You might know someone who models his or her whole personality on Barbara Stanwyck in Statute of Limitations, especially the pie scene. Do you know the pie scene? Her appalling frankness and cool demeanor are mesmerizing. Or you might know someone who basically does the Burt Lancaster shoe bit from To No Avail over and over, a real one trick pony. The problem with these apings isn't their lack of authenticity. What is authenticity. It's not that they go too far but rather that they don't go far enough. You can assemble an entire adult persona from bits and pieces in different movies, but it's better if they're taken from so many different ones that the resulting hodgepodge of elements obscures the source material except for ghostly echoes. The problem with, say, doing a Jack Nicholson bit is that it stays a Jack Nicholson bit no matter what you do, you're not yourself as long as you're doing the chicken salad sandwich bit, you're just some loser who still thinks it's funny to do the chicken salad sandwich bit. Or any number of De Niro bits, where he makes that lemon-sucking face and looks like he's going to hit someone or have a stroke or sweep the contents from a large desk in one grand motion of the forearm. If you tried to get around this problem by combining a Nicholson bit with a De Niro bit, people are liable to call for an ambulance on your behalf. Sometimes you can rely on one or two distinctive scenes or lines provided they are sufficiently obscure. I once depended on the dry pleasure of one particular scene for most of an entire summer, extrapolating from it the scaffolding of an entire fraudulent metaphysics. This was from a scene near the end of David Mamet's House of Games, where Lindsay Crouse has just decided to steal that woman's gold lighter from her purse, and she distracts her momentarily by asking her what dish that is on the buffet. She says this in the most coolly calculating manner, how I love the way she says "boo-fay," and when the woman turns her head she deftly steals the lighter, and then uses it to light a cigarette and smiles with perfect satisfaction.