The Most Influential Genre Movies

By Aaron 7/5/2007

What is a genre? “Genre” is defined as “a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, content, technique.” So a movie genre is a category in which to group movies. What makes a genre? A good movie. Movies, unlike plays can’t be grouped into simply “tragedy” and “comedy.” Instead, over time we have created the action movie, and then the action comedy, and so on. There are some movies that helped jump-start these genres, and the movies that followed them took a lot from these movies.

 

Rocky (1976)

Inspired: Rocky II-Rocky Balboa, Million Dollar Baby, Raging Bull, Cinderella Man

Honorable Note: On The Waterfront

Importance: The fight movie
 

Rocky was a pretty solid movie that revived sports movies and brought boxing to the big screen while establishing the staple storyline of the troubled/struggling challenger. Rocky helped flesh out the “fight movie” storyline and rehashed the clichés in a more cohesive fashion. Rocky is the important step in the evolution of boxing movies that creates a mold for ensuing movies to follow – down on his luck boxer gets one shot to make it big. On the Waterfront and the famous line, “I coulda been a contender,” comes to mind, but that is about life on the docks, not boxing. Another important contribution Rocky made was its “successful” use of the montage, which would later be copied by all sorts of sports movies.

 

Star Wars (1977)

Inspired: Star Wars I-III, V-IV, Star Trek, all space sci fi movies

Honorable Note: “Star Trek” (TV)

Importance: The spaceships of the future
 

Lucas’ movie was the first that really made people go, “wow, that’s a sweet starship.” This movie replaced the cheesy, saucer movies with the bad-ass looking Star Destroyers. Star Wars’ influence went beyond its contributions to the sci-fi genre. As a franchise, Star Wars harnessed a rabid fan base to make gobs of money. From a marketing standpoint Star Wars paved the way for movies to promote themselves through fast food chains and every other possible promotional avenue. The Star Trek TV show comes mildly close, but the show still didn’t have the “wow” effect or the vision that Lucas had.

 
Chinatown (1974)

Inspired: Two Jakes, LA Confidential, Black Dahlia, Hollywoodland

Honorable Note: The Third Man

Importance: The suspense noir
 

Chinatown was one of the first movies that was suspenseful. You didn’t quite know what was going on. At the same time, it was possible to figure out what was going on. The attitudes of the protagonists and the love interests are modeled in nearly every other noir – the sort of off-hand nonchalance of Nicholson and the dark past of Faye Dunaway’s character. Without this movie, one of my all time favorites, LA Confidential, never would have happened and likely would not even have been written. This movie also has one of the all-time classic movie posters, so that helps too.

 

Some Like it Hot (1959)

Inspired: Tootsie, every romantic comedy

Honorable Note: The Apartment

Importance: The modern romantic comedy
 

Some Like it Hot won a close battle with The Apartment for one simple reason: the lie factor. Almost every romantic comedy has the basic formula of falling in love in the first forty minutes, followed by a fight in the middle, usually revolving around a lie one of the characters told and then a happy ending. This lie concept was almost brand new here, and if it wasn’t, this was the first comedy to do so. This is also one of the most popular comedies about relationships and love. The other reasons Some Like it Hot wins out is because it was a vehicle for a comedy tandem (Curtis & Lemon) and because it features a bombshell (Monroe), both important characteristics of the modern romantic comedy. Some Like it Hot also helped introduce “uncomfortable comedy,” as I call it, into the mainstream.
 

Enter the Dragon (1973)

Inspired: The Quest, Bloodsport, Kickboxer, Mortal Kombat

Honorable Note:

Importance: Kung fu challenges
 

Enter the Dragon is sweet. Straight up.  But without this movie, many franchises would never have existed. The movies it influenced, and other (even lesser) franchises, thrived on the formula of focusing on one protagonist literally fighting his way to the top. Those movies had little else beyond the round by round action (as an aside my favorite one is The Quest which features a small role played by Roger Moore who actually doesn’t suck for once). Enter the Dragon is easily the best of these movies because it does the best job of telling character back stories and being more than just a fight by fight movie. Most of the other movies, with a slight exception to Mortal Kombat, skipped over these “character development” and “plot” details. Speaking of Mortal Kombat, its arguable that video games such as Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Tokken, and such, as well as their numerous offspring, would never have existed without Enter the Dragon.

 

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Inspired: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Stardust, The Golden Compass, Harry Potter

Honorable Note:

Importance: Fantasy movies/special effects
 

LOTR was a revolutionary step forward in the fantasy genre. Cult favorites like Willow and Labyrinth were good, but they weren’t close to great. They weren’t marketable and studio execs weren’t falling over themselves to produce more of them. After LOTR, execs were killing for fantasy novel rights. LOTR was more than a franchise – it was a good movie and a good adaptation. Earlier attempts to turn LOTR into a movie had failed miserably, but Jackson’s touch was perfect – combining great special effects, good action, beautiful New Zealand and epic scope. In the wake of LOTR we got movies from other popular children’s fantasy books like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Stardust, The Golden Compass, Harry Potter.

 

From Russia With Love (1963)

Inspired: James Bond X, The Bourne Identity, every action movie

Honorable Note: Goldfinger, North by Northwest

Importance: The modern action movie
 

From Russia With Love doesn’t have the flare of Goldfinger, or a line anywhere near, “No Mr. Bond I expect you to die,” but it strongly influenced the course of Goldfinger. From Russia With Love is closer to many of the other, more serious, straight-laced spy flicks outside of the Bond universe. North by Northwest came close, but it didn’t really build on a film institution like James Bond, and Hitchcock was already established. From Russia With Love is just a strong espionage flick – it begins the introduction of gadgets, the role of counteragents, stealth and other such plot devices that would be recycled and reused in later movies. This movie brought credibility and identity to a young franchise and created a template that would be used for twenty movies.

