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De Palma a la Mod

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Recent Headlines
a la Mod:

Domino is
a "disarmingly
straight-forward"
work that "pushes
us to reexamine our
relationship to images
and their consumption,
not only ethically
but metaphysically"
-Collin Brinkman

De Palma on Domino
"It was not recut.
I was not involved
in the ADR, the
musical recording
sessions, the final
mix or the color
timing of the
final print."

Listen to
Donaggio's full score
for Domino online

De Palma/Lehman
rapport at work
in Snakes

De Palma/Lehman
next novel is Terry

De Palma developing
Catch And Kill,
"a horror movie
based on real things
that have happened
in the news"

Supercut video
of De Palma's films
edited by Carl Rodrigue

Washington Post
review of Keesey book

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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

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AV Club Review
of Dumas book

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« September 2015 »
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Interviews...

De Palma interviewed
in Paris 2002

De Palma discusses
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De Palma Community

The Virtuoso
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The De Palma Touch

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No Harm In Charm

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Fly Rule

Movie Mags

Directorama

The Filmmaker Who
Came In From The Cold

Jim Emerson on
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Scarface: Make Way
For The Bad Guy

The Big Dive
(Blow Out)

Carrie: The Movie

Deborah Shelton
Official Web Site

The Phantom Project

Welcome to the
Offices of Death Records

The Carlito's Way
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Kubrick on the
Guillotine

FilmLand Empire

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Cultural Weekly

A Lonely Place

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italkyoubored

Icebox Movies

Medfly Quarantine

Not Just Movies

Hope Lies at
24 Frames Per Second

Motion Pictures Comics

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Country Cinephile

So Why This Movie?

Obsessive Movie Nerd

Nothing Is Written

Ferdy on Films

Cashiers De Cinema

This Recording

Mike's Movie Guide

Every '70s Movie

Dangerous Minds

EatSleepLiveFilm

No Time For
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De Palma a la Mod
site

Entries by Topic
A note about topics: Some blog posts have more than one topic, in which case only one main topic can be chosen to represent that post. This means that some topics may have been discussed in posts labeled otherwise. For instance, a post that discusses both The Boston Stranglers and The Demolished Man may only be labeled one or the other. Please keep this in mind as you navigate this list.
All topics  «
Ambrose Chapel
Are Snakes Necessary?
BAMcinématek
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Beaune Thriller Fest
Becoming Visionary
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Bill Pankow
Black Dahlia
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Blue Afternoon
Body Double
Bonfire Of The Vanities
Books
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Bruce Springsteen
Cannes
Capone Rising
Carlito's Way
Carrie
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Catch And Kill
Cinema Studies
Clarksville 1861
Columbia University
Columbo - Shooting Script
Congo
Conversation, The
Cop-Out
Cruising
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Dancing In The Dark
David Koepp
De Niro
De Palma & Donaggio
De Palma (doc)
De Palma Blog-A-Thon
De Palma Discussion
Demolished Man
Dick Vorisek
Dionysus In '69
Domino
Dressed To Kill
Edward R. Pressman
Eric Schwab
Fatal Attraction
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Film Series
Fire
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Fury, The
Genius of Love
George Litto
Get To Know Your Rabbit
Ghost & The Darkness
Greetings
Happy Valley
Havana Film Fest
Heat
Hi, Mom!
Hitchcock
Home Movies
Inspired by De Palma
Iraq, etc.
Jack Fisk
Jared Martin
Jerry Greenberg
Keith Gordon
Key Man, The
Laurent Bouzereau
Lights Out
Lithgow
Magic Hour
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Mod
Montreal World Film Fest
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Mr. Hughes
Murder a la Mod
Nancy Allen
Nazi Gold
Newton 1861
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NYFF
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Palmetto
Paranormal Activity 2
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Passion
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Peet Gelderblom
Phantom Of The Paradise
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Predator
Prince Of The City
Print The Legend
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Raising Cain
Red Shoes, The
Redacted
Responsive Eye
Retribution
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Rotwang muß weg!
Sakamoto
Scarface
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Sensuous Woman, The
Sisters
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Taxi Driver
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The Tale
To Bridge This Gap
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Friday, September 18, 2015
CARLOTTA WOWS W/'BODY DOUBLE' PACKAGE
LIMITED 'ULTRA COLLECTOR' EDITION: BLU-RAY, 2 DVDS, 200-PAGE BOOK w/UNRELEASED PHOTOS


