Richard Brooks
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Freedom Writers (2007)
Directed by Richard LaGravenese
influenced by Blackboard Jungle (1955)
Themes Plot
This drama recalls 1995's "Dangerous Minds," and many other films going all the way back to 1955's "Blackboard Jungle," the granddaddy of white-teacher-instructing-troubled-inner-city-kids movies.
If you've seen "Blackboard Jungle," "Up the Down Staircase," "To Sir, With Love," "Dangerous Minds" or "Stand and Deliver," you'll be way ahead of the story.
Both films, it should be said, are laden with clichés of the inspirational-teacher genre that go back to 1955's "Blackboard Jungle" and 1967's "To Sir, With Love."
Shame is reminiscent of Brooks's Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977).
For the majority of the first half, when sexuality is cloaked under euphemisms and could be interpreted as nothing more than a close friendship, it resembles the 1958 film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , a stage play with overtly homosexual themes about sexual repression.
With a local Deputy (JAMES RANSONE) doing some investigating work for him on those, Ellison attempts to piece everything together in hopes that his resultant work might rival the success of "In Cold Blood."
He tells his wife (Juliet Rylance) that he’s stumbled onto his In Cold Blood.
With Ellison's decision to keep the videos from the authorities, despite multiple bumps in the night as a consequence of his film-viewing, Derrickson attempts to capture a flimsy Capote -esque quandary of a writer putting himself and others in danger in order to claim fame (at one point, Ellison even exclaims that the story he's following could be his In Cold Blood).
“This could be my In Cold Blood,” he says.
After watching the first two (including the one depicting the hanging of the family he’s writing about), he starts to call the police, but then changes his mind, perhaps because he realizes that these films could mark his true breakthrough, providing the kind of sensational material that will assure his next project legendary status—his In Cold Blood, as he puts it.
Believing he's stumbled across his own In Cold Blood, he stays up nights scrutinizing the films and looking for connections between killings whose locations and victims are still unknown.
It’s been investigated with more vigor hundreds of times by everyone from Ingmar Bergman to Woody Allen (Richard Brooks’ underrated The Happy Ending is a particular favorite of mine).
Blanc is a cross between James Bond (inevitably) and Truman Capote of “In Cold Blood” mode, and he speaks in a comically thick Southern drawl.
More recently, he made out with Truman Capote (Toby Jones) in Infamous, Douglas McGrath's retelling of the story of the writing of In Cold Blood.
In fact, Detachment makes Blackboard Jungle look like a trip to Disneyland.
We catch up with him in a school that makes the setting of Blackboard Jungle look like Kukla, Fran and Ollie, where a distinguished cast is largely wasted as various cynical faculty members.
If Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood (1967), based on Capote's nonfiction novel, is an unusually well-respected example of the genre, more often, true crime is trashed for being voyeuristic and sensationalistic, by definition.
Pauline Kael of The New Yorker once wrote, “ The Warriors is a real moviemaker’s movie: it has in visual terms the kind of impact that ‘Rock Around the Clock’ did behind the titles of Blackboard Jungle .”
This gave the film an undeserved reputation for ultra violence, but this is not A Clockwork Orange , it's not even Blackboard Jungle or Over The Edge .
Instead, Bernie plays like In Cold Blood — if it had been directed by Christopher Guest.
It's like "In Cold Blood" written by Flannery O'Connor instead of Truman Capote.
American Beauty (1999)
Directed by Sam Mendes
influenced by In Cold Blood (1967), The Professionals (1966)
Besides Mendes and Ball, cinematographer Conrad Hall (The Professionals & In Cold Blood) and composer Thomas Newman (The Shawshank Redemption) give us some of their best work.
It's a picture with a great cool shiny surface, and it boasts superb actors (Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening and a finely chosen ensemble), witty and iconoclastic writing (by Alan Ball of TV's "Cybill"), vigorous and imaginative direction (by British newcomer Sam Mendes) and brilliantly stylized cinematography (by the great Conrad Hall, of "Cool Hand Luke" and "In Cold Blood").
Besides Mendes and Ball, cinematographer Conrad Hall (The Professionals & In Cold Blood) and composer Thomas Newman (The Shawshank Redemption) give us some of their best work.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by Elmer Gantry (1960)
Themes
A subplot out of Elmer Gantry by way of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood pits Plainview’s godless Nietzschean corporatist against an evangelical zealot and confidence man named Eli Sunday (played with a superbly oleaginous buoyancy by Little Miss Sunshine ’s Paul Dano).
The movie resonates with our memories of old films like "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "Elmer Gantry" and, especially, "Citizen Kane."
But in the tradition of films such as " In Cold Blood ," " Badlands " and " Natural Born Killers ," this is a story about murders committed not by monsters in masks or gun-wielding gangsters, but by damaged souls who were either born without a conscience or left it behind along the way.
There have been great movies about home invasion, like " In Cold Blood ," that made more of it than gruesome "events."
The fact that the audience does not see very much violence perptrated increases the intensity enormously, The fact that the perpetrators motive is not revealed also increases the tension and terror - shades of "In Cold Blood"?
Shot with an excellent cast on the South Florida locations where the real Bobby Kent was killed, it comes across in its better moments like a 'slacker' version of In Cold Blood.
Part is an In Cold Blood-style revenge thriller that unfolds in the dusty outback of western Texas.
Despite the structural similarities to films such as Bonnie and Clyde or In Cold Blood , the films that Hell or High Water most resembles thematically are The Godfather and No Country for Old Men .
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
Directed by Joel Coen
influenced by The Brothers Karamazov (1958)
Themes
All of the stories have fateful endings, which suggest the Brothers Coen have been reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or maybe O. Henry’s surprise-laden shorts.