Why do people say this inspired Mann's LOTM?
Admittedly I am only halfway through, but I don't see any similarity whatsoever to LOTM.
shareI am guessing but the answer probably had to do with the example Barry Lyndon as a period piece adapted, but not slavishly so, from a work of fiction about 150 years old with excellent cinematography and intense use of the music in the sound track. There is also the fact beyond the period piece angle that both are set during the Seven Years War, called the French and Indian War by Americans referring to the part that played out in North America. This extended to the visuals of the battle scenes involving uniforms and weapons of the same general kind.
I would not carry the notion of similarity too far, of course. The respective primary thematic concerns are not equivalent.
But the question implicitly concerns whether we can see elements in BL that might have inspired Mann. I think what I have listed is adequate to overcome the notion that there was no similarity.
I get how they had similar settings and all but I've heard people say LOTM basically "was Barry Lyndon", and I just don't see that all all, the stories are completely different.
shareMott,
Your OP said they were not similar at all. Your second post instead made it sound like they were the same "basically". There is a middle ground, as I pointed out. Best I can do.
I didn't say they were basically the same, I said they were basically set in the same time period and region.
In my OP I was referring to posts I saw that suggested the story lines were similar, which I don't see at all.
"You're influenced by who you like. I like Stanley Kubrick, I like Alain Resnais immensely. I like Andrei Tarkovsky, although there's very little in Tarkovsky I'd want to do myself. In fact I fell asleep through half of Solaris (1972), but I still love it. And Stalker (1979). He has a Russian, suffering nerve of pace that it's hard to relate to, but you can't help being impressed and moved by what you see." - Michael Mann
Mann tries to imbue old fashioned action adventures with the aesthetics of high brow directors.
His work on "Mohicans" may have been influenced by Kubrick's location photography in "Barry Lyndon", but I think a bigger influence was John Ford's "Drums Along the Mohawk".
OK, perhaps I didn't explain correctly, I was watching a review of "LOTM" and all the 3 of the guys said "This is basically Barry Lyndon", the way they said it was suggesting it was a similar story, which is was not. I can understand if Mann was influenced by the film as far as setting, style, etc, but they made it sound like it was just a copy of BL with a different setting/characters, etc.
share