II, though popular usage of the phrase increased following the release of Anderson's film in late 2007. There have been numerous uses of the phrase, or puns of the phrase, in the press. Examples of the disparate subject matter to which the phrase has been applied include the appearance of the phrase on the cover of the February 18, 2008 issue of Newsweek, in reference to heated controversy within the Republican party in regards to John McCain; as the title to a feature on the teen vampire film Twilight in Empire; as a punned title to a Vanity Fair photo editorial featuring Emily Blunt; as a title to a New York Times book review about a memoir concerning menstruation; and many times as a title for print and web articles discussing conflicts between parties or products.

In 2008, "There Might Be Blood" was the title of two episodes of two different television programs, Psych and Gossip Girl. The phrase has also been referenced by the Food Network show Good Eats, in a July episode titled "There Might Be Oil," in which that episode's theme ingredient was edible oils. In June 2009, the USA Network television series Royal Pains aired an episode entitled "There Will Be Food." The Comedy Central TV show The Daily Show has made several references to There Will Be Blood, including a June 2008 segment about Midwestern floods titled "There Will Be Flood." The Comedy Central show The Colbert Report also used the phrase in February 2008, when host Stephen Colbert began a fake brawl with fellow television entertainer Conan O'Brien by yelling, "Oh, there will be blood!" On the comedy video website Funny or Die, a video titled "There Will Be Oscars" features comedian David Spade as Daniel Plainview, ominously warning against the cancellation of the Oscar ceremony due to the writers' strike. In March 2008, the comedy duo Smosh made a parody video for YouTube titled "There Will Be Pokémon," which illustrates the last part of the film. During season 25, the TV quiz show Jeopardy featured a category titled "There Will Be Blood Sausage." In August 2008, rapper Young Buck, formerly of the hip-hop group G-Unit, released a new track titled, "There Will Be Blood." In December 2008, the Florida fight organization Mixed Fighting Alliance organized an event titled "There Will Be Blood." In 2009, the Academy Award-nominated soundtrack to the critically-acclaimed film The Hurt Locker included a track titled "There Will Be Bombs." The frequency of references to the particular phrase prompted media journalist Steven Zeitchik of The Hollywood Reporter to proclaim, "There Has Been Enough."

Some fans of the film believe Daniel Plainview's memorable quote "I drink your milkshake" will join the ranks of other famous film lines within pop culture. That particular quote has been used in other media repeatedly. In season 24 of Jeopardy, "I Drink Your Milkshake" was the title of a category about milkshakes. Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show and the 80th Academy Awards (for which There Will Be Blood was nominated for eight Oscars), has referenced the phrase "I drink your milkshake" several times on his show in response to news involving oil drilling, including during interviews with Ted Koppel and Nancy Pelosi. In February 2008, the night before the 80th Academy Awards, a Saturday Night Live skit featured a Food Network show starring Daniel Plainview (played by Bill Hader) and H.W. Plainview (played by Amy Poehler) called "I Drink Your Milkshake" in which Daniel and his son travel from state to state looking for the perfect milkshake. "I drink your milkshake" has inspired a There Will Be Blood fansite of the same name.

Other media references include the South Park episode "Breast Cancer Show Ever", which parodied the final scene of the film: after Wendy beats up Cartman, Mr. Mackey approaches and says "Wendy!" to which she replies "I'm finished" as Cartman lies facedown in blood. The December 8, 2008 episode of the stop-motion animation comedy show Robot Chicken featured a brief parody of the film in a segment titled "Just the Good Parts", which singled the oil rig explosion that robs H.W. of his hearing and the line "A BASTARD IN A BASKET" near the end of the film as the most notable parts of the film. A Daily Show segment used a film clip of Daniel Plainview speaking to the residents of Little Boston to poke fun at real-life Big Oil executives, while The Colbert Report utilized a clip from the film's oil derrick explosion scene in the segment "Aqua Colbert." On the Metalocalypse episode "Snakes 'n' Barrels II," which premiered on August 24, 2008, Leonard Rockstein appears at a sobriety rally and talks about getting rid of Dr. Rockzo, his drug-abusing clown alter ego, and demonstrates to his audience how he "[killed] that part of [himself]" by yelling "Get out, clown! Get out!", parodying Eli's exorcism of his parishioners. In the deleted scenes for the Academy Award-nominated film In the Loop (film), two characters debate the accuracy of the title of There Will Be Blood, with one proclaiming, "I went to see There Will Be Blood. And there wasn't any [expletive] blood." In the video game Red Dead Redemption, there is an area known as 'Plainview' which has oil wells.

Grandma's Boy

Would you read this book? Please answer people, I need more opinions!!!?
I'm writing a story about an Intelligent girl who just graded and is looking after her grandmas B & B while she is away. Her grandma wants her granddaughter to love, so she hires this boy to work with her. He's British and intelligent and charming. I don't a name for the boy, something like Elliot? Any suggestions!

British, intelligent boys name?
1.What is it? Mattison Faye 2.How did you come up with your child's name? My daughter is Mattison she is named after my husband Matt and Faye is my grandma and my husbands grandma's name 3.When did you have it picked out? I had Mattison picked out immediately and I had Faye picked out at about 8 months 4.Did you or your husband pick it out? I picked Mattison and he loved it and Faye we both agreed to it when his dad suggested it 5.Do you still love it? I love it but sometimes think it doesn't fit her 6.what will you name you next baby? If its a boy Mason if its a girl I don't know

How did you come up with your baby's name?
Okay, good luck to anyone who wants to help me. I watched this really cute youtube video some time ago. I can't for the life of me remember what it's called. It's like a little minature movie. Here's what it's about: A girl is sitting alone on a bench in a park, reading a book, and crying because something in the book is sad. A boy randomly comes up to her and takes her picture and it startles her. They begin to talk, and the boy starts to go on about what love is, and how people try to find it online, and something about what his grandma said about his shoes talking. Then the girl tells him that his pictures are good, they hold hands and walk away. Like I said, good luck. If you know it, thank you so much. I can't remember the name of the video. It was cute, though.

what would you call them?
I moved here to be with him. And people have told me he is a momma's boy, and such. But it gets ridiculous. Even to the point to where, his mother contorls everything he does, and he doesn't even argue back! Long story short, i have been house jumping. I started at his house ( with his mom and grandma) but his grandma kicked me out, for not getting a job within 2 weeks. But at the moment, i am staying at a hotel! Anyways, there's MUCH MORE to it, than just TWO things i'm going to mention here, but here are just two. We got into a car accident t he other day. And the original plan was, for him to stay at the hotel with me. But after the wreck, and he called his mom, she said they're going to drop me back off at the hotel, and they both were going to go home. Now like i said, the original plan was for him to stay over, but since the wreck, if you think about it, it would have been more reason for him to stay. He kind of argued with her ay first, but then i guess he just gave in. Now the second example is, he's been promising me forever he'll spend the night with me. And i guess he's been asking his mom ( but if he's 22, he shouldn't even have to ask). and she said no. then when she came to pick him up t like 9 or so, she told me she was,old fashioned" and doesn't approve of, "unmarried" people, who are just dating, to sleep even in the same bed. First of all, that's HER. She doesn't need to be telling him not to. Let him live HIS life right? I mean it's ridiculous. And also, that's "old fashioned" as she claims. Well it's 2010, and people who date, sleep in the same bed.... >.< But yea, so i tried breaking up with him. And he tried to get me to not. He actually ended up walking here to the hotel from his house, to spend the night. Now that was an improvement. He said it was to "show balls, to me and his mother" But i'm thinking that was just going to be a one time thing. It'll go back to the way it was. But anyways, i guess, what i'm basically asking is, what is your opinion on this? What should i do? What should he do?um, i do have a job. what does that have to do with anything???

