COVER ART BY JAY SHAW, NEW INTERVIEW WITH JESSICA SALT, MORE
The Criterion Collection today announced that it will release a new edition (on Blu-ray and DVD) of Brian De Palma's Sisters on October 23, 2018. Criterion had previously released Sisters on DVD in 2000. The new release features a cover by Jay Shaw. Not all of the special features that will be included have been worked out yet (the list, presented below, states, "More!"), but here is what Criterion lists for now:Special FeaturesNew 4K digital restoration, approved by director Brian De Palma, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New interview with actor Jennifer Salt
Interviews from 2004 with De Palma, actors William Finley and Charles Durning, and producer Edward R. Pressman
Audio from a 1973 discussion with De Palma at the AFI
Appearance from 1970 by actor Margot Kidder on The Dick Cavett Show
More!
PLUS: An essay by critic Carrie Rickey, excerpts from a 1973 interview with De Palma on the making of the film, and a 1973 article by De Palma on working with composer Bernard Hermann
New cover by Jay Shaw
FLASHBACK: Carrie Rickey's Philly "Flickgrrl" column on De Palma from 2009
In 2009, Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder hosted a Brian De Palma Blog-A-Thon, which Carrie Rickey wrote about in her "Flickgrrl" column for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Here's her brief summary of De Palma's career up to that point:
Few filmmakers polarize filmlovers like De Palma, whose love-'em-or-hate'em features include the marrow-chilling Sisters (1972) and the definitive high-school horror flick Carrie (1976). The director, a bearded barrel of a man, grew up near Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square (his father was the head of surgery at Jefferson Hospital) and attended Friends Central. De Palma directed Blow Out (1981), one of the best movies made in Philly, the addictively enjoyable Scarface (1983), the provocative peeping-Tomcat Body Double (1984), that slickly entertaining The Untouchables (1987) one of the most compelling among Vietnam films, Casualties of War (1989) and the stylish Mission: Impossible (1996). Though he hasn't scored a maintream hit since then, Femme Fatale (2002) is one of my guilty pleasures, an impossibly sexy dreamscape with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and Antonio Banderas.De Palma does not so much explore as present the connection between sex and power (and vice-versa), which in his films is often linked by an umbilicus of blood. (As Tony Montana, hero of the Oliver Stone-scripted Scarface, put it: First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.") Another persistent theme is that of a man unable to save a woman in jeopardy.
The naked violence and sexuality of De Palma's films have made him a controversy magnet. During the 1980s some social critic observed that every time he made a movie he lowered the national IQ by 10 points. Since there are so few filmmakers with such swoony style, I'm inclined to forgive him for a lack of substance. You will not, however, hear me defending the indefensible The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) or Mission to Mars (2000), ravishing, but indecipherable.
Updated: Monday, July 16, 2018 8:35 PM CDT
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