Filmmakers Credit Classics That Shaped Them

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Andre Jurieu
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:38 pm
Location: Back in Milan (Ind.)

#1 Post by Andre Jurieu » Tue Jan 18, 2005 5:47 pm

Off the Newssection on the Criterion website
Filmmakers Credit Classics That Shaped Them

Asked to name five films that have influenced him, writer-director Alexander Payne, 2005 Golden Globe winner for his Sideways screenplay, put Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai at the top of the list. Read Payne's take on the film, as well as Visconti's The Leopard, on Moviefone's Take 5 page, where you'll also find Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows and John Sayleson Kurosawa's Yojimbo.

cbernard

#2 Post by cbernard » Tue Jan 18, 2005 6:21 pm

Well, that's no surprise, Election and Citizen Ruth lift whole shots and sequences from Seven Samurai wholesale, it is high time Mr. Payne acknowledged his debt.

(Irony, that.)

BWilson
Joined: Mon Nov 15, 2004 6:06 pm

#3 Post by BWilson » Tue Jan 18, 2005 7:57 pm

Great little interviews, but oh my fuck that website sucks! It just keeps sliding and changing while you're trying to read, and the link to John Waters doesn't seem to work.
Last edited by BWilson on Tue Jan 18, 2005 8:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Cinephrenic
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 2:58 pm
Location: Paris, Texas

#4 Post by Cinephrenic » Tue Jan 18, 2005 8:01 pm

Does anyone see this as hints to more films such as Sideways or Viridiana here? Why would they post such information? Sideways seems affiliated with Fox.
Last edited by Cinephrenic on Tue Jan 18, 2005 9:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

BWilson
Joined: Mon Nov 15, 2004 6:06 pm

#5 Post by BWilson » Tue Jan 18, 2005 8:06 pm

cinephrenic wrote:Does any thing of hints to more films such as Sideways or Viridiana here? Why would they post such information? Sideways seems affiliated with Fox.
Well said.

The reason Criterion posted this is because several respected directors chose films that are in the collection as their Top 5.

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DDillaman
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#6 Post by DDillaman » Tue Jan 18, 2005 9:43 pm

cbernard wrote:Well, that's no surprise, Election and Citizen Ruth lift whole shots and sequences from Seven Samurai wholesale, it is high time Mr. Payne acknowledged his debt.

(Irony, that.)
I'm pretty sure that he acknowledges Kurosawa on the ELECTION audio commentary, so I don't think that it's a long-awaited gross negligence on his part. (Don't know about the CITIZEN RUTH commentary, couldn't get through it, but it was recorded after the ELECTION one.)

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Cinephrenic
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#7 Post by Cinephrenic » Tue Jan 18, 2005 9:49 pm

The reason Criterion posted this is because several respected directors chose films that are in the collection as their Top 5
There are hundreds of lists where respected directors have films that are in the collection. I don't see your point. Unless thier web masters are really bored or couldn't come up with anything elactic to post.

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GringoTex
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 5:57 am

#8 Post by GringoTex » Wed Jan 19, 2005 10:06 am

where you'll also find Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows
So that's where Jeunet learned to mix clumsily rendered atmospherics with dumb-ass characterizations.

Napoleon
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 6:55 am

#9 Post by Napoleon » Wed Jan 19, 2005 1:26 pm

Well, that's no surprise, Election and Citizen Ruth lift whole shots and sequences from Seven Samurai wholesale, it is high time Mr. Payne acknowledged his debt.
Perhaps he'll give Akira a co-directors credit on his next film?

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King of Kong
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#10 Post by King of Kong » Fri Jan 21, 2005 2:26 am

Jim Jarmusch often credits Ozu - especially Tokyo Story - as a major influence on his style - just look at Stranger Than Paradise.

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devlinnn
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#11 Post by devlinnn » Fri Jan 21, 2005 4:37 am

Anyone have the John Waters piece - seems to have vanished?

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ben d banana
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#12 Post by ben d banana » Fri Jan 21, 2005 4:45 am


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devlinnn
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#13 Post by devlinnn » Fri Jan 21, 2005 4:59 am

That link shows a blank screen from this end.

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Caligula
Carthago delenda est
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#14 Post by Caligula » Fri Jan 21, 2005 5:05 am

devlinnn wrote:That link shows a blank screen from this end.
It works for me.

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ben d banana
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#15 Post by ben d banana » Fri Jan 21, 2005 6:01 am

well here it is then (i wish he had unlimited time & funds to run a dvd label and record commentaries for everything)...
Trashploitation auteur John Waters' latest, the NC-17-rated comedy 'A Dirty Shame,' pays homage to five genres: sex-ed films, Hollywood movies, art-house cinema, sexploitation classics and porn. And so Waters has chosen a seminal entry from each genre as inspiration: "All these movies... used sex, but many pretended to be a serious treatment of something when that was not the point of the movie at all." Of course, for Waters, everything's about sex. Hence, the book he coauthored with art critic Bruce Hainley -- 'Art: A Sex Book.' Waters laughs when he thinks of Hainley's surefire tactic for making even the most tedious movie tolerable. "He said that whenever you're in a movie and you're bored, you should just think of everybody nude." Here, in Waters own words, are five films that will lead you to a greater appreciation of 'A Dirty Shame'... and are guaranteed not to bore you in the process.

