Something Wild (1986)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
A free-spirited woman "kidnaps" a yuppie for a weekend of adventure. But the fun quickly takes a dangerous turn when her ex-con husband shows up.
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What critics compared Something Wild to
That was true of “Something Wild” and “The Silence of the Lambs,” in which terror and black comedy rolled together like dice, and it’s there in the mood swings of “Rachel Getting Married”—a minor work, but so menaced by distress that the characters take every opportunity to dance the dark away.
The buzz: Well received in its screenings at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, this latest film from “The Silence of the Lambs” Oscar winner Jonathan Demme has been hailed as a return to the comedic humanism of his early work like the classic “Something Wild.”
Not that the man who made Stop Making Sense was ever all that square, but Demme did make his name with small, intimate dramas about friendship and loneliness and the inexorable pull of family ties (Melvin & Howard, Something Wild).
Musicians on Demme's iPod, like Robyn Hitchcock (Storefront Hitchcock) and Sister Carol East (Something Wild), turn up to perform.
Although the handheld shaky-cam used to give the film an unnerving, voyeuristic, home-movie vibe would not have been an option early in Demme's career, "Rachel Getting Married" revels in the emotional chaos found in such 1980s films as "Melvin and Howard," "Something Wild" and "Married to the Mob," made before the Oscar/box-office double whammy of "The Silence of the Lambs" established Demme as a "prestige" director.
Working from a script by Jenny Lumet (actress and spawn of writer Gail Lumet Buckley and filmmaker Sidney Lumet), Demme choreographs a mostly accomplished ensemble to make his fiercest and most deeply satisfying film since Something Wild.
Faces are shot in close-up with a reverence akin to Jonathan Demme, intentionally hinted at by aSomething Wild (1986) poster in the background of the movie's most romantic Applebee's-set scene.
It’s not that I was hoping for a dramatic adult turn akin to what Jonathan Demme gave us in his marvelous 1986 adventure “Something Wild,” but “Game Night” is nothing less than a live-action cartoon.
The dark humor and action twists of “Game Night” are reminiscent of a throwback to retro 80s movies like “Something Wild” and “Romancing the Stone,” films that combined comedy, mystery, action, and romance but with a slightly more ominous tone.
An even greater story influence appears to be the 1980s American thrillers After Hours (directed by Martin Scorsese ) and Jonathan Demme ’s Something Wild, in which flirtations with newcomers led to dangerous nights of the soul.
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Like Melanie Griffith's reckless, self-indulgent character in Something Wild, Danielle is a catalyst for change in Matthew's uninteresting life.
“Baby Driver” has already pivoted from lightness to dark, from celebration to threat, in much the way the late Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece, “Something Wild” (1986), deepened the moment Ray Liotta pulled up alongside Jeff Daniels’s car.
The whole sequence plays like one of those superior yuppie-in-peril movies from the early 1980s, Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, say, or David Lynch’s Blue Velvet .
There’s a great Jonathan Demme movie waiting to bust out of Rain Man, as it shares more than a few obvious parallels to that director’s road-movie masterwork Something Wild.
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Aronofsky also found inspiration for his new film in New York-centric pictures like Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild…
(It’s unsurprising to read that Paul Thomas Anderson is a huge fan of this film, for you can see strains of its DNA in his outstanding “Punch-Drunk Love.”)