Week 26.01 - Socials Roundup
29 Dec 2025 - 04 Jan 2026: Compare and Contrast
Week 26.01 posts include shots which riff on each other, from Get on the Bus (1996) to 12 Angry Men (1957); Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1990 and 1992); Arcane (2021-2024) and The Princess Bride and La Pointe Court (1955); Muriel’s Wedding (1994) and two music videos “Knowing Me, Knowing You” (1976) and “Like I Used To” (2021); and Legends of Tomorrow (2016-2022) and The Matrix (1999).
Home Alone
(question: if referring to them in the plural, is it Homes Alone, like Attorneys General?)
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York builds on a lot of Home Alone’s gags.
Both times Kate (Catherine O’Hara) realizes Kevin is missing, the structure is the same: exchange with Peter (John Heard), cut to a closeup where she barrels the camera, scream KEVIN!, hard cut to an empty shot of the place Kevin is.
But in Home Alone 2, there’s a longer dolly shot leading into it, O’Hara gets to pratfall out, and there’s a lot of onlookers gasping in the background.
We’ve put the shots together for your comparison pleasure!
(various)
One of the more famous examples of this type of shot is from Persona, but La Pointe Courte set it a template ten years earlier.
Countless movies, shows, music videos, and promo shots have riffed on this type of shot since, including animated shows such as Arcane (photo 1) and fantasies such as The Princess Bride (photo 2).
There’s also a shot-reverse-shot version as seen in Muriel’s Wedding (photos 3 and 4) which is specifically riffing on ABBA’s music video for “Knowing Me, Knowing You” (photos 5, 6, and 7), as is Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen’s “Like I Used To” music video (photos 8 and 9).
Get on the Bus and 12 Angry Men
This shot from Spike Lee’s “Get on the Bus” shows several men who have spent the last many hours fighting, agreeing, and trying to see each others’ points of view, now having come nearly to their wits’ end.
It’s a shot beautifully reminiscent of a room of men doing the same in “12 Angry Men,” a film explicitly full of men arguing about race, class, and - whether they’re fully aware of it or not - what masculinity means to them.
Legends of Tomorrow and The Matrix
If you’ve got a giant Kaiju plushie who is going to hug a scaly creature into poof!oblivion, what better to compare it to than . . . a futuristic Christ-figure invading the physical manifestation of an AI murder agent?
Sure, why not!
The shot it’s referencing is so iconic, you know what it’s up to, even if the characters involved could hardly look more different!
For a breakdown of another extended homage, see our longread on Legends and I Love Lucy, and for a different show altogether, we look at how Person of Interest riffs on multiple Hitchock films.