Comments on: Open Forum Friday: What’s The Difference Between Homage and Theft?

By: Ian

Ian — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 01:37:30 +0000

I hate to be like Capt’n Obvious here but when a movie takes the whole device of a scene and plays it in a similar situation then it is a theft. I would think that homage is more like when a director uses a creative device from a previous movie but in a somewhat novel way. I would call Brian DePalma’s use of the stairway scene at the train station in The Untouchables an homage to Sergei Eisenstein’s steps of Odessa scene from Battleship Potemkin. I would call Michael Bay’s whole film The Island a theft of Robert S. Fiveson’s The Clonus Horror, as the plot and the essential action of the characters are the same. I do not feel the change in style and the upgrade of visual effects are relevant as a significant source of originality in this question. I agree with Bolbo in the sense of this being an experiment and spoke more about this in my comment about Apocalypse Oz.

By: Bolbo

Bolbo — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 23:25:16 +0000

In the case of something like this ‘Apocalypse Oz’ movie it is to miss the point entirely to critisize it for unoriginality. From what I can tell from the site, it’s reason for being is precisely a repurposing of found materials in an experimental fashion. They point out too that the movies its based on are themselves adaptations of other people’s work. We don’t critisize Coppola or the Wizard of Oz for ripping off other people’s work, yet in many respects that’s what they did. ‘Apocalypse Oz’ seems to have some fair use/ copyright issue thing going on aswell. I think its an interesting project – and not just a trailer parody, but a new movie altogether. They aren’t claiming originality of the source material though. Tarantino on the other hand blatantly lifts and claims it as his own. God knows how he got away with ‘Reservoir Dogs’.