Honest opinions

As my love for cinema grows, I’ve come to appreciate the true greats like Lewis Milestone, William Wyler, John Ford and many mother amazing and innovative filmmakers. Recently I’ve developed a taste for Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies and i stumbled upon a scene that left me a little cheated. Quentin’s homages are rather apparent when you stumble upon most of Angela Mao movies. Look at this scene in particular –



<LINK_TEXT text=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om2rBX71 … age#t=331s”>- YouTube</LINK_TEXT>



As much as I sort of like Quentin, I call this a complete rip off. What do you think? I mean you can’t just take some other guys action scene and use it as your own! Just because the film has aged and is a little obscure that shit is wrong.

These aren’t really obscure references. By the time I saw Kill Bill, I was pretty knowledgeable in both kung fu films and chambara. I spent my mid-teen years watching only films in Cantonese and Japanese (kung fu/wuxia/chambara/yakuza/bullet ballet). Trust me. The more you watch, the more homages and references you will come across. That whole film is a post-modern self-reflexive pastiche.



You’ve got to understand, though, that every director does this. Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, all the movie brats borrowed liberally from classic Hollywood, Kurosawa and European cinema. The difference is that Tarantino will more readily talk about it and he’ll tend to borrow particular things he likes, rather than techniques.



I wrote an analytical essay once on Reservoir Dogs and City on Fire. While a number of people will dismiss Dogs as a remake of City on Fire, it’s a little ignorant. They both share a diamond heist and major plot details, but the most dynamic things about Dogs, the things that set the indie world on fire in the nineties, were its use of popular music, its non-linear structure and its incendiary casual dialogue. None of these things were in City on Fire.



I’ll give you an example of a great found footage artist, Martin Arnold. Here is one of his films made from re-edited footage of To Kill A Mockingbird. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drDPbKquQVw



It may be made of existing footage of another person’s creation, but it’s a pretty powerful work in its own right.

they acquire the technique, they don’t copy it frame by frame.

I think at the end of the day everything comes from something right? Its the same with music with many artists getting accused of stealing ideas and so on. EVERYONE has borrowed ideas from somewhere.



Just my 0.2c