Herbert Ross
22 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
Movies like Murder by Death and The Last of Sheila doubled as playgrounds for seasoned character actors to ham it up to their hearts' content.
The movie’s wit and energy hold your interest, but they don’t spark the pleasure of the unexpected, the thrill you felt in Laura, The Last of Sheila, Chinatown, The Sixth Sense, or the 1974 adaptation of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (not Kenneth Branagh’s inept remake), movies whose big reveals surprise you in their elegant simplicity.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Clue , Gosford Park , Murder by Death , all the Murder on the Orient Express es and The Last of Sheila , which I read about in a Rian Johnson tweet (and then actually watched; it’s a gem).
Prime examples include Herbert Ross’ cult classic The Last of Sheila (1973) and Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974).
That winking reference is one of many that range from the amusingly obvious — a quick glimpse of Angela Lansbury tapping away at a typewriter in a TV rerun of Murder, She Wrote , dubbed in Spanish — to craftier Easter eggs like having one major character sing a snippet of a song by Stephen Sondheim, who collaborated with Anthony Perkins on the script of another starry murder mystery, The Last of Sheila .
Also influential is Herbert Ross’s The Last of Sheila , in which James Coburn gathers the same guests who were at his house a year earlier when his wife died in a hit-and-run.
The worst offender being John Lithgow whose portrayal of Kinsey's fundamentalist preacher father sticks out as a caricature (perhaps the casting was a nod to his righteous reverend in "Footloose") until a quiet moment towards the end of the film which nearly redeems his whole performance.
Kinsey’s father (played by John Lithgow, reliving his “Footloose” sanctimony), a small-town moral tyrant, preaches that “the modern inventions of science have been used to cultivate immorality” — the same argument that very sensible people today make about Internet pornography and such, except that HE’S talking about inventions like electricity and the telephone.
Condon depicts Kinsey as the spitting mirror image of his hellfire-preaching Sunday schoolmaster daddy (John Lithgow, far more moving than he was in his superficially similar bluenose-pop role in Footloose).
La La Land (2016)
Directed by Damien Chazelle
influenced by Pennies from Heaven (1981)
Characters Themes
Watching Gosling, usually cast as a cool, detached man of action in such films as The Place Beyond the Pines and Only God Forgives, glide gracefully past Angel's Flight or the Watts Towers reminds us of the way we felt when Christopher Walken was revealed, as a saloon-dancing gangster in Pennies from Heaven, to be a frustrated song-and-dance man.
Old Hollywood is as glorious and intimidating to these 21st-century lovers as it was in Pennies from Heaven when Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters danced in front of the flickering image of Astaire and Rogers, before entering the cinema screen themselves.Something similar happens in La La Land when Mia and Sebastian drive up to the Griffith Observatory after watching Rebel Without a Cause ; it’s as though the movie has spilled over into real life.
I suspect that Gyllenhaal’s favorite movie might be the same as my own, the bitterly nostalgic ’80s-does-’30s Steve Martin musical “Pennies From Heaven.”
He was known best for Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective, both of which were mini-series on UK television, both of which were period pieces mixing fantasy and reality, both converted into theatrical films in America.
Its jumble of movie references, witting or otherwise, include Pennies from Heaven, Metropolis, and Dick Tracy, as well as the James Whale classics Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein…
It’s about as high concept as today’s comedies get, and guided by Meyers’ fine-tuned hand, it really works (she wrote Protocol and Baby Boom, and wrote/directed the satisfying update of The Parent Trap ).
(The 1981 Steve Martin musical Pennies From Heaven shares the top spot, and they're more alike than they sound.)
The film has certain superficial resemblances to Herbert Ross’s ballet movie, The Turning Point , in that the heroine’s mother (Barbara Hershey) is an ex-dancer who gave up a career to raise a daughter in whom all her hopes are invested.
With this hallucinatory trip down a rabbit hole that is equally seductive and repellent, he makes a bid for a canon that includes no less than Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ("The Red Shoes") and Herbert Ross ("The Turning Point") in creating a ballet film that captures both the gossamer pink softness of classical dance and the scarier psychological impulses lying just beneath the serene surface.
