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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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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.
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Tuesday, September 10, 2019
VIDEO - BRIAN DE PALMA - SUPERCUT
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/swancontrols3small.jpg

Just seeing this now, but nine months ago, MaxDfry posted a "Brian De Palma - Supercut" to Vimeo. It's a well-edited piece-- not sure what the music is, but it works well for the video. It's not embedded here but click the image or link above to watch.

Posted by Geoff at 7:30 AM CDT
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Saturday, September 7, 2019
'CARRIE' - BRIAN DE PALMA - ARI ASTER - NICOLAS CAGE
AS CHAPTER TWO OF 'IT' HITS THEATERS, MUCH TALK OF STEPHEN KING AND BEST ADAPTATIONS
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/carrieclosetmatch.jpg



I've seen Ari Aster's Midsommar several times now, and during that scene in the film where Dani is tripping and freaking out, trying to run away, she runs into this very small cabin and closes the door. We see a brief black screen before she lights a match and candle, and finds herself in front of a mirror (as above). This quick moment and the sort of subtle but deliberately punctuated impact it has on the viewer reminds me of Carrie (in Brian De Palma's Carrie) screaming in the closet she's just been locked in, but then calming down enough to light a match and begin saying her prayers. A bit later she goes up to her room and looks into a mirror that is about the same size as the one Dani is looking into in the cabin. The scene in Midsommar is very rapid and brief, yet seems at its essence to be informed by the way these actions are presented in De Palma's film, both visually and sonically-- kinetically.

And of course, we have read Aster talk about De Palma's Carrie on several occasions. Most recently, according to Esquire's Tom Nicholson, Aster talked about De Palma's film on an A24 podcast with fellow director Robert Eggers, saying he was "destroyed" by Carrie at a young age. "I wasn't able to watch it again until my 20s, and then I realized it's a really sad comedy. I could not get the image of Piper Laurie chasing Sissy Spacek around this candlelit house out of my head. She's got this horrible smile, holding a knife. That has come back to me in so many ways. Still, I'll have a nightmare about that."

NICOLAS CAGE: ASTER "HAS THAT AUTEUR PANACHE, LIKE DE PALMA DID BACK WHEN HE WAS DOING FILMS LIKE 'SISTERS' & 'PHANTOM'"

IndieWire's Eric Kohn posted today about a chat he had with Nicolas Cage at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Cage's new film Color Out of Space, directed by Richard Stanley, is having its world premiere during tonight's Midnight Madness:

“Ari Aster, to me, is an event,” Cage said. “If you look at ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Midsommar,’ so much thought goes into them. They’re uniquely different, but you can tell that they come from the same mind. He’s a real student of film.” The actor recalled watching “Midsommar” in a theater following its release this summer, and recognized the influence of Ingmar Bergman’s eerie character studies on Aster’s sprawling tale of a Swedish cult and the young Americans drawn into its web.

“It was exciting,” Cage said. “I saw those Bergmanesque shots. I remember thinking, ‘This is like Bergman. Then I heard a podcast where he was talking about the closeups in ‘Persona,’ and I’d just gone through my Bergman kick, so I was like, well, this is really someone willing to explore and try new things in cinema.” Cage described Aster as “someone who has that auteur panache, like De Palma did back when he was doing films like ‘Sisters’ and ‘Phantom of the Paradise.’”

Aster’s first two features take an artful approach to horror movie traditions, but Cage said there was one variation on that genre he had no interest in. “Horror is fine, you can be very creative with that. The thing I really don’t like is what they call ‘torture porn,’” he said. “If you’re just watching some woman get cut up, that’s really not for me. It needs to have a reason there, a story, that propels the characters, an emotion connected to it. I would probably have to pass on just gratuitous violence.”

Cage has been a movie buff his whole life. As a child growing up in the ’70s, his father often took him to repertory screenings at the New Beverly Cinema, where he still has fond memories of watching James Dean in “East of Eden,” Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront,” James Cagney in “White Heat,” and Todd Browning’s “Freaks.” He continues to consume new releases and classics as part of his regular viewing habits. “I am a film enthusiast and genuinely transport myself with watching films,” he said. “In a way, it makes me feel like I’m still with my father.”


