Whether one is playing a little basketball (against humans or cartoons), traveling through time, or exacting sweet revenge against one’s enemies, there is no shoe quite as versatile as the sneaker. Now, Parisian filmmaker Candice Drouet, who operates under the rather misleading banner Really Dim, has assembled an eye-popping supercut entitled “Sneakers In Movies” to pay tribute to the greatest gym shoes in cinema. While sneakers have been appearing in movies since their early days, Drouet’s minute-long montage confines itself to films made in the 1980s and later. Still in all, this allows for excerpts from movies as varied as Dope, Blade Runner, Forrest Gump, and Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Thanks to his Nike endorsements, Spike Lee is perhaps the director most closely associated with sneakers. Appropriately, two of his films, Do The Right Thing and He Got Game, are included here. The catchy music throughout is credited to Christian Cabrera.
Sneakers In Movies / Candice Drouet from Really Dim on Vimeo.
One of the neatest features of this particular supercut is that Drouet helpfully identifies the particular make and model of the sneakers being worn. Uma Thurman, for instance, opts for Asics Onitsuka Tigers when she embarks upon her bloody campaign of vengeance in Kill Bill. In Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks gets a hell of a lot of use out of a pair of Nike Cortez sneakers he receives as a gift. And when an overamplified guitar chord sends Marty McFly sailing across Doc Brown’s cluttered lab, he has Nike Bruins on his feet. Fashionable and functional, this athletic footwear has played an important role in movie history, even if it has been generally consigned to the bottom third of the screen.
[via Laughing Squid]