This is a notion that has been explored before in such excellent films as the aforementioned “Brazil” and the even-more-underrated “Pennies from Heaven,” that strange and sadly beautiful Dennis Potter creation in which a Depression-era sheet music salesman sees himself as the hero of a series of elaborately produced musical numbers when the pressures and disappointments of real life became too much.
They balance each other wonderfully, and it doesn’t hurt that Marshall orchestrates everything else around them with near perfection: “Chicago” has almost single-handedly resurrected the tradition of the movie musical, a genre that has for the most part languished since its last great masterpiece, Herbert Ross’s 1981 “Pennies From Heaven,” which didn’t attract the audience it should have.
Now, Spacek has been given a role that feels like a holdover from Steel Magnolias (1989) as a tragi-comic figure that the film is interested in more for the comic than the tragic.
This is the role that will graduate her from teen-heavy fare like "Zombieland" and "Easy A" to more adult roles the same way "Steel Magnolias" gave Julia Roberts her pick of grown-up parts years ago.
(You will find a much simpler version of the same tale, for example, in Neil Simon's "Max Dugan Returns" from 1983.)
You could get happily lost trying to pin down “Knives Out’s” various antecedents, from “Murder, She Wrote,” which a character is shown watching early on, to “The Last of Sheila,” a 1973 whodunit directed by Herbert Ross and written by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim.
I’m still not entirely sure, after two viewings, why “Babylon” — far more than “Pennies from Heaven” — feels like the one doing the lip-syncing.
The Shape of Water (2017)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
influenced by Pennies from Heaven (1981)
Visuals
That was equally true of Dennis Potter, the creator of “Pennies from Heaven” and “The Singing Detective,” who I suspect would have warmed to this movie, and especially to the sight of Eliza, suddenly spirited from her kitchen table onto a monochrome dance floor.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
Directed by Rian Johnson
influenced by The Last of Sheila (1973)
Visuals Plot Themes
Drawing on the glitzy vibe of 1973’s “The Last of Sheila,” the writer-director gives us a set of characters who are walking showboats of acrid ambition.
If this all sounds familiar that’s because it is: director and writer Rian Johnson was inspired by director Herbert Ross’s 1973 movie The Last of Sheila .
That’s too bad because Johnson, clearly working with a larger budget, has made a lavish murder mystery that pays tribute to one of his often-cited influences, the 1970’s whodunnit, The Last of Sheila .
It’s as if the filmmaker has taken The Last of Sheila and combined it with Ten Little Indians and then put his own macabre “eat the rich” spin on it.
Once again collaborating with cinematographer Steve Yedlin, composer Nathan Johnson and editor Bob Ducsay, Johnson designs Glass Onion as a jaunty and electric The Last of Sheila-style venture in which diversions turn deadly serious.
Evoking the feel of seaside murder mysteries like Evil Under The Sun (1982) and The Last of Sheila (1973) (this one particularly, given its similar absurdity), Glass Onion ramps up the broad caricatures, silly one-liners, and genuinely stupid (“stupid” is a term of endearment in my household) sight gags, all of which are wondrously funny, but, more than that, they rarely ever don’t have a callback to something important later.
In one sequence, Rod perfectly reenacts Kevin Bacon’s “punch-dancing” scene from “Footloose” before falling down a hill … and falling … and falling … like Wile E. Coyote in a jumpsuit.
For instance, one of the disc's featurettes tells us that a whole sequence in this film was supposed to be a take-off on Kevin Bacon's romping in the 1984 movie "Footloose."
It’s all there, save for banter between Spider-Man and Star-Lord about Kevin Bacon’s dancing in Footloose.
Beca’s Kevin Bacon, Aubrey’s the preacher, and the group is the town from “Footloose.”
It is honestly refreshing to see her play a character with some depth, something we haven't seen since her role in 1989's "Steel Magnolias."
The movie is a shameless retread of the old formula that gave us the considerably wittier "And Then There Were None," "Ten Little Indians," and "The Last of Sheila," in which a group is brought together, only to be murdered one by one.