Tag: cinema
Sampling and homages: The problem with heavy movie lifting
Remember that scene in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) where a baby carriage clunks down the steps in the middle of a gunfight? I’m just wondering: Did you laugh when you first saw it … because you knew it was lifted from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925)? De Palma’s inside-movie joke might’ve been a…
Remembering Judy Holliday: The shameless self-promotion of Gladys Glover
The sad loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman has me thinking about other actors who have died too soon. From Wallace Reid and Rudolph Valentino through Carole Lombard and Marilyn Monroe. John Cazale and Heath Ledger. There is a litany. And somewhere on that list is Judy Holliday, who died in 1965, at the age of…
Parody and Noir: More curves than a scenic railway
Probably because of its wide appeal as popular culture (both as a literary and cinematic genre) and of the tendency to codify characters and plot points, the noir lent itself easily to parody from early on. My Favorite Brunette (1947), directed by the forgettable Elliott Nugent and starring Bob Hope, is the movie that inaugurates…
Cowboys and Indians: Native Americans and cinema
For most of my youth, films featuring Red Indians (as we called them back then) followed a simple formula. The Indians were all bad, and attacked white settlers, wagon trains, and any soldiers sent out to discipline them. They all wore warpaint, had feathered headgear, and generally used weapons like tomahawks, and bows and arrows.…
The gun against the sword: Why Kurosawa remakes miss the point
The biggest trap directors fall into when remaking Kurosawa films is putting the gun centre stage. I’m going to admit something: I’m biased. I love Akira Kurosawa’s movies – though I tend to prefer the jidai-geki flicks to the ones set in the present day. Yet there’s an inherent issue unrelated to quality that precludes…