10 Movies That Subtly Homaged Other Movies

As anyone who has seen Joker will tell you, Todd Phillips has a penchant for homages. It's a staple of his career when he is being nominated for Oscars and it was a feature at the beginning of it too. Way before The Hangover trilogy, Phillips was writing and directing funny films centred around the college experience, belonging to subgenres like sex comedy and frat comedy. Old School, a 2003 hit starring Will Ferrell and Luke Wilson, was one of the latter.

Given the genre it belongs to, there is a likelihood that Old School hasn't aged terribly well since it was made. This would be due to the woke culture that Phillips has publically lamented before, saying in 2019 that this movement was the reason he stopped making comedies. The world will get over this loss but it would be a lie to say that films like Old School didn't have their moments.

One of the best sequences in Old School has Ferrell's Frank accidentally shooting himself in the neck with a tranquillizer gun from point-blank range, lodging a dart deep in his jugular.

It is at this point that we should mention that the absurd scenario is unfolding at a child's birthday party. Ferrell flails around while trying to stay conscious, chaotically knocking over any prop or child that gets in his way.

In homage to The Graduate, The Sound of Silence begins to play as Ferrell falls into a pool and sinks to the bottom. This mirrors a scene from the 1967 classic in which Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin sinks to the bottom of his parents' pool to get away from a party. While Benjamin wants to escape, Frank's isolation is contrastingly comically hapless.

The Sound of Silence doesn't play during the sinking scene but it does feature in separate scenes of Benjamin swimming.