"NEW GOLDEN AGE" OF STEPHEN KING ADAPTATIONS HAS MANY LOOKING BACK AT 'CARRIE', ETC.

With Andy Muschietti's highly anticipated It Chapter Two hitting theaters this weekend, The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh posted an article Thursday with the headline, "Welcome to the New Golden Age of the Stephen King Adaptation" (the headline has since been changed to "Why Hollywood Keeps Coming at the King").

Lindbergh's article includes interview quotes from Ian Nathan, who has a book coming out this week called Stephen King at the Movies, with a subtitle that promises "a complete history of the film and television adaptations from the master of horror." Nathan tells Lindbergh, "King arrived in the mid-70s with Carrie, just as a host of hot young, revolutionary horror directors, and I include De Palma in their number, were ready to transform the horror genre. The likes of Cronenberg, Carpenter, Romero, and Tobe Hooper … made their name with King and equally helped send him to the top of the bestseller lists. It was an era of excellent adaptations, mixing the freshness of King’s approach to horror archetypes with a modern, highly stylized approach to scares."

Meanwhile, several sites have been posting new rankings of Stephane King adaptations. Parade's Samuel R. Murrian ranks Kimberly Pierce's 2013 version of Carrie as the tenth worst ("Because Brian De Palma‘s version holds up so sturdily, the big question when this remake was announced was, of course: why?"), and De Palma's version at number 2, right behind Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption. Regarding De Palma's Carrie, Murrian writes:

The one that started it all remains a landmark of American horror, a simple story with a heartbeat that’s impossible not to get invested in, even moved by. Brian De Palma‘s film is practically a 98-minute film school. Changes are made to the source material, bold stylistic choices are made right and left—and it all serves a purpose; everything works.

For its first hour, Carrie is a deliriously entertaining, rising-star-studded tragicomedy. Then the prom scene hits—it will still make your blood run cold. Star Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, who plays Carrie’s violently fanatical mother, were both nominated for Oscars, an unprecedented feat for a horror movie.


Over at Thrillist, where several staff writers chose "The Scariest Stephen King Movie Moments of All Time," Esther Zuckerman writes about an unexpected choice from De Palma's Carrie:
The moment: Carrie takes a shower in the locker room
There are plenty of supernatural horrors to come in Brian De Palma's adaptation of Carrie, but there's something uniquely terrifying about the opening. After all, nothing is scarier than a bunch of teenage girls being genuine assholes. The porny gaze (let's just say it) that first permeates the girls' locker room where Carrie White showers after being humiliated in gym class shatters when Carrie finds blood between her legs. It's her period, but given her upbringing, she doesn't know that. Frantic, she runs to her classmates who immediately turn on her, their smirks morphing to jeers as they lob tampons and maxi pads her way. We're embedding the safe-for-TV cut, which frankly doesn't have the same power. It's not just the luridness that makes the moment so striking, it's the vulnerability of Carrie's nudity that's exploited when the other women start their taunts.

Back over at The Ringer, Adam Nayman ranks the ten best Stephen King movie adaptations, placing Stanley Kubrick's The Shining at the top spot, with De Palma's Carrie at number two:
It opens with an insidiously brilliant update of Psycho’s shower scene and ends with a jump scare that Hitchcock would have envied; in between, it’s merely the tenderest and most affecting movie ever made out of one of King’s novels. “Tender” is not a word usually associated with Brian De Palma, and there are aspects of Carrie more in line with (if not hugely formative of) the director’s sardonic sensibility: In between his virtuoso camera curlicues (spinning, tracking, soaring, plunging), he exploits the mean-girl high school milieu for bitchy humor and shameless T&A, and turns Carrie’s mom (Piper Laurie) into a ripe gothic-spinster caricature (“These are godless times,” she snarls at a classmate’s mother). He also goes a lot further than King in humanizing his heroine, aided immeasurably by the sublime work of Sissy Spacek—an impossibly brilliant actress who becomes translucent in front of the camera. We’re complicit in everything Carrie is thinking and feeling, and that includes her murderous rage in the home stretch, as baroque and deep red as any giallo while still rooted in a kind of bruised humanity. It’s that sense of betrayal, of somebody who hasn’t just broken bad but been broken, period, that conjures up such unholy fury, and which gives the last shot a power beyond its exacting Pavlovian reflexology (it may be the best-timed shock in movie history). Carrie is reaching out from beyond the grave, yes, but more importantly, she’s reaching out. In hell, as in life, she’s a lonely soul in need of a friend.

