I work in the industry. Look at Heat and the opening of Dark Knight Rises and you'll see a partial direct remake of many shots.
People take shots from other films all the time. The only weird thing about this is how close the two films were chronologically. Usually people steal from older films. But this is far from a big deal. Tarantino has talked about how Reservoir Dogs is basically a segment of one of his favourite Honk Kong films made into a whole feature. This is literally the way a lot of films get made, people are inspired, sometimes they see a scene that's quite tough or they can't quite crack it so they take from some other film. Doesn't mean they're hacks.
I always thought part of what made Tarantino films so fun is that he’s basically doing the film equivalent of what the audio world calls sampling a lot of the time. Not just doing it but really nailing it. Watch Lady Snowblood and then Kill Bill or Django Unchained back to back. Some shots are basically identical but the context is very different. As in music, (and many other areas I’m sure) a knowledge of the base material really adds to the enjoyment of newer work.
Tarantino's whole thing goes back to Star Wars, which cribbed heavily from films from ~4 genres—sci-fi serials, samurai films, war (mainly WWII) films, and westerns. Its great innovation and enduring legacy in film isn't just its groundbreaking special effects, but the assembly of a film almost entirely from pastiche.
[EDIT] Incidentally, when later Star Wars media gets this fundamental aspect of Star Wars and leans into it, is when it's at its best IMO. You could practically play "spot the rip-off" with The Mandalorian, it borrowed so heavily from other film and TV—and, though perhaps overrated, it's certainly one of the best Star Wars things since the original trilogy. The Last Jedi stood out to me among the Disney-era films for doing a lot more cribbing from sources of the kind that Star Wars used, rather than cribbing just from... Star Wars itself (though it also did that, heavily re-mixing Empire, especially).
Yep, which is why it holds the position of "worst Star Wars movie that's still maybe worth watching" in my personal ranking :-)
It's not higher up because I think they botched the execution pretty badly (though not entirely! Parts of the movie are quite good!) but the core idea is excellent and is exactly the sort of thing that should be done with the Star Wars IP. The space fight at the end also holds the distinction of being the only one outside the original trilogy that's given me a hard-to-define "Star Wars feeling" that I associate with the original movies (a few of the video games have achieved it, but none of the other films since ROTJ, for me personally, anyway).
> The space fight at the end also holds the distinction of being the only one outside the original trilogy that's given me a hard-to-define "Star Wars feeling" that I associate with the original movies (a few of the video games have achieved it, but none of the other films since ROTJ, for me personally, anyway).
I know the feeling you are talking about; the pod-racing scene in TPM gave me that feeling as well. There is so much to hate about TPM, but it's (IMO) the least-bad of the prequels, and by a fairly large degree.
Strongly agree with that assessment. I swore off watching any more after the astonishingly-bad garbage that was Episode II, but got lured back by reports from other fans that "no, really, they finally made a good one" with III. No. Wrong. Those people tricked me. Admittedly, it didn't help that I hadn't kept up with outside-the-films media so had no idea WTF was going on.
Episode I is the best of the prequels by a long shot, even though it's not very good. II's definitely the worst of them, though (maybe the worst overall? I dunno, Ep. IX might be even more broken on a technical level than II is, but it managed to fall into a "so bad it's... not good, but entertaining" sweet spot for me where at least I could laugh at it, while II is both badly-made and painfully boring), so at least I didn't get tricked back into the theater for another failure of quite that level.
Episodes I and VII are the two I'd put in their own special category, recommendation-wise. Like, if you've watched IV, V, VI, VIII (maybe skip it I guess since it's the middle of a trilogy? That one's hard to recommend just because of that, especially with IX being so very bad) and Rogue One, and are truly desperate for some more Star Wars, consider those. One's fairly bad and the other's a typical irritatingly-lazily-written Abrams script (do let him cast, direct, and punch up dialog, he's excellent at all of those, masterful at times, even—do not let him touch plotting), but they're by far the best of the lesser set of the films in the franchise IMO.
My memory fails me, but I think it was Ozzy Osbourne who said he didn't mind people copying him and Black Sabbath. What was important is that they add some of themselves to it, that's how we evolve.
And I agree. All art is copied to begin with, it just depends on how much of yourself you put into your version. If it's a lot, then it will appear quite original.
This is all true, but it's not what the legal system of the richest countries think. If a little Greek director were to sway a little too close to, say, The Wrestler or Black Swan, you could bet he'd be sued into nothingness by Fox Searchlight.
