Jonathan Levine
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Pretty Woman (1990)
Directed by Garry Marshall
influenced Long Shot (2019), Warm Bodies (2013)
Plot Characters Music
The studios were bound to catch my attention with a romcom that’s a reversed Pretty Woman, with a splash of There’s Something About Mary, and a twist of Dave.
Long Shot references Pretty Woman, but the Julia Roberts movie it most resembles is Notting Hill, in which a nobody (Hugh Grant) finds himself in a relationship with the world’s most famous movie star.
Luckily, Long Shot uses the odd coupling of Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen to its absolute advantage in a Veep meets Pretty Woman style romantic comedy that is sure to stand the test of time.
Take The American President, Notting Hill, and Pretty Woman and put them into a blender with some modern political subtext, copious amounts of illegal substances, and a handful of jokes about unfortunately timed erections and you’ll get Jonathan Levine’s Long Shot, a film that’s far more charming, sweet, and hilarious than I probably just made it sound.
This puts him in an unwillingly “feminised” position, comparing himself to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and Marilyn Monroe with JFK.
When Fred and Charlotte share a dance to Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love,” it’s a throwback to how significant that tune was in another movie— Pretty Woman —about two other people from wildly different worlds coming together and falling, improbably, in love against the odds.
“We’ll talk about it next with Chris Brown, Jeremy Piven, and Brett Ratner”), but the issue of what she does with her personal life (which was addressed somewhat more seriously in Rob Reiner’s The American President) is undermined by Fred’s often crude behavior.
Watching Long Shot brought back memories of a favourite romantic comedy from the 1990s – Rob Reiner’s The American President.
He’s not wrong, and “Long Shot” is best described as an unholy cocktail of “The American President” (1995), “There’s Something About Mary” (1998), and “Splash” (1984).
“Long Shot” is not original – it has dashes of “Notting Hill” and “The American President” with updated pop culture references – but it’s propelled by some excellent jokes and a supremely talented cast.
At times it might remind you of a slightly edgier version of the genteel White House romances that flourished in the mid-’90s, like “Dave” and “The American President.”
As a film that celebrates the holiday classics that came before it – there’s loving nods to Home Alone , A Christmas Carol, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas – Levine’s film is more rooted in telling a story of friendship over stitching together nonsensical comedic scenarios.
The true spirit of Christmas is challenged at every turn – meanwhile, homage is paid to all the festive perennials you can think of, including Die Hard , Home Alone and The Grinch .
But, as we said, the film is about the men, and Gordon-Levitt, Rogen, and Mackie make an odd but appealing trio, weaving their way through their own weird Christmas traditions and a series of wacky obstacles worthy of Adventures in Babysitting or even Home Alone.
The Home Alone score’s in there for some flavor.
Our guys have a long journey ahead of them, full of callbacks to their beloved Christmas stories: the Grinch, Home Alone, and most importantly, Scrooge.
With nods to holiday films like "Home Alone," "Die Hard" and "It's a Wonderful Life," "The Night Before" knows exactly what it is — a movie to watch every year with friends, a plate of leftovers on your lap, your mood enhanced by tryptophan or ... something.
Take the “slob gets dream girl” framework of Notting Hill, add lashings of political satire, power dynamics, and a Boys II Men-heavy soundtrack, and you’ve got Long Shot – an often hilarious, occasionally uncomfortable rom-com for the liberal stoner crowd.
Whether you realize it or not, “Long Shot” is “Notting Hill” re-imagined.
Long Shot references Pretty Woman, but the Julia Roberts movie it most resembles is Notting Hill, in which a nobody (Hugh Grant) finds himself in a relationship with the world’s most famous movie star.
Take The American President, Notting Hill, and Pretty Woman and put them into a blender with some modern political subtext, copious amounts of illegal substances, and a handful of jokes about unfortunately timed erections and you’ll get Jonathan Levine’s Long Shot, a film that’s far more charming, sweet, and hilarious than I probably just made it sound.
“Long Shot” is not original – it has dashes of “Notting Hill” and “The American President” with updated pop culture references – but it’s propelled by some excellent jokes and a supremely talented cast.
This year he’s back with revenge, bringing not one but two films, the R-rated comedy starring 11-year-olds Good Boys, and Long Shot, a romantic comedy that’s a cross between Notting Hill and Veep.
Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004) and Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009) blended the horror with comedy to become affection and self-aware homages to the genre rather than parodies.
