Just because it's your fave don't mean it ain't literature
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So, Sons of Anarchy is Hamlet, more or less, and so is The Lion King.
Any others like this come to mind? Extra helpful if the ‘original’ classic is a play.
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@Gashlycrumb Clueless is Emma! And there’s a fair number of modern twists on Shakespeare, like 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s the Man.
she/her | playlist
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Thanks! I heard about 10 Things… being The Taming of the Shrew, but didn’t know about She’s the Man or Clueless.
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A few more:
- Oh Brother Where Art Thou is The Odyssey
- Cruel Intentions is Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons)
- Roxanne is Cyrano de Bergerac
- O is Othello
- West Side Story is Romeo & Juliet
- Bridget Jones’s Diary is Pride & Prejudice
- RENT is La Boheme
- Apocalypse Now is Heart of Darkness
- Kurosawa’s Ran is King Lear
she/her | playlist
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@Roz Ooh, excellent.
Also ha. I once created trouble by joking around about how The Stand is Watership Down is The Oydessy. (The trouble being that someone repeated it and her thesis advisor said cool.)
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This is a kickass thread.
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Warm Bodies is Romeo and Juliet.
Throne of Blood is MacBeth.
Just One of the Guys is Twelfth Night.
The Big Lebowski is The Big Sleep.
Psych is Sherlock Holmes.
The Nanny is Jane Eyre, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. -
Star Wars is The Hidden Fortress from Akira Kurosawa.
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@Hobbie said in Just because it's your fave don't mean it ain't literature:
Star Wars is The Hidden Fortress from Akira Kurosawa.
Ohh, if we’re doing that…
A Fistful of Dollars is just Yojimbo dressed up as a Western. But Yojimbo is lifted off of Dashiell Hammett, with Kurosawa himself saying he based it on The Glass Key. Which, amusingly, inspired the Coen brothers when they were making Miller’s Crossing. So there’s that fun Gordian knot.
Also, you’ll see some folks claiming that The Northman was based on Hamlet. This isn’t true. The Northman and Hamlet were both based on the legend of Amleth from Gesta Danorum. So Shakespeare and Robert Eggers were writing two very different stories from the same legend, kind of like Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory both writing King Arthur stories a few hundred years apart.
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@Aria said in Just because it's your fave don't mean it ain't literature:
Wars is The Hidden Fortress from Akira Kurosawa.Ohh, if we’re doing that…
Totally do that, it’s fun and and I’m exited to know it.
I’m looking for ones where it’s an English-class ‘classic’ play but it’s a lot more fun when not narrowed.
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@Aria And Vantage Point is Rashomon, but that’s not how I remember it.
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During my teaching days, I read a student’s essay that stuck with me. It asserted that The Godfather trilogy is essentially a retelling of the Oresteia in Mob outfits. I’m not sure I agree but it’s definitely a reading I can enjoy.
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To sort of follow on from my previous post I’d like to raise a question for the group: Is there a line at which you draw a distinction between “this seems like X” and “oh this outright is X in a new dress”, or is it generally more a vague evolution?
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@Pavel For me, pretty vague.
For my students, I’ve got to pre-approve their suggestion. but I’d go with, “If you can argue it, argue it,”’ 'cause. Fun.
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The movie “The Great Gatsby” is a retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.
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The 2023 movie, ‘Anyone but You’ is based on Shakespeare’s play ‘Much Ado About Nothing’.
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I don’t know if it was intentional, but Materialists is Sweet Home Alabama.
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Groundhog Day is an adaptation of parts of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I think this counts because of a few lines:
Nietzsche: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’”
Groundhog Day
Phil: I’m a god.
Rita: You’re God?
Phil: I’m a god. I’m not the God… I don’t think.
Rita: Because you survived a car wreck?
Phil: I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned.
Rita: Oh, really?
Phil: …and every morning I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender… I am an immortal.Nietzsche: “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful.”
One could say that the point of Groundhog Day is that Phil Connors learns to understand the beauty of things, especially insofar as when he and Rita wake up the morning after, once the eternal recurrence has ended, he says, “It’s beautiful. Let’s live here,” showing a strong sense of amor fati.
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Arguable, but the Teshigahara film Woman in the Dunes is based on The Castle by Franz Kafka, specifically the first part and the reaction by the villages. Also, please watch Woman in the Dunes, it is beautiful.
