Wednesday, July 25, 2007

It's Virtually the Same Movie


When I was in college, a friend of mine got an A +++++++++++++++ for writing a cinema studies paper about how Cape Fear and What About Bob? are basically the same movie. Think about it, he was totally right on.

Anyway, bizarrely, we watched Aki Kaurismaki's The Man Without a Past the night after we watched Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and the similarities are crazy. Watch them. I'm serious. Man from nowhere with a mysterious past comes into people's lives and changes them for the better. A dog figures heavily in both. Male friendship is a major theme of both, and alcohol is the lubricant that pats that friendship on the bottom and moves it along.

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