So I stepped away from here for a while, and I now find myself wanting to talk about a film, but with nowhere else to talk about it, so here goes.
I was just watching MIDNIGHT RUN the other night, which is a film I remember enjoying tremendously and hadn't seen in a while, and two things struck me:
-The opening sequence, where De Niro is trying to jimmy the lock of the guy he's after as a bounty hunter: he drops his pin, bends down to pick it up, and... BAM! A huge blast of gunfire blows an enormous hole through the door, right where his head would have been. Almost a duplicate of the scene in KILL BILL. Oh wait, MR came before KB.
-The entire chase sequence in the desert... the scenery, the chopper, the endless line of cop cars in pursuit, the same cop cars turning onto a dirt road and smashing into each other and the terrain in very acrobatic ways... It seemed lifted directly from the THELMA AND LOUISE playbook. Oh wait, except that TAL came AFTER MR.
So I'm curious: was everybody stealing from similar previous sources, or did MR inspire those two movies, and if so, is this common knowledge? It should be. The film is awesome. I bet it inspired more filmmakers than we will ever know with its mixture of humor, action, heart, witty dialogue and deadpan performance.
Seems sadly *fitting* that there is actually a very recent RIP thread here about Charles Grodin... Such a great performance in this movie.
I was just watching MIDNIGHT RUN the other night, which is a film I remember enjoying tremendously and hadn't seen in a while, and two things struck me:
-The opening sequence, where De Niro is trying to jimmy the lock of the guy he's after as a bounty hunter: he drops his pin, bends down to pick it up, and... BAM! A huge blast of gunfire blows an enormous hole through the door, right where his head would have been. Almost a duplicate of the scene in KILL BILL. Oh wait, MR came before KB.
-The entire chase sequence in the desert... the scenery, the chopper, the endless line of cop cars in pursuit, the same cop cars turning onto a dirt road and smashing into each other and the terrain in very acrobatic ways... It seemed lifted directly from the THELMA AND LOUISE playbook. Oh wait, except that TAL came AFTER MR.
So I'm curious: was everybody stealing from similar previous sources, or did MR inspire those two movies, and if so, is this common knowledge? It should be. The film is awesome. I bet it inspired more filmmakers than we will ever know with its mixture of humor, action, heart, witty dialogue and deadpan performance.
Seems sadly *fitting* that there is actually a very recent RIP thread here about Charles Grodin... Such a great performance in this movie.
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