Alejandro G. Iñárritu
215 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
Man in the Wilderness (1971)
Directed by Richard C. Sarafian
influenced The Revenant (2015)
Characters Plot Visuals
Glass, who previously served as the inspiration for the title character played by Richard Harris in director Richard C. Sarafian's conspicuously less compelling Man in the Wilderness in 1971, is a man of two worlds.
The legend of American frontiersman and fur trapper Hugh Glass, who was left for dead after being mauled by a bear in the early 1820s, inspired Richard C Sarafian’s 1971 film Man in the Wilderness , in which Richard Harris starred as “Zachary Bass”.
The story inspired the 1971 movie Man in the Wilderness , which starred Richard Harris as Zach Bass, and Michael Punke's novel The Revenant , which Inarritu and Mark L. Smith adapted into the film's screenplay.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Hugh Glass, a real-life 19th century mountain man and guide whose story inspired legends, books, and at least one previous film (Man in the Wilderness with Richard Harris).
The natural-lighting gimmick was done better by Kubrick in Barry Lyndon; the basic story was told before in 1971’s Man in the Wilderness, which took up nearly an hour less of our time; the sometimes discordant score (by Ryuichi Sakamoto among others) recalls Neil Young’s fuzzbox music for Jim Jarmusch’s acid western Dead Man (and this film’s dependence on an Indian helping an ailing white man was already parodied nicely by Jarmusch); and the symbolic heaviness of man against nature got some play in Joe Carnahan’s underrated existential drama The Grey.
In 1971's Man In The Wilderness , an equally loose take on the Hugh Glass legend that renames him Zachary Bass, Richard Harris is mauled by an off-camera beast.
Themes of rapacious greed, western entitlement and cultural intolerance coupled with environmental disregard flow with subtle might, but at the heart of Iñárritu’s woodland tempest looms Glass’ superhuman perseverance, driven by the memory of those he loved and incarnated in the same dreamy sylvan echoes that Terrence Malick brushed so artfully into “The New World.”
The sinuous long takes are an Emmanuel Lubezki specialty, and can’t help but evoke the cinematographer’s work on The New World , an appropriate reference point, perhaps, but also one whose deep, ineffable strangeness on a shot-to-shot level exposes the conventionality of Iñárritu’s aesthetics.
The film opens in a way that reminded me so much of Terrence Malick’s "The New World,” which was also shot by “The Revenant’ cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and that alone made me fearful that we’re in for more of the same.
The film is directed by Alejandro Iñárritu in a Terrence Malick (“The New World”) vein, with shots of the sky through the trees, silhouettes against the setting sun and omniscient overviews of the entire landscape.
But Lubezki’s work is less reminiscent of Birdman than his Terrence Malick collaborations The New World and The Tree of Life, full of gorgeous waking dream imagery and haunting shots of raging fires in a nighttime snowstorm or a bell ringing atop a decimated church.
Many have said the same about Terrence Malick's dreamy visions of a lost America, especially "The New World."
Rope (1948)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), The Revenant (2015)
Visuals
Though shoehorned into three play-like acts, Birdman transpires in one long, flowing, bravura take — which appears to contain some hidden cuts, à la Hitchcock's Rope, and some CG tricks of the sort that blow the illusion by reminding us we're in a realm where anything's possible so nothing's truly wonderful.
It has less to do with the formal stuntwork — which simulates a single elaborately choreographed take, à la Hitchcock's Rope — than with the unflagging momentum of the performances within it.
The much-vaunted single-take effect achieved by DP Emmanuel Lubezki and editors Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione (with a couple of exceptions the film appears to play without cuts ) is not a gimmick, but a storytelling technique that achieves an arguably superior effect to that realized by Alfred Hitchcock in "Rope."
The device was perhaps most famously used by Alfred Hitchcock in his 1948 film, “Rope” (though that film does have several hard cuts between reels), and in Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 fantasy, “Russian Ark.”
What isn't in doubt is the fantastic cinematography courtesy of DP Emmanuel Lubezki who employs a near continuous shot throughout the film (with an unknown amount of actual cuts -- presumably across dark scenes much like Alfred Hitchcock used in the somewhat similarly shot "Rope" but likely also elsewhere now that visual effects can be used to create the appearance of seamlessness).
Though it wouldn’t be accurate to say Birdman was filmed in a single long take—there are several moments when characters pass through a darkened space in order to mask visible cuts, the digital-age equivalent of the reel changes in Rope —Iñárritu and Lubezki go to great lengths to make sure the film feels to the viewer like one continuous shot.
1917 (2019)
Directed by Sam Mendes
influenced by Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), The Revenant (2015)
Visuals
Maybe because it sounds near-impossible to streamline the unpredictability of a live battlefield as opposed to, say, the urban Broadway-ness of Birdman or the Berlin nightlife of Victoria.
