James Toback
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Connections, in both directions
If James Toback's petty-criminal tale "Fingers" inspired Jacques Audiard's previous "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," it's Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" that looms over his latest "A Prophet."
That one was very loosely inspired by James Toback's "Fingers," with Harvey Keitel as the vulnerable son of a gangster.
Audiard may have had the stones to tweak Jim Toback 's Fingers in '05 (with the racy The Beat That My Heart Skipped), but here, his approach to cinematic '70s-isms is slavish—and downright corny.
Sleeping with Other People (2015)
Directed by Leslye Headland
influenced by The Pick-up Artist (1987)
Characters
Master cocksman Jake (Jason Sudeikis), a fast-talker in the mold of the master cocksman played by Robert Downey Jr. in The Pick-Up Artist, peppers his speech with references to Aaron Sorkin and "Game of Thrones" and Wes Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell because he's totally hip.
Hitch (Smith), a smooth, fourth-wall breaking ladies man (like Alfie or Robert Downey Jr. in The Pick-Up Artist), makes his living helping the helpless attract the attention of their ladies fair.
The Gambler remakes Karel Reisz’s gritty 1974 film of the same title, which was based on a semi-autobiographical script by the irrepressible James Toback, who went on to write and direct 1978’s Fingers and a number of provocative indies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Two Girls And A Guy, Black & White, and Harvard Man.
He wrote and directed the underrated The Pick-Up Artist (another semi-autobiographic story, in which Robert Downey Jr. was the Toback surrogate) in 1987 and followed that up with the documentary The Big Bang.