Stanley Donen
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La La Land (2016)
Directed by Damien Chazelle
influenced by Funny Face (1957), It's Always Fair Weather (1955)
Visuals
Anyone who has ever splashed through puddles in tribute to Gene Kelly or sighed with blissful contentment at Funny Face will adore La La Land.
And throughout “La La Land,“ there are references to many musicals, from the faux Paris dance finale of “An American in Paris” and the career trajectory melodrama of the 1954 version of “A Star is Born,” as well as the dream ballet from “Oklahoma” and the jazz club scenes from “Funny Face.”
Envuelta en un lustroso atuendo que evoca, desde luego, las películas musicales de Jacques Demy (Los paraguas de Cherburgo, 1964), Vincent Minelli (An American in Paris, 1951) o Stanley Donen (Funny Face, 1965), la película de Chazelle oscila entre la alegre vivacidad y la profunda melancolía, apoyada por el score y canciones de Justin Herwitz, pero su esencia esta más vinculada al espíritu de los musicales de Rene Clair (Le Million, 1931) o el pretendido naturalismo espontáneo del Woody Allen de Todos dicen que te amo (1996), películas en las que una noción de “sinceridad” predomina sobre el rigor técnico de la pirotecnia.
Or maybe you’ll hold out until Chazelle can’t think of anything better to do than stick balloons in Stone’s hands like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face.
, Funny Face , A Star is Born , The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (particularly) — there are nods to them all.
He makes allusions to Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), Funny Face (1957), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), and more.
The Tourist (2010)
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
influenced by Charade (1963)
Visuals Dialogue Plot Characters Themes
At the very least, it ought to play out like a slick imitation of a Stanley Donen film, like Charade (1963).
They also share some decent dialogue, the sharpness of which harkens back to romantic capers like “The Lady Eve’’ and “Charade.’’
What it was not, however, was a particularly dazzling piece of filmmaking, which makes von Donnersmarck precisely the wrong guy to direct The Tourist, a cosmopolitan trifle along the lines of Charade or Alfred Hitchcocks To Catch A Thief.
The motivations of characters shift as easily as Cary Grant’s in “Charade.”
And then, if you're thinking about The Tourist, with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie (who were perhaps thinking about Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, and Audrey Hepburn), well, think about adding To Catch a Thief or Charade to your Netflix queue instead.
"The Tourist" is a facsimile of a masquerade of a gloss on "Charade," and on all the lesser cinematic charades that followed in the wake of director Stanley Donen 's 1963 picture.
(The old Cary Grant charmer “Charade” did this perfectly.)
While watching the new Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz spy thriller “ Knight and Day ,” I kept flashing back to Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in Alfred Hitchcock ’s “ North by Northwest ” and Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Stanley Donen ’s “Charade,” the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made.
But since Knight and Day really wants to be Charade (1963), it kept reminding me that as much as Cruise and Diaz aren’t Kutcher and Heigl, neither are they Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn—by a very long shot indeed.
"Knight and Day" aspires to the light charm of a romantic action comedy like “Charade” or “ Romancing the Stone ,” but would come closer if it dialed down the relentless action.
He says he wanted to pattern this on two Cary Grant caper films, Stanley Donen�s, Charade (1963) and Alfred Hitchock�s North by Northwest (1959).
The reason director/co-writer James Mangold's ("3:10 to Yuma" and "Walk the Line") carefree homage to globe-trotting capers like Audrey Hepburn's "Charade" works so effectively has more to do with teamwork than plot.
It's obviously inspired by Fred Astaire's wall and ceiling dance sequence in "Royal Wedding," and the fact that it was shot the same way (with a revolving set rather than computer-generated effects) makes those scenes all the more impressive to behold.
The most rousing action sequence, a fight in a zero-gravity hallway, cleverly lifts from "2001" (and "Royal Wedding," in which Fred Astaire danced on the walls and the ceiling).
There are images in this smoothly elegant film that will be talked about for decades: six sleepers floating weightlessly in a hotel room; a Paris street folding in on itself; and in an echo of Fred Astaire’s dancing-on-the-ceiling scene from “Royal Wedding,” two guys crawl all over a ceiling with the same special-effect technique, except they’re not tap-dancing — they’re trying to kill each other.
The movie gives off something reminiscent of old caper romances like Charade, How to Steal a Million, A Fish Called Wanda, the Ocean’s movies, and the underrated Duplicity, in which Julia Roberts and Clive Owen keep their con going so long that what they’re left with is each other.
Contemporary audiences are less likely to be reminded of Charade and To Catch a Thief than that other Grant wannabe, George Clooney, in the Oceans movies, but it’s a change of pace.
On the most basic level, the con-artist romance Focus is a Cary Grant movie in the North By Northwest or Charade mold.
Smith frankly doesn’t seem all too happy throughout “Focus”—he certainly doesn’t manage the sort of charm that Cary Grant brought effortlessly to a similarly convoluted piece like “Charade.”
When Julia thinks she sees the same man (Burn Gorman) following her to a movie (she watches “Charade,” a classic that clearly inspired this project) and then to a grocery store, her panic rises, especially when she sees news reports about a serial killer named The Spider.
There’s nevertheless a clear love for classically straight-forward suspense cinema dripping from every pore of this effort, perhaps best indicated by a mid-film sequence in which Julia heads to the cinema to watch Stanley Donen’s Charade.
