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Death by rusty fork. Heh heh heh.

I am for directors ripping off other directors. for it. not moaning and chanting. for it.

clear enough?

Hollywood is formulaic, very much so. With few exceptions, I cannot think of a film that doesn’t follow one or more of the tired formulas that have been recycled since the day. Here’s one that has always and will always leap to mind first: “Bubba Ho-tep” I was blown away by this small film with an original idea that it stole from the book it’s based on. If you’ve not seen it, Elvis is in a nursing home. He meets a wheelchair bound JFK who has been dyed black. They team up to fight a 2,000 year old mummy that wears cowboy accoutrements. Good god, I knocked over three kids and pushed a nun down in order to get my ticket for this puppy and it delivered on so many levels.

Sure, it has the usual four acts and some unusual pathos. It has cheesy effects and sad acting by the bit players. But there’s a mummy. In a Stetson hat. And boots. And it wasn’t porn of any kind. Elvis talks about a boil on his penis. JFK has a spot where they took out some of his brain and replaced it with sand. The film is quirky and new and nobody saw it until it was released on DVD. It’s a film that cries for attention and I’ll bet you credits to Navy beans that no one will ever be able to copy its premise.

I saw “Dark City” and I liked it. Roger Ebert had it on his 10 best of the year but I’m stumped as to why cause it surely didn’t make mine. Frankly, I am still waiting for the pay off, cuz I am sure that the next morning, it all changed again for the proponents. Did the “Matrix” steal from it? Sure it did, just like “Dark City” did from “The Lathe of Heaven.” And like “The Forgotten” took from the former. Look at film making as a huge, never ending buffet that you go to once a week. You mix up the food and add this to that. You get a good meal, even if it all seems familiar each time.

But on the argument that they ripped off the look and feel:

Dark City came out February 27th, 1998. The Matrix started principal photography on March 14, 1998. That means The Matrix was previsualized months before that. Sets were built (though they did shoot at the same studio, I’ll give you that). The script was storyboarded. The visual approach was already prepared.

The Matrix takes from a lot, I agree, the influences are very clear when you watch it. It’s not a complete original like many people want to believe. But it’s damn near impossible that they “ripped off” Dark City, a movie that was made around the same time. Both movies draw from similar sources, especially in terms of premise. Like I said, I think it’s just as absurd when I hear people criticize Existenz as a Matrix knock-off.

But look, Proyas does the same thing. Dark City takes from Fritz Lang. Sets and ideas that evoke Metropolis, images lifted directly from Liliom. You’re right, a lot of contemporary filmmakers do this. I don’t think Proyas or the Wachowski’s should be lumped with Tarantino, though. But that’s another topic….

Sometimes the creator who gets ripped off gets a little upset, though.

http://www.poormojo.org/pmjadaily/archives/002657.html

But there’s something here that needs to be addressed because it’s factually incorrect: The Matrix is not a rip-off of Dark City. The Wachowski’s didn’t steal or lift anything from that movie. Dark City came out in 98. The Matrix was written years before that. The film was well into production before they saw Proyas’ film. Movies share similar ideas. Especially in sci-fi. People call Existenz a rip-off of The Matrix. It’s not. They came out around the same time, that’s different.

I don’t have anything more to say about Minority Report.

Anil, I consider films #1-5 among my favorites of all time. So I can understand if you want Sin City higher; I’d take it over most films. In regards to The Big Lebowski, I won’t hate you, but I think your statement (On a noir list that includes Big Lebowski, you might as well add anything else if it’s equally great.) should be amended to: On a noir list that includes Big Lebowski, you might as well add anything else if it’s equally great, made by the pre-eminent noir filmmakers of our day, and is a remake of one of the most important and influential noirs.

Daniel, I didn’t see Dahlia, but I heard it was bad. This wasn’t supposed to be list of most-noirish films, but best films that are noirish. And I don’t regard Ritchie as a noir filmmaker; I see his films more in the British gangster/caper tradition. There is some neo-noir overlap there, but it’s just never felt noirish to me.

Jandy, I completely agree that the Lookout was underrated and overlooked, and that Brick is an absolute masterpiece. Clearly, by Evan’s logic, you and I have defeated Jeffmcm. I’m so proud of us for both being so smart.

Brick is cool and admittedly it has the most interesting and original premise among the ten but overall I would’ve placed it lower. The spot would be right if you had named the list “Most interesting noir ideas of the last 10 years”.

Don’t hate me for this but I hated seeing Big Lebowski on the list. It’s a great film and I see how you relate it to the classical noirs but I don’t like to see the borders of film-noir stretched out so much. On a noir list that includes Big Lebowski, you might as well add anything else if it’s equally great.

