Ok, how about Terry Giliam, his movies are so fucking bonkers and can’t imagine too many stolen goods.
[quote=“WeaselCo”]
Ok, how about Terry Giliam, his movies are so fucking bonkers and can’t imagine too many stolen goods.
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12 Monkeys was a remake of a French short called " La Jetee’ "
I thought the “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling” movies were pretty neat. If you read the backstory on the website, you can see that the movies were made by a guy who was horribly disappointed to find out that Tarantino’s work was derivative. I think most people go through a similar phase, and this guy just happened to document his outrage.
In highschool I got really into Shakespeare. I bought a big Annotated Shakespeare book with all the plays, and I started reading about the author himself, out of sheer curiosity as to what made the man tick. I found out first that A Comedy Of Errors was based on another play. Not an old work, mind you, but a play that Shakespeare would have seen or read and simply decided to redo - plot, characters, and everything. Then I found that Hamlet was essentially taken from an old story, and more specifically a particular version of the story that a famous playwright had done. I was floored. Shakespeare is a God of writing if anyone is, and come to find out almost his entire body of work is derivative.
Then I got over it. The thing is, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is his. He may have created monologues from old bits of poetry and dialogue, but he made it work for what he was doing, and nobody can doubt that all his work adds up to one man’s voice. The more I read and researched writers that I liked, the more I realized that Shakespeare’s mode of working was more the norm than the exception. Innovation is as much about emulation as it is invention. It’s taking an idea that almost works and making it work. It’s putting two ideas together and making a new idea. Mozart was somewhat famous during his time for “improving” other composers’ music, much to their chagrin.
I can’t think of a time when Americans have been so obsessed with ownership over intellectual property. They don’t realize that this is a modern conceit, created in other peoples’ interests and not theirs as consumers. I’d actually love to see more movies like “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling”, only focused on other artists - filmmakers, musicians, what-have-you - so people can see how it’s all connected. We need to stop telling people that anything good has to be new.
Nothing is ever completely “new”. Various influences lead people to create something original, something everybody loves. Mostly life experience. If you were able to find out everything about a writer’s life and his own memories and thoughts, you’d be surprised how much is simply put in his works, unchanged, pure. So, for example, what’s Tarantino’s experience? He’s been watching films, watching films, and watching films through his whole life. Some particular scenes stay in memory forever, even from the cheapest, lamest movies ever, those form something new, a bit changed though. Look at the reference list for Kill Bill, you’ll see world famous films, and films which don’t even have 5 votes in IMDB.
Dude, you’re trying too hard with your randomness. So much so in fact, that your starting to make sense.
Every now and then, someone stumbles across that Mike White video and thinks he has the answer to QT’s genius - he’s a thief. I think QT’s use of City On Fire’s plot goes beyond being homage, but I don’t care. What none of these critics has been able to do is actually make a point, like “QT steals, and therefore he’s bad”. That standard can’t be applied across the board in any medium, because artists do it all the time. The fact is that only in the 20th and 21th Century has western culture become obsessed with the ownership of intellectual propery, and it has to do with money, not morality or ethics. Shakespeare copied everything, including entire plots and down to some monologues. Nobody says he’s a thief or that those facts diminish the man’s work, because Shakespeare is not an easy target. In short, people are stupid cowards, and they can’t cope with a living genius.