Robert Rodriguez
184 connections found
Filmography
Four Rooms 1995 
El Mariachi 1993 
Sin City 2005 
The Faculty 1998 
We Can Be Heroes 2020 
Alita: Battle Angel 2019 
Spy Kids 2001 
From Dusk Till Dawn 1996 
Planet Terror 2007 
Desperado 1995 
Once Upon a Time in Mexico 2003 
Machete Kills 2013 
Shorts 2009 
Machete 2010 
Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over 2003 
Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams 2002 
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 2005 
Bedhead 1991 View:
Connections, in both directions
The film in essence is abundantly silly, but Rodriguez adds his own flourishes such as casting his favorite actors and combining story elements from “Invaders from Mars,” “The Thing,” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
A meant to be chic sci-fi film, set in an Ohio high school, that pays homage to a number of other trashy genre horror classics such as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "The Thing."
John Carpenter's The Thing is hilariously echoed in a scene in which Casey and his classmates Zeke (Hartnett), Stokely (DuVall), Mary Beth (Harris) and others must prove their humanity by snorting vials of diuretic No-Doz, while lesser genre highlights such as Night of the Kreeps are given their due as well.
Like Scream, The Faculty is both an homage to a classic modern horror movie by John Carpenter -- The Thing, in this case -- and a general riff on pop culture as seen through the eyes of a bunch of precociously analytic, verbally adept teenagers.
Calling it a "riff" on Body Snatchers is, if anything, not strong enough: for the first two-thirds of the movie or better, it's virtually nothing besides the exact plot of Body Snatchers populated by the same cluster of generic teen characters who've inhabited every single teen movie since John Hughes codified them in The Breakfast Club .
This film is a clear nod to both "The Breakfast Club" and the classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", a blend that actually reminds of "Scooby Doo" sans the dog!
Unlike with The Breakfast Club (or any of the Body Snatchers films, for that matter), there is little reason for our protagonists to establish connections at the start.
But, more surprisingly, it also pays homage to "The Breakfast Club."
"The Faculty" is his latest screenplay put to film, and while the concept is slyly clever -- take the kids from "The Breakfast Club" and drop them in to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" -- and kicks up some of his still-hot embers, after outlining the gimmick he wrote the rest of the movie on auto-pilot, pausing only to pack it with his spot-on, stock-in-trade pop culture references.
Here he essentially plugs The Breakfast Club into Invasion of the Body Snatchers and lays an alien invasion at 90210 High.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour
influenced by Sin City (2005)
Visuals Themes
To Amirpour, the people who live in Bad City (a low-budget variation of "Sin City") aren't as interesting as the city itself, only assigning these personalities surface afflictions to keep them in order (e.g.
The name’s evocation of Frank J. Miller’s comicbook crime capital “Sin City” can hardly be coincidental: Graphic novels are another point of reference of Amirpour, not least in her high-contrast monochrome aesthetic, and she has written one to tie in with the film’s release.
Bad City, undoubtedly inspired at least in part by Sin City, is a town that both literally and figuratively is being drained of blood; where people don’t so much live and merely exist.
It is set in the fictional Iranian ghost town of Bad City (the name nods toward Frank Miller’s Sin City) and plays out like the missing link between Kathryn Bigelow’s first two features; the ultra-cool biker pastiche The Loveless and the latterday vampire flick Near Dark.
This accomplished debut feature in gorgeous black-and-white, from U.S.-based writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, is set in Bad City -- which looks like a contemporary U.S. industrial town with some Western undercurrents and a dash of Frank Miller’s Sin City, though everyone speaks Farsi and an actual vampire roams the street at night.
As Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez did with their decidedly masculine Sin City, so writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour has captured Los Angeles on gorgeous black-and-white video to create the fictional Persian town of Bad City, for what she describes as “the first Iranian vampire western.”
