Tag: Romantic Comedies

Reel 78: Love the Film, Hate the Side Effect, Pt. 2

Oddly enough, I hate the artwork on this episode but I love the fact that I was able to match the films’ respective fonts. You win some, you lose some.

We conclude our mini-series with another pair of films that you can’t help but love. Unfortunately, they’ve also had a ripple effect, and the ripples weren’t so great.

We open with Halloween, from 1978. This film was directed by John Carpenter and stars Jamie Lee Curtis. She’s a teenager who has some truly weird adventures in babysitting. It also stars Donald Pleasance as the voice of reason that everyone ignores.

Halloween set many of the horror/slasher film tropes in motion, for sure. But Hollywood has this unfortunate habit where everything has to be bigger, and scarier, and gorier, and just…more. And so other films of the genre suffered specifically because they tried too hard to replicate the original.

From there we jump to 1989’s When Harry Met Sally…, which also set the template for a lot of films in that “star-crossed lovers” rom-com category. The bad news is that the films in its wake didn’t pay enough attention to what made this couple star-crossed, and Hollywood wound up cranking out a lot of films that looked the same, and (perhaps worse) sounded the same, soundtrack-wise, but were clearly not the same in terms of quality.


COMING ATTRACTIONS:

In Reel 79, we’re going to take you on a tour of the dark side of television. We’ll start with A Face in the Crowd (1957), directed by Elia Kazan and starring Patricia Neal and Andy Griffith, in one of the few times you’ll see him as this kind of character. From there we go to 1976 and Network, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Peter Finch and William Holden. These are two films that were so oddly prophetic that most people today don’t realize they were originally intended to be satire. Join us, won’t you?

Reel 50: Inspired TV

Yow! We’ve made it to the 50-episode mark! Thanks so much for your support; we couldn’t have done it without you.

Today we’re looking at a pair of films that bear a very strong resemblance to a pair of television shows, but (on paper, at least) there’s no official connection between the two productions.

We start with 1953’s Stalag 17, directed and co-written by Billy Wilder. This film stars William Holden in an Oscar-winning performance. The film also stars Don Taylor, Robert Strauss, Harvey Lembeck, Peter Graves, Neville Brand, Richard Erdman, Michael Moore, Sig Ruman, and Otto Preminger. It’s worth noting that Strauss and Lembeck appeared in the original Broadway production.

Stalag 17 almost certainly inspired the 1965-71 CBS comedy Hogan’s Heroes, which was also set in a German POW camp and had several other elements in common. (Claude says during the episode that Hogan’s Heroes also took place in Stalag 17, but his memory failed him; Hogan’s Heroes was set in Stalag 13.)

From there  we jump forward, to 1992. Cameron Crowe’s Singles,  starring Bridget Fonda, Campbell Scott, Kyra Sedgwick, and Matt Dillon, among others.

Despite the film being about a half-dozen young adults making their way in the world, and most of them living in the same apartment building, this is not connected to the NBC  television series Friends, which is about a half-dozen young adults making their way in the world, most of whom live in the same apartment building. And Friends debuted nearly two years after Singles. However, it was green-lighted only a short time after Crowe turned down Warner Brothers’ offer to adapt Singles into a series. But you can be the judge of that one.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: 

Over the next several episodes we’ll be taking you around the world. And we start South of the Border, down Mexico way. We’ll be reviewing Y tu mamá también, a wild little coming of age road film from 2001. Then we’ll be looking at Roma, a story about the life of a housekeeper in Mexico City. Both of these films were directed by Alfonso Cuarón, who chose to release Roma only to Netflix to ensure the largest possible audience.