At Consequence of Sound, where every single Stephen King adaptation is ranked from worst to best, Leah Pickett writes of De Palma's Carrie, which comes in at number five:
De Palma’s Carrie, in the wake of William Friedkin’s landmark horror event The Exorcist three years prior, marked another watershed for the genre. Critics raved, careers rocketed (perhaps a young John Travolta’s most of all), and — in what is still a rarity for horror films — the Academy took notice. Sissy Spacek, in the gruesome title role that made her a star, and Piper Laurie, who hadn’t appeared onscreen since 1961’s The Hustler and shocked audiences as Carrie’s mentally unstable mother, received Academy Award nominations for their performances. Sure, Laurie may seem hammy by today’s standards, but she leaves her mark; after all, Moms from Hell don’t get much more terrifying than Margaret White.

Although dated and, yes, more than a little bit campy, Carrie is a classic for a reason. For proof, re-watch the opening scene — how King and De Palma were able to capture the symbolic horror of “becoming a woman” with comments on the religious, social, and societal is beyond me, but they pull it off – and also, that prom scene, which is frenetic, lyrical, blood-soaked Sodom and Gomorrah theatre at its best.

And that 2014 remake? Eh, don’t bother.


Posted by Geoff at 8:38 PM CDT
Updated: Sunday, September 8, 2019 11:11 AM CDT
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Friday, September 6, 2019
KOEPP'S CORNER - NEW NOVEL, UPCOMING FILM
'COLD STORAGE' PUBLISHED THIS WEEK; FILM THRILLER 'YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT' COMING SOON
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/outrunshadow.jpg

David Koepp posted this image above last week on his Instagram page, with the caption, "You can’t outrun a shadow, Kevin Bacon." Bacon stars with Amanda Seyfried in Koepp's new thriller, an adaptation of Daniel Kehlmann's 2017 novella, You Should Have Left. As one might expect, Koepp has written the screenplay adaptation. The film is being produced by Bacon along with Jason Blum, for Blumhouse Productions.

Bacon, who starred in Koepp's Stir Of Echoes twenty years ago, brought Kehlmann's book to Koepp's attention. According to Deadline's Anthony D'Alessandro , "The film version varies from that of the book, which is akin to Stephen King’s The Shining. You Should Have Left is the unsettling story of a wealthy man with a younger wife and six-year-old child. Mistrust and suspicion characterize their marriage while they are in a remote location that may or may not be obeying all the physical laws of the universe."

Bacon was on hand last night at a Barnes & Noble in New York City to moderate a discussion with Koepp about Koepp's first novel, Cold Storage, which hit stores this week. That same day, Koepp participated in an hour-long "Ask Me Anything" discussion on reddit. "My first novel, Cold Storage, came out this week," Koepp stated in the reddit introduction. "It's about a deadly organism that absolutely MUST be contained and destroyed, but is neither contained nor destroyed. Mayhem ensues."

In the ensuing discussion, Koepp was asked, "What's been the biggest challenge going from screenwriting to novel writing?" Koepp replied, "Just the scope of a novel. It was something I'd wanted to do for a long time -- not write a novel per se, but write in a longer format -- but still, the sheer amount of typing involved was impressive. Even for a brisk novel like Cold Storage. But I was DELIGHTED by the ability to go inside a character's head, to delve into someone's thoughts, after 30 years of only being able to write what they do or say."

