Mark Robson
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At least Earthquake -- a clear inspiration for this film, even if its release date of 1974 makes it seem as long ago as the Dead Sea Scrolls -- jumped between characters and showed a real L.A. populated by cowards and heroes, daredevils and madmen, Charlton Heston and Richard Roundtree.
It’s essentially a remake/ripoff of the 1974 disaster movie nadir “Earthquake,” only there’s only a handful of characters, not the usual three or four dozen.
Earthquakes haven't been exploited at the movies as much as one would think (most prominently in 1974's Earthquake, which brought us the Sensurround gimmick), but those with long-memories can cross-reference 1997's Dante's Peak and Volcano, which are more or less the same movie as (each other and) San Andreas, except with geysers of lava.
And as we all know, sound technology has come a long way since the 1974 Charlton Heston “Earthquake” movie introduced audiences to something called SenSurround.
Of course, San Andreas is really about destruction, and the orgy of cracking earth, collapsing dams, tumbling buildings, and rushing tsunamis is all expertly rendered, missing only the theater-shaking gimmick of Sensurround, which shook audiences watching Irwin Allen’s infamous Earthquake (1974).
Even 1974’s Earthquake at least had sensurround and seats that shook.
Shutter Island (2010)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced by Isle of the Dead (1945), Bedlam (1946)
Visuals Characters
Grad-level geeks will also recognize the references to Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb, and Val Lewton's Isle of the Dead.
It’s fun, in a film-school kind of way, to pick out the references: “Out of the Past,” “Laura,” “Isle of the Dead,” and so forth.
It is a dazzling pastiche of a Hollywood movie of the 1940s and 50s, part Gothic horror in the Val Lewton mode of Bedlam and Isle of the Dead and part noir- thriller in the psychiatric cycle that stretches from Hitchcock's Spellbound to Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor, complete with the obligatory dream sequences, expressionist gestures, throbbing undercurrents of guilt and anxiety and bold narrative twists.
The movie plays like a loopy fever-dream Scorsese had after a marathon of Hitchcocks Vertigo, Val Lewtons Bedlam, Kubricks The Shining, and William Peter Blattys The Ninth Configuration.
There is, in his performance, a touch of the amused relish that was shown by Boris Karloff, when he, too, oversaw an asylum, in “Bedlam,” the Val Lewton chiller of 1946.
So while Shutter Islandâ??s official sources, some screened for its cast and crew, include Shock Corridor and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the deeper onesâ??still within B-movie noir and German Expressionismâ??include Lewtonâ??s Bedlam (1946) and G.W. Pabstâ??s pioneering Secrets of a Soul (1926).
The director melds a number of arty influences into an organic whole: silent film, particularly by focusing on his actors’ hyper-expressive eyes; German Expressionism via the use of stark angles and paranoid pictorals; Symbolist painters by way of Jean Delville and Arnold Bocklin (Bocklin’s shivery Isle of the Dead springs to mind; a shot of Dafoe’s naked white body echoes Delville’s painting of Prometheus).
Eggers is assiduous and thorough, and I suspect he knows very well the entire lineage of his opening image of his characters’ approach to the island—Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead by way of Val Lewton’s 1945 film of the same title by way of the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010)—and more likely than not that he’s caught up with the essential lighthouse films, such as Roy Boulting’s Thunder Rock (1942), as well.
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by Valley of the Dolls (1967)
Themes
But writer/director Quentin Tarantino thoughtfully humanizes Sharon Tate, the 26-year-old Valley of the Dolls star who was murdered by the Manson Family in 1969, to weave a narrative about celebrity and shattered dreams in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood .
Rick’s new next door neighbors happen to be Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), hot off directing “Rosemary’s Baby,” and his actress wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie almost capturing Tate’s particular sweet naivete) who is a rising star with "Valley of the Dolls."
The theater staff is amused and surprised, if not exactly star struck – they don’t really know who she is until she mentions her part in Valley of the Dolls .
This year I’ve seen three movies featuring Tate: this, The Haunting of Sharon Tate , and Charlie Says ; I also watched the fevered Valley of the Dolls , which Tate starred in.
The rising star’s murder near the end of her pregnancy and its peace and love era-ending eeriness notwithstanding, the real Tate’s role (and that of Patty Duke’s Neely O’Hara) in Valley of the Dolls is obvious subtext here, especially for the trajectory of DiCaprio’s TV actor Rick Dalton who battles alcoholism while trying to stay relevant as an actor and ends up making B-movies in Italy.
It's been done a thousand times, including such famous performers as Wallace Beery in "The Champ," Kirk Douglas in "Champion," Sylvester Stallone in "Rocky," Michelle Rodriguez in "Girlfight," Hilary Swank in "Million Dollar Baby" and Mark Wahlberg in "The Fighter."
Which is sometimes all you want out of a boxing movie, “Raging Bull,” “Million Dollar Baby,” and 1949’s “Champion” notwithstanding.