Helga
(1967, dir: Erich F. Bender; starring: Ruth Gassmann, Eberhard Mondry)
'Helga' was a sex-education movie made in Germany in which this woman nurse would talk about sexual things, just so they could show breasts and nudity. That was literally the only way they could get around the Supreme Court decision about obscenity, because they were supposedly telling you how the sperm goes in and forms an embryo and all that kind of stuff, when really the only shock was to look at nude women. 'Helga' was bought and dubbed by American International Pictures around the time when 'Mondo Cane' and all those shockumentaries came out. It was such a hit that they made a sequel called 'Michael and Helga,' which could have male nudity. I grew up with movies that operated under the guise of treating sex as a serious subject, just so they could get away with showing sexual things and appear socially redeeming. In 'A Dirty Shame,' every time Tracey Ullman's character gets a concussion, she has a flashback to all these vintage sexploitation films.

Teorema
(1968, dir: Pier Paolo Pasolini; starring: Silvana Mangano, Terence Stamp)
I always remember ['Teorema'] in a very sexy way. Terence Stamp plays someone who comes to a family and has sex with every person in it: the mother, the father, the son and the daughter, even the maid. There are sex miracles and levitation and completely surreal Catholic imagery. 'Teorema' really does have a lot to do with 'A Dirty Shame.' Ray-Ray [Johnny Knoxville's character] is a holy man. He's a sex saint. Because the sex is so good, miracles happen and a new sex act is invented which leads to -- I don't want to give away the ending -- but full spirituality. Of course, it happens in a very humorous way, but I'm not so sure that Pasolini didn't have a very wicked sense of humor, too. I think Pasolini is one of the best filmmakers ever. As he said, he was a Communist, a Catholic and a revolutionary. He was a huge role model for me.

Fuego
(1969, dir: Armando Bo; starring: Isabel Sarli, Armando Bo)
'Fuego' was directed by Armando Bo, who was the Russ Meyer of Argentina. He always starred his wife, Isabel Sarli, who I'm obsessed with. She looks like Divine in 'Female Trouble.' (Actually, we made Divine look like her in 'Female Trouble.') In 'Fuego,' she plays a nymphomaniac. She just goes downtown nude in a fur coat, picking up people and then throwing them out. She didn't get hit in the head (like what happens in my movie), but she acts like she did. I don't think there is such a thing as nymphomania; it just seems like a sexist way of thinking about women. So in a way, 'Fuego' was a joke on this, because this movie tried to pretend to treat the subject of nymphomania in a serious way, but it was completely an exploitation film. She made another movie called 'Carne' ('Meat'), where she just gets raped over and over. Every day, she takes the same walk through the woods to work in these ludicrous high heels, and every day, she gets raped in a meat locker, but never changes her walk. It's so ludicrous!

Kansas City Trucking Co.
(1976; dir: Joe Gage; starring: Jack Wrangler, Richard Locke)
I don't really remember 'Kansas City Trucking Co.' that well, but I think that's where I got the idea for a tow-truck driver gone insane. It was the first in a trilogy of early gay porno movies that all took place in trucking companies. They were all made by Joe Gage, who was an auteur of porn. He made 'Kansas City Trucking Co.,' 'El Paso Wrecking Corp.' and 'L.A. Tool or Die.' In my movie, Ray-Ray has a sex garage where all the perverts gather and practice their craft. If you look at the imagery of these old '70s porn movies, they look just like today's Calvin Klein campaigns. 'Kansas City Trucking Co.' was hardcore, but to me, art and porn can be the same because of the auteur factor, which Joe Gage was. Growing up on these films led to the idea of making a satire of a sexploitation/sex-education movie. I was not an innocent when I saw any of these movies. I had already taken LSD by then, so it was infected by that. I wanted to do a sex movie about sexual things that maybe nobody does.

The Children's Hour
(1961; dir: William Wyler; starring: Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine)
'The Children's Hour' was a very serious movie about lesbians, but of course at the end, they chicken out. There was another one called 'Tea & Sympathy' about gay men. It tried to be a serious drama about homosexuality, and the clichés were just staggering. At the time, these were thought of as incredibly serious adult movies. 'Children's Hour' had been a hit Broadway play. This was before the ratings board, but they tried to make it "for mature audiences." Every straight man who went to see it thought he was going to see some hot lesbian action. They made it so highfalutin to get away with it. In the movie, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine were schoolteachers, and the ad featured a very tasteful line drawing of the two of them, and all it said was, "Different." It always made me crazy. I kept trying to talk Fine Line into doing a re-creation of that ad for this movie. It would just have a very tasteful drawing of Tracey Ullman looking lecherous and completely out of her mind.

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Fletch F. Fletch
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:54 pm
Location: Provo, Utah

#16 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Mon Jun 12, 2006 12:19 pm

The Guardian interviews Jarmusch about music (and films) that influenced him and he also tells a funny anecdote about working with Tom Waits:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic ... 39,00.html

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