Carlotta Films out of France shocked in the best way possible this morning when the company announced on its Facebook page that it will be releasing a limited "Ultra Collector" edition of Brian De Palma's Body Double on December 2, 2015. Limited to 3000 copies, the three-disc set will include a "new restoration" of the film, plus supplements, on Blu-ray/DVD, as well as a 200-page book featuring new and archived literature about the film, as well as previously unreleased photos.

Body Double will be the very first release in Carlotta's "Ultra Collector" series, of which it plans four titles per year.


Posted by Geoff at 11:49 AM CDT
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NYFF PRESS & INDUSTRY SCREENING OF 'DE PALMA'
HAPPENED YESTERDAY (THURSDAY 9/17), AMY TAUBIN ON STAGE W/PALTROW & BAUMBACH AFTERWARD



CHRIS KNIPP REVIEW: THE KIND OF FILM ONE SHOULD WATCH OVER AND OVER ON DVD
Here's an excerpt from Chris Knipp's review of De Palma:

"As De Palma talks, apparently in a single long interview, Baumbach and Paltrow, who claim a decade-long friendship with him, edit in clips to illustrate the movies and their influences. De Palma is very specific and not very theoretical, but makes several key general remarks along the way. The rest we have to deduce by ourselves. First he says he doesn't work from character as they (Baumbach and Paltrow) do, but starts with 'structure' and lets the film develop from there. He also says that everybody remarks on the genius of Hitchcock, but he is the only director to follow Hitchcock's methods extensively...

"The one long interview that seems to provide the material for this film includes De Palma's description of his dysfunctional family, his Quaker education, his undergraduate studies at Columbia and graduate work at Sarah Lawrence, and his various marriages and divorces, but personal details are firmly subordinated to the 28-film oeuvre, but he does describe his early and in some cases long-term relationships with major film figures who were contemporaries: Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese, De Niro. Baumbach and Paltrow's illustrative material is invaluable. Clips showing long tracking shots (Pacino, Nick Cage), of chases and shootouts, help give just a glimpse of De Palma's technical gift for storytelling with motion.

"The chronological approach means De Palma can describe developments in the film industry, his role in the New Hollywood when briefly directors could be independent and creative in a studio setting, followed by the takeover of the bottom-line obsessed aesthetically challenged producers of the Eighties and onward. As he comes to the end of his of a nearly fifty-year career, De Palma says a director's best work is usually done in his twenties and thirties and forties, and suggests that he may not be up to the physical demands of the job now as he nears seventy: so he takes us from the beginning to the end. He may not be the most profound or uplifting filmmaker, but he must be one of the frankest, humblest, and clearest. This is a highly informative film about De Palma's work; it's actually the kind of film one should have on DVD and watch over and over to focus on and cull out elements."


