FOR SATURDAY'S 35MM SECRET MOVIE CLUB MIDNIGHT SCREENING IN LOS ANGELES
Brian De Palma's Blow Out will screen from a 35mm print at midnight Saturday, May 25th, as part of the Secret Movie Club's "'80s Fever Dream" series, and also part of its series, "The Antonioni Effect." The films are shown at the Vista Theatre in Los Angeles. Sergio Pinheiro worked up a great new poster (included here) for the screening. Here's the description of the film screening from the Secret Movie Club promo materials:
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960’s hip thriller Blow-Up birthed not one but at least two cinematic children: Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 The Conversation (screening 1 day earlier than this movie on Friday, May 24, 2019 @ 11:59p) and this 1981 Brian De Palma thriller which uses the same basic story as Blow Out AND the same basic profession as The Conversation, the sound recordist.One of the minor miracles of the two movies that follow Blow Up is that for all their clear inspiration taking from Antonioni’s original, they are both, somehow, equally original and idiosyncratic to their respective writer/directors. While Coppola’s The Conversation explores his career long fascinations with Catholic guilt, hypocrisy, societal greed, and man’s capacity for monstrous violence, De Palma’s Blow Out explores De Palma’s personal obsessions with Hitchcock, cinema, seedy sexuality, and a kind of cinematic language that almost completely transcends anything verbal.
Blow Out follows B movie sound recordist Jack Terry as he realizes that he may have inadvertently recorded proof of an assassination when he records the sound of a car accident one night as part of his routine sound effect recording.
From there, the movie gets giddily cinematically hysterical in typical De Palma phantasmagoric fashion, as Terry comes to realize he is part of a greater US political conspiracy that includes assassination, presidential politics, seriel killing, and prostitutes.
Accompanied by De Palma company regulars Nancy Allen and John Lithgow, Travolta wanders through a series of stunning cinematic De Palma set pieces until the whole thing circles back to be about moviemaking itself and the exploitative nature of almost all moviemaking whether or not it started out in exploitation cinema.
One of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite movies and one of the most beloved De Palma movies (along with Scarface and Phantom of the Paradise which we are also showing) Blow Out is the perfect way to start your Summer. Come join us for some 80’s Fever Dream cinema and paranoia!