Ok, well my boyfriend of 22yrs old, is still living with his mother and g'ma. His mother controls his life.?
Her lil boy is now 2 weeks old and I ran into her one night she was so high she could barely see straight. Baby was crying in the trailer (yeah she's poor no job no man he left her) screaming his head off and she was sitting on the porch she could barely talk straight. She was on all kinds of stuff when she got prego then she stopped it all for a healthy baby. Doc found pot in her system and warned her if she showed it again, they would meet her at the doors for that baby and put it in foster care. She's 17, living with her g'ma who's too old to work, on SSI and food stamps. Won't take no advice from anyone but will take all the clothes, formula and money she can get from family. I feel so sorry and I can't take that baby I have 4 of my own! What can I do I don't want to report her because no one in the family has the room for another kid but I just see her ruining her life AGAIN and this baby's life. How can I talk some sense into her. I'm 32, got a man, a nice home, 4 lovely kids and everything going for us, a born again Christian and live my life for God. I want to just yank that baby away from her and smack her upside her fool head, she wants to raise that baby HER way. Giving him a tub bath the day he gets home from the hospital almost drown him and yelled at her grandma for telling her it wasn't right. I'm afraid she's gonna put him in a bad situation. I think I need to have a family meeting but gosh I know when she finds out she'll accuse me of being a narc and throw a fit and move in with her drug buddies if her g'ma confronts her.

My teen cuz is a new mom and she's back on the stuff AGAIN?
okay, here is the first few pages of it, its actually sci-fi/romance/thriller sort of thing and is based on a teenage girl. i wrote this last month and then lost interest and now again i gained it back but, i just want to know genuinely is if this is too boring...all comments are welcome:) Prologue The world we live in has had many pioneers .They all grew up, like every other boy or girl on this planet. None of them knew about their destinies while they were still children. However, as they grew up, that ancient power that has governed us all since time immemorial lead them to their foretold destinies. By the time they had all grown up, they were all aware of the daring feat they were going to perform. Neil Armstrong...Yuri Gagarin....Edmund Hillary (along with Ten zing Norway) knew of the impossible task they were about to perform before they did it. They had all asked for it, they were prepared to face their challenge, with years of training, dedication, perspiration to backup their burning desires and were all equipped to undertake their maiden journeys for humanity. All of them, except…..for one particular girl. She had none of the so called training, expertise or desire to undertake, what would be the world’s greatest achievement. Perhaps the best of us don’t need any of those or maybe they don’t deserve it, or it could be just that she won herself this opportunity through sheer luck or misfortune depending on the way you consider it. Such was the plight of your normal, ordinary, everyday teenager living in the land of the tallest building in the entire world. It was as many would term an upcoming city, others called it the happening city and whichever way you’d prefer to call it, this place could probably be in a few years as established as Tokyo, Singapore, or Paris. I am talking about none other than Dubai, sounds odd doesn’t it, well….did you strike a few chords? You may or may not have for all I can tell, but at the moment, our story begins not in Dubai but in its neighboring emirate and capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi. Chapter-1 Natalie sat up in bed, awake and alert as ever. The day’s first rays of sunlight had just creeped into her bedroom, through the slit in her curtain, leaving all of its contents gleaming with early morning subtleness. Her eyes were all groggy from staying up late last night, and wasting the credit on her cell phone. Talking was apparently, what she thought her talent was. She could blab on anything and everything, at anytime and circumstance. Though oddly enough she preferred solitude as well, after a long episode of conversation. Her instinctive desire to communicate and befriend, easily contributed to her charisma. Stumbling out of bed and towards the curtains she drew them apart and opened the latch of the window, looking around, carefully taking in the astounding view of the cornice and the beach it receded into, a little further. Her gaze lingered upon the azure waters of the gulf, calm and composed as usual, with the sun’s orange blaze illuminating its benign surface. The wind was blowing directly onto her face causing her bangs to flutter. It was cool, but not humid or misty as she thought it should have been at this hour. She now looked below and watched the people from various strata of life scattering like tiny little insects, which was normal when you looked down from the 16th floor of your apartment. Among the people were many schoolchildren, bickering with each other, obviously for some lame reason she would not know about. Their attention was diverted when the school bus arrived and they hopped on, without further argument. It looked cute...ok what am I saying...i am no grandma…. The bus didn’t move even after they had gotten in. It appeared to be waiting for someone. Natalie moved on to examining the long chain of parks just below her building, running parallel to the cornice, road and the line of apartments including hers. She stared once more at the bus; it stayed there for five more seconds and left off in a hurry. Suddenly, she felt alarmed, she didn’t quite understand why. Her sub conscious mind seemed to do so. Her conscience tried to wrap around the reason for which she felt like she did just then. There was nothing particularly wrong with today, the sun had risen on time, the alarm clock, as usual didn’t bother to spare her ear drums today as well, the people outside also merged in with the beginning of another September and she had definitely woken up quite enthusiastically ,so whats different about today? Annoyed by the fact that she failed to notice something, she stared at the place where the bus had been….the bus…the bus!!! Suddenly, dumbfounded by her slack realization, she whirled around and gawked at the alarm clock. “Oh…my…god..!!”, she shrieked. It read 6:45 and not 5:45 lik

Is it too boring or should i continue?
Ok...long story...but please read on. I desperately need answers. Ok so my grandma lives in Massachusetts and i live in New Jersey. I visit EVERY summer for as long as a month or more--without my family (parents, brothers, ect.). She has neighbors that live right across from her house named the Petersons. They are very, very kind and have a nephew named Robbie. He is totally sweet, cute, funny, and kind. The best part is that i think he likes me too. Here's why: we've had a lot of moments. One night, when my grandma and i had dinner at the Petersons, Robbie had gone down to the hammock. I came down about 3 minutes later. He helped me on and then rocked me back and forth. Then he got on and laid beside me. About 25 minutes later, he decided to go to his dock. He sat at the end with his legs over the side, and natrually i followed him. We sat there quietly, looking at each other and the water. Another time when his uncle brought us to the beach (Washburn), the current was VERY strong. So we tied a raft (tube) to the boat and let the current take us. It was soooo romantic and soooo fun. Then, later on, we went to the sandbar. I think i had stepped on a crab and grabbed his hand for reflex. We looked at each other, then about 2 minutes later, that felt like 2 hours, we let go and swam back. Now i can't get him out of my head!!!! I really miss him!!! So if you guys could tell me some tips on how to get him out of my head, that would be great!

How do i get a boy out of my head who live 400 miles away from me (Cape Cod, Massachusettes)?
Its an asian movie. A little spoiled boy was sent to his grandmothers house for the first time because his mother had to find work somewhere. The grandma's house is technically in the middle of no where. His grandma cannot speak or write. The boy was very cruel to his grandma calling her names and doing really bad stuff to her house but she does not do anything to punish him. At the end, he realizes how bad hes been and tries to help his grandma to write so he can send letters to her. Do you know wat movie it is? Thanks :)

What asian movie is this?
Are there any movies out there that have something to do with xbox/video games like grandma's boy does?

I Am Legend

I Am Legend is a 2007 film directed by Francis Lawrence and starring Will Smith. It is the third feature film adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel of the same name, following 1964's The Last Man on Earth and 1971's The Omega Man. Smith plays virologist Robert Neville, who is immune to a vicious man-made virus originally created to cure cancer. He works to create a remedy while living in Manhattan in 2012, a city inhabited by violent victims of the virus. The film's plot is an example of a zombie apocalypse story.

Warner Bros. began developing I Am Legend in 1994, and various actors and directors were attached to the project, though production was delayed due to budgetary concerns related to the script. Production began in 2006 in New York City, filming mainly on location in the city, including a $5 million scene at the Brooklyn Bridge, the most expensive scene ever filmed in the city at the time.

I Am Legend was released on December 14, 2007, in the United States, and opened to the largest ever box office (not counting for inflation) for a non-Christmas film released in the U.S. in December. The film was the seventh highest grossing film of 2007, earning $256 million domestically and $329 million internationally, for a total of $585 million.

In September 2012, U.S. Army virologist Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville (Will Smith) is left as the last healthy human in New York City. Three years earlier, a cure for cancer made from a re-engineered measles virus was developed with a 100% success rate. However, the virus mutated into a lethal strain that spread worldwide and killed 5.4 billion people (90% of humanity). Of the 600 million survivors, only 12 million people were naturally immune to the virus. The rest degenerated into bald, pale, aggressive beings referred to as "Darkseekers," who hunted down the immune humans as prey. The "Darkseekers," so called for hiding in buildings and dark places during the day due to a painful intolerance to UV radiation, exhibit increased speed, agility, aggression, and strength. These abilities stem from an increased metabolic rate, which also consumes the infected with an overwhelming hunger which makes them resort to cannibalism. Despite their primal behavior, the Darkseekers seem to retain some basic problem-solving intelligence, animalistic cunning, and the capacity to organize themselves.

