Mervyn LeRoy
30 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
influenced by The Bad Seed (1956)
Themes Characters
Other movies have told stories based around young men who lash out at society, but Ramsay blends the reality of that sort of situation with the type of bad kid horror subgenre seen in films such as "The Bad Seed," "The Omen" or "Orphan," only basing it in reality rather than doing it as a sensationalist genre film.
It's found in such brilliant short fictions as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (filmed as The Innocents), Paul Bowles's Pages From Cold Point and, more recently, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, as well as horror movies such as The Bad Seed and The Omen and in real life in the James Bulger case.
Kevin is a horror movie trope -- ripped from movies like The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, The Omen, and the recent Orphan -- far too menacing to be even remotely connected with anything real.
Motiveless malignancy in cinema youngsters is no rarity though, except for blood-will-out The Bad Seed, ordinarily from demonic possession.
From "The Bad Seed" to "The Omen" to "The Good Son," kids have been creeping us out for years.
As a result, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" comes across less like the powerful and profound drama that it clearly wants to be and more like an excruciatingly arty version of the old horror-exploitation standby of the killer kid, a trope that has been deployed in the past in works ranging from the Broadway-sanctified "The Bad Seed" to grindhouse insanity like "The Children" to mass-market takes like the Vera Farmiga vehicles "Joshua" and "Orphan."
Marshall quotes from Pennies from Heaven, too (Gere�s striptease in "All I Really Need Is Love" is a nod to Christopher Walken as the tap-dancing pimp), and Gold Diggers of 1933 and Jailhouse Rock (together, in the knockout "Cell Block Tango" sextet, where Roxie�s jailmates sing the stories of the homicides that landed them in the clink).
You know that the nightmare of a ghoulish forced abortion that opens the movie is a premonition of bad experiences with evil kids, but you're thinking The Omen or The Bad Seed – something in the devil cult or genetic malfunction line.
Has John and Kate Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga) ever watched The Bad Seed, for heaven’s sakes?
When watching the new Orphan, it's hard not to think of earlier "evil children" movies like Alice Sweet Alice (1976), The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976 and 2006), and Village of the Damned (1960 and 1995).
Before you can say “The Bad Seed just got badder,” she’s attacking her snotty classroom rival on the playground, casually crushing injured pigeons with bricks, and threatening to castrate her stepbrother with a carpet knife.
The kind of thriller which echoes the likes of The Bad Seed (1956) and The Good Son (1993).
Wan no oculta que estamos frente a una cruza entre La Mala Semilla ( The Bad Seed , 1956), de Mervyn LeRoy, Las Esposas de Stepford ( The Stepford Wives , 1975), de Bryan Forbes, Chucky: El Muñeco Diabólico ( Child’s Play , 1988), de Tom Holland, Hardware (1990), de Richard Stanley, y La Huérfana ( Orphan , 2009), de Jaume Collet-Serra, e incluso coquetea con el slasher una vez que nuestra muñeca tuneada avant-garde desata su furia contra todos aquellos que amenazan física o psicológicamente a Cady, como el perro de la vecina Celia (Lori Dungey), un animal que se abalanza contra el androide y la niña cuando ambos osan entrar en la morada contigua, o un purrete psicópata llamado Brandon (Jack Cassidy), quien “viola” simbólicamente a M3GAN -esto es el mainstream yanqui, casi todo está vedado para lograr una baja calificación por edad para el estreno masivo en salas- cuando se lleva a la muñeca, la tira al suelo, le saca un zapato, la golpea en la cara e incluso le agarra el pelo, ganándose q…
(You might compare it to pictures made about the 1942 Doolittle Raid on Tokyo—like 1944’s “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” an accomplished morale-booster.)
It's a brilliant tribute to many things: Paris's bohemian era, the evolution of pop music from Gilbert & Sullivan to Nirvana and musicals from "Gold Diggers of 1933" to Lars von Trier's "Dancer in the Dark."
Watching him in his snits, I recalled Peter Ustinov's great Nero in "Quo Vadis" (1951), collecting his tears for posterity in tiny crystal vials.
