David Gordon Green
162 connections found
Filmography
Joe 2014 
All the Real Girls 2003 
George Washington 2000 
Undertow 2004 
Pineapple Express 2008 
Snow Angels 2007 
Stronger 2017 
The Sitter 2011 
Halloween 2018 
The Exorcist: Believer 2023 
Our Brand Is Crisis 2015 
Your Highness 2011 
Manglehorn 2015 
Prince Avalanche 2013 
Halloween Kills 2021 
Halloween Ends 2022 View:
Connections, in both directions
Days of Heaven (1978)
Directed by Terrence Malick
influenced George Washington (2000), Undertow (2004)
Visuals Themes Music
The film is a lyrical look at the lives of a group of children from Winston-Salem, a poverty-stricken North Carolina backwater and comes across as a sort of ‘Terrence Malick shoots Gummo’ – indeed, Green freely admits the influence of Malick, in particular the photography of Days of Heaven.
The most apt comparison I’ve seen is to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, a beautifully photographed, quiet portrait of a time and a place.
Though other 1970s influences are also apparent—the 1969 short “A Day With The Boys,” directed by character actor Clu Gulager, also included on the disc, is a key source for the film’s kids-at-play vibe—George Washington suggests what Malick’s Days Of Heaven would have been like if it just followed the girl and never left the city.
Many critics have compared the film's style to films like "Days of Heaven" by Terrence Malick.
Candace Evanofski's molasses-toned voiceover narration reminds us of the mournfully matter-of-fact cadences of Linda Manz's voiceover in Days of Heaven, a movie with which George Washington is often compared.
Nearly every review of George Washington so far has compared the film as a cross between Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997) and Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), both great films that use mood and style over story and character as George Washington does.
Find out why Jonah Hill's mashup of Adventures in Babysitting and After Hours really needs to sit on it.
You can tell that David Gordon Green was emulating Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" more than "Adventures in Babysitting," as the movie gets wilder and darker, but often times opportunities for conflict are merely forgotten about or easily dismissed as the film races towards the finish line.
It recalls its genre antecedents (think After Hours and Adventures in Babysitting) in concept – here, Jonah Hill plays a reluctant babysitter lugging three kids in a minivan through Brooklyn while dodging a sulky drug dealer (Sam Rockwell) – but never gets at the same itchy spirit of anarchy.
At the upper end of the form is Scorsese's After Hours; at the bottom is the Tina Fey-Steve Carell vehicle Date Night, which is now joined by The Sitter .
Clearly hankering for a taste of gumball, he packs the kids into the minivan and before you can say "After Hours" or "Adventures in Babysitting" or "Date Night," he becomes embroiled in one misadventure after another involving a fey-but-psychotic drug dealer (Sam Rockwell), angry black people, stolen cars, explosions, a crashed bat mitzvah, corrupt cops, missing drugs, a nice girl and firecrackers to the crotch.
"After Hours," "Risky Business," "Something Wild," "Into The Night"… these are movies I adore because of that feeling of a world that we rarely glimpse that suddenly washes over these unsuspecting characters.
In terms of the slasher elements to Halloween (2018) , the kills are incredible, with some playing off-screen and some of them just going right for the jugular (which is literal in some cases), and I love the fact that while Green wants to make something that will appeal to modern audiences, he often leans into the classicism of Carpenter’s approach to violence in Halloween (1978), thereby delivering a mix of brutality that honors its past while also making great strides in bringing familiar slasher tropes back to the big screen in new ways, akin to what Wes Craven was able to do with the Scream series.
Green ( The Pineapple Express ) and McBride have crafted a clever homage to the kind of flick that Jamie Kennedy geeked out on so memorably in the original 1996 Scream .
Today, after an onslaught of franchise building, it’s easy to take for granted that the original “Halloween” (1978), “Friday the 13th” (1980) and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984) were actually inventive before they were satirized in “Scream” (1996), my own teenage touchstone.
While not completely meta in its laughs like a Scream, the film does play homage to its cannon and is littered with Easter eggs and call backs.
It’s hard to argue the point: Years have passed since the self-referential horror of the “Scream” franchise, not to mention snazzier home invasion thrillers from “You’re Next” to “The Babadook” that took the “Halloween” mold to fresh heights.
(Yes, even the second gets blipped from the continuity, along with Laurie’s blood relation to her stalker, which one of the film’s sub- Scream class of self-aware teens confirms aloud.)