Neville, who lost his wife Sarah (Salli Richardson) and daughter Marley (Willow Smith) in a helicopter accident during the chaotic quarantine of Manhattan in December 2009, has a daily routine that includes experimentation on infected rats to find a cure for the virus and trips through an empty, decaying Manhattan to collect supplies from abandoned homes and hunt deer that have moved into the city. He also waits each day for a response to his continuous recorded AM radio broadcasts, which instruct any uninfected survivors to meet him at mid-day at the South Street Seaport. Neville's isolation is broken only by the companionship of his German Shepherd Samantha ("Sam") and interaction with mannequins he has set up as patrons of a video store.

When one of his experiments on rats shows a promising treatment, Neville sets a snare trap and captures an infected woman; an enraged male Darkseeker, the alpha male of the pack, locks eyes with him. Back in his laboratory, located in the basement of his heavily fortified Washington Square Park home, Neville attempts to cure the infected woman without success.

The next day, after finding one of his mannequins was apparently moved to the front of Grand Central Terminal, he is caught in a trap and passes out. When Neville regains consciousness and manages to get free, it is dusk and he is attacked by a pack of infected dogs set on him by the alpha male. Although Neville and Sam manage to kill the dogs, one of them bites Sam. Initially Neville brings Sam home and injects her with a strain of his serum, but when she shows signs of infection and tries to attack him, Neville is forced to strangle her.

Later that night, overcome by grief and rage after burying Sam, Neville attacks a group of the infected with his car, intending to end his misery by killing as many as he can. Despite killing a large number of Darkseekers, they overwhelm Neville and nearly kill him before he is rescued by a pair of immune survivors, an adult woman named Anna (Alice Braga) and a young boy named Ethan (Charlie Tahan), who have heard his radio broadcasts. Anna and Ethan take the injured Neville back to his home, where Anna explains that they are making their way to a putative survivors' camp in Bethel, Vermont.

The next night, the alpha male leads a group of infected in an attack on the house, having followed Anna and Neville back the night before. The Darkseekers force Neville, Anna, and Ethan to retreat into the basement laboratory. They seal themselves in a room with the infected woman, where they discover that Neville's treatment is working: the subject has reverted to a more human form. Unfortunately the infected break in and the alpha male begins to break through the acrylic glass separating them by ramming it. Discovering that the last treatment has been successful, Neville draws a vial of the woman's blood and gives it to Anna before shutting Anna and Ethan in a safe. Then, when the glass finally breaks, he uses an M67 hand grenade to wipe out the attackers at the cost of his own life. Anna and Ethan escape to Vermont and locate the survivors' colony, where Anna hands over the cure. In a voice-over, Anna claims that the survivors are Neville's legacy, as his fight for a cure became legend.

The tone of the film's ending was altered before the film's release, especially the stand-off between Neville and the infected in his laboratory. Visual effects supervisor Janek Sirrs recounts the original ending starting with the stand-off: "At that point, Neville's - and the audience's - assumptions about the nature of these creatures are shown to be incorrect. We see that they have actually retained some of their humanity. There is a very important moment between the alpha male and Neville. The alpha male slapped his hand on the glass and smeared it revealing a butterfly shaped imprint." Neville realizes that the alpha male is identifying the infected woman he was experimenting on by a butterfly tattoo, and that the alpha male wants her back. Demonstrating that he will cease fighting and return her, Neville is allowed to approach them, with the alpha male ordering the infected not to touch him. Neville brings the alpha female back to consciousness, still infected due to him having removed the cure, and the alpha male embraces her; Travis Schaub stated, "Then, when Neville finally turns the alpha female over to the alpha male, there is this little love moment between the two of them." Neville and the alpha male then exchange stares; Neville apologizes to them, which the alpha male acknowledges before the infected leave. He then looks at the photos of the infected he has experimented on and killed, and he realizes that he is the monster of their legends: the infected think of him as someone who hunts down and kills their people. The original final shot follows Neville, Anna, and Ethan as they cross the remnants of the George Washington Bridge accompanied by a recording from Anna telling possible survivors that there is hope, and Neville knows the compounds of the cure, meaning he can recreate it and help humanity survive and rebuild, thus establishing his legend.

The late 1990s brought a reemergence of the science fiction horror genre. In 1995, Warner Bros. began developing the film project, having owned the rights to Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend since 1970 and The Omega Man. Mark Protosevich was hired to write the script after the studio was impressed with his spec script of The Cell. Protosevich's first draft took place in the year 2000 in San Francisco, California, and contained many similarities with the finished film, though the Darkseekers (Called 'Hemocytes') were civilized to the point of the creatures in The Omega Man and Anna was a lone morphine addict; as well as the fact that there was a Hemocyte character named Christopher who joined forces with Neville. Warner Bros. immediately put the film on the fast track, attaching Neal H. Moritz as producer.

Actors Tom Cruise, Michael Douglas, and Mel Gibson had been considered to star in the film, using a script by Protosevich and with Ridley Scott as director; however, by June 1997 the studio's preference was for actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In July, Scott and Schwarzenegger finalized negotiations, with production slated to begin the coming September, using Houston as a stand-in for the film's setting of Los Angeles. Scott had Protosevich replaced by a screenwriter of his own choosing, John Logan, with whom he spent months of intensive work on a number of different drafts. The Scott/Logan version of  I Am Legend was a bold, artistic mash of scifi action and psychological thriller, without dialogue in the first hour and with a sombre ending. The creatures in Logan's Legend were similar to the Darkseekers of the finished film in their animalistic, barbarian nature. The studio, fearing its lack of commercial appeal and merchandising potential, began to worry about the liberties they had given Scott - then on a negative streak of box office disappointments - and urged the production team to reconsider the lack of action in the screenplay. After an "esoteric" draft by writer Neal Jimenez, Warner Bros. reassigned Protosevich to the project, reluctantly working with Scott again.

In December 1997, the project was called into question when the projected budget escalated to $108 million due to media and shareholder scrutiny of the studio in financing a big-budget film. Scott rewrote the script in an attempt to reduce the film's budget by $20 million, but in March 1998, the studio canceled the project due to continued budgetary concerns, and quite possibly to the box office disappointment of Scott's last three films, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, White Squall, and G.I. Jane. Likewise, Schwarzenegger's recent films at the time (Eraser and Warner Bros. own Batman & Robin) underperformed, and the studio's latest experiences with big budget sci-fi movies Sphere and The Postman were negative as well. In August 1998, director Rob Bowman was attached to the project, with Protosevich hired to write a third all new draft, far more action-oriented than his previous versions, but the director (who reportedly wished for Nicolas Cage to play the lead) moved on to direct Reign of Fire and the project did not get off the ground.

In March 2002, Schwarzenegger became the producer of I Am Legend, commencing negotiations with Michael Bay to direct and Will Smith to star in the film. Bay and Smith were attracted to the project based on a redraft that would reduce its budget. However, the project was shelved due to Warner Bros. president, Alan F. Horn's dislike of the script. In 2004, Akiva Goldsman was asked by head of production Jeff Robinov to produce the film. In September 2005, director Francis Lawrence signed on to helm the project, with production slated to begin in 2006. Guillermo del Toro was originally approached to direct by Smith but turned it down in order to direct Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Lawrence, whose film Constantine was produced by Goldsman, was fascinated by empty urban environments. He said, "Something's always really excited me about that... to have experienced that much loss, to be without people or any kind of social interaction for that long."

Goldsman took on the project as he admired the second I Am Legend film adaptation, The Omega Man. A rewrite was done to distance the project from the other zombie films inspired by the novel, as well as from the recently released 28 Days Later. A forty-page scene-by-scene outline of the film was developed by May 2006. When delays occurred on Will Smith's film Hancock, which was scheduled for 2007, it was proposed to switch the actor's films. This meant filming would have to begin in sixteen weeks: production was green lit, using Goldsman's script and the outline. Elements from Protosevich's script were introduced, while the crew consulted with experts on infectious diseases and solitary confinement. Rewrites continued throughout filming, because of Smith's improvisational skills and Lawrence's preference to keep various scenes silent. The director had watched Jane Campion’s film The Piano with a low volume so as to not disturb his newborn son, and realized that silence could be very effective cinema.