Like Birdman and Rope before it, the “cheat” cuts in 1917 are easy to spot, but the act of looking for them amidst the soldiers’ trek across torched farmland and sniper-filled, bombed-out towns, and simultaneously taking in the endeavor’s overall technical marvel yields a sense of awe rarely achieved in film.
One year later, Birdman, another film mostly presented as a single shot, would sweep the Oscars.
It’s a trick deployed before, by Alfred Hitchcock in the stage-born 1948 thriller “Rope” and Alejandro González Iñárritu in his 2014 Best Picture Oscar winner “Birdman.”
Essentially filmed in one long, two-hour shot, the film—which features the masterful cinematography of living legend Roger Deakins—is a cinematic feat rarely attempted, though not without precedent (Birdman, Rope, and Russian Ark are other examples of one-shot films).
Director Sam Mendes, telling a tale based on stories that he heard in his youth from his grandfather (who at age 19 had been a messenger for the British Army during WWI) has here combined elements of “Dunkirk” and “Saving Private Ryan,” among others, and used Alejandro González Iñárritu’s single-shot storytelling method (used for “Birdman” and “The Revenant”) to create some impressive, innovative world-building.
This scene, dazzlingly fluid and exciting, recalls the Omaha Beach sequence in "Saving Private Ryan," among other inspirations.
Although his directorial style isn’t quite as self-conscious as it was in Birdman , Iñárritu still makes use of several impressive long takes; the bear attack is as terrifying as anything you’ll see in a horror film this year, and the opening battle scene is reminiscent of the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan .
The film’s opening sequence featuring an attack by a Native American tribe on the hunters is stunning, recalling some of the all-time best cinematic action scenes like Saving Private Ryan .
Whatever “cheating” there might have been with the camerawork snuck past my eye; like the opening of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan , the sequence is a masterstroke of sustained, seamless and cinematically coherent panic.
The carnage is violent and crazed and sloppy with blood, like the opening moments of Saving Private Ryan , with arrows instead of bullets.
An extended set piece showing a raid by Ree Indians on a troupe of American fur traders is straight out of the Saving Private Ryan playbook, with the mobile camera catching sudden-death atrocities at the corner of the frame.
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006)
Plot Visuals
Like Pulp Fiction, Amores Perros focuses on three stories about criminal behavior.
Novelist Guillermo Arriaga's script, while borrowing from "Pulp Fiction," has plenty of engaging surprises of its own.
This movie, a triptych whose overlapping structure is reminiscent of such movies as "Pulp Fiction," "Before the Rain" and "Winter Sleepers," is definitely fierce and most definitely human.
For marketing purposes, Amores Perros has been tagged in America as Mexico's answer to Pulp Fiction.
Without a doubt, the majority of the reviews of Amores Perros, the acclaimed debut feature from Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, will, at one time or another, invoke Pulp Fiction .
To be honest, comparisons between "Pulp Fiction" and "Amores Perros" probably wouldn't be unfair.
As other commentators have noted, the filmmakers could well be paying homage to Luis Bun~uel, "Tristana" in particular, as this sequence unfolds with pitch-dark humor as two heretofore fortunate and privileged people have been protected from the shallowness of their feelings for each other.
Fans of Bunuel’s 1970 film, “Tristana,” will see Bunuel’s influence all over this story, but Inarritu nevertheless makes it his own as he eventually connects it to the film’s final act, “El Chivo and Maru.”
So when the showdown comes, as the movie promises, the sequence feels unsatisfying, not like that in, say, Ethan and Joel Coen’s “True Grit,” where a young girl gets justice for a murdered father, but rather where two men you barely know, seeing them only in dire circumstances, are locked in a death struggle not unlike McTeague and Marcus in Death Valley at the climax of Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed.”
I told him it reminded me of Erich Von Stroheim's exhilarating silent classic Greed , a movie that even in abridged form (Von Stroheim's original cut, long lost, was nearly nine hours) is an uncompromising, visceral experiment in naturalism.
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced Amores Perros (2000)
Themes Plot Visuals
Recalling Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction - but edgier than both - this is a hell of a first film.
And while the director is no doubt sick of hearing the Pulp Fiction comparisons (he told one interviewer he was influenced more by Faulkner than Tarantino), the similarities seem about as coincidental as Reservoir Dogs' to City on Fire, right down to the closing segment of a badass's bloody path to redemption.
El Chivo plays "Long Cool Woman in a Red Dress" before toying with his kidnap victim recalling Michael Madsen's far more violent scene in Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs."
Its world of violence and subtropical beauty, its passion and heartbreak, its grimy realism and its sneaky, almost spiritual touches of surrealism mark it as a powerful and original work, the best and boldest debut film I've seen since at least "American Beauty" and maybe "Reservoir Dogs."