 

Spartacus (1960)

Inspired: Braveheart, Gladiator, The Patriot

Honorable Note: Ben-Hur

Importance: The epic movie
 

Spartacus was a movie that took a well-established actor (Kirk Douglas), and built an epic movie around him. This practice was a marketing trick studios would use in the nineties to bring back the historical epic. Spartacus tried to turn a mildly shocking realism (white slavery and death matches) into a popular movie and succeeded by choosing to embellish the life of a man who tried to challenge the Roman Empire. Ben-Hur was more of a religious movie that thrived more on the religious supernatural and Sodom and Gomorrah mold than on the historical epic. Spartacus also heavily influences Gladiator, a Best Picture winner, with its uprising/gladiator/handsome rogue themes. Spartacus also lent a lot of themes to the Mel Gibson epics in their story progression and endings.

 

Porky’s (1982)

Inspired: American Pie, Road Trip, National Lampoon’s Van Wilder

Honorable Note: American Graffiti, Animal House

Importance: The teen comedy
 

As much as I wanted to put one of my favorite movies down, American Graffiti, Porky’s won out. Porky’s is more of the immature, teenage, sex comedy that would dominate my generation’s late nineties, spawning a successful comedy franchise that shared a similar storyline (the American Pie movies). Porky’s has the geeky protagonist and the quest for sex whereas Graffiti has the mature, nostalgic feel of subtle brilliance. In fact, Graffiti lost out because it was a better movie because it was simply more than a cheap teen attraction. Animal House barely enters the equation because Animal House was more college humor than teen comedy. Porky’s raunch and nudity as well as its cheap-to-make and weak dialogue became a template for studios to crank out the modern teen comedies that plagued the nineties.

 

Batman (1989)

Inspired: Batman Forever, Spiderman, X-Men, Daredevil

Honorable Note: Dick Tracy

Importance: The comic book franchise
 

*gasps* Who are you? Batman. Batman was a dark film that tried very hard to honor the comic. It’s financial success and popularity helped pave the way for the financial megastars like Spiderman and X-Men. Dick Tracy gets some notice because it was an early comic flick, but it was before its time and didn’t come anywhere close to the financial or popular success of Batman. Batman’s strong performance by Jack Nicholson, as the Joker, was a tough act for Danny DeVito to follow, and Jack’s maniacal extremes clearly helped influence Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin. Again, just like Star Wars, Batman was and important component in the comic industry’s ability to market movies to the public as Batman got a McDonald’s deal and quickly unloaded as much merchandise as it possibly could.

 

48 Hrs. (1982)

Inspired: Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour

Honorable Note: Beverly Hills Cop

Importance: The buddy (action) comedy
 

48 Hrs creates a commercial friendly formula for comedic action movies: pairing a fast talking comedian with a hard-nosed action star. The movie has all the pieces that come back in the late eighties and nineties to revive various careers – a funnyman who is either really good (Martin Lawrence in Blue Streak) or really incompetent (Chris Tucker in Rush Hour) along with a fish out of water story (Jackie Chan et al.) 48 Hours won a close battle with Beverly Hills Cop because BHC doesn’t have a strong buddy element – its sort of just action with slapstick and fast talking while 48 Hours has two good actors playing off of each other.

Could “Avatar” Win Best Picture?

By Brett Hogan

 

Last week, the trailer for James Cameron’s sci-fi experiment “Avatar” debuted. While initially unimpressed with the teaser, I began to wonder: Could this film win best picture? 

 

Buzz has been generating for this movie for years. Years. The technology to make this movie didn’t exist when Cameron conceived it, so he invented it. When is the last time you heard of a director spearheading the invention of anything? The casting started in 2005. Most movies these days, even epics, are done in half that time. I could go on. 

 

The most important thing to take away from all of this is that people are saying this will be the future of movies. Now, I don’t agree with the idea that CGI will become more prevalent than it already is. But I do believe that this will set the bar miles higher for sci-fi. I mean, that is what Titanic did. And that won some awards if memory serves.

 

I’ll bet you’re asking yourself, how can you even suggest that a film like this will win Best Picture when the initial trailer was nothing better than visual stimulation? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, the Academy has expanded Best Picture to ten films. This doesn’t guarantee anything other than improved chances for most films on the cusp.

 

Second, after last year’s Oscars debacle, which saw the best film of the year, “The Dark Knight,” not only get shafted in awards but nominations as well, the Academy is pulling out all the stops to appease those with the loudest voices in the film industry, the fanboys. Now, the Academy probably didn’t lose anything because of that other than some viewers of the award show. Perhaps if people are again outraged with the winners or nominees, the heads of the Academy would lose their jobs. So this is all about the Academy protecting itself, which is not so outrageous.  

 

 

Third, there is an economic motive here. I’ve heard this film will cost $190 million, not counting the R&D costs associated with Cameron’s inventions or the cost of getting 3-D cameras into every theater in the country. The Academy will do everything in its power to get people into the seats and make this the next “Titanic” or “The Dark Knight.” But the Academy doesn’t have much power, besides nominating and awarding, so they will slap the “Nominated for Best Picture” moniker onto every commercial and print ad to get the people who didn’t believe the critics to relent and see this movie.

 

Of course, all of this is pure conjecture, and no revolutionary film (Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, etc.) has ever won the Best Picture category because it changed the game. Except maybe Titanic. But still, could this movie actually win? My answer is no but a nomination is certain and who knows what could happen from there. We’ll know more come February 2010.