Small Film Sets { }
With thanks to the Letterboxd community.
If you’ve been following along for a while, you might remember that my theme for Ubercross A was ANALOGOUS FILMS, movies with surprising similarities.
It’s tough to do these well by working at them head-on, because when you think of “similar movies,” you tend to think of the unsurprisingly similar ones first. Like, it’s not exactly a shocker that the Percy Jackson movies are similar to the Harry Potter franchise. And if you try too hard, the connections you build tend to feel forced.
To come up with a truly surprising connection that no one’s thought of before, I’d recommend relaxing, enjoying movies, and just writing down little thoughts as they come to you. But man, I hate working like that. I’m a nose-to-the-grindstone, make-a-plan-and-get-it-done type of content creator. The few movie connections I could find for the Ubercross “Big A” and “Small A” were almost as much as I could manage, and the two smaller ones came from research, not from my own inspiration.
Fortunately for me, the Letterboxd community is on the case. Letterboxd is best described as “informal reviews by film fans,” and those reviews can range from the length of a short tweet to full-blown essays. It’s open to anyone, but upvotes soon drive certain responses to the top.
More relevant to my interests is its “lists” section, which is run in a similar fashion. Although most fan-built lists are dozens or hundreds of films long, occasionally a list will contain only a few films that meet some narrow parameters. Some are full summaries, and some are just a few aspects, but all involve some pretty weird coincidences. Like so:
If you know Get Out, then you probably guessed that one without even looking…but the description also fits Shrek 2 pretty well, for the most part. (Fiona’s mother isn’t quite the racist her husband is, and he’s redeemed by the film’s end, but…)
Films where the main character’s child is abducted, and they must embark on a dangerous quest to save them from being given to an abusive owner: Taken and Finding Nemo (Ronnie Botes). Again, I might quibble with the word “abducted”; maybe “removed by force”? But the rest is on the money.
A rural community of women decide together to escape their oppressors in search of a better future: Chicken Run and Women Talking (Jonathan Boehle)
A blue guy named Sully has unique access to a hostile species that maintains the most precious resource in the world. He discovers the species is not what he thought, befriending a young female and eventually fighting against his own kind to protect her: Avatar and Monsters, Inc. (Camn)
Movies where, about 50 minutes in, the protagonist’s adoptive mother drives him out into the forest to abandon him, because his life has been threatened and apparently throwing him into the woods by surprise seems like the safest option: A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) and The Fox and the Hound (Jonathan Boehle)
Late 1990s movies with Kevin Spacey as a bad dude whose trailers used “Baba O’Riley”: A Bug’s Life and American Beauty (Jonathan Boehle)
Movies where Ryan Gosling wants to [have sex with] a doll: Lars and the Real Girl and Barbie (Matthew Tonis)
You’ll notice a distinct pattern here: all but one of these pairings have one cartoon marketed to kids and one “grown-up” film that isn’t. The exception is Lars/Barbie, and Barbie could be mistaken for a kids’ movie by those who haven’t seen the trailer, which makes it clear the upcoming film will earn its PG-13 rating.
That wasn’t true in my puzzles, which tended to cross genre barriers but only crossed audience-age barriers once out of five pairings. There is something compellingly funny about finding a kids’-movie plot mirrored in an adults’ movie, and vice versa. But it’s still interesting how often the Letterboxd lists go to that well.
I just wish I didn’t have to comb through so many other lengthy lists to get the short ones. Note to Letterboxd: a separate page for “lists of two movies” or “lists of fewer than ten movies” would probably be more popular than you think!