The power imbalance in creative copyright is real.
I'm very positive on creative 'copying' and feel even your comment has a hint of disapproval that is common in society and counterproductive.
Everything I've read about artists I respect seems to involve them falling in love with another artists work and aping it when they are young.
Even once they get famous, I find originality has more to do with where they get their inspiration than what they put into it themselves.
I love tracing the roots of the things I love. It's endlessly rewarding. And now I'm going to watch this anime.
One of my favourite words is "scenius", the genius of a collective artistic scene. This necessarily implies 'copying' and mutual inspiration.
And I think the same applies to software. I'm generally more excited about something that is the next step in an evolution, than something that pretends it's entirely new.
The only thing I disapprove of is when I feel that the copy is cheap and lazy, and on the internet, without acknowledgement of the inspiration.
> I find originality has more to do with where they get their inspiration than what they put into it themselves.
I'm not sure I understand how you're separating a person's inspiration from who they are. If I'm inspired by something, it's because it talks to me as a person. If the person then creates something, how have I not put the inspiration (myself) into it. They are one and the same to me.
'originality' often means 'I've never seen anything like that before' but carries the implication of 'no one has ever done that before'.
But if someone takes random musical thing that's been happening for centuries in a folk tradition or something that weird Avant guard artists are doing and turns it into pop culture, that'll often be seen as 'original' in the first sense as it is new to most viewers when it's not original in the second sense.
"Rapper's Delight" by Sugarhill Gang is a good example, it's both original (first hip hop record success) and totally ripped off at the same time, while also being really good.
This X10. Nowadays is virtually impossible to create something out of thin-air. We learn from our teachers, our books, and our influencers. From a philosophical standpoint it's very difficult to defend the idea of "copyright".
Even without adding something more, I want to see grit and passion. You can cover it 1:1 if you "get it" and not just want the attention from something known to work.
It’s strange to me that the article focuses on Requiem for a Dream when Black Swan is much more directly inspired by Perfect Blue - if you wanted to you could even argue that it’s a remake of Perfect Blue. The plots are that similar. The article touches on Black Swan briefly, but I think it gets stuck focusing on the tub shot.
> Aronofsky bought the rights to “Perfect Blue” to use one of its scenes for his “Requiem for a Dream” (2000)
which TFA actively denies.
It's actually puzzling how Aronofsky went back to Perfect Blue, after being caught effectively plagiarising it once already and likely knowing that Kon, beyond the formal politeness typical of the Japanese, wasn't really happy about it. It's like he was daring to be sued.
Both directors don't come out of this particularly well - Kon for being a frustrated but ultimately weak character, Aronofsky for achieving success with fundamentally plagiarized work.
Indeed; the tub shot was arguably the only thing in Requiem for a Dream that was clearly a Perfect Blue ripoff. As TFA says, several other things that pissed of Kon were already present in the source material for Requiem.
I've watched both movies, never made the connection, even if some scenes are replicated or very heavily inspired, this is nothing new in art in general, not by any measure, and both works are still infinitely more original than the N'th sequel/prequel of whatever they've pushing the last 15 years.
Painting portray the same subject, or use the same lightning or the same composition or be a comment on the same theme endlessly.
Music, books, movies, products, they will always be a product of imagination + previous experience, and that's perfectly human, and good. The artificial limitation on this sometimes inspire great stuff, and other times, the opposite.
It's an homage. It's easier to argue the "rip-off" case when the movie being stenciled is commercially successful, like when 2 Days in the Valley tried to ride the success of Pulp Fiction. Filmmakers are film nerds and they reference other works constantly, given the freedom (I'm watching Euphoria on HBO and suddenly there's a tracking shot lifted from the 1927 silent film Wings?). I like identifying these homages and connecting the linage of the art form. A few years ago I made an algo for it that doubles as a recommendation engine: https://cinetrii.com/
A homage usually means taking one or two shots, or perhaps a motif, from another film. It's common for a film to contain homages to many different films, and that's great - like you say, watching films and picking these out is a lot of fun.
But when a film takes lots and lots of shots and motifs from one single other film, there's a point at which it stops being a homage and becomes plagiarism.
It's been years since I've seen either of these films - although I remember Perfect Blue having a huge impact on me around age 20 - so I don't have an opinion on whether plagiarism happened here or not. Certainly the author of this article wants us to believe it did but I didn't find the article convincing one way or another.
