Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
Directed by Blake Edwards
Holly Golightly is an eccentric New York City playgirl determined to marry a Brazilian millionaire. But when young writer Paul Varjak moves into her apartment building, her past threatens to get in their way.
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What critics compared Breakfast at Tiffany's to
She assumes that she will naturally fit in, that the college might be full of eccentrics like her, and that the city might be a magical place like the one she’s often dreamed about in her small room, covered in posters for films like Sweet Charity and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and images of long-dead pop stars.
An old soul, Eloise bedecks her teenage bedroom in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and Sweet Charity (1969) movie posters, and, when packing for university, stuffs her suitcase with Cilla Black and the Searchers LPs, almost forgetting to bring socks alongside all her Sixties memorabilia.
Indeed, from the vinyl to the posters of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s to the retro-looking dress Eloise has constructed out of newspaper as she dances about the house to the fact that she receives her college acceptance letter on paper, I wasn’t entirely sure exactly what decade we were in as the movie began.
Orphaned as a child and raised by her grandmother, Eloise is obsessed with the ’60s; posters of Twiggy and of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s adorn her walls, and she treasures the family’s vintage vinyl collection.
An aspiring clothes designer raised in rural Cornwall by her kindly grandmother (Rita Tushingham), she's plastered her bedroom with posters of Twiggy and Breakfast at Tiffany's and twirls blissfully to the crackling sound of her mother's old LPs.
Oh, and she’s obsessed by the ’60s, to the point that early on – given that her bedroom is bedecked in pictures of Twiggy and posters of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Sweet Charity” and that she dances around to a portable record player playing crackly vintage pop – we might think it actually is the ’60s – at least until she grabs her digital alarm clock and sticks on her Beats by Dre headphones on the train on the way to London.
Jerry has a thing for Japanese women, but has never learned to speak their language; instead, he grunts at them in English, using a vaudeville-level Japanese accent of a sort not heard since Mickey Rooney donned fake buckteeth to play a yammering Japanese neighbor in the 1961 Breakfast at Tiffany's .
(Think Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's .)
“Licorice Pizza” is a humorous and loving look at a very particular time and place, one that is distinctly politically incorrect (Gary’s PR client, Asian restaurateur Jerry Frick (John Michael Higgins), competes with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” Mickey Rooney in indulging in cringe worthy Asian stereotypes while Gary’s agent calls Alana an ‘English pit bull with sex appeal and a very Jewish nose’).
John Michael Higgins plays the owner of the Mikado restaurant, marrying a succession of Japanese wives/partners whom he tries to communicate with via seriously offensive sing-song pidgin English, like Mickey Rooney in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
Higgins and his Japanese wife listen to the proposed ad (which does everything it can to downplay the food and up the Orientalist appeal), and Higgins “translates” to his wife by adopting a grotesque caricature of a Japanese accent (think Mickey Rooney’s ghastly Breakfast at Tiffany’s performance).
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, there are no black characters (even though his partner is Maya Rudolph, half African American, and who has a brief cameo in the film); there are comical scenes where a character played by John Michael Higgins gives Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s a run for his money in mock Japanese stereotypes; and most evidently, the central story sees a 15 year old boy (played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper Hoffman in his acting debut) in love with a 25 year old (she might actually be 28) woman, played by popster Alana Haim.
In a way Amelie is like Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s (and in fact, Toutou looks like Audrey Hepburn in the occasional shot).
She has the same natural beauty and infectious smile that carried "Roman Holiday" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" among others.
A romantic comedy that stubbornly refuses to play by the rules, "Amelie" could be this generation's "Breakfast at Tiffany's."
From the moment Elise (Jolie) appears on screen – in a cream gown and fur lifted from Breakfast At Tiffany’s – we are transported to a shimmering realm of 1950’s glare and colour where subtlety and originality have been obliterated.
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And in Andy Tennant's Hepburn homage (The Philadelphia Story meets Breakfast at Tiffany's), her spin as Melanie Carmichael (nee Smooter), a Deep South scruff turned Fashion Week design darling (godawful wardrobe notwithstanding), lacks both Kate's sly ambivalence and Audrey's sad grace.
One of those, as I say in my video review (click the link above to watch), is brilliant casting work — each character an individual and not the kind of stereotype Asian performers often have found themselves trying to overcome in Hollywood confections (this is a looooong way from Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s).
She looks positively like Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” as she strides, almost floating, toward an elevator.
(Think Natalie Portman in "Garden State" or, going back further, Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's.")
This is a device unworthy of the brothers’ usual ingenuity, though it does link Inside Llewyn Davis to another 1961 pop-cultural artifact: the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in which the true soulmate of Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) is a cat named Cat.
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The term was Rabin's, but the character has been around forever -- think Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," or Barbra Streisand in "What's Up, Doc," or Zooey Deschanel in anything.
There's Vivian watching Audrey Hepburn on TV (Charade, as Breakfast at Tiffany's would be too on the nose), and the film begins and ends with a guy crossing Hollywood Boulevard, blaring, "Welcome to Hollywood!