Posted by Geoff at 2:00 AM CDT
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Thursday, September 17, 2015
AMAZING INTERVIEW FROM VENICE, @ THE PLAYLIST
MORE LIKE A LONG CONVERSATION, ABOUT 'DE PALMA', THAT YOU SHOULD READ RIGHT NOW
What else can I say-- this interview in which The Playlist's Jessica Kiang talks to Jake Paltrow, Noah Baumbach, and, by the way, "Would you mind awfully if Brian De Palma was also present at your interview?"-- at the recent Venice Film Festival, is something you need to go read right now. Here's a small excerpt:
In the film, several times you mention your theory that it's only when directors are in their thirties, forties and fifties that they make their most interesting films...[Here De Palma's partner, who is sitting in on the interview and has obviously had words with him before about this act of gentle self-sabotage sighs "How many times did you have to say that?" and De Palma lets out a gust of laughter in response]
BDP: I'm sorry! What can I say? I'm a student of directors, and I noticed that.
Yeah, and the Hitchcock example you give in the film is perfect.
BDP: Exactly. "Torn Curtain" is not really the greatest picture. And let's not forget "The Birds" with that model stumbling about.
So what does that mean for your future directing career?
BDP: I'm finished. I'm done.
[Widespread protest. Expressions of disbelief.]
BDP: Anything else is just for kicks.
You can't be.
JP: You have like three things on!
NB: Oh dear. It was this interview that did it. The final ending.
JP: Oh come on, when are we gonna see your "Trouble with Harry," Brian?
BDP: [relenting a bit] Oh, I don't know. I always have ideas, and being on the independent film making stage, we try get them together. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. But yes, I'd like to keep working, because the brain keeps clicking. I guess I'll keep doing it until in the immortal word of William Wyler, "You can't walk anymore."
Pshaw, you can still be wheeled on.
NB: Thing is, you get to prove yourself wrong now. So with your next movie, all the critics will say, "Brian proves himself wrong, makes his best picture."
JP: All shot in your apartment from your La-Z-Boy
BDP: Maybe. If it was shot in the apartment.
JP: That would bring its own aesthetic.
Honestly, I feel like if you'd had a Kickstarter up at the end of the screening last night the audience would've have put their hands in their pockets and you'd probably have got instantly financed.
NB: So maybe now's the time to strike!
BDP: I'm open to offers….
You must have some passion projects somewhere in a drawer.
BDP: Oh, there's always passion projects...
[At this point I'm given the one-last-question signal, but De Palma kindly insists the PR gives us a little more time]

Posted by Geoff at 7:43 PM CDT
Updated: Friday, September 18, 2015 11:16 AM CDT
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TOM WOLFE TO SPEAK AT 'BONFIRE' SCREENING
25 YEARS ON, AUTHOR TO REFLECT ON THE NOVEL & FILM AT 92Y IN NYC, OCT. 27
Thanks to Hugh for letting us know that Tom Wolfe will speak following a screening of The Bonfire Of The Vanities, Brian De Palma's film adaptation of Wolfe's most famous novel. The event will take place at 7pm October 27th, at 92nd Street Y in New York City. The screening is part of the 10th Annual Forum on Law, Culture & Society Film Festival, which presents "films that illuminate the moral dilemmas and dramatic moments of the legal system."

The 92Y web page offers this description of the event: "This comedy-drama starring Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith and Bruce Willis explores the mix of ambition, racism, politics and greed in 1980s New York, when being a Master of the Universe defined the very meaning of Wall Street excess and entitlement. Twenty-five years on, Tom Wolfe reflects on the novel and film, and United States Attorney Preet Bharata offers his view on its continued relevance."

In addition to Wolfe and Bharata, novelist and law professor Thane Rosenbaum will also be on hand for the post-film discussion.


Posted by Geoff at 12:04 AM CDT
Updated: Friday, September 18, 2015 11:14 AM CDT
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Wednesday, September 16, 2015
DE NIRO'S BEEN TALKING 'THE WEDDING PARTY'
"MY CAREER HAS JUST HAPPENED THE WAY IT DID"
Robert De Niro has been out promoting his new film, a Nancy Meyers comedy called The Intern. More Content Now's Ed Symkus has a nice little interview with De Niro in which he touches on his earliest film memories, his films with Brian De Palma, and De Niro's work as a director. Here's an excerpt:
Q: Can you recall any early memories at a movie theater that made you say I want to be an actor?

A: I don’t remember specifically. I saw the usual things; in those days there were a lot of Westerns, and there were the classic double bill features at the Loews Theater, movies with Spencer Tracy or Marlon Brando or Tony Curtis. One departure I remember was “Suddenly Last Summer” with Elizabeth [Taylor]. I also liked going to the movies because it was air conditioned when it was so stiflingly hot (laughs). I started studying acting when I was 10, going to acting school on Saturdays. I don’t know what actually kicked off my wanting to do it at that time. I forget. But when I was in my teens, I started up again.