Like a couple of other powerful debuts from the last decade (I'm thinking of American Beauty and Reservoir Dogs), its dark, almost surrealist tone escalates it high above the usual gory gunfare and marks it as a film to be reckoned with.
The self-seriousness of these struggles is underscored by the fact that Chase and Glass were both real dudes — the Essex ordeal would provide fuel for Moby Dick, while Glass's life inspired the 2002 Michael Punke novel on which The Revenant is based.
Aunque el guión está parcialmente inspirado en el libro de Michael Punke, cuyo personaje principal realmente existió y forma parte del folklore estadounidense, el encuentro entre hombre-bestia y bestia sirve como metáfora de la lucha por lo imposible (similar a la manera en la que Herman Melville lo acentó en el mítico viaje hacia el abismo del navío comandado por el capitán Ahab en contra de la ballena blanca, en Moby Dick; o como lo es el propio quehacer cinematográfico para muchos, un devenir constante de tropiezos y sinsabores superados por la fortaleza y la fe de su director, y por quienes cierran los ojos a la realidad y deciden creer ciegamente en él).
Life Itself (2018)
Directed by Dan Fogelman
influenced by Babel (2006), Amores Perros (2000)
Plot Themes
As in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 2007 drama Babel , everything is interrelated.
It essentially brings nothing new to the table, and Fogelman’s vision doesn’t break new ground, considering the cinematic catalogue has already explored this concept with films such as Babel, Vantage Point and even the Oscar-winning Crash (the less said about that film, the better) with various degrees of success.
Think Crash or Babel , movies trying so hard to Be About Something they come across as maudlin.
An unholy combination of “Rashomon” and “Babel,” it strings together seemingly disparate plotlines into one massive, messy tableau of (sorry, has to be done) life itself, a life that zings toward the warm embrace of death.
This is one of those Crash, Babel, or Magnolia-esque dramas where all of the seemingly disparate stories are connected in some type of way.
They're all cogs in a "we're all connected (by senseless death, trauma, and self-hate; also baby-making)" construct that feels more artificial and inorganic by far than the most grotesquely contrived trash of the 2000s hyperlink narrative fad; it feels like a version of the already-not-very-good 2006 Babel that was made by serial killers.
Watching this irresistibly pretty movie star pantomime panic, I was reminded of Robert Redford as the titular hero of the 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson , another prestigious nineteenth-century survivalist drama of literary pedigree, and one that also had a difficult, although ultimately neatly controlled production.
Based on a true story, it’s a masterpiece of suffering; it’s Robert Redford’s “Jeremiah Johnson” on steroids—a massive, muck-crawling, muddy-bearded, raw-meat-strewn, morose mess of hypothermic hatchet-versus-knife-fighting, flintlock-swinging, ursine destruction, and wheezing-grunting-snarling madness—wherein Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass displays for our “entertainment” the Hobbesian creed to perfection.
It's Jeremiah Johnson meets Apocalypse Now.
Iñárritu famously went for realism here, putting his cast and crew through all kinds of misery, but the end result is simply spectacular, something like the gorgeous naturalism of Malick's "The New World" crossed with "Jeremiah Johnson."
In keeping with the canine title references, the final shot brings to mind the post-apocalyptic world of 1975's sci-fi cult film "A Boy and His Dog."
The Player (1992)
Directed by Robert Altman
influenced Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Visuals
It is clear that González Iñárritu and his team of writers studied closely the films of Robert Altman, “The Player” being a touchstone, and “Short Cuts,” also, based on Carver’s writings.
For movie geeks, the mind starts thinking of classic movies that open with long tracking shots, such as Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" or Robert Altman's "The Player."
It all ends up unexpectedly Altmanesque, with “The Player” and “A Prairie Home Companion” coming to mind.
Short Cuts (1993)
Directed by Robert Altman
influenced Babel (2006), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Visuals Themes Plot
It is clear that González Iñárritu and his team of writers studied closely the films of Robert Altman, “The Player” being a touchstone, and “Short Cuts,” also, based on Carver’s writings.
The play they’re doing doesn’t seem like much, but being Carver (Altman directed “Short Cuts” from Carver stories) it promises emotional explosions.
And while the single-take conceit succeeds here, it’s hardly an innovation, having being tried at one time or another by everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Robert Altman, the latter’s Short Cuts having dipped into the same Carver omnibus as Birdman.
Their main topic here is the lack of communication that exists between people, a concept already beautifully deconstructed by Robert Altman in his 1993 gem Short Cuts.
This fourth strand seemingly doesn�t have the Magnolia/Crash/Short Cuts-like connection to the other three, but its not just family trees and coincidental correlations.
Grand Canyon, Magnolia, Happiness and Short Cuts all pulled this "Six Degrees of Separation" style of melodrama off without a hitch.