I also wonder how common it is, and what's considered to be an acceptable level in the film industry - are there hard and fast rules about what constitutes plagiarism, like there is in academic writing? Or is there an acceptable level in the US that's different to Japan, perhaps?
> Or is there an acceptable level in the US that's different to Japan, perhaps?
Or more simply, suing cross-countries in such a complicated field as copyright, is extremely hard. In many cases, tbf, this goes both ways - which is why the US is always very keen to "harmonize" copyright laws whenever they are discussing trade deals. But the imbalance in economic resources typically means richer players in the US have a degree of recourse that non-US players will almost never get.
> But the imbalance in economic resources typically means richer players in the US have a degree of recourse that non-US players will almost never get.
Imbalance between the US and Japan? Remember this happened in the year 2000. Look up which of the two countries had higher per capita GDP back then.
In any case, it doesn't seem like anyone is suggesting this was plagiarism at a level that could be sued over - it's not a case like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly which was a shot for shot copy. I was more thinking about ideas of honor in Japan vs the US and how that might affect the respective outlook of the two directors.
In creative industries the US always had the upper hand economically on pretty much any country you can mention, since WW2. The Japanese creative sector continues to struggle with profiting from exports to this very day, their income is overwhelmingly driven by domestic audiences (which themselves are a fraction of American ones). There is absolutely no chance that a Japanese film company or distributor could ever find the money to sue a major US player, whereas the opposite is very doable.
> I was more thinking about ideas of honor in Japan vs the US
I don't think there is any particular stigma with the concept of suing for plagiarism in Japan, or any higher tolerance for copying, at least since the '90s (in the '80s and earlier, their mindset was definitely different - more similar to modern Chinese attitudes for which ripping off is just a fact of life; but newer generations are less hungry and hence less unscrupolous).
It seems like your algorithm is mostly scrapping stuff from websites? Considering your post, I thought it was either user-contributed or made entirely by you.
I only saw Requiem for a Dream when it was in the theatre and other than the soundtrack from PWEI's Clint Mansell, what I remember about it at the time was sitting in the theatre watching it and thinking that I had picked the worst date movie ever.
Some months later, she evened the score with American Psycho, so it netted out. I remember people talking about Perfect Blue, but anime wasn't my thing other than Ghost in the Shell being part of the 90s hipster/geek crossover canon.
I also made the mistake of taking a date to see Requiem for a Dream, and it turned out she had serious addiction problems in her family, and it was so emotional to see that she had to leave halfway through.
I saw Perfect Blue in theaters. It must have been 1999. I remember just being burnt out on movies that were about not knowing what was real and what wasn’t. There were so many that year (The Matrix and eXistenZ just to name two.)
Speaking of having a little too much homage, an old anime I like (mostly nostalgia) is Bubblegum Crisis and it has direct rip-offs from Blade Runner and Streets of Fire.
It sucks that Kon felt slighted, but there really is no such thing as 'too much homage'. Scorsese's The Departed is a shot-for-shot remake of Infernal Affairs and also his first Oscar. It's how art gets mades.
I've read a couple things over the years that the win for The Departed is a sort of make-up from the Academy for Scorsese losing Best Director for Raging Bull in '81 to Robert Redford (for "Ordinary People", who remembers that?) and for Goodfellas in '91 to Kevin Costner (for "Dances with Wolves", who WANTS to remember that?)
Having seen both, Ordinary People is definitely the better movie.
Goodfellas vs Dances With Wolves: A tie. Sorry, there really are people who really liked Dances With Wolves. I myself saw it again after over 20 years recently, and it's still great in my older age. Most of the criticism I've seen of it is flawed. From an artistic standpoint, it beats Goodfellas hands down - but Goodfellas is much more entertaining.
It's funny, I think your Ordinary People vs Raging Bull comment excellently underscores the original article.
Raging Bull is a cinematic masterpiece. As "art as art" it is sublime. It is a love letter to film.
Ordinary People is an emotional masterpiece. As "art as therapy" it is sublime. It is a love letter to humanity.
When people "steal" from Raging Bull it's fairly obvious and usually surface level.
Plenty of people stole from Ordinary People, too, it's just harder to spot because what they stole is more psychological and subtextual.
Just as a simple example, the most iconic televison show of the last 30 years (The Simpsons) cribbed way more from Ordinary People than Raging Bull.
If you look, it's easy to spot the influence throughout the series' run. But there's no single iconic shot like their Raging Bull slo-mo homage in "The Homer They Fall."