While it’s easy to dismiss the concept of “Warm Bodies” as just another young-adult supernatural romance that exchanges vampires and werewolves for flesh-hungry zombies, Levine’s film shares more in common with the modern, clever takes on the genre like “Shaun of the Dead” than it shares with the “Twilight” franchise.
“Warm Bodies” takes almost as much of its inspiration from “Zombieland” and “Shaun of the Dead” as it does from “Romeo and Juliet.”
Working from Isaac Marion's novel, writer-director Jonathan Levine (who saw the funny side of cancer in 50/50) bends the rules to make the story work and softens the violence, too, but it's still a witty reinvention of the genre like Shaun of the Dead before it, drawing parallels between the apathy of youth and the zombie masses.
It pales compared to the juiced-up entertainment of "Zombieland" or the we-are-all-walking-dead satire of "Shaun of the Dead."
( Shaun Of The Dead got across the same point in two quick paired shots, noting how little difference Simon Pegg sees in his average morning when everyone around him becomes a shuffling corpse, but that’s beside the point.)
Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn are funny, but they deserve better material than this 'Romancing the Stone' riff.
Taken at face value, Snatched was probably envisaged as a kind of Romancing The Stone style caper for the Taken generation that combines edgy action-comedy with some touching mother-daughter moments.
Soon, the film starts to mirror plot lines from “Romancing the Stone.”
There’s a great bit involving Christopher Meloni as a Romancing the Stone Michael Douglas wannabe that builds to a spectacularly insane conclusion, while a running gag involving a dog whistle is paid off nicely during the film’s final act.
Instead, the odd-couple comedy—a surprisingly violent and unsurprisingly crass play on Romancing the Stone—runs the gamut from mildly amusing to dismal.
No, the only reason it registered in my head was due to it being a pivotal location in the action-adventure rom-com, "Romancing the Stone."
There are also a couple of coy allusions to Romeo and Juliet, from a balcony scene to the leads’ names, but it’s equally interesting to compare the movie to films like Beauty and the Beast, Ghost or Twilight.
With every bite, R becomes increasingly drawn to visions of Perry’s gorgeous girlfriend, Julie (as in Juliet), who is seconds from becoming a zombie’s lunch herself when R rushes to the rescue and hauls her back to his lair, a la “Beauty and the Beast.”
Thus begins a story with underscored parallels to "Romeo & Juliet" (note the names), as well as to tales like "King Kong" and "Beauty and the Beast," with R starting to evolve and become more human while Julie gradually accepts that he doesn't want to eat her.
After stowing Julie away in the derelict 737 plane R calls home, a Beauty and the Beast effect—or as the DSM calls it, Stockholm Syndrome—comes into play.
Before you can say “Beauty and the Beast” (or maybe, “Luke and Laura”), Julie begins so see something attractive in R. per formula, this something is premised at least in part on her strained relationship with her dad, the odious General Grigio (John Malkovich), who lost his beloved wife to corpses and so bears a grudge.
But Twilight is a think piece compared with Bodies .
I was hoping, dear readers, for a relatively painless “Twilight” rip-off at the very most.
Warm Bodies is the product of Summit Entertainment, the distributor of the Twilight movies, and there's little doubt the hope is to attract a fraction of Stephenie Meyer's core audience.
Teresa Palmer plays the object of R's ardor, and though she may have been cast for her not-insignificant resemblance to Kristen Stewart, cashing in on that Twilight for zombies thing, Palmer has a lot of her own spark, and a really lovely, wholesome chemistry with Hoult.
Unsurprisingly, as R(omeo)’s Julie(t), Teresa Palmer will closely mimic Kristen Stewart’s every last hair-twitching, eye-rolling mannerism to ensure that the Twilight tourists in the audience get exactly what they are paying for.
Armchair critics have been comparing the film, sight unseen, to Twilight for its supernatural central pairing, but in execution, it’s far more like a twee, low-key, passive teen romance, along the lines of Nick And Nora’s Infinite Playlist , or Levine’s own 2008 film The Wackness .
It happened in the little-seen My Boyfriend's Back (1993), and the concept of "undead boyfriend" is back again with Warm Bodies, a certifiably strange but quietly appealing "zombie rom-com" that's based on the novel of the same name by Isaac Marion.
Jumping back to my horror side though, I did immensely appreciate all the little nods to past horror films Warm Bodies threw in, be something as simple as showing the DVD for Lucio Fulci’s Zombie or something more implied like R’s constant commentary about typical everyday zombie knowledge.
Where’s Liam Neeson (“Taken”) and his particular set of skills when you need him to liven up a humorless, pointless exercise?