In one truly spine-chilling scene, seated right behind her at a matinee showing of Charade .
A grocery store pursuit is shot well; a sparse screening of Charade is downright intense.
The setup is pure Hitchcock (an element Okuno playfully acknowledges when Julia runs into a movie theater to watch "Charade," before someone creeps up on her), but the tone is closer to the nightmarish dread of "The Vanishing."
She first feels him following her as she wanders into the middle of a matinee screening of “Charade,” then to the grocery store where she almost buys cigarettes — she’d given up smoking a few months ago, but when she ultimately relents and buys a pack, it serves as a great way to show signs of stress on screen.
The reference is to Fred Astaire, who did the same with a hat rack, in “Royal Wedding” (1951)—part of a chorus of echoes that resound throughout.
The screenplay abounds in convolutions that undercut expectations and take matters in new directions, including a major one toward the close that Russell and Singer might have borrowed from Peter Stone’s “Charade.”
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
influenced by Charade (1963)
Visuals
Half of "Rogue Nation" belongs to the digital realm of trickery; the other half delivers a more gratifying combination of bodies in space, usually going at each other, along with crosses, double-crosses and settings reminiscent of everything from the 1966-1973 TV show to Hitchcock to Stanley Donen's "Charade."
Devoted watchers of Turner Classic Movies and collectors of Criterion will make themselves giddy counting the references to classic thrillers of the ‘30s and beyond (the very first thing in this writer’s notes on the film is an all-caps “CHARADE!”)…
Even though it’s not Hitch, Stanley Donen’s Charade is an obvious tonal influence.
And for a man in his late 70s, he tackles the role’s intense physical requirements with gusto; at one point, the ship capsizes, sending Redford rolling up the walls and to the ceiling in what looks like the horror-movie version of Fred Astaire’s famous gravity-defying dance in “Royal Wedding.”
In scenes recalling Stanley Donen’s “Royal Wedding,” Our Man appears to dance on the cabin ceiling as the ship rolls like a toy in the thundering waves.
The Age of Adaline (2015)
Directed by Lee Toland Krieger
influenced by Two for the Road (1967)
Visuals
A less lofty, though no less charitable comparison might be made with the time-travel romance Somewhere in Time, while Adaline’s sturdy cross-cutting evokes Stanley Donen’s relationship puzzle Two for the Road; there’s even a scene here, surely no coincidence, set around 1967, with Lively driving a black convertible and meeting cute with a young man stranded on the English countryside.
(When the bag-rupture first happens, she goes full Fred Astaire in “Royal Wedding,” rolling up the walls and across the ceiling.)
At first, she's walking up the walls and onto the ceiling like Fred Astaire in "Royal Wedding," but soon she becomes focused.
I don’t mind that this drug allows her to writhe up a wall and across the ceiling as if Fred Astaire was having a seizure in Royal Wedding .
This releases the CPH4 into her system, turning her eyes purple and forcing her to re-enact Fred Astaire's "Royal Wedding" dance on the walls and ceiling, but in excruciating pain.
Another asset is its literate and sophisticated dialogue (by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who also wrote "The Net" ) reminiscent of Stanley Donen's "Charade" (written by the estimable Peter Stone).
As he does, “The Little Prince” makes a remarkable stylistic leap from the accomplished but familiar CG environs of these opening scenes (big-eyed, bobble-headed humans; modernist-futurist design influences) into 2D stop-motion animation, bringing the world of Saint-Exupery’s original story to life in beautiful handcrafted images based on the author’s own crudely elegant watercolors (seen in the book’s first printing and all subsequent editions).
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
Directed by Marc Webb
influenced by Two for the Road (1967)
Plot Visuals
For a lot of casual filmgoers in their teens and 20s -- the ones yet to encounter a Charlie Kaufman script such as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" or who haven't seen the bittersweet 1967 "Two for the Road," written by Frederic Raphael, or have yet to dive into a Milan Kundera novel -- the structural mind games played by the romantic comedy "(500) Days of Summer" may throw them, happily, for a loop.
Come to think of it, as with that overrated gimmick flick Memento, the only reason this movie doesn't play out in a forward-linear fashion is that it's all so structurally obvious that there would be no point (Two for the Road, it ain't).
This a movie where kids go to a lower-rung picture palace to see Charade (1963) and where the TVs always seem to be tuned to cheesy black-and-white 1950s sci-fi movies.
In line for the movies (a revival house showing of "Charade"), Jay suggests a game of 'trade,' in which each picks out someone in the crowd they wish they could change places with while the other guesses who it might be and why.
Jeff (Jake Weary) accompanies Jay to a classy old movie theater to see a revival of Charade.
While his trickiness reminded me of Sandrich — as when he intercuts Travolta and Newton-John duetting on “Summer Dreams,” but to two separate groups of listeners — his exuberant camera moves have all the panache and style of Stanley Donen at his very best (as in The Pajama Game.
At its best, which is fleeting, “Murder Mystery” evokes an unholy mix of Agatha Christie and “ National Lampoon’s European Vacation ,” with an aspirational dash of the 1963 Stanley Donen romantic actioner, “ Charade .”
Like Natalie Portman in "Garden State," Audrey Hepburn in "Funny Face" and Jean Seberg in "Breathless," it establishes Gerwig as a smart, funny woman you'd like to get to know better.