Will Smith signed on to play Robert Neville in April 2006. He said he took on I Am Legend because he felt it could be like "Gladiator [or] Forrest Gump—these are movies with wonderful, audience-pleasing elements but also uncompromised artistic value. [This] always felt like it had those possibilities to me." The actor found Neville to be his toughest acting challenge since portraying Muhammad Ali in Ali (2001). He said that "when you're on your own, it is kind of hard to find conflict." The film's dark tone and exploration of whether Neville has gone insane during his isolation meant Smith had to restrain himself from falling into a humorous routine during takes. To prepare for his role, Smith visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Georgia. He also met with a person who had been in solitary confinement and a former prisoner of war. Smith compared Neville to Job, who lost his children, livelihood, and health. Like the Book of Job, I Am Legend studies the questions, "Can he find a reason to continue? Can he find the hope or desire to excel and advance in life? Or does the death of everything around him create imminent death for himself?" He also cited an influence in Tom Hanks' performance in Cast Away (2000).

Abbey and Kona, both three-year-old German Shepherd dogs, played Neville's dog Sam. The rest of the supporting cast consists of Salli Richardson as Zoe, Robert's wife, and Alice Braga as a survivor named Anna. Willow Smith, Will Smith's daughter, makes her film debut as Marley, Neville's daughter. Emma Thompson has an uncredited role as Dr. Alice Krippin, who appears on television explaining her vaccine for cancer that mutates into the virus. Singer Mike Patton provided the guttural screams of the infected "hemocytes," and Dash Mihok provided the character animation for the "alpha male" infected. There were several filler characters with uncredited roles in old news broadcasts and flashbacks, such as the unnamed President's voice, and the cast of The Today Show.

Akiva Goldsman decided to move the story from Los Angeles to New York City to take advantage of locations that would more easily show emptiness. Goldsman explained, "L.A. looks empty at three o'clock in the afternoon, [but] New York is never empty . . . it was a much more interesting way of showing the windswept emptiness of the world." Warner Bros. initially rejected this idea because of the logistics, but Francis Lawrence was determined to shoot on location, to give the film a natural feel that would benefit from not shooting on soundstages. Lawrence went to the city with a camcorder, and filmed areas filled with crowds. Then, a special effects test was conducted to remove all those people. The test had a powerful effect on studio executives. Michael Tadross convinced authorities to close busy areas such as the Grand Central Terminal viaduct, several blocks of Fifth Avenue and Washington Square Park. The film was shot primarily in the anamorphic format, with flashback scenes shot in Super 35.

Filming began on September 23, 2006. The Marcy Avenue Armory in Williamsburg was used for the interior of Neville's home, while Greenwich Village was used for the exterior. Other locations include the Tribeca section of Lower Manhattan, the aircraft carrier Intrepid, the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx and St. Patrick's Cathedral. Weeds were imported from Florida and were strewn across locations to make the city look like it had overgrown with them. The closure of major streets was controversial with New Yorkers. Will Smith said, "I don't think anyone's going to be able to do that in New York again any time soon. People were not happy. That's the most middle fingers I've ever gotten in my career."

A bridge scene was filmed for six consecutive nights in January on the Brooklyn Bridge to serve as a flashback scene in which New York's citizens evacuate the city. Shooting the scene consumed $5 million of the film's reported $150 million budget, which was likely the most expensive shot in the city to date. The scene, which had to meet requirements from fourteen government agencies, involved 250 crew members and 1,000 extras, including 160 National Guard members. Also present were several Humvees, three Stryker armored vehicles, a 110-foot (34 m) cutter, a 41-foot (12 m) utility boat, and two 25-foot (7.6 m) Response Boat Small craft, as well as other vehicles including taxis, police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances. Filming concluded on March 31, 2007.

Reshoots were conducted around November 2007. Lawrence noted, "We weren't seeing fully rendered shots until about a month ago. The movie starts to take on a whole other life. It's not until later that you can judge a movie as a whole and go, 'Huh, maybe we should shoot this little piece in the middle, or tweak this a little bit.' It just so happened that our re-shoots revolved around the end of the movie."

A week into filming, Francis Lawrence felt the infected (referred to as "Dark Seekers" or "hemocytes" in the script), who were being portrayed by actors wearing prosthetics, were not convincing. His decision to use computer-generated imagery (CGI) resulted in an increased budget and extended post-production, although the end results were not always well-received. The concept behind the infected was that their adrenal glands were open all of the time and Lawrence explained, "They needed to have an abandon in their performance that you just can’t get out of people in the middle of the night when they’re barefoot. And their metabolisms are really spiked, so they’re constantly hyperventilating, which you can’t really get actors to do for a long time or they pass out." The actors remained on set to provide motion capture. "The film's producers and sound people wanted the creatures in the movie to sound somewhat human, but not the standard," so Mike Patton, lead singer of Faith No More, was engaged to provide the screams and howls of the infected.

In addition, CGI was used for the lions and deer in the film, and to erase pedestrians in shots of New York. Workers visible in windows, spectators and moving cars in the distance were all removed. In his vision of an empty New York, Lawrence cited John Ford as his influence: "We didn't want to make an apocalyptic movie where the landscape felt apocalyptic. A lot of the movie takes place on a beautiful day. There's something magical about the empty city as opposed to dark and scary that was the ideal that the cast and crew wanted."

I Am Legend was originally slated for a November 21, 2007 release in the United States and Canada, but was delayed to December 14, 2007. The film opened on December 26, 2007 in the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland having been originally scheduled for January 4, 2008.

In December 2007, China banned the release of American films in the country, which is believed to have delayed the release of I Am Legend. Will Smith spoke to the chairman of China Film Group about securing a release date, later explaining, "We struggled very, very hard to try to get it to work out, but there are only a certain amount of foreign films that are allowed in."

A tie-in comic from DC Comics and Vertigo Comics has been created, I Am Legend: Awakening. The project draws upon collaboration from Bill Sienkiewicz, screenwriter Mark Protosevich, and author Orson Scott Card. The son of the original book's author, Richard Christian Matheson, also collaborated on the project. The project will advance from the comic to an online format in which animated featurettes (created by the team from Broken Saints) will be shown on the official website.

In October 2007, Warner Bros. Pictures in conjunction with the Electric Sheep Company launched the online multiplayer game I Am Legend: Survival in the virtual world Second Life. The game is the largest launched in the virtual world in support of a film release, permitting people to play against each other as the infected or the uninfected across a replicated 60 acres (240,000 m) of New York City. The studio also hired the ad agency Crew Creative to develop a website that would be specifically viewable on the iPhone.

I Am Legend grossed $77,211,321 on its opening weekend in 3,606 theaters, averaging $21,412 per venue, and placing it at the top of the box office. This set a record for highest grossing opening for a film for the month of December. The film grossed $256,393,010 in North America and $585,349,010 worldwide. The film was the sixth highest grossing film of 2007 in North America, and as of April 2010 stands among the top 100 all-time highest grossing films both domestically and worldwide (unadjusted for ticket price inflation).

The film was released on DVD on March 18, 2008 in two editions: a one-disc release, including the movie with four animated comics ("Death As a Gift," "Isolation," "Sacrificing the Few for the Many," and "Shelter"), and other DVD-ROM features; and a two-disc special edition that includes all these extras, an alternative theatrical version of the movie with an alternate ending, and a digital copy of the film. On the high-definition end, the movie has been released on the Blu-ray Disc format and HD DVD format along with the DVD release; with the HD-DVD version being released later on April 8, 2008. Both HD releases include all the features available in the two-disc DVD edition. A three-disk Ultimate Collector's Edition was also released on December 9, 2008.

The film has sold 7.04 million DVDs and earned $126.2 million in revenue, making it the sixth best-selling DVD of 2008. However, Warner Bros was reportedly "a little disappointed" with the film's performance on the DVD market.

Reviews were mostly favorable. The consensus among favorable reviews was that Will Smith's performance overcame questionable special effects. Review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 69% of critics gave the film positive write-ups, based on 204 reviews. At the similar website Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 to each review, the film has received an average score of 65, based on 37 reviews.