Q: I first saw you in “Greetings” and “Hi, Mom!” so I was introduced to you as an offbeat comic actor. Has there ever been a plan of making a comedy then a serious one then a comedy?

A: No, you do what comes along, then find a way to rationalize why you want to do it or justify it. So my career has just happened the way it did. I guess I’m still a work in progress. I actually first worked for Brian De Palma on “The Wedding Party” when I was 19. I played one of the groomsmen. I think the only other person you would know in it is Jill Clayburgh.

Q: You’ve directed two films: “A Bronx Tale” in 1993 and “The Good Shepherd” in 2006. Any plans for another?

A: I don’t know. I want to do a sequel to “The Good Shepherd,” but I never planned on directing more than five movies in my life, so if I do another one ... well, it’s possible, but it would have to be really special.


"I WAS LOOKING AT THE CONTRACT AND IT SAID 50 DOLLARS"
A couple of weeks ago, The Mirror's Gerard Couzens reported that, in an interview with an unnamed Argentinian magazine, De Niro talked about picking up the check for that first role in De Palma's The Wedding Party: "When I went to pick up my check I was with my mom because I was under-age and she had to sign the contract for me. I was looking at the contract and it said 50 dollars. I thought it was 50 dollars a week but she explained that it was 50 dollars for the whole thing."

Posted by Geoff at 10:43 PM CDT
Updated: Wednesday, September 16, 2015 10:45 PM CDT
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Tuesday, September 15, 2015
MORE VENICE LINKS - INTERVIEWS, ETC.
"I MET NOAH AT A BIRTHDAY PARTY FOR PAUL SCHRADER TWENTY YEARS AGO AND JAKE AT A PARTY ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO"
Here are some more interviews and reviews of De Palma from the Venice Film Festival last week:

Owen Williams, interviewing Brian De Palma for EMPIRE
There were not many surprises at this year’s Venice Film Festival, but one film that proved an unexpected joy was De Palma. A simple talking-head documentary, featuring Brian De Palma gassing happily about his entire CV from Murder A La Mod to Carrie to Scarface to Passion, it’s directed by the unlikely team of Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow.

“I met Noah at a birthday party for Paul Schrader twenty years ago and Jake at a party about ten years ago,” De Palma told Empire in Venice. “And we just had a rapport and a love for movies”.

“There were so many conversations we had with Brian and things he would talk about that at a certain point we thought we should just ask him to talk about it on camera,” says Paltrow. “It was selfish at first. So we asked and he was up for it.”

The film drew overwhelmingly positive reviews after its first press screening because it’s not just a piece for fans of De Palma, but a thorough, sometimes rather indiscreet, monologue on what it’s like to go from being part of the explosion of young ‘70s filmmakers, alongside Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese, to becoming part of the Hollywood establishment, to then falling out of favour.

“Well you don’t want people thinking they’ve heard the same anecdote 863 times, because I’ve been asked about certain films rather a lot,” says De Palma. “My relationship with these two directors and my feelings for them and the questions they’re answering, means I’m not going to be stylized and on script”.

“What we were looking for was to get the feeling of those dinners we’ve had where Brian would regale us with these incredible stories,” says Baumbach. “And I think that’s what we got”.

Jonathan Romney, The Observer

Noah Baumbach seems an unlikely director to be making a film about you – his films are very different from yours.
I tend to be attracted to film-makers who are not like me at all. I met Noah almost 20 years ago – I immediately liked him, he’s very bright. Because we approach cinema from different directions, we were fascinated by our different views on how to tell a story. They did their interview with me five years ago, in Jake Paltrow’s living room, shooting on this digital camera, with Noah doing the sound. It was like the old cinema school days – you had three people and that was your crew.

You and your contemporaries, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and George Lucas, were influenced by French directors such as Godard, yet you all ended up becoming American classics.
You’re in the right place at the right time, and you end up getting all these influences from the French New Wave, and the Hollywood system’s breaking down... We were all at Warner Bros at the same time – Francis had done Finian’s Rainbow there, Marty was there, I was there, and I knew Steven [Spielberg] through Margot Kidder, who was my girlfriend at the time, and that’s how we all came together...