Koepp was not asked anything specific about his work with Brian De Palma, but he did answer a question about collaborating as a screenwriter with directors:

Collaborating can be a joy, and it can be torture. Sometimes both with the same person. For the most part, I've really enjoyed my collaborations with directors. I'd say ninety percent of the time they've been true partnerships, and there's been respect and encouragement on both sides. The other ten percent of the time -- well, it sucked. I'm sure you've been in bad relationships, where you feel like no matter what you say it's the wrong thing, and you KNOW that no matter what THEY say it's the wrong thing. Same thing with a bad collaboration.

Or, sometimes, you get along great, but the combination of your particular talents just isn't producing good work. That happens too, and it's sorta the worst.

All work with directors is close. You are the two people who have the greatest creative stake in the movie, and you're the two that are with it the longest. All the others come and go, but you and director remain. So it is a close and long-lasting relationship. Unless the director fires you, of course. And make no mistake, that power is theirs, and not yours.


Posted by Geoff at 11:59 PM CDT
Updated: Saturday, September 7, 2019 12:20 AM CDT
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Thursday, September 5, 2019
MUBI ON ALMODOVAR & DE PALMA - POINTS OF CONTACT
FROM LAWRENCE GARCIA'S ESSAY ON ALMODOVAR'S EARLY FILMS
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/ffcoatoff.jpg

At MUBI, Lawrence Garcia looks at the early films of Pedro Almodóvar, and brings up the cinema of Brian De Palma in the process:
Unlike some of his contemporaries, Almodóvar was never much of a niche director, having achieved a fair measure of success from the start. Pepe, Luci, Bom and Labyrinth of Passion both played at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Dark Habits bowed at the Venice Film Festival, while What Have I Done to Deserve This? and Law of Desire had the (backhanded) distinction of being selected for the annual New Directors/New Films showcase in New York. But Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, 1988), which again saw Maura take the lead, would vault him into another level of success entirely. The recipient of an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, it’s quite handily the most well-known of his 1980s output.

Although it at one point lifts Psycho’s score directly—prefiguring Alberto Iglesias’ supremely Herrmann-esque score for Julieta (2016)—the film’s rhythms are that of a bedroom farce. Opening with separate dubbing sessions of the famed “Lie to me” scene from Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), the film is, at bottom, about a woman’s emancipation from a feckless, fraudulent man—though along the way, it manages to work in subplots involving a Shiite terrorist cell and a blender of gazpacho laced with sleeping pills. That general arc, though, had something of an unfortunate real-life mirror, since Women on the Verge would be the last time Maura would work with Almodóvar until Volver, a full two decades later. But the film did inaugurate Almodóvar’s collaboration with cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, who could go onto shoot six of Almodóvar’s films. With reference to this long-standing partnership, Brian De Palma, for whom Luis Alcaine shot 2012's Passion, would off-handedly remark: He “lights women beautifully.”

De Palma turns out to be a rather useful point of comparison for Almodóvar. The first scene of Matador, after all, anticipates the American director’s deployment of Double Indemnity in the opening of Femme Fatale (2002)—a film in which, lest one forget, Banderas does an absurdly campy impression of a gay man going on about floppy disks. Likewise, one might recognize shades of Blow Out (1981) in Almodóvar’s own work, such as in the recording sessions of Law of Desire and Women on the Verge. As is the case for most cinephiles of a certain age, Hitchcock looms large for both directors, but in addition, the two share voluptuous visual styles, a taste for scuzzy, voyeuristic pleasures, not to mention a weakness for the bravura set-piece—though Almodóvar’s camerawork never quite reaches the same vertiginous, whirligig intensity as De Palma’s, weighted as it is towards the materials of performance.