A. O. Scott wrote that Will Smith gave a "graceful and effortless performance" and also noted the "third-act collapse". He felt that the movie "does ponder some pretty deep questions about the collapse and persistence of human civilization". Dana Stevens of Slate wrote that the movie lost its way around the hour mark, noting that "the Infected just aren't that scary." NPR critic Bob Mondello noted the film's subtext concerning global terrorism and that this aspect made the film fit in perfectly with other, more direct cinematic explorations of the subject. Richard Roeper gave the film a positive review on the television program At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper, commending Will Smith as being in "prime form," also saying there are "some amazing sequences" and that there was "a pretty heavy screenplay for an action film." On the negative side, the film has been criticized for diverging from Matheson's novel, especially in its portrayal of a specifically Christian theme. Much of the negative criticism has concerned the film's third act, some critics favoring the alternative ending in the DVD release.

Popular Mechanics published an article on December 14, 2007 addressing some of the scientific issues raised by the film:

The magazine solicited reactions from Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, virologist W. Ian Lipkin, M.D., and Michel Bruneau, Ph.D., comparing their predictions with the film's depictions. The article raised the most questions regarding the virus' mutation and the medical results, and pointed out that a suspension bridge like the Brooklyn Bridge would likely completely collapse rather than losing only its middle span. Neville's method of producing power using gasoline-powered generators seemed the most credible: "This part of the tale is possible, if not entirely likely," Popular Mechanics editor Roy Berendsohn says.

I Am Legend earned four nominations for the Visual Effects Society Awards, and was also nominated for Outstanding Performance by a Stunt Ensemble at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Outstanding Film and Actor at the Image Awards, and Best Sound at the Satellite Awards. In June 2008, Will Smith won a Saturn Award for Best Actor. Will Smith also won the MTV Movie Awards for Best Male Performance.

The film follows the plot of the novel very loosely. Many have pointed out that the only similarities between the novel and the film are the title, the main character's name, and the fact that he is isolated in a city full of monsters. There are quite a few noticeable differences:

Francis Lawrence confirmed that there will be a prequel and that Will Smith will be reprising his role. He stated that this movie would reveal what happens to Neville before the infected take over New York. D. B. Weiss has been recruited to write the script, while Lawrence would direct "if we figure out the story". Smith stated the film would have Neville and his team going from New York City to Washington, D.C. and back again, as they made their last stand. The film will again explore the premise of what it's like to be alone, as Lawrence explained, "... the tough thing is, how do we do that again and in a different way?"

EuroTrip

EuroTrip is a 2004 American comedy film. The main plot tells a story about how Scott Thomas (Scott Mechlowicz) and his three friends travel across Europe in search of his German pen pal Mieke (Jessica Böhrs), whom he initially mistakes for a man. Realizing he has feelings for her, they visit London, Paris, Amsterdam, Bratislava, Berlin and Vatican City in Rome, encountering awkward and embarrassing situations along the way.

Scott "Scotty" Thomas (Scott Mechlowicz) is dumped by his girlfriend Fiona (Kristin Kreuk) at his high school graduation. Devastated, he e-mails the happenings to his German pen pal Meike, who he believes is a German guy named "Mike". His friend, Cooper Harris (Jacob Pitts), quips about Scott being "predictable" and all people on the Internet are homosexuals looking for sex. They decide to go to a party to prove Fiona won't stop him enjoying graduation, but they arrive to find she has been sleeping with Donny (Matt Damon), the lead singer of a college band, and are treated to a performance of the song "Scotty Doesn't Know", a song that details the affair.

Drunk and angry, Scott arrives home and receives an e-mail reply from Mieke, who answers sorry for all that has happened, and wants to arrange a meeting in order to make Scott feel better. Resonating on Cooper's earlier comment of Internet relationships, Scott tells Mieke to stay away from him. Fortunately, Scott's brother Bert (Nial Iskhakov) explains that "Mieke" in German is not "Mike", but actually similar to "Michelle" in English. Realizing his mistake and that he has feelings for her, he tries desperately to contact her again, only to find she has blocked his address. Pushed by Cooper to leave Ohio and go to Germany to find her, Scott resolves to travel to Europe to fix the situation and confront her face-to-face.

Unable to afford a passenger ticket, Scott and Cooper receive a discounted rate by traveling as couriers to London, where they end up befriending the members of a Manchester United football hooligan firm, led by Mad Maynard (Vinnie Jones), after accidentally stumbling upon their pub and escaping a fight by claiming themselves as members of a Manchester United fan club from Ohio. After a wild night of drinking, Scott and Cooper wake up on a double-decker bus on their way to Paris for a Manchester United game. In Paris, they meet up with their fraternal twin friends Jenny (Michelle Trachtenberg) and Jamie (Travis Wester), who decide they will accompany them to Berlin to find Mieke (Jessica Böhrs). They agree on visiting other parts of Europe, since this will be the last summer the four of them will spend together before going off to different colleges.

Following a long train ride with an overly enthusiastic Italian man (Fred Armisen) attempting to grope them, the group ends up in the fictitious French town of Crans Sur Mer, but leave immediately after realizing that only men go to the town's nude beach during the summer (the women don't want to be gawked at and therefore go to another beach). In Amsterdam (which is actually filmed in Prague), Cooper heads to Club Vandersexxx (which is said to be the Red Light district's "hottest sex club" as a bribe to American men) which is actually a brutal BDSM club, and Scott and Jenny mistakenly go to a café and eat what they believe to be hash brownies and proceed to "freak out," only to realise that they are normal brownies. While Jamie is at a camera store seeking to have his prized Leica M7 camera cleaned, the female shopkeeper takes him to the alley to engage in oral sex. Unfortunately, Jamie, who is in charge of all of the money and passports, is robbed of everything by a mugger (Diedrich Bader).

With no choice but to hitchhike to Berlin, they manage to get a truck driver to pull over. Unfortunately, he does not speak English. The driver mentions Berlin in his speech many times, he is actually saying he is going nowhere near Berlin, as he is wanted there for assaulting a woman and raping a horse. They ultimately end up in Bratislava, Slovakia (filmed in Milovice in the Czech Republic), where they are horrified by the desolation of Eastern Europe. They talk to a Slovak man and discover there is no train network, but due to an exaggerated exchange rate, they get the executive suite at a lavish Slovak hotel with only $1.83. Deciding to have "some more fun", they arrive at a nightclub, owned by a man Jenny met at the railway station in Paris. Smitten, she nearly falls for him, until she discovers he is married and bisexual. In a fit of depression, Jenny downs half a bottle of absinthe, becoming so intoxicated she makes out with her brother - who are both horrified after snapping back to reality. The next morning, the same Slovak man drives them to Berlin. Unfortunately, Mieke's father states his daughter has gone on a boat tour for the summer and will only be reachable in Rome for a short time. In order to afford flight tickets, Jamie sells his precious Leica camera.

In Rome, the four head to Vatican City, where Mieke will tour before she leaves. Cooper erroneously rings the bell of Saint Marco, before setting fire to a "pope hat" and throwing it onto the fireplace, which lights up white smoke in Vatican City, making everyone believe a new pope has been elected. Trying to escape, Scotty gets tangled in a golden curtain, before stumbling out on the balcony where he is believed to be the new pope. Spotting Mieke, he jumps down a banister to meet up with her. Although the Swiss Guard realize what is going on and attempt to stop them and severely punish them for their actions, the football hooligans from England return and save Scott and Cooper. Scott finally introduces himself to Mieke in person and upon confessing his love for her, Mieke has sex with Scott in a confessional before she boards her boat, telling Scott to continue to write to her. A man whom Jamie took on a tour of the Vatican turns out to be Arthur Frommer (played by an actor), author of the guidebook Jamie has memorized and he hires him to tour every museum and cathedral in Europe. Scott, Cooper and Jenny finally get their passports and prepare to head home. On the return trip, Jenny entices Cooper to have sex with her in one of the aircraft's toilets.

Scott moves to Oberlin College in the fall and is surprised to see Mieke. She states she is his roommate, due to another misunderstanding about her name. The film ends with Scott and Mieke embracing one another and kissing on his bed.

