Have you ever seen Murder By Death? I have. I watched it last night. It's a "dinner-and-a-murder" caper written by Neil Simon. Really, it's almost a spoof of capers, but that's a hard call to make because capers are spoofs of murder mysteries. Or homages. One of the two.
Where's the distinction? Where does one cross the line between spoof and homage. Lemme go to the dictionary.
My Dictionary tells me that homage (which can be pronounced "hom-ij" or "ohm-azh") is "respect or reverence paid or rendered" and that a spoof is "a mocking imitation of someone or something, usually light and good-humored; lampoon or parody." So the difference is respect?
I beg to differ. A spoof can be respectful. Look at The Naked Gun: From the FIles of Police Squad. The Zuckers and Jim Abraham (ZAZ as they have been known to be called) are clearly poking fun at cop movie and TV shows (since Naked Gun started out as Police Squad, a thirty-minute television program that only lasted six episodes). But I think they do it respectfully. As in the source material, the Naked Gun series' Frank Drebin always gets the bad guy at the last second, usually at gunpoint, and always gets the girl (who is always Jane). Even though the films tend to disparage police since the main character is a bumbling idiot, they never seem to forget where they came from.
Often with spoofs - and this has become painfully obvious lately with disasters like Date Movie and Epic Movie - entire scenes from original material will be played out by different actors. One scene in Scary Movie (title trend duly noted, guys) even mentions that it's all just a scene from another movie. How respecful is that? If I recall, they even mention that movie's title - Scream, of course. If respect had been eliminated from Scary Movie, I would probably have been the first to flare up in anger considering Scream is one of my all-time favorites, and probably one of the most brilliant horror films ever (I'll be talking about metafiction soon, methinks).
In regards to homage, I'll provide the example Shaun of the Dead. Two unsuspecting losers find themselves hungover in a town full of stupid, slow zombies. The film pays respects to just about any zombie flick that came before it, most notably Night of the Living Dead. The title, after all, is a play on one of Night's sequels and was probably a play on the popularity of Stuart Gordon's zombie flick released about the same time, Dawn of the Dead. The difference between Shaun of the Dead and The Naked Gun (besides the fundamental fact that we're comparing cop movies to zombie features; I would compare it to Hot Fuzz, but I have yet to see it and it's just not fair to compare movies you haven't seen)? Shaun of the Dead was executed more stylistically similar to the films it credits. The Naked Gun series, indeed most of ZAZ's combined and individual efforts, have a style of their own.
Also, when you laugh at Naked Gun or Scary Movie or Not Another Teen Movie, you're usually laughing at the idea that they really are making fun of something. When you laugh at Shaun of the Dead, you're not. The jokes are original.
Maybe that's the root of it all - a spoof and an homage are really the same thing with only one difference. A spoof needs to be funny (or attempt to be). An homage does not.
Humor doesn't hurt, as Quentin Tarantino has shown us. I laugh when I watch Kill Bill. Because it's a direct throwback to other movies that people adore and despise as much as any other, yet it feels so comfortable and natural to watch it. You don't feel bad about laughing the way you do when you laugh at movies like Spider-man 3 in the middle of a theater full of people who seem to be actually enjoying it seriously (cue caterpillar-esque lip-quiver).
Tarantino is a writer/director, though who makes me question his originality. Does he actually write original screenplays and direct original movies when so much of each film he makes is grounded in movies made before his birth? Does that make him derivative? All he seems to do is make homages to other directors, but I like them all the same, even if I didn't like the movies they're referencing. That must have something to do with the true nature of homage, then. There's got to be something original in it. I guess I would say that Tarantino is original by way of being derivative. There's enough there to say, "This is just like that one movie!" but enough there to say, "This is definitely a Tarantino film."
Wow. I got pretty far astray from where I started here.
Murder By Death - spoof or tribute? Hard to say.
Not to spoil the movie if you've never seen it, but at the very end, after all five detectives (who are all based strongly on other famous fiction detectives - Sam Spade, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, et al) make their wagers on the killer, and the butler is revealed to be Lionel Twain (Truman Capote), Twain actually stands up to reveal his motive was to get back at all the terrible endings to mystery novels and movies ("where the killer is a character who hasn't even been introduced until five pages from the end"), a screenwriting move that makes Twain's character completely break free of the realm of the movie. Never before had it been mentioned that the detectives were actually based on other fictional characters. You just assumed it. Because it's a spoof. Or an homage. Or something. It is this pivotal moment in the film that makes me unable to determine whether Murder By Death is simply farce or tribute. The fact that Lionel Twain is played by Truman Capote - a real-life novelist who even wrote a book called In Cold Blood which was a real-life murder mystery - convolutes my brain with thoughts of metafiction (will get to discuss this later when my thoughts subside a bit).
Because of the lack of distinction here, I can't give this movie anything but a mediocre rating. But it really did make me think. Something that most comedies can't make me do.
I'm all confused. Anybody have thoughts on this?