Of the films included in the retrospective, the closest point of contact between Almodóvar and De Palma is Kika, an antic slapstick comedy that over its runtime presents a veritable catalogue of scopophilic antecedents: a phallocentric photoshoot in the vein of Blow-Up (1966); an intrusive survey of domestic activity à la Rear Window (1954); a crucial narrative turn from The Prowler (1951); and a prominently placed poster of Peeping Tom (1960) for good measure. Add to this the throughline of an exploitative reality show—sordid true crime, with none of the desired moral/ethical balance—and the film would seem to have the makings of a De Palma-esque thriller. But in keeping with Almodóvar’s filmography, the film’s primary draw is how melodrama and farce serve as containers for these varying interests—seen most clearly in the lengthy, slapstick sequence of Forqué’s eponymous lead character being raped by a recently escaped convict. For this scene, Almodóvar courted a fair amount of controversy—which he had done before, and would continue to do in the decades following. His early reputation as the enfant terrible of Spanish cinema, though diminished, has yet to disappear entirely. But there’s nothing quite like the shock of a first encounter, and if nothing else, Kika makes for a potent one.


See also:
Almodóvar Video Essay by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López
Vulture's William Penix on Almodóvar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Posted by Geoff at 11:59 PM CDT
Updated: Friday, September 6, 2019 7:26 AM CDT
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Wednesday, September 4, 2019
NANCY ALLEN & BRYAN FULLER TO PRESENT DTK IN L.A.
MORE CAST POSSIBLE, OCT. 19, EXCLUSIVE ACTION FIGURES, 'DRESSED TO KILL CANCER' EVENT
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/dtkcancer2019.jpg

Nancy Allen and Bryan Fuller will host a special event screening of Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill on Saturday, October 19, at The Theatre at The ACE Hotel in Los Angeles. All the information so far is in the image above, but note the two packages that offer exclusive action figures (Bobbi vs. Liz 2-pack in the "Autotron" package, and Bobbi action figure in the "I Borrowed Your Razor" package). Also note that all packages offer "Photo Opp with Cast," while the post-screening Q&A, to be moderated by Fuller, reads, "with actress Nancy Allen & more...", suggesting the potential for more cast members to added to the line-up as we get closer to the event date.

Posted by Geoff at 7:42 AM CDT
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Tuesday, September 3, 2019
REVIEW - 'BLOW OUT' ON CINEMA MARQUEE IN 'JOKER'
'SCARFACE' IMAGERY APPEARED IN TODD PHILLIPS' 2016 FILM, 'WAR DOGS'
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/blowoutposters2.jpg

South China Morning Post's James Mottram, reviewing Todd Phillips' Joker following its world premiere this past weekend at the Venice Film Festival, mentions that "at one point we see a cinema marquee advertising Brian De Palma’s Blow Out." This would suggest that Joker, which Phillips has said is inspired by films such as Martin Scorsese's The King Of Comedy and Taxi Driver, Milos Forman's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and Sidney Lumet's Serpico, takes place in 1981. Phillips' most recent previous film, War Dogs (below, from 2016), included imagery from De Palma's Scarface.


Posted by Geoff at 7:34 AM CDT
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Monday, September 2, 2019
DE PALMA ON 'PREDATOR', #MeToo, GETTING OLDER, ETC.
CHALLENGE AS HE HEADS TOWARD 80: "IF I GET TO MAKE A COUPLE MORE PICTURES, GREAT"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/mastercard10.jpg
It appears that Brian De Palma may have sat down for an extra Mastercard Masterclass the other day, or perhaps for a few minutes with the press, before or after the Mastercard conversation with Rossy De Palma, Nadine Labaki, and Valeria Golino. A rough-cut Reuters video is posted at One News Page. Meanwhile, Mike Davidson of Reuters filed an edited interview article that posted earlier this morning, under the headline, "A Minute with: Brian De Palma on horror, #MeToo and critics"...
VENICE, Italy (Reuters) - Veteran film director Brian De Palma, maker of “Carrie” and “Scarface”, has no intention of retiring yet, though he is 78, and is now working on a horror movie inspired by the scandal engulfing Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

Some 70 women have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct dating back decades. Once among Hollywood’s most powerful producers, Weinstein has denied the accusations and said any sexual encounters were consensual. He has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges against him.

