Cross posted from
Yellow Bunting
Genre is a useful tool for classifying films and a good way
to attract certain audiences to certain films. Sub-genres and Hybrid-genres are
a way for directors and writers to come up with new ideas and unique pieces of
work. Sometimes then they accidently kick off a (usually short lived) trend:
Cowboy-Ninja Films
What’s cool? Cowboys are cool. What else is cool? Ninja.
Therefore cool squared is personified by films like
Bunraku (Guy Moshe, 2010) and
The Warrior’s Way (Sngmoo Lee, 2010). Both genres share similar
themes such as honour, revenge, redemption etc and in both these cases at
least, makes for some striking visuals with
The
Warrior’s Way evoking a steampunk-esque aesthetic while
Bunraku favouring a comic book/puppet
theatre inspired look.
Terminal Illness Rom Coms
The perfect valentine’s date movie. Or not. 2010 and 2011
saw the release of
Love and Other Drugs (Edward Zwick, 2010) and
A
Little Bit of Heaven (Nicole Kassel, 2011). One starred Anne Hathaway
and the other Kate Hudson and each played a woman who was dying from an awful
terminal illness but found love. So that was nice.
For painfully obvious reason neither film was terribly well
received though A Little Bit of Heaven got
it far worse. Possibly because of the absence of Anne Hathaway.
Victorian Department Store Melodramas
Oh how the big wigs at ITV must have been kicking themselves
when BBC broadcast The Paradise last
year. Their own series Mr Selfridge looked
like a rip off in comparison. Despite the fact that The Paradise is derived
from a novel from Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart (albeit with all of Zola’s ideas
on Hereditary personality deficiencies within a screwed up French family, the
very thing the series was written to demonstrate, removed) novels and Mr
Selfridge is based on the establishment of (guess where?) Selfridges department
store on Oxford Street the two share a
staggering number of characters and plot devices. Eccentric, brilliant owner whose
ideas are scoffed at but eventually proved right? CHECK. Young naïve sales girl
with hidden talents for retail? CHECK. Men throwing themselves at her from all
directions? CHECK. Rich bitch in fabulous hats skulking around and manipulating
everyone? CHECK. Swooshing skirts. CHECK.
NOTE: I am aware that being set in 1906, Mr Selfridge should properly be termed
an Edwardian Department Store
Melodrama, but that aside, all the other glaring similarities between the two
still stand.
Films based on board games
Battleship I’m
looking at you. But it may surprise you to learn that another classic family
favourite, Cluedo, was turned into a film in the 1980s. Clue (Johnathan Lynn, 1985) stars Tim Curry as butler who brings
together a group of eccentric and chromatically themed characters in a case of
blackmail and murder. It is wonderfully tacky and gloriously cheesy and comes
complete with three different endings, only one of which makes sense but don’t
think too hard about that. It was poorly received but has become a cult classic.
Horrifyingly it is being remade by Gore Verbinski.