I got an idea for a series of posts from the movie The Conversation directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It won Best Picture, so a lot of people have seen it.
For the next week, I will post about movies that have ripped off other movies. Maybe it wasn't intentional. Maybe it was subconscious. Maybe it was. Maybe seeing a movie only triggered an idea and they only partially ripped a movie off.
So as I was watching The Conversation and there is this scene where Gene Hackman is in his hotel and blood comes out of the toilet. A whole lot of blood from the victim(s) that were murdered. And I immediately thought of Dirty Pretty Things, where a heart of a murdered person was found when they unclogged the toilet. Toilet. Blood/heart. Hotel. I was thinking that maybe whoever wrote Dirty Pretty Things had seen The Conversation.
Also, finding the anonymous donor that you're not supposed to know about is a theme too often found in movies and is not at all that interesting.
With the case of Return to Me this movie also rips off a lot of other movies. And a lot of other movies since then have ripped off a lot of similar themes. It's been awhile since I've seen Random Hearts. But basically in this movie, Harrison Ford's wife and Kristin Scott Thomas' husband had an affair and they think that they need to have an affair too. So he tracks KST down so they can have this affair. The first half hour is gripping and leads someone to think that this is going to be a great thriller. However, it gets pretty unoriginal and lame real quick. That is one of the biggest disappointments of all movies.
I'll look at a few other movies this week. Some that are just cheap imitations of others. Since the movie industry has been around over 100 years (not as long as me), a lot of the movies I have seen during my lifetime are rip-offs unbeknownst to me.
I like watching old movies, though. Sometimes when I see older movies, like The Conversation it is amazing to see its influence over other films. I saw The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly pretty recently and it was amazing to see its influence on how few westerns I had seen. If you can call Shanghai Noon a western (there was a pretty interesting bathtub scene in both).
Anyway, during the next week, comments are more than welcome. Maybe my scope is limited and you may see something that I may not. I am using this week to point out how much Hollywood uses the same ideas. OVER AND OVER. Whether they mean to or not.
Yours Truly, rancette
at 7:48 AM PST