The bad feeling over the gold coins comes to a head in an instant of violence, and the boys run away from home, entering a world that evokes " The Night of the Hunter " (1955).
This story of two brothers (Jamie Bell and Devon Alan) whose dreary, mud-slathered, peptic-ulcer–blighted existence in the swampy south is shattered by the arrival of a nasty uncle (Josh Lucas) seeking a stash of gold plays rather like The Night of the Hunter, by way of Badlands, by way of Macon County Line.
Their unwanted adventure turns into yet another kind of plot, a Southern gothic thriller haunted by The Night of the Hunter, impelled by their uncle's implacable greed and brutality, and quite a bit more generic than what's come before.
Filmmaker David Gordon Green merges the dreamlike qualities of his "All the Real Girls'' with gritty -- or more precisely, dirty -- family drama and "The Night of the Hunter'' thriller elements.
The most striking reference point for David Gordon Green's Undertow is Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter .
What begins as an homage to the Southern fried films of the ‘70s (almost anything with Burt Reynolds) soon turns into a family horror film, not unlike The Night of the Hunter (1955), but with a tone all its own.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Directed by James Cameron
influenced Halloween (2018)
Characters Plot
Sequestered away in a fortress of a house, surrounded by homemade shooting ranges and avoidant of human contact, Reinventing Laurie as something of a killer herself, akin to Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 , both psychologically and physically, makes her inevitable confrontation with Michael one hell of a tense third act.
Fortified by the arsenal in her basement, she channels badass mother figures like Ripley from “Aliens” or Sarah Connor from “Terminator 2.” In 1978, Laurie had no one to rely on but herself.
In a way the script reminded me of Terminator 2 to Terminator.
You know, something akin to watching Ripley do the same in "Aliens 2" where she transformed from victim to warrior, or Sarah Connor in "Terminator 2." In fact, this offering -- directed by David Gordon Green from a script he co-wrote with Danny McBride & Jeff Fradley -- has plenty of similarities to that latter film, including the protagonist being deemed crazy and paranoid for believing the character who previously tried to kill her was going to come back and thus she's prepared herself, including being heavily armed, to deal with the menace.
A good portion of Halloween is dedicated to fleshing out the shell that is her former self; she looks unclean and ragged, totes around heavy firearms with the skill and marksmanship that would make Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgment Day proud, and is a recluse hiding away in an isolated compound full of safety cautions and weaponry.
The new "Halloween" functions as a direct sequel to the original, and Curtis' Laurie returns as buff and badass as Linda Hamilton was in "T2."
The Princess Bride (1987)
Directed by Rob Reiner
influenced Your Highness (2011)
Plot Dialogue Themes
When assessing the small motion picture sub-genre of the "fantasy comedy," it's necessary to acknowledge that the impregnable pinnacle is occupied by Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride , a classic whose prominence may never be challenged.
The bulk of the film consists of that quest, and there are echoes – on a juvenile level to be sure – of “Monty Python And The Holy Grail” and “The Princess Bride.”
It's as if a chemically altered college kid watched a bunch of Judd Apatow movies, and then decided to remake " The Princess Bride ."
A slapdash assortment of various genres, “Your Highness” plays like “The Princess Bride” meets “Clash of the Titans” with a little bit of “Up in Smoke” thrown in for good measure.
Sort of "The Princess Bride" as retold in colorful sailor's vernacular.
The most obvious point of reference is The Princess Bride, which was both funny and thrilling, as well as oddly romantic and sweet.
With original director John Carpenter's blessing, Green manages something that is both a tribute to and an evolution of the 1978 classic, with moments designed to create resonances that are not just re-enactment but part of his bigger theme of trauma-causing scars (there are also, in a nod to his days as an Austin resident, a couple of subtle visual nods to the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre).
Starting with George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead , Simon unpicked the rebellious socio-political threads of films such as Last House on the Left , The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Shivers before arriving at the more conservative inflections of Carpenter’s ruthlessly efficient modern morality tale.
Badlands (1973)
Directed by Terrence Malick
influenced Undertow (2004), Pineapple Express (2008)
Themes Plot
But production values are somewhat beside the point when the movie in question is more “Harold & Kumar” than “Badlands.”
Over the course of his own three films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line) Malick has steadily moved away from ordinary plot mechanics and into pure poetry.