In an interview with Reuters during the Venice Film Festival, where De Palma revisited his career in a masterclass, the director spoke about sexual misconduct in Hollywood, dealing with bad reviews and adapting to changes.

Below are edited excerpts of the interview.

Q: There is talk you are looking to revisit the horror genre maybe with a take inspired by the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Why that subject matter?

De Palma: “Because my years of working in and out of Hollywood you were very aware of the kind of abuse to women that was going on. And being a director who directs women all the time you are very sensitive in how they are treated in the movie that you are making. So I was aware of some of the things that were happening during the Harvey Weinstein era and it is an interesting story to tell, plus, I like the sort of suspense drama and I created a script that is sort of based on some of the real cases reported in the New York Times. But it is basically a suspense film using that as the historical backdrop.

Q: Did the #MeToo movement need happen to bring change?

De Palma: “It annoyed directors like myself and others of my contemporaries because as directors you deal with actors all the time. And you must engender their trust. And if you... take them out to dinner or abuse them, it goes against what you are trying to do to gain their trust in order for them to be as free when they perform in their movies. It is basically crazy and people who do it, I always have felt are misusing their power.”

Q: You have had a feisty relationship with some of the film press. Do you think some of that was unjustified in the past?

De Palma: “You are always judged against the fashion of the day so you can’t take it too seriously. A lot of my films did not do well when they came out and were not particularly reviewed well and people are still talking about (them) today.

At the time it can be quite hurtful but if you outlive it you will be surprised what remains important in cinema over the years.”

Q: A number of your films in the 1980s had the feistiness of Hollywood then. It seems those films are now out of vogue.

De Palma: “It is a skill. Not only that, whatever happened to beauty in cinema? When was the last beautiful picture you saw where people were lit beautifully? That means you have to sit or be in a particular light and say your lines so that you are hit a certain way like they did in the 1930s and the 1940s. You don’t see that any more.”

Q: What challenges have you faced as the industry changed?

De Palma: “You try to do the best you can but in the immortal words of (director) William Wyler ‘Once your legs go it is time to hang up your riding crop’ basically. It gets more difficult to make movies if you physically have limitations so if I get to make a couple more pictures, great, but as you are heading into 80, it becomes quite a challenge.”


DE PALMA, AGAIN: "At the time it can be quite hurtful but if you outlive it you will be surprised what remains important in cinema over the years."


Posted by Geoff at 9:36 AM CDT
Updated: Monday, September 2, 2019 11:06 AM CDT
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Saturday, August 31, 2019
DE PALMA - 'THE CRUCIAL PROBLEM IS CLIMATE CHANGE'
CITES GODARD IN VENICE INTERVIEW - "CINEMA IS LIFE SEEN FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/briansigns4small.jpg

Brian De Palma has been at the Venice Film Festival the past couple of days. Yesterday, Christina Newland tweeted, "Guys, I just thought I’d inform you: I did a very brief interview with Brian De Palma and we talked about onscreen fucking. (His words, not mine.)"

Huffington Post's Giuseppe Fantasia also caught up with De Palma and posted the interview yesterday. Here's an excerpt, with the assistance of Google Translation:

"The crucial problem is climate change. We have not been up to a responsibility that we have towards the environment, and that consists of having to protect it, which is our crucial role. Someone like Trump does not want to put it in his head and even goes so far as to deny that this is the role of America. Children will have to face a world different from this one in which we have not been able to safeguard what is around us. Thumberg is right to point this out to us. We are the ones who are living the life unlivable to them. Isn't it terrible?"