At its best, Snatched is cleverer than its Taken-invoking double entendre of a title would suggest.
Judging by the mildly naughty past-participle title, you might as well see “Snatched” as a raunchy female comedy version of “Taken,” assuming you care to see it at all.
This spoof of Taken pairs today's comedy firebrand Amy Schumer and yesterday's icon Goldie Hawn as Emily and Linda, a vacationing mother and daughter fighting and fleeing their Colombian captors.
Their dilemma is less like Taken, more like Outrageous Fortune, the low-brow Bette Midler–Shelley Long vehicle from the ’80s.
Hawn and Schumer’s characters are captured, but they keep managing to escape, making “Snatched” less a comic version of “Taken” and more like something out of a “Scooby Doo” plot.
Ogletree attempts to mock some of the genre’s best lampooning ‘The Walking Dead’ TV series and movies including Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead and Warm Bodies, the latter three were already self-aware making it much harder to find some comedic openings.
Witless even in comparison to the collective work of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, The Walking Deceased braids together ostensible parodies of The Walking Dead and Warm Bodies for the purposes of trumpeting above all else the filmmakers' straight bona fides.
Hawn, in theory at least, is supposed to be playing one of those cranky maternal comic nightmares, like Shirley MacLaine in “Terms of Endearment” or “Postcards from the Edge” or — to tie it to the franchise era of Mother’s-Day-weekend-as-marketing concept — Jane Fonda in “Monster-in-Law.”
Their dilemma is less like Taken, more like Outrageous Fortune, the low-brow Bette Midler–Shelley Long vehicle from the ’80s.
Hawn, in theory at least, is supposed to be playing one of those cranky maternal comic nightmares, like Shirley MacLaine in “Terms of Endearment” or “Postcards from the Edge” or — to tie it to the franchise era of Mother’s-Day-weekend-as-marketing concept — Jane Fonda in “Monster-in-Law.”
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Directed by George A. Romero
influenced Warm Bodies (2013)
Characters Themes
While there are many literary and cultural variations on the cannibalistic undead beings, the 1968 George A Romero film Night of the Living Dead is commonly accepted to have set the contemporary standard for how zombies are imagined.
Movies about the dead returning to life have been around almost as long as cinema itself, but it is writer-director George A. Romero who popularized an entire subgenre of zombie films with 1968's "Night of the Living Dead" and its subsequent companion pieces, 1978's "Dawn of the Dead" and 1985's "Day of the Dead."
Yes, there’s enough new think on the zombie backstory here to fry the brains of hardcore Night of the Living Dead fans, but writer Isaac Marion creates a universe unique to Warm Bodies where these horror inconsistencies seem plausible, and Levine translates said universe to screen rather well.
Love and Monsters is reminiscent of the 2013 zom-rom-com Warm Bodies in its confident mixing of, well, love and monsters, and the proceedings are enhanced by imaginative effects and some late-inning surprises.
There are many pieces of pop culture that seem to clearly influence the design and approach of “Love and Monsters,” whether it’s the bunker-bound survivors, chipper robots and irradiated, overgrown creatures of the “Fallout” series; the rom-com-meets-monster-movie premise of “Warm Bodies”; or perhaps the most direct influence, “Zombieland.”
This decision shapes an imaginative voice behind Love and Monsters’ presentation, displaying a film that isn’t eager to play it safe inside its genre construction (similar to Warm Bodies, this film conveys its dark realities while juxtaposing that with a dry sense of humor).
DeAngelis’ text recalls recent tales of forbidden love in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, Isaac Marion’s zombie-romance book Warm Bodies, and Rick Yancey’s alien invasion love story The 5th Wave, along with about fifty others.
From Claire Denis' masterpiece of desire Trouble Every Day to the zom-rom-com Warm Bodies .
Movies about the dead returning to life have been around almost as long as cinema itself, but it is writer-director George A. Romero who popularized an entire subgenre of zombie films with 1968's "Night of the Living Dead" and its subsequent companion pieces, 1978's "Dawn of the Dead" and 1985's "Day of the Dead."
There’s almost nothing in this movie that hasn’t been done better by other filmmakers, including the idea that zombies retain some shards of human identity — see George A. Romero’s underappreciated “Day of the Dead” — and the walled-off human city where Julie and her hardass anti-zombie dad (John Malkovich, in his recent gettin’-paid mode) and other survivors live, as seen in almost every apocalypse flick.
Casting a hot young performer opposite a veteran has been a common Hollywood ploy ever since Wallace Beery teamed with 9-year-old Jackie Cooper in 1931's The Champ.