All scenes were filmed in Prague, Czech Republic, especially in the streets close to the Rudolfinum. The opening scene placed in the United States was filmed at the International School of Prague. The scene when the main characters are boarding the train station in Paris was filmed in Prague's main railway station (Hlavní nádraží). The scene inside "Vatican City" was actually filmed in Prague's National Museum.

Mieke's email to Scotty includes a German word "zussamen", a possibly intentional error, which Scott is then able to find in a German-English dictionary. The actual German word is zusammen, meaning "together".

Eurotrip was released on DVD on June 1, 2004, in an R-rated theatrical version (91 minutes) and an "Unrated" extended version (93 minutes).

The film was released in the United States and Canada on February 20, 2004 in 2,512 theaters. Over its opening weekend, the film grossed $6,711,384. It went on to gross $17,771,387 in the United States and Canada and $3,025,460 in other territories for a worldwide total of $20,796,847.

On the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, the film received a 47% approval rating based on 111 reviews and a 23% rating based on 26 reviews from top critics. On Metacritic, the film scored 45 out of 100 based on 30 reviews.

The film features additional tracks not included on the soundtrack album:

"Scotty Doesn't Know" is a song that was written exclusively for the film. It is performed by the band Lustra, but in the film, the lead singer is portrayed by Matt Damon, whose character surreptitiously steals a girl from "Scotty", hence the title and subject matter.

The song contains numerous lewd references to how Scotty's girlfriend Fiona has been cheating on him for an extended period of time. In the film, the song becomes something of a popular phenomenon: a week or so later in Bratislava, the song is remixed and is playing in a popular nightclub. By the end of the film, it has become so widespread and (presumably) popular that Scott's best friend Cooper is able to use it as the ringtone on his phone.

Stay Alive

Stay Alive is a 2006 horror film directed by William Brent Bell, who cowrote it with Matthew Peterman. It was produced by McG, co-produced by Hollywood Pictures and released on March 24, 2006 in the US. In the U.S. the film was rated PG-13 for horror violence, disturbing images, language, and brief sexual and drug content. This is the first film in five years released by Hollywood Pictures.

A character in a video game called “Stay Alive” is spotted entering an eerie mansion. The character flees up the stairs and enters a room when, out of the darkness, a woman in a blood red dress lunges at the character. She knocks him off the staircase banister, and the character is killed when he is hanged by a chandelier chain. The player of the game, Loomis Crowley, quits playing and goes about a normal routine before he goes to bed. He is later awoken by a nightmare, and is killed in real-life by the woman in the red dress, in a manner similar to how his character died.

Elsewhere, Loomis’ friend, Hutch, receives a phone call informing him that Loomis is dead. At the funeral, Hutch is given all of Loomis' games by his sister, Emma, including Stay Alive. At the funeral, a blonde girl named Abigail introduces herself as a close friend to Loomis's roommate.

After the funeral, Hutch arrives at a coffee shop; which is owned and operated by his girlfriend, October, and her brother, Phineus. Hutch hands October the bag containing Loomis' possessions, and Phineus eventually finds Stay Alive, which they decide to play as a group that night.

That night October, Phineus, his friend Swink, and Abigail arrive at Hutch's house, with Hutch’s boss, Miller, playing at his office. To start the game, the players have to recite "The Prayer of Elizabeth" during the game’s intro. After a few hours of gaming, Miller’s character is suddenly killed after he is stabbed in the throat by the woman who killed Loomis. Moments later, Miller dies the same way as his character.

When Hutch returns to work, he is informed of Miller’s death after talking to two detectives, Thibodeaux and King. While this is happening, Phineus plays Stay Alive and just before he dies, he pauses the game. After doing some research, Hutch calls everyone together to reveal he knows how people are dying, when he notices Phineus' absence. They call him and learn he's on his way, when immediately after he is run down and killed by The Countess's horse-drawn carriage. Thibodeaux and King arrive on the scene, and King decides to play Stay Alive. King's character’s head is ripped in half, killing him. King is then killed in the same manner.

Hutch and Abby decide to go to Loomis's house, where they find the address of Stay Alive’s developer, Jonathan Malkus. They proceed to go to his mansion, and, assuming no one is home, they go in. There, they meet Jonathan, who tells them about how he based his game off The Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory.

Meanwhile, October learns that in order to kill The Countess, you must find her tower and trap her in her body, driving three nails in her heart, one in her throat, and another in her head. Swink then announces, after seeing a newscast, that King is dead, and that the group are suspects. They all flee, later meeting at Loomis’ house to formulate a plan.

October, who tries to confront the Countess on her own, is killed by her. Swink, Abigail and Hutch decide to investigate inside Malkus’ mansion. Swink decides to stay behind and play the game as both a distraction for The Countess, and an aid to the duo. Hutch and Abigail go inside the mansion, where they find various clues about The Countess, revealing that Malkus's house is actually the Bathory plantation. The group fights off The Countess several times, but Swink is seemingly killed by her after he is cornered and stabbed with a pair of rose cutters.

After a run in with The Countess’ black carriage, Hutch and Abigail locate Elizabeth’s alter. Suddenly, the door slams shut leaving Abby alone while Hutch panics and tries to open the door. She pleads with him to go ahead, as The Countess closes in on her.

When Hutch reaches the tower, he finds the Countess's body. He's able to get the nails in her body in the correct places, trapping her spirit in her body just before she kills Abigail. However, October earlier informed Hutch that the only way to truly get rid of The Countess is to burn her body. After she attacks him, Hutch manages to set The Countess on fire. Realizing the exit is locked, Hutch accepts the fact that he's going to be killed by ever-increasing fire, until Swink, who cheated the game like it cheated Phineus, and Abigail kick the door open and rescue him as Elizabeth’s body burns.

The movie ends in a video game store, showing that Stay Alive is now being officially released across the country. The last words are the incantation that resurrects The Countess.

As of June 29, 2006, the film opened at #3 in the U.S. box office, eclipsing its production budget with 11.7 million dollars that first weekend. It ultimately grossed a total of 23.08 million dollars in the United States. It was considered a box office success due to its production budget of only 9 million dollars. The movie has grossed a total of over 27.1 million dollars worldwide.

The theatrical version was given negative reviews by critics. Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 24 out of 100, based on 17 reviews.

In the Los Angeles Times, John Anderson commented that "'Stay Alive' spends a lot of time inside the video game system, and what will terrify the audience very early on is the realization that there's better acting in the video game than on the big screen." One reviewer from The Singapore Bell stated that Stay Alive converted him "to Satanism, as only this film can show that hell truly exists." Meanwhile, Variety magazine concluded: "Seldom is there anything close to real passion or panic on display here from cast members."

The DVD was released in the USA on September 19, 2006. It was made available in an unrated edition (100 minutes) and a PG-13 edition (85 minutes). The 15 minutes of new unrated footage include a new character and subplot. The unrated edition features more adult material.

Good Will Hunting

Good Will Hunting is a 1997 American drama film directed by Gus Van Sant. Alongside Ben Affleck and Robin Williams, the film starred Matt Damon in the lead role of Will Hunting, a prodigy hoodlum from South Boston who works as a janitor at MIT. Written by Affleck and Damon, who rose to stardom with the film's success, Good Will Hunting was a box office hit and earned two Academy Awards.

Will Hunting (Matt Damon) is a janitor at MIT and has a genius-level intellect, eidetic memory and a profound gift for mathematics. Despite this, he remains working as a janitor and lives alone in a sparsely-furnished house in a rundown South Boston neighborhood, spending time with his friends Chuckie Sullivan (Ben Affleck) and Morgan O'Mally (Casey Affleck). An abused foster child, he subconsciously blames himself for his unhappy upbringing and turns this self-loathing into a form of self-sabotage in both his professional and emotional lives.

In the first week of class, Will solves a difficult graduate-level problem taken from algebraic graph theory that Professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård), a Fields Medalist and combinatorialist, leaves on a chalkboard as a challenge posed to his students, hoping someone might find the solution by the end of the semester. When it is solved quickly and anonymously, Lambeau posts a much more difficult problem—one that took him and his colleagues two years to prove. When Lambeau chances upon Will writing on the board, he chases him away, taking him for a vandal. However, Lambeau realizes Will wrote the correct answers and sets out to track him down.

