Armageddon and Deep Impact (1998)

The Matrix and Dark City (1998)

Volcano and Dante’s Peak (1997)

I humbly off into that future database another odder comparison that would require only an edge only about 1.6 times as long: “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” and “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas” …many scenes (albeit one animated) sync-up very nicely.

Personally, I’d rather have an enema than watch either of those films. I couldn’t even make it through the mash up.

I hadn’t heard of them, because I don’t watch television and could care less what pathetic chum Hollywood is cranking out for the hungry masses.

Can someone further mash the FWB and NSA video with additional footage from “Booty Call”?

(Of course, at another point, its working title was Fuckbuddies, which I wish they’d kept. I think it’s a more accurate description of the actual film.)

Hollywood puts out pedantic crap anyway, but its offerings aimed towards women are even more depressing. The only movies I’ve seen in the theater lately are Hanna (loved it) and X-Men: First Class (fun, but racist and sexist- very distracting from any plot). American cinema is utter garbage, and so I ignore most of it.

I wonder if either of these twin turds pass the Bechdel Test? I highly doubt it.

Yes, but isn’t that the way all art proceeds? Didn’t your F*uck Buddies movie steal the idea from the Seinfeld episode? Didn’t Seinfeld steal the idea from _________?

See All Art Is Theft poster in Jay Maisel thread.

If copyright reform happens, will we celebrate originality less?

I saw the indie film Friends (with Benefits )at a film festival where is went on to win Best Narrative Feature. I then subsequently began reading about similar films in production, followed by trailers, followed by films that seemed so stikingly familiar to a film I’ve already seen, one would begin to wonder if the filmmaker got a great payday by selling his script to Hollywood. He in fact did not secretly (nor not so secretly) sell it to anyone. I searched around the internet (not hard to do) and found a lot of info on that topic.

Anyway, I don’t wish to debate the ethics of Hollywood, just wanted to point out a great little film that unfortunately seems to have more than sparked these two flicks. And I do believe that in this case it seems a little more than just borrowing a concept.

See “Midnight in Paris” if you don’t believe me. It should still be in a theater near you. You might even call it a romantic comedy, but it’s not the formulaic type (although Woody Allen kind of follows his own formulas ;)

Also, see any of the films that won a lot of awards last year (or any year). They win the awards, while films like these (and the summer action/superhero movies) don’t, because they’re actually good… but you hear more about the crap ones because they spend a lot more on advertising.

it can be seen here:

http://vimeo.com/10719611

Interestingly, the ostensible subject of these films is personally relevant — I’ve been in an open relationship for over twenty years now with a guy who was my fuck-buddy when we were both 18. Not that either of us has strayed much. Probably less than most supposedly-faithful cheaters. Yes, we’re boring.

Sometimes it really does work out when you least expect it.

As for movies, I only watch gudda-gudda gunfights and explosions about once a year too, as it bores me even more.

Movies that are interesting have serious, genuine drama, or interesting cinematography, or fantastic ideas.

Hollywood will remake generic chick flicks and action flicks every month for the rest of time, because people pay to see them. It’s really that simple.

For a fun game, do what we do: when you watch the damn things, see how many lines and scenes you can predict word-for-word and shot-for-shot. After a bit, you’ll be batting at least .500!

But seriously, this process developed so quickly in film (unsurprisingly, since it was already present for a long time in the other dramatic and plastic arts) that Luis Buñuel and a friend created the tree you’re proposing back in the 1920′s.

The sameness of films is one of the reasons I was so taken aback by the critique that the film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Hironobu Sakaguchi, 2001) “had no plot”. O rly? And how many SF movies have you seen that are more adroitly plotted?

Genres exist, in this case, we’re seeing two sets of people create works that are both horizontally and vertically integrated into a number of genres, both at the level of signifier and signified. To some degree, they should be praised for their fidelity even as we castigate them for their unoriginality.

How the hell do you make two films look virtually identical, given different sets, crew, actors, etc. etc.? That’s virtuosity in and of itself. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin deprecates “aesthetisizing politics” without really coming to grips with what a hugely complex and fraught process that actually becomes.