You made a film about American involvement in Iraq – Redacted – before The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty made it respectable for US cinema to tackle such issues.
People disliked it in America. You can’t criticise the troops. It was [my Vietnam film] Casualties of War all over again – you put these kids in a situation, old men sending young men to war in places that are completely mysterious to them, and a culture that they don’t understand, driven by a political ideology that makes no sense whatsoever, and they go crazy. You feel so frustrated that your country is involved in something that you’re financing with your taxes, that you have no power to stop. Unlike Vietnam, where there were pictures that finally turned off the country, there are no pictures, there are just drones shooting people out of heaven.

De Palma contains some great stories about difficulties on set – like Orson Welles refusing to learn his lines on your 1972 film Get to Know Your Rabbit.
What does he care? He’s playing a tap-dancing magician in some silly comedy. A lot of actors, when they get older and extremely famous, think learning lines is not really necessary any more, whether it’s Brando or Orson or Bob De Niro, and they come up with excuses like, “It’s gonna be more spontaneous.” When you see them looking around the set, you think they’re taking a dramatic pause – they’re really looking for the line over there or over there.

Jill Lawless, Washington Times

“My movies tend to upset people a lot,” De Palma says in the documentary. Not that it particularly bothers him.

In the documentary - titled simply “De Palma” - the filmmaker turns out to be a funny, perceptive and candid judge of his own work...

De Palma, who received the festival’s Glory to the Filmmaker Award before a Venice screening of the documentary on Wednesday, said “it’s kind of overwhelming, literally, to have your whole life and movies lived in front of you in two hours.”

“But it’s very honest and it’s very much me,” he said. “I have a sense of humor about what I’ve done. How could you live life in this business and not have a sense of humor?”


Posted by Geoff at 2:55 AM CDT
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Monday, September 14, 2015
DE PALMA IS 'TOO WILD TO NOT BE REVILED'
AND 'THE MARTIAN' IS NOT AS GOOD AS DE PALMA'S 'MISSION TO MARS', SAYS JOHN SEMLEY
A couple of Mission To Mars-related items, beginning with John Semley, special to The Globe and Mail:
In past years covering TIFF, I’ve generally avoided the parties. There are a few reasons for this.

First, I am generally contemptuous (or at least wary) of celebrity and everything it connotes, and really don’t care if I am, technically, standing in the same room as George Clooney or Susan Sarandon or Pete Postlethwaite or whoever. Second, as a working journalist, parties have previously served a purely utilitarian function, providing free food and booze that I can suck back, hunched over a tiny cocktail napkin, wearing a knapsack like a cartoon turtle. I also generally try to avoid any social event where I’d have to wear much more than jeans and a t-shirt.

But in the spirit of experiencing new things, pushing myself outside my comfort zone, wearing pants that aren’t stained with mustard, etc., I accepted an invitation to the cocktail party celebrating the premiere of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, starring Matt Damon as a NASA botanist accidentally left behind on the Red Planet.

The movie itself is a fairly hollow crowd-pleaser, workshopped to feel massively appealing — funny enough, tense enough, propelled by Drew Goddard’s glib, Sorkin-lite dialogue. It’s fine. Is it as good as Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars, in which Tim Robbins and Connie Nielsen’s slow dance in Zero Gs to Van Halen’s Dance the Night Away? No. Of course it isn’t. But then, what is?


And last month, Reb MacRath posted a highly entertaining rant on why De Palma is "the Real Deal," under the headline, "Too Wild to Not Be Reviled". I like his description of Passion as "a beautifully calm thriller." Check it out:
No matter what he did, though, two things could be counted on: bubble-headed critics would still call him a clone of Alfred Hitchcock with an obsessive interest in voyeurism and kinky sex,..and the hardest core De Palmians would stand by their man.

Until...Well, every story has one...Until he put out a completely non De Palma movie entitled Mission to Mars. And you'll have to travel far and wide to find a movie this reviled.