Meanwhile, Will gets revenge on a bully named Carmine Scarpaglia, who, according to Will, used to beat him up years ago in kindergarten, and he now faces imprisonment after attacking a police officer who was responding to the attack. Realizing Will has enormous potential, Lambeau goes to Will's trial and intervenes on his behalf, offering him a choice: either go to jail, or be released under Lambeau's personal supervision to study mathematics and see a therapist. Will chooses the latter, even though he does not believe he needs therapy.

Will treats the first five therapists Lambeau has him see with utter contempt. In desperation, Lambeau finally calls on Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), his roommate at MIT, now an estranged old friend, who happened to grow up in the same neighborhood as Will. Sean differs from his predecessors in that he pushes back at Will and is eventually able to get past Will's hostile, sarcastic defense mechanisms. Will is particularly struck when Sean tells him how he gave up his ticket to see the Boston Red Sox in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series (thus missing Carlton Fisk's famous home run) in order to meet and spend time with a stranger in a bar, who would later become his wife. This encourages Will to try to establish a relationship with Skylar (Minnie Driver), a young English woman he had earlier met at a bar near Harvard University, where she is in her last year of study—and will soon graduate.

This doctor-patient relationship, however, is far from one-sided. Will challenges Sean to take a hard, objective look at his own life. Sean has been unable to deal with his beloved wife's premature death from cancer two years before.

Meanwhile, Lambeau pushes Will so hard that Will eventually refuses to go to the job interviews that Lambeau arranges for him. Will accidentally walks in while Lambeau and Sean are arguing furiously about the direction of his future.

Skylar asks Will to move to California with her, where she will begin medical school at Stanford. Will panics at the thought. When Skylar expresses sympathy about his past, it triggers a tantrum and Will storms out of the dorm. He shrugs off the work he has been doing for Lambeau as "a joke." Lambeau begs Will not to throw it all away, but Will walks out.

Sean points out that Will is so adept at anticipating future failure in his interpersonal relationships, that he either allows them to fizzle out or deliberately bails, so he can avoid the risk of emotional pain. When Will refuses to give an honest reply to Sean's query about what he wants to do with his life, Sean shows him the door. Will tells his best friend Chuckie (Ben Affleck) that he wants to be a laborer for the rest of his life. Chuckie becomes brutally honest with Will; he is insulted that Will intends to waste his potential. He says to Will, "You don't owe it to yourself. You owe it to me. 'Cause tomorrow I'm gonna wake up and I'll be fifty. And I'll still be doing this... [but] you're sittin' on a winning lottery ticket... `cause I'd do anything to have what you got... It'd be an insult to us if you're still here in twenty years. Hanging around here is a fuckin' waste of your time." He says that his greatest wish is to knock on Will's door one morning and find he isn't there.

Will goes to another therapy session, where he and Sean share that they were both victims of physical child abuse. Sean then gets Will to truthfully reply to him stating, "It's not your fault" over and over. At first Will responds to the comment saying "yeah, I know" but after repeating, Will begins to cry and Sean comforts him. Finally, after much self-reflection, Will decides to cease being a victim of his own inner demons and to take charge of his life. Soon after, Sean takes a sabbatical to travel the world and begins packing up his office when Lambeau visits. The two reconcile as friends and go out for a drink.

When his buddies present him with a rebuilt Chevrolet Nova for his 21st birthday, he decides to go after Skylar, setting aside his lucrative corporate and government job offers. Concurrent to the scene in which Will leaves, Chuckie knocks on Will's door, and gets no reply, much to his joy because earlier in the film, he had told Will that, if one day he knocked on his door and he wasn't there, it would mean that he had gone to do something with his life. Will leaves a brief note for Sean, using one of Sean's own quips, "If the professor calls about that job, just tell him, sorry, I had to go see about a girl."

He then drives off across a scenic American highway as the credits roll. The screen cuts to "The End", which was shown as the first scene of the film backwards.

Affleck and Damon originally wrote the screenplay as a thriller: Young man in the rough-and-tumble streets of South Boston, who possesses a superior intelligence, is targeted by the FBI to become a G-Man. Castle Rock Entertainment president Rob Reiner later urged them to drop the thriller aspect of the story and to focus the relationship between Will Hunting (Damon) and his psychologist (Williams). At Reiner's request, noted screenwriter William Goldman read the script and further suggested that the film's climax ought to be Will's decision to follow his girlfriend Skylar to California. Goldman has denied widely spread rumors that he wrote Good Will Hunting or acted as a script doctor.

Castle Rock bought the script for $675,000 against $775,000, meaning that Affleck and Damon would stand to earn an additional $100,000 if the film was produced and they retained sole writing credit. However, studios balked at the idea of Affleck and Damon in the lead roles, with many studio executives citing that they wanted Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. At the time Damon and Affleck were meeting at Castle Rock, director Kevin Smith was working with Affleck on Mallrats and with both Affleck and Damon on Chasing Amy. Seeing that Affleck and Damon were having trouble with Castle Rock, Smith and his producer partner Scott Mosier brought the script to Miramax, which eventually caused the two to receive co-executive producer credits for Hunting. The script was put into turnaround, and Miramax bought the rights from Castle Rock.

After buying the rights from Castle Rock, Miramax gave the green light to put the film into production. Several well-known filmmakers were originally considered to direct, including Mel Gibson, Michael Mann and Steven Soderbergh. Originally Affleck asked Kevin Smith if he was interested in directing, Smith declined, saying they needed a "good director," stating he only directs things he writes and he is not much of a visual director. Affleck and Damon later chose Gus Van Sant for the job, whose work in previous films like Drugstore Cowboy (1989) had left a favorable impression on the fledgling screenwriters. Miramax was persuaded and hired Van Sant to direct the film.

Good Will Hunting was filmed on location in the Greater Boston area and Toronto over five months in 1996. Although the story is set in Boston, much of the film was shot at locations in Toronto, with the University of Toronto standing in for MIT and Harvard, and the classroom scenes being filmed at McLennan Physical Laboratories (of the University of Toronto) and Central Technical School. The interior bar scenes set in South Boston ("Southie") were shot on location at "Woody's L St. Tavern". The cast engaged in considerable improvisation in rehearsals; Robin Williams, Ben Affleck and Minnie Driver each made significant contributions to their characters. Robin Williams' last line in the film, as well as the therapy scene in which he talks about his character's wife's little idiosyncrasies, were both ad-libbed. The therapy scene took everyone by surprise. According to Damon's commentary in the DVD version of the movie, this caused "Johnny" (the cameraman) to laugh so hard that the camera's POV can actually be seen moving up and down slightly as it shows Damon breaking character by also laughing so hard.

Director Gus Van Sant says in the DVD commentary that, had he known just how successful the movie was going to be, he would have left at least a couple of edited scenes intact that were cut purely for considerations of length. One of these involves Skylar's visit to Chuckie in hopes of shedding light on some of Will's eccentricities that Will himself is unwilling to discuss.

The film is dedicated to the memory of poet Allen Ginsberg and writer William S. Burroughs, both of whom died in 1997.

The footage during the closing credits is along the Massachusetts Turnpike in Stockbridge, heading west toward the New York border. When the car passes under a bridge, the sign on it reads "Prospect St Stockbridge."

Good Will Hunting received many positive reviews from film critics: It has a 97% "Fresh" rating according to film review compilation website Rotten Tomatoes, and was nominated for many awards (see below).

According to the box office reports, Good Will Hunting grossed $225 million internationally (twenty-two times the film's budget). Although the film's limited release at the end of 1997 (traditional for likely Oscar candidates) merely hinted at its future success, the film caught on, thanks to good reviews and a strong reception by the American public. The film received international praise, in part due to the acting of Matt Damon, Robin Williams and Minnie Driver, all of whom were nominated for Academy Awards for the film, with Williams winning. Damon and Affleck won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

In the film's opening weekend in limited release, it earned $272,912. In its January 1998 wide release opening weekend, it earned $10,261,471. It went on to gross $138,433,435 domestically for a total worldwide gross of $225,900,000. The film had to compete at the box office with James Cameron's Titanic, which later went on to become the highest grossing film of all time (now surpassed by Avatar).

It has been contended that the film is based on the true story of Boston 'Southie' mathematics prodigy William Sidis who, in 1918, at age twenty, after completing work in mathematics and law at Harvard was hired on at the MIT physics labs by physicist Daniel Frost Comstock so "to keep the boy out of jail", as Comstock told Sidis' mother.