With lines like that, it’s not as if the lurid and highly stylized and neon-noir “Terminal” isn’t announcing itself as a derivative B-movie borrowing elements from pop culture touchstones ranging from old-timey gangster films of the 1940s and 1950s to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” to “Pulp Fiction” to “Sin City” to “Blade Runner” to certain films by Brian De Palma and Guy Ritchie.
Stein’s exhausting pastiche unfolds like a cross between “Alice in Wonderland” and “Sin City,” as its dire cast of hitmen, femme fatales, and shadowy masterminds are filtered through a neon underworld where nonsense is the only kind of sense that anyone has left.
This high-concept head trip directed and written by Vaughn Stein takes us to a film noir Oz seen through a bloody, stylish "Sin City"/"Pulp Fiction" lens.
A stylish retro-noir starring and produced by Academy Award nominee Margot Robbie, “Terminal” riffs on everything from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” to Frank Miller’s “Sin City” films.
She plays Annie, a mysterious woman who seems to be everywhere in an anonymous town so seedy it's like Sin City had a secret underbelly nobody knew about.
Written and directed by first-timer Vaughn Stein, the film desperately wants to be a Cockney riff on Sin City or one of Nicholas Winding Refn’s chic, self-indulgent cine-advertorials.
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Directed by Sergio Leone
influenced Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)
Themes Visuals
The title would make it seem that Rodriguez is straining for the epic scope of Sergio Leone�s Once upon a Time in the West (or Leone�s more pretentious Once upon a Time in America), but not only can�t he keep the story straight, he muddles the action scenes as well.
Editor/composer/cinematographer/writer/director Robert Rodriguez's loose homage to Sergio Leone's 1969 horse opera, Once Upon A Time In The West, does a fine job in bringing together a plethora of diverse characters, all well-played by a passel of addictively watchable actors (Mickey Rourke and his Chihuahua, Cheech Marin, Salma Hayek for about 5 minutes, Eva Mendes, Danny Trejo, and many more).
After the low-budget ''A Fistful of Dollars'' and ''For a Few Dollars More,'' Leone moved up to bigger budgets for ''The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'' and ''Once Upon a Time in the West'' -- and therefore, Tarantino told his friend, Rodriguez should now make ''Once Upon a Time in Mexico.''
The dusty milieu signaled that the filmmaker had slurped down his share of spaghetti westerns — the latest movie is named after Sergio Leone's savage masterpiece "Once Upon a Time in the West" — yet it also moved dizzyingly, up-to-the-minute fast.
Tarantino also contributed something to the culture of the film, which follows his influential " Pulp Fiction " in its recycling of pop archetypes and its circular story structure.
There was talk that this was the next “ Pulp Fiction ,” that the ‘00s had their first generation-defining movie.
Here, Rodriguez and Miller adapt three of the original stories, weaving them together like the three sections of Tarantino's bent magnum opus "Pulp Fiction."
Rodriguez clearly assumes Sin City to be his Pulp Fiction, his rambling portmanteau--a blending of disparate tales to form a complete, overwhelming epic.
Like Pulp Fiction 11 years ago, Sin City seems poised to be a classic amongst scholarly film enthusiasts, comic book fanatics and pop culture junkies, which means it will probably also spawn a string of pale imitators.
With the return of Willis’ cop character for the final half-hour, the directors’ desire to dovetail the stories in “Pulp Fiction” mode becomes clear.
Overlord (2018)
Directed by Julius Avery
influenced by From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Planet Terror (2007)
Plot Themes
Then, not unlike From Dusk Till Dawn -- which suddenly morphed from one kind of movie into another -- Overlord goes completely bonkers.
Some fantastic films have pulled off this trick, like John Carpenter’s The Thing (sci-fi and horror), Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk till Dawn (crime and horror) and Pan’s Labyrinth (fantasy and war) to name but three.