I mean, really, imagine a De Palma Movie with just one splashing bloody sequence, no kinky sex and almost no trademark camera work. What is [it] about? Well, it combines, quite wonderfully, elements of Gravity, Interstellar and the upcoming movie, The Martian. We begin, Interstellar-like, with a sequence set on earth, in which we get to know the characters. The 15 minutes are well-spent. The flight to Mars is shown in an interesting compression of time. The astronauts land, explore--and are gruesomely dispatched by--we cannot be certain if it's a force of nature or...maybe an alien presence. A rescue team is sent. Lovely scenes aboard their craft until the rocket springs a leak. Gravity-style repair work. Not entirely successful. Exquisite suspense and a heartbreaking loss as they abandon ship and try to reach the dispatched rescue vehicle. They land...search...find graves, indicating someone's still alive. And then...

Now comes the movie's first big surprise--which I won't reveal. Another, still bigger, is coming. What I will say is that, in a two-hour film, the structure and pacing are both spot-on. The acting and scripting are equally good. ('I didn't travel 100 million miles to stumble in the last ten steps.' Or: when chided because he can't dance, the hero tells his wife: 'Hey, some couples tango and some go to Mars.') The movie's inner Swiss watch ticks as we advance on schedule to the Big Reveal.

As for the last fifteen minutes...Here we come to the great I Don't Know. I didn't like the ending. I'd wanted something different. Many viewers have hated the ending and condemned the entire film because of it. Stand back, though. We can't have it all ways.

We can't have a Real Deal Rebel who's been completely housebroken and repeats all the tricks we love best, at our call. The Real Deal is subversive and loves to thwart expectations. The Real Deal will transform a kinky, borderline sleazy film like Femme Fatale into a dream, onto which he then tacks on a lush, romantic ending. The Real Deal, late in his career, [will] thwart all expectations with a beautifully calm thriller, Passion.

Because he refuses to 'heel' on command, we should never grow too comfortable in the presence of such an artist. The best are loving people--with a streak of junkyard dog.

But relax. They're not out to hurt but delight us as they take us by the throat. Now and then they succeed at that by showing us their hearts.


Posted by Geoff at 10:58 PM CDT
Updated: Monday, September 14, 2015 11:02 PM CDT
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DID ANYONE ELSE CATCH THIS?
In the new interview on the Criterion edition of Dressed To Kill (which was released last week), Noah Baumbach talks about how even the dialogue scenes in Dressed To Kill, such as the one between Kate and her son, Peter, are artfully choreographed. Brian De Palma then responds, "When I write scripts like this... you know, I'm working on one now, where I have a very good idea... but then you've got to bring the characters into it, and you've got to bring the emotional story into it to hold the audience."

I know he's always working on ideas and screenplays, but still, nice to hear he has another potential thriller in mind. The Baumbach/De Palma interview for Criterion was filmed this past May.

Posted by Geoff at 7:23 PM CDT
Updated: Monday, September 14, 2015 11:00 PM CDT
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Saturday, September 12, 2015
MORE REVIEWS, ETC., FOR 'DE PALMA' DOC
STEPHEN MAYNE: "I'M NO DE PALMA FAN, BUT... I URGE EVERYONE TO GIVE IT A GO"
Here are some more links to reviews and articles centered around De Palma:

Stephen Mayne, Pop Matters
"The day finished with a screening of De Palma, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s documentary charting Brian De Palma’s career. It’s an incredibly simple set-up – a seated De Palma talks through his career with nothing more than film clips to break up the shots. It’s also addictively entertaining. I’m no De Palma fan – I’m in the camp that finds his stylistic tics irritating – but he has made some undeniably great films, and even better, he’s a wonderful speaker. Dropping in anecdotes from Steven Spielberg’s car phone to the similarity between Cliff Robertson and a mahogany wall, it’s a pleasure to spend a couple of hours in his company. I urge everyone to give it a go."