This story of two brothers (Jamie Bell and Devon Alan) whose dreary, mud-slathered, peptic-ulcer–blighted existence in the swampy south is shattered by the arrival of a nasty uncle (Josh Lucas) seeking a stash of gold plays rather like The Night of the Hunter, by way of Badlands, by way of Macon County Line.
Green wasn't born when Malick's first movie, ''Badlands," came out in 1973, and he was only 3 when ''Days of Heaven" was released five years later.
Green tells his story with sensitivity and novelistic attention to detail that recalls the famous work directed by "Undertow" producer Terrence Malick, "Badlands."
Malick has also made three films -- all masterworks -- that have moved in the opposite direction: from heavy plot ("Badlands") to mixed ("Days of Heaven") to very little plot ("The Thin Red Line").
The only thing I can think to compare Pineapple Express to is Midnight Run, which similarly mixed action and comedy in an unconventional but symbiotic manner.
The dumb, bantering hitman and doublecrossing friends recall Midnight Run.
In a sense, this harkens back to the "buddy flicks" so rampant in the 1980s, odd-couple outings like 48 HRS. and Midnight Run (no wonder iconic '80s band Huey Lewis and the News was tapped to belt out the closing-credits title song).
In the end, the film is solid entertainment in the Midnight Run vein.
It seems appropriate subject matter for a comedy that is itself a unique blend of action and comedy, the kind of buddy movie that they made a lot more of in the '80s (Midnight Run, 48 Hours, etc.), but that has kind of fallen out of style now that the Farrelly brothers and Will Ferrell have replaced dark humor with the gross-out variety in the "adult comedy" genre.
Despite its rusty mechanics and hodgepodge of tones, Pineapple Express convincingly imitates the mode of Midnight Run: on-the-run odd-couple comedy with gunplay and car chases.
There’s a sort of familial relationship between “Mud” and David Gordon Green’s sadly underappreciated “Undertow,” though Nichols’ film is far less dark and forbidding—in fact, despite the seriousness of many of its themes, there’s an overall sense of lightness to it.
There's a whole lot of early David Gordon Green in the film's slow-moving, minor-key exploration of place: Nichols and cinematographer Adam Stone do a better job than any filmmakers have since at least Green's own Undertow in using the sticky, sunblasted and plant-filled landscapes of the American South as a visual expression of character, and the absolutely gorgeous exterior cinematography crafts a romantic overlay for battered, impoverished settings that exactly matches Ellis's own half-awareness of the shortcomings of the adult worldview he's trying to adopt.
And while the film doesn't have the lighthearted swashbuckling tone of some of those kid favorites – indeed the ultimate effect cleaves much closer to the Ozarks noir of Winter's Bone or David Gordon Green's sublime Undertow – it still had a similar odor as the adventure section of the library.
After the impressive Take Shelter, writer-director Jeff Nichols takes on the sort of swampy southern gothic that David Gordon Green handled so masterfully in Undertow (2004).
Audiences were amazed when Gary Sinise's character in "Forrest Gump" appeared to have no lower legs, and the same is true for Jake Gyllenhaal's character in "Stronger".
“Lt Dan,” he scribbles on a sheet of paper from his hospital bed, a reference to the double-amputee “Forrest Gump” character.
The reference is to the double amputee played by Gary Sinise in Forrest Gump.
When he awakens in the hospital, he shows evidence of a gallows humor, remarking on his resemblance to Forrest Gump ’s Lieutenant Dan.
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Directed by Richard Linklater
influenced Pineapple Express (2008)
Visuals Themes
In the pot movie canon, it's got the buddy vibe of the Harold & Kumar or Cheech & Chong films blended with the more laid-back, less-forced style of something like Dazed and Confused, and all of it directed by someone who knows how to handle violent comedy in the vein of the dark material made famous by Quentin Tarantino.
In Green's hands, one might expect a more introspective, artsy look at the drug scene, something more along the lines of Dazed and Confused (1993).
You have Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, Gregg Araki's Smiley Face , and now David Gordon Green's Pineapple Express.
Carpenter was also a classicist who grew up on the films of Howard Hawks and John Ford and looked to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and the 1960 French horror film “Eyes Without a Face” for inspiration when making “Halloween.”
As the daughter of “Psycho” (1960) star Janet Leigh, Curtis was born to pioneer the teen slasher genre.