The genre switch-up isn’t as sudden as, say, From Dusk Till Dawn , while Asbæk’s sneering baddie pales in comparison to Inglourious Basterds ’ Hans Landa or Pan’s Labyrinth ’s Captain Vidal.
This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the movie took a From Dusk till Dawn -style turn once the horror elements come into play, but the film’s tone doesn’t shift much after this reveal.
Julius Avery directs this high-energy, low-imagination genre mashup, a combination of Inglourious Basterds and Planet Terror that is not nearly as fun as that description might imply.
Rodriguez isn’t the first director of tough content to have a successful go at more wholesome fare: A couple of years ago surrealist David Lynch (Blue Velvet) made the gently uplifting The Straight Story (rated G), and cinematic con man David Mamet (House of Games) made the sweet The Winslow Boy (also rated G).
The World's End (2013)
Directed by Edgar Wright
influenced by The Faculty (1998), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Plot Music
The fight set-pieces pitting the homosapiens against a circle of rampaging "blanks" get repetitive quickly, while an extended sequence where the guys must prove to each other that they are still, in fact, themselves is like a copycat of a scene from 1998's far more inspired " The Faculty ."
That name comes from a key location in Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) where the story swings wildly from a road movie to a monster splatter fest.
The simultaneous farting and pissing sounds of the tap signify foamy golden trouble: it's the same cloacal sound effect made by the Chango Beer served at the various hellholes in From Dusk Till Dawn.
But this mix of Ultimate Fighting with demolition derby, played by souped-up cyborgs on a super-fast track, basically amps up the savage roller-skating of Norman Jewison’s 1975 Rollerball.
Hugo and Alita also fall under the spell of a violent game named Motorball that attracts millions of fans (a ripoff of the 1975 film “Rollerball”).
There is food, drink, and, motorball, a viciously violent sport that calls to mind the James Caan classic, Rollerball .
In the case of Kick-Ass, it only served to remind me what a great R-rated movie "Sin City" is.
The film wittily references Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Frank Miller's Sin City, and Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western scores (among many other films, TV shows, music, and comics).
What makes it different from "Sin City" or the "Kill Bill" movies is that it features Hit Girl, a moppet who swears like Joe Pesci and turns villains into corpses by the dozen: a tween Tarantino.
Set in the 24th century after a massive war called The Fall, “Alita” takes place in a "Blade Runner"-like shanty city located directly underneath a seemingly lifeless floating metropolis that hovers above on a great disc.
Alita: Battle Angel is an unholy mashup of Blade Runner, Rollerball , Robocop, and The Terminator… all of which, it must be noted, predate the 1990 Japanese manga by Yukito Kishiro this is based upon.
Randomly filching from Blade Runner, Metropolis, The Matrix, TRON, Rollerball and a teenage boy’s wet dreams, it’s more of a scavenger hunt than a movie.
So, if you're looking for comic-book-quality characters, mindless mayhem and postapocalyptic visuals you looked at already in Blade Runner, Dark City, The Fifth Element, The Matrix, Jupiter Ascending, Ready Player One and Mortal Engines, I really can't recommend Alita: Battle Angel highly enough.
In the hands of Rodriguez and writer/producer James Cameron, it aims for the sci-fi heights with its blend of Astroboy, Rollerball, Blade Runner, and Cameron's own Dark Angel.
In other words, Alita is basically Whip It crossed with Blade Runner—and it rules.
Rodriguez isn’t the first director of tough content to have a successful go at more wholesome fare: A couple of years ago surrealist David Lynch (Blue Velvet) made the gently uplifting The Straight Story (rated G), and cinematic con man David Mamet (House of Games) made the sweet The Winslow Boy (also rated G).
Some scenes have a definite “Sin City” vibe – the heightened visuals have no use for realism – and some of the slow motion effects are astounding.
Nevertheless, it is a fun ride that signposts right from the beginning that it is working on a very stylised level in a similar yet far less apparent way to Sin City (Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, 2005).
