It actually got sunny and warm for a little bit this afternoon! Yay us!
Otis and I watched Barb Wire tonight. I can't be the first person to realize that it's Casablanca with silicone boobs and automatic weapons, can I?
L to R: Ex-lover, anti-hero, ex-lover's new spouse who is Important to the Cause
L to R: Ex-lover's new spouse who is Important to the Cause, ex-lover, anti-hero It's uncanny!
No, really, it is. It has a dieselpunk setting with T&A (including a way-too-long softcore-porn opening sequence), Triumph motorcycles, and lots of guns, but it also has analogues for Rick, Ilsa, and Victor Laszlo (all gender-bent), as well as Sam, Louis, Strasser, Ferrari, and Ugarte, and most of the plot points and set pieces of Casablanca, including the final scene at the airport. There's even a variation of the final line: "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" becomes "I think I'm in love."
What it doesn't have is any good acting, any real excitement, or any reason at all to watch it. It truly does suck, and I wouldn't have even mentioned it were it not for this blatant
1 comment:
I think "Casablanca"-patterning (or other "crowd-pleasing film" patterning) is more common than we realize--certainly the Roger Corman school has peen practicing the latter for years.
Another "Casablanca" film is "The Russia House." It didn't occur to me when I'd read the book, but became apparent when I saw the Sean Connery-Michelle Pfeiffer-Klaus Maria Brandauer film that Fred Schipisi made of it (with a screeplay by Harold Pinter--Pinter even starts it with a variation of the "I stick my neck out for nobody" line). The difference being that,(and this is where LeCarre comes in) at the time the story is set, with Russia becoming defanged, but the West's spy networks inflating threats to justify their budgets, that the problems of two little people DO amount to a hill of beans in a world where the Absolutes of Patriotism and Idealism and The Good Cause don't have columns in the ledger book. I thought it did an effective job of contrasting the modern age with the more innocent days of WWII--but if you got the "Casablanca" connection.
WV=bokmaub, n. Librarian on Arrakis
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