fine whine

(for posterity, this is)

Jarlsberg? Great stuff.

It's a good cheese for crackers.

Seriously, though, why is it that wherever I turn I run into a homage to Casablanca? This probably all started last weekend with a shotgun showing of Overdrawn at the memory bank, as seen on MST3K. That video's a pretty direct rip of the Bogie classic, and even starts up the film in a couple places, WB logo and all. Yesterday I watched Neil Simon's Cheap detective, billed by Blockbuster as a follow-up to Murder by death (about which I have previously written. The only connection I see between the two Neil Simon films is Peter Falk as Sam Spade. Well, that and the messy ending -- neither movie seems able to end cleanly. So many plots and characters pass through the proceedings that a conclusion without a big mess is just about impossible.

The last Neil Simon movie I saw with a decent denouement was The Sunshine boys, but that could be due to the cast of characters numbering in the single digits. But I digress.

Cheap detective takes a bunch of bits out of the old Warner movies (not like Dead men don't wear plaid does, literally) and turns it into a clever spoof of the whole Sam Spade/Dashiell Hammett oeuvre. It makes them its own, though, and I think I'm sure to recognize more bits here and there as I watch more old films.

But that's not the end of it. I've been watching series at a time of the BBC sci-fi show Red dwarf, and the very first episode of the fourth series lifts a great bit of the ending, wholesale. Sure, they say "we'll always have Parrots" but it's there, somewhere.

The "Parrots" bit really is brilliant, I must say.