While slasher films were not uncommon — Hitchcock popularized the genre in 1960 with Psycho — the format they followed was more along the lines of a whodunit.
She deserved that glorified cameo and had more than earned her acting chops in previous film classics, including Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary stab-happy thriller, “Psycho.”
Friday the 13th may have lifted its gory riffs from Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (just as Carpenter looked back to Bob Clark’s Black Christmas ), but it was Halloween that paved the way for its blockbuster success.
Fortified by the arsenal in her basement, she channels badass mother figures like Ripley from “Aliens” or Sarah Connor from “Terminator 2.” In 1978, Laurie had no one to rely on but herself.
Curtis should have been allowed to own this picture, in much the same fashion as Sigourney Weaver owned Aliens and (sorry, Arnie) Linda Hamilton owned Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
The fact that it grafts a standard-issue Halloween film, where a serial killer cuts his way through the teenage populace of a small town, onto something with the emotional resonance and mother-daughter bonds of Aliens is a little curious.
And if you want to watch a female empowerment flick where a former villain turns into a well-armed warrior to deal with her former tormentor, check out the aforementioned "Aliens" and "Terminator 2" offerings.
Also also he lives with a mother (Joanne Baron) who belittles and slaps him when she isn’t kissing him full on the lips and works for his junkyard-owning father (Rick Moose) who just wants to watch Hard Target and is given to saying things like, “I hope you find love, son.”
A decir verdad lo único que funciona como es debido en Halloween Ends es -nuevamente- la música de sintetizadores ochentosos de Carpenter, su vástago Cody Carpenter y Daniel A. Davies, hijo del gran Dave Davies de The Kinks y ahijado de John, ya que las casi dos horas de duración se hacen insoportables y cualquier otra referencia al pasado resulta dolorosa y se siente debilitante en comparación cual osteoporosis artística crónica, desde las referencias al paso a The Thing (1982) y Hard Target (1993), de Carpenter y John Woo respectivamente, hasta las alusiones implícitas en el arco de desarrollo del personaje del eficaz Campbell, como la nombrada Psycho II -metamorfosis de victimario en recuperación a victimario consciente de por medio- o esa misma introducción que invierte el género sexual de la leyenda urbana de “la niñera y el hombre de arriba”, por cierto ya adaptada a la gran pantalla en Scream (1996), de Wes Craven, When a Stranger Calls (1979), de Fred Walton, y aquel opus primordial d…
Today, after an onslaught of franchise building, it’s easy to take for granted that the original “Halloween” (1978), “Friday the 13th” (1980) and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984) were actually inventive before they were satirized in “Scream” (1996), my own teenage touchstone.
Although older films like Peeping Tom and Psycho laid the groundwork for the slasher, its golden age was between 1978 and 1984, which saw the release of classics like Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Directed by Joel Coen
influenced Pineapple Express (2008)
Characters Visuals Themes
The movie's too long - and the violence and mayhem are unexpectedly harsh and heavy - but Franco's inspired, looped performance is right up there in the annals of reefer filmdom with Jeff Bridges' the Dude in The Big Lebowski.
But to be blunt, the movie's aspiration to be the little doobie brother of "The Big Lebowski" doesn't click (a black-and-white prelude set in a 1937 military pot-testing lab is a very Coen brothers touch.)
As such, "Pineapple Express" is to action movies what "The Big Lebowski" was to film noir: a brilliant pastiche of the genre in which every classic set-up goes spectacularly off-track because the protagonists are always high!
Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Directed by John Carpenter
influenced Prince Avalanche (2013)
Visuals
They dress in the same blue jean overalls Kurt Russell wears in Big Trouble in Little China, except they don’t look nearly as awesome or fit as him.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Directed by Terry Jones
influenced Your Highness (2011)
Plot Themes Dialogue
There are some amusing one-liners but the majority of the comedy makes one realize how brilliant Monty Python and the Holy Grail is.
The bulk of the film consists of that quest, and there are echoes – on a juvenile level to be sure – of “Monty Python And The Holy Grail” and “The Princess Bride.”
For every "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," there are countless woebegone failures like 2009's " Year One ."
But McBride and company haven't worked hard enough to create the puffy, pretentious, formal diction of a king's court (the gold standard being "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"), and without that contrast, the gags become tiresome and repetitive.
The decision to stick with the filthy gags instead of the insightful intelligent ones seen in similar medieval parodies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, keeps it from being memorable.