All this recent DePalma talk's got me thinking about a lot of my favorite filmmakers and the general approach they take to carving out their own, unique artistic identity. DePalma's a perfect example of a prominent director who conventional wisdom says had trouble getting out of the way of his titanic influences. balmakboor argued that De Palma didn't merely copy and paste stuff from Rear Window or Vertigo into his work, but rather "made careful inclusions and omissions and alterations that changed or even inverted the meaning of Hitchcock's narrative." I don't necessarily see that, though. To me, it's obvious he didn't immediately forge an individual distinctiveness because he (probably consciously & unconsciously) got too bogged down in Hitchcock, whatever his intentions of doing so were. It's not even that I find it especially offensive in DePalma's thrillers, (in fact, I'm a pretty big fan of most of the films he gets the most flak for in this regard) it's just that it is distracting and it can sorta take you out of "the moment." I think if you go and watch Blow Out or even Carrie, it's easy to see that that's where he's at the top of his game. He still takes inspiration from Hitch, but he distills that inspiration and re-conceptualizes it in his own brand
But I mean, it's a really fine line, right? It's okay in my book for directors to give nods to their heroes, sure, but they've also gotta bring something original to the table. Like, I'm a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson, but there are still many cringe-inducingly winking moments in Magnolia & Boogie Nights (easily my 2 least favorite of his) that are just so dang distracting to me because of his constant aping of Scorsese or Altman. Or like the I Am Cuba woman. I can almost forgive that in those films, though, because they're pretty enjoyable enough in their own right to make the references feel like less of a crutch. But, again, then there's stuff like De Palma's early movies that so meticulously rip off Hitchcock, it gets to a level where it's just hard to watch for me. It feels like the fleeting homage is the whole point and that's just lame. Even worse than all that, though, are more egregious examples like when Tarantino just out-and-out steals the whole American Boy needle in the chest story and shoves it into Pulp Fiction. And then that becomes this modern classic scene when, in reality, QT didn't come up with it. He blatantly stole it from a relatively obscure movie and, yeah, he's quick to acknowledge it when someone calls him on it, but it still feels wrong to me
So where do you draw the line?