That Plot Seems Familiar
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Apocalypse Now
Retelling of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A United States Army officer/trained assassin is sent into the depths of a southeast Asian jungle to seek out a renegade colonel and terminate his command during the Vietnam War.
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Clueless
An homage to Jane Austen's Emma. Cher (Alicia Silverstone) and Dionne (Stacey Dash) are pampered upper-class girls who care less about getting good grades than wearing the right clothes and being as popular as possible. But Cher also has an innate urge to help those less fortunate. Cher is looking for the perfect boyfriend, whom she ends up finding where she least expected.
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Cold Mountain
Yet another take on Homer's The Odyssey. Inman, a young Confederate soldier, who is injured during the explosive 1864 battle of Petersburg, Virginia, is struggling to make his way home to Cold Mountain, NC, where his beloved Ada awaits him. In Inman's absence, Ada befriends Ruby, who helps her keep up her late father's farm. Meanwhile, in his travels, Inman encounters a menagerie of interesting and colorful characters.
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Cruel Intentions
A modern adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses. An unscrupulous student gets more than he anticipated when he attempts to deflower the Headmaster's beautiful, virgin daughter.
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Easy A
A modern retelling of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. After a little white lie about losing her virginity gets out, a clean cut high school girl sees her life paralleling Hester Prynne's in 'The Scarlet Letter, ' which she is currently studying in school. Hoping to become popular, she decides to use the rumor mill to advance her social and financial standing.
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Forbidden Planet
A futuristic version of Shakespeare's The Tempest. The far-off star Altair-IV, occupied by two lone inhabitants and Robby the Robot, is visited by a search party from Earth.
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O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Owes much to Homer's The Odyssey. Plus a little nod to the Preston Sturges film Sullivan's Travels. A successful Hollywood director disguises himself as a bum and sets off to see America from the bottom up. In the midst of the brutality and despair, he makes a valuable discovery-- that what the downtrodden need most is laughter.
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Ran
Based on King Lear by William Shakespeare. An aging warlord decides to split his kingdom between his three sons, who will live in three separate castles. The two eldest sons are quite happy, but the youngest thinks his father has gone mad, and predicts that it won't be long until the two older brothers are fighting with each other.
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She's the Man
Based on Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. Viola becomes furious when she learns that her high school, Cornwall, has just cut the girl's soccer team. So furious, in fact, that she takes advantage of her twin brother Sebastian skipping town for a few weeks to take his place at his school, Illyria, so she can join the soccer team there. But her disguise as her brother leads to major complications when she falls in love with her soccer-playing roommate and the girl he's in love with falls in love with "Sebastian".
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Ten Things I Hate About You
Adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Cameron is the new kid in school who becomes smitten with the beautiful Bianca. But Bianca's overprotective and domineering father forbids Bianca to date unless her older sister Kat, an surly and hostile senior, does. In a bid to get Kat a boyfriend, Cameron sets up a plan to have the school stud, Joey Donnar, bribe Patrick Verona, an outcast senior with a rumor-filled past, to take Kat out on dates so he can go to the school's homecoming dance with Bianca. However, neither Patrick or Kat expect their relationship to lead to something so much more.
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The Hours
A reworking of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The Hours tells the story of three women: Virginia Woolf, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway as she recuperates in a London suburb with her husband in 1923; Clarissa Vaughan, beloved friend of an acclaimed poet dying from AIDS, who in modern-day New York is planning a party in his honor; and Laura Brown, in a 1949 Los Angeles suburb, who slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home. By the end of the novel, these three stories intertwine in remarkable ways, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace.
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Warm Bodies
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with zombies. After a zombie epidemic, R (a zombie) rescues Julie (a human survivor) from a zombie attack. The two form a special relationship in their struggle for survival, R becomes increasingly more human, setting off a chain of events that begins to transform the other zombies and maybe even the whole lifeless world.
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West Side Story
Adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. This musical sets the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet against a backdrop of the rivalry of two street gangs, the Sharks and the Jets, in New York of the 1950s. A young woman who is sister to the Sharks leader has her first taste of love with the former head of the Jets.