La insurrección canina invoca de entrada un poema de Rilke (“Cualquier cosa terrible merece nuestro amor”), pero serán de naturaleza muy distinta los referentes narrativos, más bien populares, que rigen sus delirios expresivos: su trayectoria de padecimientos será análoga y correrá irónicamente en paralelo con la del desterritorializado culto ciudadano afrocanadiense de 12 años esclavo (McQueen 13), su visión heroica perruna remitirá de modo inevitable en todo instante al regio sufridor perrazo de pura raza collie Lassie cuyo sacrificial retorno a casa estaría movido por La cadena invisible (Fred M. Wilcox 43), sus peripecias en el regazo infantil sufrirán un revés que lleva del sonrosado Guardián el perro salvador con la inefable Chachita (Gómez Landero 49) a la ferocidad de las complacientes peleas encarnizadas de Amores perros (Iñárritu 00), sus penalidades se desarrollarán entre la serena resignación del asno encarnación de la gracia divina de Al azar Baltasar (Bresson 66) y la im…
Canine lovers may have a deeper appreciation for what it attempts, though only if they can stomach the kind of simulated animal cruelty that made passages of Amores Perros so difficult to sit through.
If you have seen “Amores Perros”, the cynical Mexican film about the connections people have with their pet dogs, you will remember that this is exactly what happens to a gentle Rottweiler owned by a slum dwelling youth.
Through a chain of escape attempts, Hagen is eventually caught by a Turkish restaurant owner who attempts to train him as a fight dog — encouraging his attack instincts with a brutal training regimen that reps the most grueling watch for dog lovers since “Amores perros.”
El director asegura haberse inspirado en la manera en que el novelista J.M Coetzee describe las relaciones humano-animal para narrar la historia de Hagen: y se nota, pues lo que empieza como una cinta de Disney tipoVolviendo a casa, una aventura increíble (Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey) termina siendo un escaparate para la crueldad humana más a tono con, digamos, la primera historia de Amores Perros.
The Tree of Life (2011)
Directed by Terrence Malick
influenced The Revenant (2015), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
But Lubezki’s work is less reminiscent of Birdman than his Terrence Malick collaborations The New World and The Tree of Life, full of gorgeous waking dream imagery and haunting shots of raging fires in a nighttime snowstorm or a bell ringing atop a decimated church.
At other times, Lubezki’s choices recall his work on “The Tree of Life,” especially in scenes in the second half when Glass’s journey gets more mystical.
Just as Lubezki did in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life , he captures these landscapes in such detail that you can catch every icicle hanging from the trees.
(Consider the résumé: “Y Tu Mamá También,” “The New World,” “Children of Men,” “The Tree of Life,” “Gravity” and at least two more Terrence Malick films to come.)
Ultimately Lubezki’s nature photography has the same effect here as his work in Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” in that it allows our pitiful, human hectic mud-crawling to be put in proper perspective—minute occurrences—crawling within the vastness and serenity of the cosmos.
Iñárritu made the obvious choice of bringing in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who DP'd Alfonso Cuaron's Children Of Men and Gravity, as well as Malick's The New World and The Tree Of Life.
The Revenant's focus on setting already makes it feel like a follow-up to Werner Herzog's classics Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath Of God.
Filmed in Canada and Argentina (filming took so long that the snow melted!), its reputation of having had a difficult shoot has given it the allure of being some grand artistic achievement on the same level as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) or Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982).
He endures a lot for his art (one of the books that will be written about The Revenant will be about the legendary difficulty of the shoot, about the conditions the cast and crew endured and how Inarritu seemed as mad as Werner Herzog on the set of Fitzcarraldo or Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now), but the most impressive acting is Hardy's transformation into the amoral, mercury-tongued Fitzgerald.
The main difference between The Revenant and, say, Apocalypse Now or Fitzcarraldo —two flawed epics that were, indeed, allegories of themselves and pretty important ventures, all things considered—is that there’s no real madness in it.
The Revenant is his Fitzcarraldo , a film whose behind-the-scenes agony has become indistinguishable from that of the characters.
There are also elements of “Gladiator” (Glass’ visions of his dead wife), “Fitzcarraldo” (in Glass’ obsession and determination) and “The New World” (in the visual style carried over by Terence Malick’s cinematographer and production designer).
The location may recall Marlon Brando’s 1976 western, The Missouri Breaks, but thematically it’s closer to the late colossus’s politics.
A triptych of stories of dog owners set in a Mexico City that makes the metropolis of Luis Buñuel�s Los olvidados look quaint, Amores opens in medias mess as a car containing two fleeing youths and a bleeding rottweiler collides with another containing a model and her pampered Lhasa apso.
Give me the less pat Los Olvidados instead, but this pumped telenovela is very much the film Kieślowski would have made had he followed Buñuel's lead and voyaged to Mexico.