Nigel Andrews, Financial Times
"The early films have seldom had the scenic thrill of the Italian outdoors. But happily Brian De Palma was here to bless, and be blessed by, a tribute documentary: Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s De Palma. Wow! What other word is there for being avalanched by De Palma imagery for two hours? The bearded, darkly twinkling director talks to the camera — great stories, great thoughts on art, life and cinema — between movie clips so resplendent they run everything else at Venice ragged. Carrie, Dressed to Kill, The Untouchables, Scarface. De Palma did action painting on a movie screen. His images should hang on museum walls. He is, or was, the Jackson Pollock of high-drive narrative cinema."

Alonso Duralde, The Wrap
"I found myself wishing that De Palma was twice as long; the movie does touch upon his entire filmography — including obscurities like Get to Know Your Rabbit and Home Movies, as well as the video for Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark — but I would have loved to have heard as much detail about, say, Femme Fatale as there is about Carlito’s Way. You don’t have to love De Palma’s movies to find De Palma a fascinating look at a vital period of American film history, through the eyes of a controversial artist."

Peter Debruge reviews Our Brand Is Crisis for Variety
"In Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s new Brian De Palma documentary, the director tells a story about how Columbia exec Dawn Steel flew to the set in Thailand, took one look and caught the next plane home. That’s the sort of character [Sandra] Bullock seems to be channeling here: She wields the power, but is also susceptible to the elements, hit with altitude sickness and forced to drag around an oxygen tank from the moment she lands in Bolivia."

John Bleasdale, Cine Vue
"Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's unpretentious documentary De Palma (2015) reveals a clear-sighted and fascinating director, who often seems as bemused by the vagaries and inconsistencies in his own career as everyone else. Brian De Palma was initially seen as the most talented of the Young Turks who came to prominence in the seventies. Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg all deferred to him and his fierce intelligence. However, De Palma was to be left struggling in their wake as they all went on to accrue massive commercial and critical success while his own career, despite the occasional peak, suffered from troughs of ever-deeper despond.

"The directors eschew the conventional prologue to such 'Extended Features' fare that would involve a chorus of praise from De Palma's peers, perhaps to forestall those obvious comparisons. It's consistent with his no-frills approach, which has De Palma sitting down for presumably a day-long conversation about his career, interspersed with a little archive footage and clips from his films. De Palma talks about his financially comfortable if emotionally-stunted childhood. He was the son of a famous surgeon who had little time for his children and cheated on his wife. The latter caused the young De Palma to spy on his father and the attraction and guilt of voyeurism seems to have been imprinted."


Posted by Geoff at 5:48 PM CDT
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Friday, September 11, 2015
VIDEO: DE PALMA & BAUMBACH DISCUSS DTK
ALSO: ARMOND WHITE ON DTK AS "A GAY MOVIE LANDMARK"; CRITERION ESSAY BY MICHAEL KORESKY

Armond White, Out

"William Friedkin’s Cruising, another 1980 film, portrayed gay society through a sleazy serial-killer mystery set in New York’s Bondage-Discipline underworld. (Al Pacino played a heterosexual cop tantalized by forbidden behavior, neurotically seeing gayness only as a sex-and-death equation). But in Dressed to Kill, De Palma dramatized cruising as part of social life — the sexual license that even middle-class heterosexuals enjoyed. De Palma’s sophomoric lustiness derived from his earliest film burlesques (The Wedding Party, Greetings, Hi, Mom!, Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise) where counterculture ideas confounded the mainstream.

"For his first, truly adult film about sex, De Palma’s perspective matures in Dressed to Kill. Kate’s manhunt, set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, equaled the jailhouse symbolism of Jean Genet-Jean Cocteau’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950). It also explored the same existential territory seen in a breed of underground New York porn films like Sam Scott’s Non-Stop (where seemingly spontaneous, peripatetic episodes ranged from rendezvous at Manhattan’s West Side piers to street assignations in Greenwich Village). De Palma outclasses porn, but his artistic connection to Surrealist filmmakers from Hitchcock to Cocteau to Bunuel proves he was unafraid to depict subconscious, even outré, desires.