The rest, great choices. On a side note, I have seen The Man Who Wasn’t There second time in color, and I have to tell you it was way more gorgeous. If only people could overcome their simple conservatism for black&white in film-noirs (not that I’m against b&w, mind you)

I like the effort if not the execution; I would agree with probably 5 out of the 10, but none of the 5 I don’t agree with are offensively bad choices. Like Jandy, I also had to consider the lack of L.A. Confidential and The Usual Suspects. Just goes to show time flies.

How about Snatch or Lock, Stock? The Black Dahlia (even though I hated it)? Could have included some foreign films in here as well.

Still, excellent work.

I hadn’t thought of Big Lebowski as a noir before. Now I’ll have to rewatch it (considering I really only remember the goofing off at the bowling alley part).

Will have to drop that into the ‘ole Netflix queue.

I knew that would come up. I conspicuously left Graham’s title as is for that very reason. I know, I’m a stinker.

And yes, Cronenberg is his own genre. For that matter, the Coens are their own genre as well, so Lebowski and Man Who Wasn’t There are really Coen films first and noir/comedy/crime films second.

I have not seen Ice Harvest, Adam. Remind me what that one is about again? (I’m too lazy to google at the moment)

Of course Blazing Saddles is a Western. What else would it be? Again, this might be because I don’t favor hard and fast categories; just because it’s a parody doesn’t mean it’s also not a Western. It’s both. Kiss Kiss is definitely not a parody; it’s not making fun of noir conventions, just using them in a meta-fashion. And I don’t think Big Lebowski is a parody either; it’s not sending up or mocking noir conventions, just using them in a surprising manner.

As for History of Violence, I agree with you most there. It’s definitely its own creature. But it’s also heavily noir influenced.

But I think your comment about Scanner and Runner shows how little I was looking at this through that lens. I totally agree with you that Scanner Darkly is truer to Dick’s vision, but Blade Runner is much, much better. It’s fine to discard as much as you want from the source material, as long as you make a great movie. But if you discard a lot of the source material, and replace it with a shiny and stupid Tom Cruise vehicle, I think I can bash you for not paying closer to Dick’s story all I want without it being about Dick’s vision. It wasn’t that he wasn’t “true” to a “sacred” text, it’s just that he made a stupid, simplistic movie.

But otherwise, you’ve pretty much hit all the bases. Despite its debt to noir, I’m not sure that I’d call History of Violence a noir; a Cronenberg movie is part of no other genre than Cronenberg movie. Some of these are definitely noir parodies, like Kiss Kiss and Big Lebowski, so it makes it hard to categorize them. Is Blazing Saddles a Western?

My dark horse pick of the best noir of the last ten years? The sorely underrated Ice Harvest.

I think I’m in the minority on this (certainly among my fellow pretentious critics), but I really disliked The Man Who Wasn’t There. It really felt like the Coens had completely lost sight of the quick-and-dirty aesthetic that made noir great in its heyday, replacing it with goofy special effects and way-overdone visual metaphors (not to mention a far-too-long running time).

Yep.

And A Scanner Darkly is probably the best Dick adaptation ever. Blade Runner is a great film, but a piss-poor adaptation. Scott didn’t even read Dick’s book. It was “too confusing,” he said. Scanner is as pure a representation of Dick as can be found.

Phillip K. Dick is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and my favorite science fiction writer of all time. And in 1982, a brilliant director decided to take one of his least “filmable” books, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and make a movie out of it. And the results were, to say the least, fantastic.

Since then, everyone and their brother has tried to make a decent PKD movie, and they have all sucked. Minority Report took a nuanced and difficult story and turned it into a confusing, sensory assaultive video game with the soul of a turd. It introduced me to an incompetent named Colin Farrell, and misused Bergman’s man-muse horribly.

I can heap a great deal of this at the feet of Frank, but the worst bit is that, having replaced Dick’s fascinating plot with a silly whodunit, only way he was able to resolve that silly whodunit was with a Murder, She Wrote tactic: “I never said she drowned, I just said she was murdered. You must be the killer!”

Cue laugh track and/or Angela Lansbury.

Firstly, Dark City should have been WAY higher on your list. Apart from The Man Who Wasn’t There and Brick, it appropriates the tropes of noir better than any of the other selections. Kiefer Sutherland’s Igor performance continues to grate, but everything else about it remains top notch. By the way, I’ve seen the new director’s cut, and it’s ok. They’ve added a few scenes in and shuffled things around, but it’s not a big change.

And you’re a teensy-weensy bit too hard on Shane Black and Scott Frank. I don’t think you can call The Lookout “compelling” and Minority Report a “cinematic crime.” That’s being a bit subjective, no?

I can also share the love for Veronica Mars, although I like Kristen Bell’s acting chops. My wife and I went through quite the obsessive stage with that show when we got it on DVD. I think we finished the first season in 3 days.