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The basic plot of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window -- man believes he witnessed a murder, has to prove it really happened -- has been reused for so many films and TV shows that it's not that surprising when another homage or ripoff comes around. Yet last year's Disturbia, starring Shia LaBeouf as a guy under house arrest who thinks his neighbor is a serial killer, bore close enough resemblance to be labeled an update on Hitchcock's film. And now, not surprisingly, Dreamworks, its parent company Viacom and Universal Pictures, are being sued for creating an unauthorized remake.*

The defendant in the case is not exactly related to Hitchcock's film, though; the lawsuit was filed by Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust, which owns the rights to Cornell Woolrich's original short story "It Had to Be Murder" (called "Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint" in the article), upon which Rear Window is based. Film business followers may remember the name Sheldon Abend from the important Supreme Court copyright case of 1990, Stewart v. Abend, in which Abend sued James Stewart and the production company Patron Inc. after Rear Window was aired on television.

If you've seen both Disturbia and Rear Window do you think the case is valid? Is Disturbia really that much more of a ripoff than Manhattan Murder Mystery, Head Over Heels and most of Brian DePalma's early career? Even Antonioni's Blow Up and Coppola's The Conversation are fairly similar in concept. Obviously some works, such as the Simpsons episode in which Bart thinks Flanders murdered his wife, are okay because they fall under the permissions of parody.

*Note: We accidentally listed Steven Spielberg as an executive producer on Disturbia, though he was not. That information has been removed from the post. [ed]

After hearing about the death of Ingmar Bergman yesterday, I began thinking about Michelangelo Antonioni. I knew the legendary Italian filmmaker was older and I feared he'd be the next to pass on. As it turns out, he was. Antoninoni died the same day as Bergman, in fact, on July 30. The director of classics like L'Avventura and Blow-Up, Antonioni was the more accessible of the two filmmakers for me, at least when I was first introduced to both as an ignorant teenage film student with a distaste for slow-paced cinema. To this day, I still prefer the films of Antonioni, although not for the same reasons. Back then it was the music and the women that attracted me; today it is the curiosity of his camera and the nonchalant simplicity of his plotting. Of course, I also still think of Antonioni's films as being some of the sexiest art-house pictures ever made. Thanks to Blow-Up, I still have a thing for the now 70-year-old Vanessa Redgrave.

Born in 1912, Antonioni earned a degree in economics and was a film journalist before deciding to attend film school. His first credit was as screenwriter for Rossellini's A Pilot Returns and he continued writing scripts, including Fellini's The White Sheik, while carving out a filmmaking career for himself, initially making documentary shorts. Antonioni's debut feature came in 1950 as Story of a Love Affair. A decade later he achieved his first widespread critical acclaim for L'Avventura, the first in a trilogy -- in themes only -- that also includes La Notte and L'Eclisse. In the mid-60s, Antonioni signed a three-picture deal with producer Carlo Ponti to make English-language films. These films were Blow-Up, for which he was nominated for two Oscars, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger, which stars Jack Nicholson. He had a stroke in 1985, leaving him partially paralyzed and unable to speak. Yet he still managed to make Beyond the Clouds, aided by Wim Wenders, in 1995, and his final work, a disappointing segment of the 2004 film Eros.

If his death occured in one of his own films, Antonioni would likely become forgotten, replaced, or thought of as inconsequential. But a film depicting Antonioni's life and death as so meaningless would be too implausible. There are so many memorable scenes and images in his films -- the ending of Blow Up is one of my favorites in all of cinema -- and he has been a great inspiration to and influence on directors following him. Perhaps he would want us to accept his passing as just another event in time, but there's no way he would expect us to think of what he did in life as unimportant.

Oscar season is upon us and with it comes the discussion of film legends who never won an Academy Award. While on this topic, it is important to acknowledge how many great producers are ignored by Oscar due to the fact that foreign films are rarely nominated for Best Picture. Carlo Ponti was such a great producer, and with his death today, he misses the opportunity of ever receiving an Academy Award, even a lifetime achievement honor.

Ponti is not well known, but he should be. Aside from the fact that he discovered Sophia Loren, whose film career he jump-started and who he married (twice -- kind of), he also produced films for many of the masters of cinema, including Antonioni (Blow Up; Zabriskie Point; The Passenger), Fellini (La Strada), de Sica (basically any of his starring Loren), Demy (Lola), Godard (A Woman is a Woman; The Riflemen; Contempt), Polanski (What?), Melville (Le Doulos; The Forgiven Sinner), Forman (The Fireman's Ball), Varda (Cléo from 5 to 7) and Lean (Doctor Zhivago). Some of his films were nominated for the foreign language Oscar, and a couple won the award, but Ponti was only nominated once, for Zhivago, in the Best Picture category (which is oftentimes considered the Best Producer category). Of course, he did get to help his wife win an Oscar, at least -- for de Sica's Two Women.