Just don't confuse "Southpaw" with a really good example of the genre and its ringside dramatic possibilities, whether old ("The Set-Up," "Champion") or newer ("Raging Bull" or the less grandiose "The Fighter").
And despite speeches about Hope’s graduation from the School of Hard Knocks, he doesn’t function as a bristling working-class hero or antihero, like the fictional protagonists of Golden Boy , Body and Soul , The Set-Up , and Champion.
We’ve seen it many times before, in everything from Champion to Requiem for a Heavyweight, but what makes this one different is the dedication, commitment and sincerity the star brings to every aspect of the role.
This odd little film reminded me of Val Lewton’s 1943 ghost tale “The Seventh Victim,” which is also about a young woman searching for a lost sibling.
It’s there in the short-lived SensurroundTM technology designed to make whole theaters playing the 1974 disaster movie Earthquake rumble in time with the action onscreen; in Harry Smith’s never-realized dream of showing his alchemical cut-out-animation epic Heaven and Earth Magic to audiences seated in chairs modeled after objects featured in the film, including watermelons and eggs; in Abel Gance’s triple-screen Napoleon .
Therefore, “Breathless” is a film suffused with films--it opens with a dedication to Monogram Pictures, an American B-movie studio of the time and contains references to such movies as “The Harder They Fall” (best known for being the last screen appearance of Humphrey Bogart), “Westbound,” “Whirlpool” and homages to the works of such American filmmakers as Sam Fuller and Anthony Mann.
Lifting his defining gesture of rubbing his thumb across his lips from Humphrey Bogart in "The Harder They Fall," Michel has tailor-made for himself an identity collaged from Hollywood myth.
Decades after 1967’s Valley of the Dolls and decades prior to 2016’s The Neon Demon, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven‘s Showgirls, the over-the-top tale of ill-gotten fame, busted dreams and the skeezy, grimy underbelly of Las Vegas, dragged its garish arse across screens across the world.
There are also some noteworthy theories, such as the one that considers Showgirls to be part of a camp trilogy that also includes 1967’s Valley of the Dolls and 1981’s Mommie Dearest .
El filme, dirigido por el bastante pasable Jon Amiel (La Emboscada, Sommersby), cumple perfectamente con los parámetros de las películas de desastres que tanto auge tuvieron a mediados de los 50 (como representaciones simbólicas del miedo estadounidense al comunismo y las consecuencias de la Guerra Fría) y a finales de los 90 (con el miedo inherente al mentado cambio de milenio que, supuestamente, traería una serie de calamidades para la humanidad), de las cuales algunos ejemplos van desde El Dïa Que Paralizaron La Tierra (The Day The Earth Stood Still, 1951) hasta Terremoto (Earthquake, 1974), Día de la Independencia (Independence Day, 1996), Tornado (Twister, 1997) o Armageddon (1998).
I was reminded, too, of how Zazie Beetz is the best thing about Deadpool 2 --she's in Bullet Train as a fellow assassin called The Hornet (Brad Pitt is "Ladybug")--and how she was also in the incredible The Harder They Fall , a film that is better than this one in every single respect for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it's not a self-satisfied, self-referential, Oceans Eleven smug-stival.
The film takes some of its cues from the 1946 cult classic “Bedlam” (great title) with the master Boris Karloff in a diabolical role.
Boxing has often been the subject matter of many films but few have captured the good and the bad of the sport as clearly as The Fighter, which can stand up to comparison with classics such as Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall.
Mankind's saviors are a dirty dozen or so cartoonish oil-rig roughnecks headed by Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis, looking unnervingly like Frank Sinatra in Von Ryan's Express) enlisted by NASA head Dan Truman (a bemused Billy Bob Thornton) to fly a pair of space shuttles to the celestial intruder and nuke it.
The genre features natural disasters like Charlton Heston avoiding a cracking earth in 1974’s “Earthquake,” or Steve McQueen and Paul Newman fighting for top billing as they try to put out a skyscraper fire in the human-made disaster epic “The Towering Inferno.”
The only thing missing from "Everest" would be a movie poster with stars' photos accompanied by the slogan from 1974's "Earthquake" -- "Who will survive?"
Of course, in the tradition of such ensemble-rich Hollywood disaster flicks as The Towering Inferno (1974) and Earthquake (1978), 2012 offers up a lot of talented actors getting paid obscene amounts of money to ham it up in support roles in front of a green screen – Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, Stephen McHattie, Jimi Mistri and George Segal all get to ask 'What was that?", roll their eyes a lot and die or fall in love.
And the makers of Earthquake even possessed the ingenuity to cast 52-year-old Ava Gardner as 59-year-old Lorne Greene's daughter.
This is 1974's "Earthquake" redux only without Chuck Heston, Marjoe Gortner and Victoria Principal.
“The Dressmaker” doesn’t so much change the pattern of this “Peyton Place” style story as render it ugly and humorless.