"Kate’s bored gallery browsing is depicted when she stares back at an Alex Katz portrait that mirrors her own impatience. Her sexual frustration is caricatured when she observes a painting of a gorilla whose oversized, hairy, supine nakedness mocks her own, suppressed, animal instincts. She abstractly writes in her memo pad, 'Pick up turkey.' (Come now, Brian!)

"It’s all prelude to her noticing the handsome man wearing sunglasses who invades her space and stirs her curiosity. Their cat-and-mouse politesse (a game of high-class silent flirtation) deepens Kate’s interest which De Palma sensualizes by having the camera follow them in slowly flowing perambulations through museum exhibit space. This silent sequence (except for Pino Donaggio’s tense, teasing music score) is a long, masterful pantomime, delicately acted by Dickinson. The desperation and feints of cruising are clearly presented in details so timeless that the sexual hunt is immortalized (including Kate feeling wanton and exposed as she stands before one of Eric Fischl’s satirical nudes)."

Michael Koresky's essay for the Criterion edition of Dressed To Kill

"De Palma the political filmmaker might seem at odds with De Palma the teasing sex-horror specialist, but these two halves of his split personality have worked in tandem throughout his career, and certainly do so in Dressed to Kill. This film is a minefield of potential offense—with its horrific butchery of a middle-aged woman and its full-frontal images of naked women shot like soft-core pornography—and, especially at a moment when studio output like Kramer vs. Kramer and Looking for Mr. Goodbar was being accused of containing reactionary responses to second-wave feminism (respectively, for demonizing a woman for abandoning her marriage and child and, like Dressed to Kill, depicting the murder of a woman trying to liberate herself through sex), it was bound to incite some anger. Indeed, feminist groups publicly protested Dressed to Kill, creating a perception of it as misogynistic. Yet the film is far more sympathetic to its women than its men, and more important, its recognition of its own voyeur-horror lineage, its ratcheting up of nearly every element—from the nudity to the graphic bloodletting to the extravagant camera work to the often absurdly drawn-out slow motion—to orgiastic heights, places the sadistic impulses of Hitchcock’s work (so, the Movies) explosively at the forefront. It’s both ghastly and erotic, impeccably crafted and dirty-minded, a luxurious wallow in the dream and nightmare that is cinema.

"Kate’s explicit shower reverie at the beginning is our first clue to the way De Palma is playing with Psycho’s indelible imagery in Dressed to Kill. The camera slowly peeks around a corner and flaunts in lewd close-up her naked breasts and genitals (aptly, actually those of a body double: Victoria Lynn Johnson, direct from the pages of Penthouse). What had once been impossible was, in 1980, not only permissible but also marketable; this is the true titillation, the dark heart of Psycho laid literally bare. The fact that the film ends with a second shower scene—also imaginary—underlines its relationship to Hitchcock as a game of surreal one-upmanship.

"In this and all the entries in De Palma’s grand project of showing us Hitchcock’s thrillers stripped of pretense and elegance—so that, for example, Vertigo becomes Obsession (1976), the double of the protagonist’s dead wife revealed to be his daughter; and Body Double (1984) brazenly combines Rear Window and Vertigo into a tawdry peep show, set in the underworld of Los Angeles porn—we can see De Palma the thrill hound and the confrontational artist. Janet Leigh’s cinema-shattering shower seems to be a primal scene for him, something he needs to return to over and over. His oeuvre is soaked with shower scenes, as parody (Phantom of the Paradise, 1974), locker-room fantasy (Carrie), tragedy (Blow Out, 1981), and travesty (Body Double). (Even 1983’s Scarface has one, a chain-saw massacre visited on the protagonist’s male friend—which our antihero is forced to watch.)

"Shower scenes, with their combination of sensuality and danger, are particularly right for a film as fueled by hallucinatory erotic energy as this one. De Palma himself says he was actually more influenced by Luis Buñuel than Hitchcock when making Dressed to Kill (and there’s certainly a touch of Belle de jour in the opening masochistic daydream). Its central murder is an event that occurs at the convergence of two characters’ sexual fantasies: Kate’s and her killer’s."


Posted by Geoff at 1:28 AM CDT
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