The film and its popularity was parodied by Affleck and Damon themselves in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

"Miss Misery" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, but lost to "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic. Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" is also featured in the closing credits after "Miss Misery," but does not appear on the soundtrack.

While Danny Elfman's score was nominated for an Oscar, only two cues appear on the film's soundtrack release. Elfman's "Weepy Donuts" was used on NBC's The Today Show on September 11, 2006, while Matt Lauer spoke during the opening credits.

Langoliers

The Langoliers is one of four novellas published in the Stephen King book Four Past Midnight in 1990.

On a cross-country red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston, some passengers awaken to find that the crew and most of their fellow passengers have disappeared.

There is Brian Engle, an off-duty airline pilot. Dinah Bellman is a young blind girl with minor psychic powers. Fifth-grade teacher Laurel Stevenson takes to watching over Dinah. Nick Hopewell is from England. Don Gaffney, a retired tool-and-die engineer. There is Rudy Warwick, a businessman. Albert Kaussner is a talented Jewish teen violinist. A teenager with drug problems is called Bethany Simms. Rounding out the group is Bob Jenkins, a mystery author and Craig Toomy, an irritable investment banker on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. They realize only those sleeping are now left on the plane. Engle takes control and lands the plane in Bangor, Maine.

The airport is abandoned with no signs of life. There are no odors or electricity. Food and drinks are tasteless and fire simply sputters out. They soon hear 'radio static' in the distance. Craig believes it is 'Langoliers', monsters he had heard about as a child who go after those who waste time.

In trying to get to his appointments, Craig snaps and takes Bethany as a hostage. He shoots Albert, who escapes injury because the gun has no force. Craig is subdued and tied up. Bob theorizes that they have flown through a time rip caused by an aurora borealis that the airlines spotted over the Mojave Desert. Bob declares that the world they are in is the past, a world that doesn't allow time travelers to see past events, but a deserted world that "time" has left behind. To get back, Bob theorizes, they must fly back through the aurora.

The survivors work together to refuel the plane. Since it holds 'present time', it will burn properly, unlike the combustible materials in the bullet and matches.

Craig, now completely insane, escapes and rampages through the airport. He stabs Dinah in the chest and kills Don. He fears the others are manifestations of the Langoliers he heard of. Albert defeats Craig and leaves him on the airport floor.

While the plane is in its final preparations Dinah telepathically communicates with Craig and persuades him that his board meeting is being held on the runway. Craig makes his way out and hallucinates arriving at the meeting, but has a breakdown before his boss and screams that he deliberately cost the company millions, ensuring his eventual firing and disgrace.

It turns out Craig is right, in a way. Creatures emerge from the forest and head for the plane, consuming everything in their way. Craig is eaten.

In the plane, Bob determines that the Langoliers are the timekeepers of eternity, and that their purpose is to eat what is left of the past. The plane takes off, and as they fly the passengers see that the rest of the land falls apart, leaving a formless, black void. The survivors make their way back to Los Angeles and discuss their pasts as they fly; Nick reveals himself to be an assassin for the British Army who was going to Boston to find a politician funding the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and assassinate his girlfriend. Dinah speaks to Laurel about how her life is ending happily, and then succumbs to her injuries. Nick confesses his feelings for Laurel and the hopes of a romance with her. Albert and Bethany confess a similar attraction.

Bob realizes all must be asleep to survive going through the rift again. Nick volunteers to manipulate the controls though all know this will cost him his life. He takes a moment to ask Laurel to pass a message to his father, saying that he, Nick, has quit the business. The cabin pressure is decreased and all fall into a deep sleep. Nick vanishes as the plane goes through the rift.

Seemingly, nothing has happened. They land the plane in Los Angeles and the world first seems deserted. When they check outside, they hear a noise; this noise is not the ominous sound of the Langoliers, but a relaxing hum. Inside the airport, sounds echo and food has taste. Bob concludes that the time rift brought them into the future and that this world is not dead, but a world that's waiting to be born. The group moves themselves against the wall to avoid human traffic in the airport. They then see colors with holograms of people and activity going on. A flash hits them and they find themselves in the present again. Happy to be back, the group goes outside for some fresh air. But they freeze in mid-air in a quintessential 90's movie-ending.

The Langoliers was adapted for a two-part TV Movie in 1995. The TV movie starred Kate Maberly, Kimber Riddle, Patricia Wettig, Mark Lindsay Chapman, Frankie Faison, Baxter Harris, Dean Stockwell, David Morse, Christopher Collet and Bronson Pinchot.

The movie version of "The Langoliers", produced for broadcast on ABC-TV, was filmed almost entirely in and around the Bangor International Airport in Bangor, Maine (author King's hometown) during the summer of 1995. King himself made a cameo appearance in the film as Craig Toomey's boss, during Toomey's hallucination.

The partial main antagonist, Craig Toomy, was known to tear fragments of magazine, or whatever other paper-like material he could get his hands on, into small strips. Ben Hanscom happened to be doing this quite rapidly (with a napkin) at the first table discussion as Grownups in It (novel).

Carrie (1974) · 'Salem's Lot (1975) · The Shining (1977) · The Stand (1978) · The Dead Zone (1979) · Firestarter (1980) · Cujo (1981) · Christine (1983) · Pet Sematary (1983) · Cycle of the Werewolf (1983) · The Talisman (1984; with Peter Straub) · It (1986) · The Eyes of the Dragon (1987) · Misery (1987) · The Tommyknockers (1987) · The Dark Half (1989) · Needful Things (1991) · Gerald's Game (1992) · Dolores Claiborne (1992) · Insomnia (1994) · Rose Madder (1995) · The Green Mile (1996) · Desperation (1996) · Bag of Bones (1998) · The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) · Dreamcatcher (2001) · Black House (2001; with Peter Straub) · From a Buick 8 (2002) · The Colorado Kid (2005) · Cell (2006) · Lisey's Story (2006) · Duma Key (2008) · Under the Dome (2009) · Blockade Billy (2010) · Doctor Sleep (TBA)

The Gunslinger (1982) · The Drawing of the Three (1987) · The Waste Lands (1991) · Wizard and Glass (1997) · Wolves of the Calla (2003) · Song of Susannah (2004) · The Dark Tower (2004) · The Wind Through the Keyhole (TBA)

Rage (1977) · The Long Walk (1979) · Roadwork (1981) · The Running Man (1982) · Thinner (1984) · The Bachman Books (1985) · The Regulators (1996) · Blaze (2007)

Night Shift (1978) · Different Seasons (1982) · Skeleton Crew (1985) · Four Past Midnight (1990) · Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993) · Hearts in Atlantis (1999) · Everything's Eventual (2002) · Just After Sunset (2008) · Full Dark, No Stars (2010)

Danse Macabre (1981) · Nightmares in the Sky (1988) · On Writing (2000) · Secret Windows (2000) · Faithful (2004; with Stewart O'Nan)

Riding the Bullet (2000) · The Plant (2000; unfinished) · Ur (2009)

Creepshow (1982) · Cat's Eye (1985) · Silver Bullet (1985) · Maximum Overdrive (1986; also director) · Pet Sematary (1989) · Sleepwalkers (1992) · Cell (TBA)

Sorry, Right Number (1988) · Golden Years (1991) · The Stand (1994) · The Shining (1997) · Chinga (1998; with Chris Carter) · Storm of the Century (1999) · Rose Red (2002) · Kingdom Hospital (2004) · Desperation (2006)

Ghosts (1997; with Michael Jackson) · Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2010; with John Mellencamp) · Black Ribbons (2010; with Shooter Jennings)

Creepshow (1982) · The Dark Tower (2007) · The Stand (2008) · The Talisman (2009) · American Vampire (2010) · N. (2010)

The Aftermath (1963) · Sword in the Darkness (1970) · The House on Value Street (1974) · The Cannibals (1983; 1989)

Unpublished works by Stephen King · Media based on Stephen King works · Stephen King in popular culture · Tabitha King · Naomi King · Joe Hill · Owen King · Bryan Smith · Peter Straub · Rock Bottom Remainders · Dollar Baby · Jerusalem's Lot · Castle Rock, Maine · Derry, Maine · The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red.