the list of 9 for april 14, 2008:
NINE INSTANCES OF UNRELATED FILMS WITH THE SAME TITLE
When I was finishing up my film Claustrophobia in 2003, I noticed that, on the IMDb, ashort film of the same title was also in production. For a time, our two films accidentally mergedand I found cast and crew members associated with my film who I never even met. The problem wassoon sorted out, but it was a reminder that sometimes films come along that share the same title -and no, I'm not talking remakes. Here are nine confusing moments in cinema history:

  1. CRASH. Paul Haggis's overrated 2004 Oscar winner had a lotof art house snobs scratching their heads when it came out; everybody remembered DavidCronenberg's disturbing 1996 film of the same title pretty well. (To further muddle things up, in1992 there was a Marcia Gay Harden drama called Crush, followed a year later by an unrelatedAlicia Silverstone thriller called The Crush.)

  2. SUNSHINE. Istvan Szabo's epic portrait of 20th centuryHungary was a tour de force for star Ralph Fiennes in 1999. In 2007, Danny Boyle unleashed a scifi slasher flick. You can't get much more different than that. "Sunshine" seems to be in voguethese days, as far as film titles go: note Little Miss Sunshine and the upcomingSunshine Cleaning, costarring Claustrophobia's own Mary Lynn Rajskub.

  3. BLACK RAIN. Film distributors had a major problem on theirhands when, in 1989, two movies with the title Black Rain came out at the exact sametime. In both cases, "black rain" referred to the post-atomic bombing rain that fell onHiroshima in 1945. The similarities end there. Shohei Imamura's bleak period picture was about theevents in question; Ridley Scott's modern-day police thriller starring Michael Douglas was anothercreature entirely.

  4. JACK FROST. One of the weirdest holiday films ever wasthis 1998 family tearjerker about a rock star (Michael Keaton) who dies and comes back... as asnowman! The Jack Frost of two years earlier was about a serial killer who dies and comesback as a snowman as well, only with less friendly intentions. Unlike the above entries, I wiselyskipped both Jack Frosts. (I also skipped Robin Williams in 1996's Jack.)

  5. MR. AND MRS. SMITH. Alfred Hitchcock's limp, unsuspensefulattempt at screwball comedy in the '40s has nothing to do with the bombastic spy action of therecent Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie blockbuster.

  6. CHOCOLAT. Claire Denis' provocative drama about racerelations in colonial Africa thrilled art house audiences in 1988. Twelve years later, thesaccharine Juliette Binoche/Johnny Depp vehicle got unwarranted Oscar noms, yet was about nothingmore scandalous than sexy candy making.

  7. CARRIE. William Wyler directed a 1952 screen adaptation ofTheodore Dreiser's anti-capitalist novel Sister Carrie. Paramount released it. When Iworked at Paramount, we got a deal around Christmas where employees could buy Paramount homevideo products (tapes and DVDs) for a bargain. I laughed when one of my coworkers ordered Wyler's Carrie, mistaking it for the better-known Brian DePalma horror flick.

  8. INVINCIBLE. The 2006 Mark Wahlberg football movie was notin any way a remake of Werner Herzog's complicated 2001 Nazi/freak show drama.

  9. MAD LOVE. This list could go on and on - if you want toget foreign, compare Michael Haneke's sadistic 2001 La Pianiste with Roman Polanski's 2002Holocaust film Le Pianiste (of course they were released in the U.S. as The PianoTeacher and The Pianist, respectively - but some French folks may have gottenconfused). Or try Tom Hanks in Cast Away versus Oliver Reed in Castaway. OrBabe, the pig movie, versus The Babe, a Babe Ruth biopic that starred John Goodman.Or Twister the tornado blockbuster versus Twister the quirky comedy withCrispin Glover. But I'll finish up with Mad Love, because while most have rightfullyforgotten the lame Drew Barrymore lovers-on-the-run movie, everyone should definitely seek out thefantastically strange 1930s Mad Love with Peter Lorre as a maniac doctor.

Copyright © Mark Tapio Kines 2011