Sam Wood
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But the film doesn't so much call the playwright's beloved Our Town to mind as it does his screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT, particularly the moment when murderous Uncle Charlie explains to his wide-eyed niece that if you ripped the fronts from most American houses, you'd find swine.
Many will see this intricately staged drama as a cryptic reworking of Thornton Wilder's Our Town with its focus on the smallest details of daily life among people who are working out their destinies by the choices they make.
The effect of this contained environment is theatrical and calls to mind Thornton Wilder's Our Town -- most of the staging happens in the audience's minds.
In the end, Von Trier's movie feels like a rebuke not just to the myth of American fraternity - the dark flipside of Thornton Wilder's Our Town - but to the very notion of common humanity.
One could be forgiven for momentarily mistaking Dogville for that fourth wall-breaking production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town that aired on HBO last year; as Dogville's narrator, John Hurt is as thorough and intrusive a commentator as Our Town's Stage Manager.
This is realised on screen in a strikingly original cinematic style that draws on Thornton Wilder's Our Town with its knowing narrator (Hurt) and a set made of almost nothing!
It rips off Spielberg’s A.I ., and Marvel fans probably won’t recognize that it also rips off Thornton Wilder’s Our Town — that’s part of the MCU cultural cheat.
Ripping off -- or at least borrowing heavily from -- the ending of The Constant Gardener and having DiCaprio do a bit of Gary Cooper from the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) don't really change what the story is really about.
Thus, his latest comedy, “About Time,” which he wrote and directed, is a disappointment, not only because it keeps reminding you in spots of other films and plays that toyed with similar ideas — oh, let’s say “Groundhog Day” and “Back to the Future” or even the Thornton Wilder classic play “Our Town” — but also because the movie doesn’t measure up to Curtis’ own high standards.
His whole persona is an embodiment of Ingrid Bergman's laughing retort, in Saratoga Trunk, when an admirer tells her how beautiful she is: "Yes, isn't it lucky?"
It’s in these intersections of the domestic and the cosmic that “The Tree of Life” thrums with the kind of profound simplicity Thornton Wilder captured in “Our Town.”
The engine behind it is the mournful tone which channels Thornton Wilder's Our Town for its expression of the fragility of life and the temporary nature of all things.
(A British film critic at the time of its release likened it to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which could explain it: I frickin’ hate Our Town.)
The first that leaps to mind is a super slo-mo opening sequence set to Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” that pinpoints specific moments where the irony of becoming a zombie is simply too funny not to laugh at—like a zombie bride tackling her new husband moments after the nuptials and a zombie stripper wearing pasties and chasing businessmen out of a strip club.
Equal parts gorefest and buddy-comedy, the film’s deadpan tone is doubly clear when Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” thunders over the opening credits.
Late in the film, Via is part of a production of “Our Town,” and there is in Chbosky’s film a touch of Thornton Wilder and a feel for the honest everyday rhythms of life.
I’m sure that the excursion-to-a-Coney-Island-day-at-the-beach scenes in the 1941 comedy “The Devil And Miss Jones” or the 1959 “Imitation of Life,” as Hollywoodized as they were, presented more realistic versions of such excursions than this movie does—I mean, Coney Island is/was a lot of things, but lyrical is not one of them.
It’s an eighties reboot of the stateroom sequence from “ A Night at the Opera ” (1935), when Margaret Dumont opens the door and a torrent of waiters, maids, and Marx Brothers falls out.
All About Eve (1950)
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
influenced by The Pride of the Yankees (1942)
Plot
Regardless of the personal or professional shortcomings of its writer and director, despite the similar narrative structure of All About Eve and Citizen Kane, and despite the fact that Mankiewicz wrote and directed a couple of major clunkers, you’ll never convince me that Joseph L. Mankiewicz is a lesser talent than his brother, whose only major accomplishment apart from Citizen Kane is the screenplay for The Pride of the Yankees.
Kevin, with his spinning Rolodex of inner personalities, is an actor’s extended holiday, and the puckish Scottish star makes each one a showstopper: The prissy headmistress Miss Patricia, the eternal 9-year-old boy Hedwig, a pair of Irish girl twins, a pompous film professor specializing in Japanese cinema (!) — it’s like a human version of the stateroom scene in “A Night at the Opera.”
Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson
influenced by A Night at the Opera (1935)
One of the movie’s more amusingly tongue-in-cheek moments finds the two leads seated at opposite ends of a conference table, enacting perhaps the most eccentric contract negotiation scene since “A Night at the Opera.”
The whole thing plays like the stateroom sequence from A Night at the Opera as choreographed by George Jetson.