K-Pax ripped this movie

When I fist saw a trailer for K-PAX, I remember thinking "wow - a big budget American remake of Man Facing Southeast". The more I read about the film, the more I noticed a lack of any reference or credit to Man Facing Southeast.

I rented the DVD of K-PAX to see if any of the bonus material would explian the connection to Man Facing Southeast. Again, no reference. There is a brief comment on the "Spotlight On Location - The Making Of K-PAX", where producer Lawrence Gordon mentions reading the 1995 novel "K-PAX" written by Gene Brewer.

I went to Mr. Brewer's website assuming that perhaps he based the premise of his novel on the story and characters from "Man Facing Southeast", and wanted to find out if that was the case or not. In stead, I found the follwing disclaimer posted:

"A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR ABOUT MAN FACING SOUTHEAST: Universal Pictures has recently been sued by the owner of the English-language rights to MFSE. I first learned about this Argentinian film five years after I had written K-PAX. Any similarity in plotline between the two is, therefore, purely coincidental."

Well, that's a pretty big coincidence all right. You would think someone at Universal would have seen or at least heard of Man Facing Southeast. Don't they have people who research this sort of thing?

The worst part about all of it is how unbearably BAD the newer movie is.

My god, that movie was bad. I even saw it for free and it pissed me off what an awful ripoff it was.

6 billion people in the world and just TWO can't have the same idea without it being called plagerism? What is this crap?

K-PAX was marvelous.

Damn, that is so sad. He must be stuggling if he is making sequels (I have just rented "Corazon" Part 2, and will watch it tomorrow night.) I've just recently discovered him. When I read the summay of "Hombre Mirando..." I thought I was going to be sick.....I remembered "K-PAX" and what total CRAP it was! I can't believe Kevin Spacey went for it.

I talked to Subiela also, and he said he loved the movie K-Pax and would drop his lawsuit against the studio.

Twigays are gay and your movie is gay.

Yes K-Pax it is a great movie from a stolen idea, so what?
K-Pax it is just a movie and it would never be a classic like Hombre Mirando al Sudeste.

Cheers lads,

M.

both movies are fantastic in their own right, but there still remains the mystery of if one influened the other.

Countless review(er)s thought it was a remake of MFSE, and when told it was not they were very puzzled.

Upon watching both movies back to back there are a number of striking similarities in the details of the characters and overall the plot. Here is what I found: MFSE-KPAX parallels:

-man (who appears out of thin air) ends up in a mental hospital claiming to be a visitor/ET from another planet
-doctor and patient relationship is core focus. A genius stranger and a highly intrigued but very skeptical doctor
-similar styles in how they correspond Rantes/Prot [R/P] seems to think the doctor could not make sense of their home planet, what it is like. The doctor would not believe R/P.
-R/P have similar feels as characters, exprerssions, remarks, etc
-both R/P feel the must tell the truth, and in doing so would have ended up where they are, a mental institution (striking parallel)
-both doctors question if their patients are scientists or physicists They are confused on how their patients have so much technical/scientific knowledge. Both seek the confirmation of the knowledge from experts (R=scientisit in laser lab P=astronomer at observatory(s)
-other patients engage Rantes/Prot[R/P] very much as he appeals to their needs (emotionally) and helps them, gives them attention, hope, encouragement
-R/P sends and receives info by staring into sky
- R/P meets with doctors children and has a touching effect
-doctor has levels of unhappiness in his life, out of touch with his child(ren)
- R/P write their notes in pencil and in a language others than English, a foreign symbol based language
-doctor pursues the real identity of R/P throughout the film in a very similar manner. Both are hjaunted by the mysteriouness and lack on information on their patient.
-in the end both patients last scenes show them in a catatonic state
(end)

Brewer claims no connection and says 'its a total conicedence!'. chances are... well you decide! this story has become a 'franchise' for Brewer, 3 books, major motion picture...alot at stake, but at the same time anything is possible so who knows.

Reviews of interest. I do not endorse anything in particular here, just the factr that is actually some deeper insight, discussion and review of the real fabric of these films:

Anywhere But Argentina (Brewer gawks “it’s a total coincidence”)
http://www.reel.com/reel.asp?node=movienews/confidential&pageid=18707
Alien from Argentina?
http://www.reel.com/reel.asp?node=movienews/confidential&pageid=14926

http://www.epinions.com/content_194004160132
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117916190?categoryid=31&cs=1

Law suit filed in 1997:
Entertainment Law Digest | Film
Writer who bought English language rights to "Man Facing Southeast" says studios
stole concept and script. New Filing LA Superior. Removal CD


here is another review I found online that will add some more depth and insight into this discussion.
http://www.moria.co.nz/sf/kpax.htm

Upon opening, K-PAX was taken in and celebrated by the people who regard the mawkish, simplistic likes of Forrest Gump (1994), The Cider House Rules (1999) and Chocolat (2000) as profound understandings of the human condition. What was not mentioned in almost all of this is that K-PAX is blatantly plagiarized from a much superior Argentinian film Man Facing Southeast (1987). The film here at least has the excuse of being based on Gene Brewer’s 1995 novel, but nowhere in either of the book, Brewer’s two sequels or the film is Man Facing Southeast credited as source of inspiration, when the similarities are such that it is impossible that this could not have been the case.

