so does that mean those movies were unoriginal as well? the only simmilariti with last samurai is a person falling in love with another culture. the samurai were criminals who wanted to keep Japan from entering the modern age. They had a beautiful culture, but they weren't really victims like the Indians or the Navi.
Having a few simmilarities and being a complete rip off aren't the same.
Did you miss the part where I said that they're not the same exact story? I said they share the same basic premise because they do: A white soldier in a foreign land comes in contact with an indigenous culture, adopts it as his own (or "goes native"), and then helps that culture retaliate against the white people who are encroaching on them. And yes, "Dances With Wolves" counts because the native tribes were not a part of his homeland. That is the basic premise that they all share. Of course the specifics are different, but I
conceded to that in my original statement. I also said nothing about whether or not the movies themselves were original. You said I was nitpicking and I responded by saying that they all shared the same basic premise, which is not nitpicking, it's fact. I said nothing about their originality or lack thereof.
yes it would, but the description you just gave make it sound completely unoriginal. he didn't invent a new story. he just filmed his life. how does that count as original? that would be like me telling you what happend the other day and calling it my brand new original story. It's not a brand new story if it just happened the other day.
And really the whole reality tv is about as unoriginal as you can get. It's all my mom has been watching for the last 15 years. it's so freaking old and boring. It's been milked for all it's worth. And then splicing it with other people's movies? How is using film from somebody else's movie original?
You just made this movie sound like the most unoriginal movie of all time.
What the hell does reality television have to do with anything? Since you're clearly not reading (or understanding) what
I'm writing, would it help if I let the always eloquent Roger Ebert explain the film to you?
" '
Tarnation' is the record of that pain, and a journal about the way [Jonathan Caouette] dealt with it -- first as a kid, now as the director of this film, made in his early 30s. It is a remarkable film, immediate, urgent, angry, poetic and stubbornly hopeful. It has been constructed from the materials of a lifetime: Old home movies, answering machine tapes, letters and telegrams, photographs, clippings, new video footage, recent interviews and printed titles that summarize and explain Jonathan's life. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," T.S. Eliot wrote in "The Waste Land," and Caouette does the same thing.
His film tells the story of a boy growing up gay in Houston and trying to deal with a schizophrenic mother. He had a horrible childhood. By the time he was 6, his father had left the scene, he had been abused in foster homes, and he traveled with his mother to Chicago, where he witnessed her being raped. Eventually they both lived in Houston with her parents, Adolph and Rosemary Davis, who had problems of their own.
Caouette dealt with these experiences by stepping outside himself and playing roles. He got a video camera and began to dress up and film himself playing characters whose problems were not unlike his own. In a sense, that's when he began making "
Tarnation"; we see him at 11, dressed as a woman, performing an extraordinary monologue of madness and obsession.
...
The method of the film is crucial to its success. "
Tarnation" is famous for having been made for $218 on a Macintosh and edited with the free iMovie software that came with the computer. Of course hundreds of thousands were later spent to clear music rights, improve the soundtrack and make a theatrical print (which was invited to play at Cannes). Caouette's use of iMovie is virtuoso, with overlapping wipes, dissolves, saturation, split screens, multiple panes, graphics, and complex montages. There is a danger with such programs that filmmakers will use every bell and whistle just because it is available, but "
Tarnation" uses its jagged style without abusing it.
Caouette's technique would be irrelevant if his film did not deliver so directly on an emotional level. We get an immediate, visceral sense of the unhappiness of Renee and young Jonathan. We see the beautiful young girl fade into a tortured adult. We see Jonathan not only raising himself, but essentially inventing himself. I asked him once if he had decided he didn't like the character life had assigned for him to play, and simply created a different character, and became that character. 'I think that's about what happened,' he said.
...
Jonathan Caouette not only experienced his life, but recorded his experience, and his footage of himself as a child says what he needs to say more eloquently than any actor could portray it or any writer could describe it."
It would help if you would bother to read the whole thing closely, because you're clearly not doing that with my posts.
If you can't understand the originality of Tarnation's technique, intent, and content, then I question the depth of your overall understanding of film making and art in general.
Also, it's spelled "similarities". If you don't know how a word is spelled you can either look it up since you're already on the internet, or you can just
use a different word.