Rather it's a gleaming, glossy parade of good-looking actors trading quips and striking poses in sexy period duds, only a couple of stops more naturalistic than "Sin City" or "Dick Tracy."
The opening title card of Gangster Squad says “inspired by a true story,” which is pretty funny, considering the movie immediately following it is Sin City meets Young Guns in the form of a Jimmy Cagney parody.
That is rid it of the scourge of a murderous gangster spreading drugs and prostitution, in this case the Jewish mobster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn, looking like a fugitive from “Sin City”).
This isn't the heavy-handed CG-noir of Sin City, but even so, it feels fake.
Sinners (2025)
Directed by Ryan Coogler
influenced by The Faculty (1998), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Themes Visuals Plot
Most notably, there’s more than a touch of Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, and Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess on display.
In its wildest moments, Coogler’s film seems like a collision of Lovecraft Country with True Blood, though more obvious comparisons will likely be drawn to From Dusk Till Dawn. But unlike that 1996 Robert Rodriguez-Quentin Tarantino joint, Sinners isn’t winking at the audience from behind grotesque violence and droll B-movie tropes.
Sinners takes a more mainstream approach, more akin to Robert Rodriguez, and the results are ok.
Sinners does feature elements that harken back to Salem’s Lot, Night of the Living Dead, The Thing, and From Dusk Till Dawn.
So Sinners is a vampire movie, and very much of the late night drive-in styling that inspired the similar setup of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996).
…the comparisons that many critics are drawing to Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s 1996 cult classic, From Dusk Till Dawn…
The cinema-class allusions (razor-eye: Buñuelâs Un Chien Andalou; aging cop: name your Clint Eastwood movie) combine neatly with Sin Cityâs strikingly original lookânot a knockoff of film noir, but footage thatâs inky black and iridescent white, with occasional tiny, surprising splashes of color (the blue eyes of the hooker played by Gilmore Girlsâ Alexis Bledel; Owenâs bloodred Converse sneakers).
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Directed by Edgar Wright
influenced by From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Plot Themes
This pays homage to the modern and original “Night of the Living Dead”, and the original and modern “Dawn of the Dead” with even some references to “From Dusk Till Dawn” , and there are so many I won’t point a lot out to you, but some are so blatant you’ll just laugh out loud (We’re coming to get you Barbara!) and some are so subtle you have to really pay attention, and not once will you see a reference to another film and roll your eyes, because writers Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright slip it in with such charm that some you’ll chuckle to and some you’ll just belt out laughing, and Romero somewhere is watching this film and smiling with much satisfaction.
Anointed by no less a personage than Peter Jackson (who knows a little something about zombies) as the "most entertaining movie I've seen this year," Shaun borrows from obvious sources (Dawn of the Dead, From Dusk Till Dawn) as well as less obvious (Seinfeld).
In the affectionately playful tradition of such comedies as "From Dusk Till Dawn" and "Bubba Ho-tep," "Shaun of the Dead" arrives as perhaps the first bona fide "rom zom com," or romantic zombie comedy.
The whole thing takes place in a deliberately retro, highly stylized urban milieu that is redolent of that “some time in the 20th century” vibe that you can find everywhere from Brazil (1985) to Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005) to Streets of Fire (1984) to, well, John Wick (2014).
It's Sin City meets John Wick but gender-flipped, except that the Kill Bill movies and Atomic Blonde have been there and done that.
But the film belongs to Rourke, who makes Marv into the epitome of the crime movie 20-watt muscle, channeling Sterling Hayden from "The Asphalt Jungle" and every role Mike Mazurki ever played.
But in compressing Ender's journey aboard the battle school from six years into one, he's erased certain details along the way, such as how the laser tag matches inform the piloting of spaceships later on and exactly how Ender's dual-wielding Christ Pose of an Antonio Banderas impression circa “Desperado” singles him out for leadership qualities in one instant.