Man Facing Southeast was a film haunting in the crystalline simplicities of its insight into the human condition. It created an amazing allegory for the life of Jesus Christ where the psychologist ended up being cast as Pontius Pilate. K-PAX is really Man Facing Southeast having been put through the Hollywood wringer. As part of the faux-liberal desire to offend nobody, the Christ allegory has been thrown out and in has come a lot of bland feelgood messages about believing in one’s self and cliché dichotomies that the simplistic naiveté of fools and idiots has a greater truth to it than does science-based rationalism. The film also retains the sense of ambiguity that Man Facing Southeast did of leaving us unsure whether the patient is delusional or really an alien. Both films sit on the fence between two clearly mutually incompatible explanations. Of course without the Christ allegory the story is much less effective as the parable of faith it was intended as in Man Facing Southeast. Although K-PAX does offer a slightly more compatible explanation with an end that makes it seem as though it could have been explained as an alien inhabiting another person’s body.

The film is made by British director Iain Softley. If nothing else can be said about Softley, one can at least complement him on the versatility of his genre hopping, with films traveling from Backbeat (1994), a fine biopic about the early days of The Beatles, to the Merchant Ivory-esque Henry James-adaptation The Wings of the Dove (1997) to flops like the wannabe cool computer geek thriller Hackers (1995) and the voodoo film The Skeleton Key (2005), to this which is really an sf film pitched to the American heartland, a science-fiction film for people who don’t like science-fiction. It is often quite a beautifully photographed film. Softley and cinemtographer John (Gladiator) Mathieson insert cool and hauntingly framed shots of light reflected through crystals, the New Mexico desert landscapes, observatory towers against evening skies, the night streets of Manhattan and one gorgeously showoffy shot of the shadows of the red flags on the map moving as dawn rises.

But for all Softley’s lovely photography, K-PAX is rarely a film that emotionally affects one with the haunting regard that Man Facing Southeast did. There’s rarely any of the sense that there was in Man Facing Southeast of the visitor come to heal the sick and the poor in spirit or of the uncanny charisma he exudes. Rather all this visitor seems to do is incite the patients to squabble over who gets to return home with him at the end - but there’s not even any accompanying explanation of why all the patients come to believe in his particular delusion. All we do see is little bits that cannot help but seem loopy - of him issuing instructions for David Patrick Kelly to find the Blue Bird of Happiness [another uncredited pillaging as this is actually a creature taken from a fairytale - see The Blue Bird (1940)] or Kevin Spacey talking to a dog. These are scenes where we are constantly aware of the film nudging us with its desire for affect and to find awe, but with only a slightly less accomplished a touch they are scenes that could have been laughed off the screen for their conceptual silliness. The most successful of these scenes is where Spacey demonstrates the planet’s orbit to a group of assembled astronomers. (If nothing else the film should be commended for going out and getting its astrophysics and Einstein right. Although one has minor quibbles - why would a visitor from a binary star system (systems that usually do not support orbiting planets, by the way) need to wear dark glasses ? Wouldn’t it be the other way around - that they would find the light on Earth too weak instead of too bright ?). Rarely does the film ever mount the debate of simplicity vs psychiatry into anything profound, all it has to offer are a series of glib, pithy tradeoffs between Spacey and Jeff Bridges. And when Spacey departs at the end, the film leaves us with surprisingly little more than a handful of feelgood cliches - “psychiatry doesn’t have all the answers to the human condition”, “that we should make the best of the here and now as it is the only life we have.”

Kevin Spacey’s performance was highly acclaimed and even spoken of by some people as award worthy. But one cannot help but feel that Spacey is miscast. Spacey is an actor whose specialty seems to be anonymous tightly bound white-collar types on the verge of meltdown or eruption of one type or another. Nobody delivers witheringly dry sarcasm quite like Spacey does. But he’s not the first actor that immediately comes to mind when you think of a character delivering hauntingly simple reflections on the oddities and contradictions of the human condition or radiating patient, understanding charisma. And when Spacey starts delivering Prot’s lines with the same arch tone that usually denotes the way he delivers a snide putdown, you realize this is not an actor who’s acting but someone who is merely holding himself in check. Jeff Bridges, who himself gave a much better performance in a similar role in Starman (1984), is more modestly convincing as the psychologist, although this is clearly a feelgood movie psychologist who blurs the lines of involvement with his patients much more so than professional decorum would allow in the real world.
(end)

when i saw this film in 1986 i wept for its knowledge about photographs, memory, and argentina. the film was released right at the end of the generals and disappeared folks dropped from airplanes into the atlantic/electroshocked to death. the state psychiatrist is everyperson so guilty to have survived--to have survived his brain is metaphoric crumble through someone else's fingers. judging films is totally arbitrary/this is a truly great film

Just to throw another log on the fire, MFSE was actually stolen from Murray Leinster's short story, "The Strange Case of John Kingman" 1948.

IMHO:

MFSE = better story telling
K-PAC = better entertainment