Bah! That movie is better when it’s Valmont w/ Colin Firth, Annette Bening, Meg Tilly and Fairuza Balk.
Hodge
Yeah, but in Back to the Future, I think it was done that way as sort of a self-reference thing. Just to be funny. Because it’s not as though the sequels are nothing more than recycled versions of the original. God bless Michael J. Fox. 
I haven’t seen this but I’ve heard that the American version of “La Femme Nikita” (American version being “Point of No Return”) is pretty bad.
Is “Reservoir Dogs” really a rip off? 
That’s so depressing…it’s one of my favorite films. Now I feel like I was duped into liking it…
I haven’t seen Valmont, but if it’s better than Dangerous Liaisons, I wanna see it! I loved DL and could not bring myself to watch Cruel Intentions.
I know this is the wrong thread, but I saw a rip-off of just one line that made me throw a shoe at the TV.
In Exit Wounds, a character speaks the exact same “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” line as Kevin Spacey did in The Usual Suspects.
For some reason, that blatant thievery really irritated me.
That line predates The Usual Suspects by a long shot. In fact, I thought it was pretty corny that they put it in such a good movie. This fundie girl used to wear a shirt that said that when I was in jr. high and I see bumper stickers all that say it all the time.
Tarantino lifted the situataion from the last half hour of City on Fire, and many scenes were direct copies. However, most of what you see in Reservoir Dogs is original material that Tarantino added. The 5 minute flashback that sets up “Mr. Pink” is actually substituted for the first 60-70 minutes of City on Fire. Whether it’s a rip-off is a matter of debate, but I think they’re both very good movies, and different enought that seeing one doesn’t spoil a viewing of the other. For the first hour of City on Fire, you won’t see any similarity to Reservoir Dogs.
Point of No Return is a poor remake. The Hong Kong version, called Black Cat, though not as good as the original, is quite good, though the story is filtered throuhg a Hong Kong mentality.
NumberSix I really need to work on my simlies.
[sub]no I won’t[/sub]
Ok I saw this one movie where this guy and a girl fall in love and later they get married. I’m pretty sure I saw that one befor.
Elfkin how can you say that Volcano and Dante’s Peak are the same movie? Other than the fact a volcano and some vulcanologist are in it the movies are totally different. Volcano is a beautiful movie about race relations.
‘With the ash on them I can’t tell them apart’
WhooHoo!
I haven’t seen the movie itself yet, but the ads for “The Musketeer” show a fight scene involving ladders that is ripped directly from a Jet Li fight scene in “Once Upon A Time In China.” It’s so obvious that, although I’ve only seen the China fight scene once, I recognized it immediately.
Zebra: Consider me whooshed. In my defense, though, I’ve read similar complaints before that were very vehemently defended, so sometimes it’s difficult to tell if someone is serious or not. I tend to read such comments as being serious unless smileyed. But that’s my problem.
The Fast and the Furious is the same movie as Point Break except with cars instead of surfing. I was amazed at how similar it was
The film Pure Luck was once recommended to by this girl whose opinion means very little to me. However, I had nothing better to do, so I decided to give the thing a try. It turned out that the WHOLE freaking movie was a scene-for-scene, line-for-line (in direct translation) of the French movie entitled La Chevre with Pierre Richard. I fine-combed the credits, and nowhere was this mentioned. To add to things a little, the French original was much funnier, as some of the jokes simply didn’t translate very well.
Not sure. The Internet Movie DataBase for Pure Luck says that Francis Veber (the director and writer of La Chevre) was given writing credit in Pure Luck, as the writer of La Chevre.
In True Stories, a charming film by David Byrne in 1986, there’s a scene where he’s driving and sees a paper bag blowing in the wind, and comments about how sometimes everything is so beautiful, he can hardly stand to hold it inside, a la American Beauty.
How are we defining “ripoff” here? Remaking a movie? There was an inferior 1960s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s * Rashomon*, called The Outrage, starring William Shatner. It is a bad, bad movie, and I would not hesitate in calling it a ripoff of Kurosawa’s masterpiece. However, The Magnificent Seven, generally acknowledged to be a classic Western, is a remake of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Is that also a ripoff?
There seems to be a fine line between plagiarism and homage. How do you define the boundary between the two? Shakespeare himself borrowed most of the plots of his plays from extant works. Was he ripping off Holinshed or creating something entirely new? Was Kurosawa ripping off Shakespeare by recycling King Lear’s plot in his war epic, Ran?
rjung:
In basic plot, sure, but how can you get a bigger rip-off than redoing a hockey movie with soccer? Heck, if I recall correctly, both movies even end with the game being tied at the end, the victor to be decided by a series of five penalty shots/kicks, and the same exact sequence of goals and misses by the two teams that ends in ultimate victory! (I might be slightly off there, but I don’t think I am.)
Chaim Mattis Keller
Heck, even Shakespeare didn’t come up with it first. Check these out:
Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England (1577 edition)
Samuel Harsnett’s treatise, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603)
and A Mirror for Magistrates (1610 edition) features Cordelia.
There is nothing new under the sun (and I didn’t say that first, either). How many times have I duplicated someone else’s thread title? All authors and filmmakers should be forced to run a search before writing anything.
:sheepish grin:
Ah, I see you already mentioned that, gobear. I do apologise. Sorry…
I was just trying to show how easy it is to rip someone off unintentionally… sorry…
Oooops… maybe my fine comb is missing some teeth. Thanks for the reality-check.