What does it even mean, to remember, to steal, art...?
A shot for shot for remake yes, but much longer. Scorsese clearly has no idea how to do better editing. And I wouldn't call The Departed art, rather a showcase how much worse Hollywood cinema is, compared to original art.
I won't call a film a ripoff unless it adds nothing to the world which wasn't given by the original.
Pi clears this bar easily. Sure, shooting 16mm off the hand, with oversaturated, Expressionist lighting, and some of the body horror (or did they both "rip off" Cronenberg there?) approaches homage. If one has seen Tetsuo first, there's more to appreciate.
But Pi is an excellent movie, which carries its own themes gracefully, Aronofsky made his reputation on that film and deserved to. The soundtrack was also groundbreaking.
If we were to adopt your idea of what constitutes a ripoff, the result would be more bland and defensive cinema, the kind where the script may as well have been written by the studio's attorneys.
From reading the synopsis of the plot (I've seen Pi several times, but never heard of Tetsuo: the Iron Man before), what does Tetsuo: the Iron Man have to do with Pi? The story at least shows no obvious connection.
It's a question of degree, and also one of context. In this case, he seems to have extracted a lot of value from somebody else's work without himself having created much that is new.
Satoshi Kon also worked on the excellent Jojo's Bizarre Adventure OVA from the 90's. JJBA has recently risen in popularity in the west and fans have taken to the recent anime series. But while the anime is certainly more "faithful" to the source material, I think the OVA is a much better-directed product, and more compact, to boot.
I do not know this for certain, but judging by similar releases within some period, it appears there are at least three major studios. When one releases a big film, at least one of the other large studios releases a very similar film. [1] One pair I recall is The Cave (2005) and The Descent (2005). These copies are not sharing actual source shots with each other, but I would guess there is some "studio espionage; one studio discovers what the other is doing and rushes to produce a similar film to be released within a few months of the other.
The (forgettable) film Crash with Sandra Bullock won Best Picture in the mid-2000s... but it's mostly (for the first half or so) a sanitized, watered down, far less daring or interesting version of Magnolia, which is an absolutely brilliant film.
If you’re tracing Crash back to Magnolia, keep on going until you reach Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993). Magnolia uses a similar template, just weighs it all down with more melodrama.
I recently watched Magnolia in the Prince Charles Cinema in London. I'd seen it multiple times before, but never in a cinema. The bit with the frogs was incredible, going from peaceful to absolutely deafening. That scene is now my most memorable.
There are so many movies I haven't had a chance to watch in a cinema, I wish more theaters would play classics on their largest screens. I just found out that one of our local cinemas now has weekly 'classic sneaks'. Lucky me.
I'm not going to tell you what movies you should like. Magnolia is a long film, and it takes a while to get where it is going. Some people think it's gimmick-y, others are willing to suspend belief and go with it. But either way, Julianne Moore wound tight, desperate William H Macy, lonely John C Reilly, Jason Robards on his deathbed... these are all epic performances (as is Tom Cruise of course). The secondary players as well -- Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Melora Walters, Jeremy Blackman (kid), Luis Guzman -- are superb. I acknowledge lots of people hate Magnolia but if you found it forgettable, I doubt you were even paying attention in the first place.
Given that most aspects of Japanese arts were "inspired" (ahem) by Western artists, it's just a good lesson that the shoe can hurt when put on the other foot.
I'm pretty sure without Walt Disney, there would have never been any Anime in Japan.
The "god of manga" Osamu Tezuka (yes, they call him god, not godfather) certainly never denied lifting ideas from Disney and other early American animators.
But there's the difference: Tezuka was, as the moniker makes obvious, hugely successful, also financially. It's easy to be gracious to people copying from you when you're successful yourself.
It's a very different thing when you're struggling and other people are being successful and making bank with ideas copied from you - and that is clearly what irked Satoshi Kon as well.
Everybody was lifting from everybody at the time. The two postwar periods were golden ages in creative industries precisely because there was no practical limitation to riffing and reimagining. Then the boomers got law degrees and went to work.
People take shots from other films all the time. The only weird thing about this is how close the two films were chronologically. Usually people steal from older films. But this is far from a big deal. Tarantino has talked about how Reservoir Dogs is basically a segment of one of his favourite Honk Kong films made into a whole feature. This is literally the way a lot of films get made, people are inspired, sometimes they see a scene that's quite tough or they can't quite crack it so they take from some other film. Doesn't mean they're hacks.