Once that is over, the makers tack on an extended sequence depicting Jimmy Doolittle's daring raid on Japan, a la Mervyn LeRoy's "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo."
Those two events have been the subject of their own books and movies (like "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo").
Like the Energizer Bunny from Hell, this thing just keeps going and going and going … We can’t leave America in this state of disgrace, so the film morphs into Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Doolittle’s (Alec Baldwin suffering from John Wayne syndrome) bombing of Japan.
Even with its echoes of "The Bad Seed" and "Misery," "Goodnight Mommy" unexpectedly hits a squirm-inducing nerve.
In the context of a story about a virginal, silent novice, this is practically the equivalent of Natalie Wood’s Louise in Gypsy first stepping out to sing “Let Me Entertain You.”
After finally speaking up, Nancy (and here Winslet resembles not only Dennis, but Eileen Heckart's Hortense Daigle in "The Bad Seed," another stagey, campy film) doesn't feel so well and promptly vomits all over Penelope's displayed art books.
Actor Wentworth Miller's ('Prison Break') first produced script pays homage to Hitchcock's Uncle Charlie ("Shadow of a Doubt") with little dabs of "Psycho" (a motel, stuffed birds, reflections in a policeman's Ray Bans, a swinging cellar light, an unharmed fly) and a dollop of "The Bad Seed" for good measure, but the film impresses more as artful craftsmanship than emotionally satisfying thriller.
Park’s skills for surreal subjectivity and the mischievously weird certainly don’t hurt, but they can’t quite banish Stoker’s narrative speed bumps and draughts of cold air as the film bluntly denotes the compulsive correspondence of orgasm and murder, and nastiness by inheritance (evoking The Bad Seed).
Evil Dead: El Despertar ( Evil Dead Rise , 2023), nuevo capítulo de la retahíla del espanto que se propone independiente pero retoma a nivel conceptual lo hecho por Álvarez en Posesión Infernal , es el segundo largometraje del cineasta irlandés Lee Cronin, aquel de la interesante y remotamente similar El Bosque Maldito ( The Hole in the Ground , 2019), esa cruza entre La Invasión de los Usurpadores de Cuerpos ( Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1956), de Don Siegel, La Mala Semilla ( The Bad Seed , 1956), de Mervyn LeRoy, El Otro ( The Other , 1972), de Robert Mulligan, El Resplandor ( The Shining , 1980), de Stanley Kubrick, y The Babadook (2014), gran obra de Jennifer Kent acerca de la histeria familiar.
The writer-director, Michael Sucsy, is probably not old or smart enough to have seen Greer Garson and Ronald Colman in Random Harvest, Mervyn LeRoy’s 1942 masterpiece about love and amnesia, but to a ripe old movie buff like me, The Vow brings back warm memories.
There's no close-up of the marquee, or of the posters on the street, to indicate what they've just seen, but here are some suggestions: Memento, Regarding Henry, Random Harvest, I Love You Again, any of the Bournes.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
influenced by Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)
Themes
Instead, they’ve drawn inspiration from WWII-era classics like Air Force and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo , grounding their ensemble in authentic human emotions and giving them inner lives beyond what happens to them in the cockpit.
While there were some notable exceptions, the first 40 years of Hollywood movies about organized crime rarely strayed from the blueprint established by Warner Bros. studios beginning in the 1930s with the classics “Little Caesar” and “The Public Enemy.”
It has a modern outlook but provides a throwback, too, to the genre’s florid history – a flirtatious Claudette Colbert marinating in her milk bath in 1932’s The Sign of the Cross, or a pouting Peter Ustinov as Emperor Nero lounging about in silks and velvets in 1951’s Quo Vadis. This time, they’ve put sharks in the Colosseum.
Like all great movie monsters, from Kong to Godzilla to Edward G. Robinson in "Little Caesar" and Al Pacino in "Scarface," Harris is bigger than life, a morally ambiguous titan, a source of both wisdom and terror.
Diane Lane’s wrinkles and liver spots are right out of the MGM makeup department files on Greer Garson in Madame Curie.
No less an icon than Jimmy Stewart played a composite version of White in 1959's The FBI Story, which was effectively endorsed by Hoover.