Pillow Talk (1959)
Directed by Michael Gordon
Playboy songwriter Brad Allen's succession of romances annoys his neighbor, interior designer Jan Morrow, who shares a telephone party line with him and hears all his breezy routines. After Jan unsuccessfully lodges a complaint against him, Brad sets about to seduce her in the guise of a sincere and upstanding Texas rancher. When mutual friend Jonathan discovers that his best friend is moving in on the girl he desires, however, sparks fly.
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What critics compared Pillow Talk to
Their budding romance is propelled with some help from a montage of citywide cavorting, in which Burstein resurrects split-screen techniques that hark back to 1959's fluffy Pillow Talk.
One wouldn't necessarily put Peter Chelson's saccharine-coated flick "Serendipity" in the same company as the classic romantic romps of yesteryear (such as "Pillow Talk") or even in the category of contemporary ditties like "Manhattan", "Sleepless In Seattle", or "You Got Mail" for that matter.
Images of this boy's life and that girl's existence provide a smart riff on the split-screen moments Doris Day and Rock Hudson shared in the fluffy romance "Pillow Talk.
But directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — who did the last "Jump Street" movie, as well as the sublimely superior "The Lego Movie" — keep it moving and occasionally weird (with a giddy drug trip, and a split-screen idea that seems like a nod to, of all things, "Pillow Talk").
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Thanks to permissive parents, easy access to drugs and money and moral guidance that apparently came from Al Pacino's "Scarface" and gangsta rap videos, they grew up to be low-lifes who spend their days getting high, basking in the California sun and generally carrying on as if they were on some sort of twisted reality show, perhaps "Less Than Zero: The Next Generation."
Scarface may be the gangsta rapper’s movie of choice (and you know these dudes knew that), but Alpha Dog has no layers of meditation, genre-centric or otherwise; rather, it feels like how these kids would portray themselves if they could, i.e. with a complete lack of irony (Foster's ridiculously histrionic performance notwithstanding) or insight, pandering to the mirror-kissing ethos of youthful posturing it should be reflecting.
Johnny has a "Scarface" poster on his wall, and he emulates that character in his business decisions.
For a brief moment, Strange New Worlds turns into Pillow Talk.
Seconds was seen as a significant acting departure for Hudson, whose career in the late 1960s was on a downward slide after successfully working in several of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas (including All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind) and a number of romantic comedies with Doris Day in the late ’50s and early ’60s (the most famous being Pillow Talk).
The frame fractures into an ultra-hyperactive version of the split-screen telephone scenes from Bye Bye Birdie and Pillow Talk.
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Fans of Alex Ross Perry will point out that hostility is his natural terrain, that people in his films are born to bridle, and that, if you want niceness, you could always stay home and watch “Pillow Talk.”