Here at the Lido, where the 76th International Film Festival is underway, today Brian De Palma, director-symbol of New Hollywood origin, "father" of tension-rich impact shots, such as the characteristic slow motion shot or 360 ° rotation of the camera around a body, the worthy heir of Alfred Hitchcock whose styles and manners have been revisited. From Carrie - which featured his ex-wife Nancy Allen - up to Blow Out, Scarface, The Untouchables and Carlito's Way, just to name a few, his work has contributed to maintaining the thriller genre while making suspense his strong point. That word, which has a different sound depending on whether it is pronounced in English or in French, is preferable to fear, which has nevertheless always managed to be conveyed in its own way in his films. "I've always created it, even though I'm not a master like Hitchcock. When I make films, it's as if they were a canvas that involves the audience in the protagonists and their personas, and all facets of the characters. In any case, today, given the situation we are experiencing, there is something to be afraid of."

"In America" - he adds - "we have a crazy president, but unfortunately he is our president." And yet, we point out to him, there is a large slice of the population that voted for him and continues to love him. "We are living in a very particular period," he replies. "We have never had such a president and I hope he will not be re-elected." "We can call it the last bastion of white America," he adds. "America is a great country that is based on migratory flows and that has always tried to include migrants. What he is doing, as we know, is keeping them out, even though our country has always welcomed those who are different, it has always tried to integrate it. The mistake lies in having created a structure that is exclusive, rather than inclusive." Also in Italy, we point out to him, we are experiencing a situation in many ways similar. "I don't know much about Italian politics," he says, "but I keep myself informed and I obviously have my ideas..."

...

Fighting the many bad things that surround us is a "Mission Impossible," wanting to mention one of his most beloved movies, which was followed with later chapters. "Cinema helped me a lot," he explains. "It gave me so much and it gives me so much today when I do it, but there is one thing that it gave me and made me discover even better, which is beauty. I am a visual storyteller, I tell the story through images. My goal is always to create stories that speak through images and I learned to tell stories through images even when politics was going to disturb what was around me. The real challenge was to be able to create those images despite what was happening, often in a dangerous and ridiculous way."

"See Life Through A Different Lens" is the title of the Masterclass organized by Mastercard which included him as a panelist together with the actresses Rossy De Palma, Nadine Labaki and our Valeria Golino. "It's what we do with films: to see life with different eyes, from another perspective. We should always do it. It is a gift that not everyone has. I think of my job being to point the camera at someone or something and then show them how I live life. I'm inspired by Godard: cinema is in line with what is said in those seconds or minutes. Cinema," he concludes before saying goodbye, "is life seen from a different perspective.”


Posted by Geoff at 3:51 PM CDT
Updated: Saturday, August 31, 2019 4:22 PM CDT
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Friday, August 30, 2019
PIC - DE PALMA, DE PALMA, LABAKI, GOLINO IN VENICE
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Brian De Palma, Rossy De Palma, Nadine Labaki, and Valeria Golino all took part in a panel onstage today: "See Life Through A Different Lens," presented by Mastercard at the Hotel Excelsior, as part of the Venice Film Festival (festival director Alberto Barbera popped up on stage near the tail end of the conversation). I will post more about the conversation tomorrow (it was presented live on the "Best Movie" Facebook page), with more pics and other interviews from Venice.

Posted by Geoff at 6:19 PM CDT
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Thursday, August 29, 2019
VENICE - DE PALMA & LEHMAN AT BAUMBACH PREMIERE
REVIEW - 'MARRIAGE STORY' IS "A KIND OF SCREWBALL KRAMER VS. KRAMER"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/briansigns1.jpg

Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman attended the world premiere today of Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story at the Venice Film Festival. After pre-movie drinks at the Hotel Excelsior (where De Palma will participate in a Mastercard conversation event tomorrow), De Palma and Lehman arrived on the red carpet, where they posed for photographs, and De Palma signed autographs (as in the photo above, taken by Alberto Pizzoli). See below for a few more pics, a YouTube video from the Red Carpet, and a few links to early reviews of the well-received Marriage Story, which stars Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in what Telegraph critic Robbie Collin describes as "a thinly veiled cine-memoir about the filmmaker’s recent divorce from the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh."

 

Robbie Collin, The Telegraph

One of the strangest and most beautiful paradoxes of cinema is this: the more needlingly specific it gets, the more sweepingly inclusive it feels. At the Venice Film Festival earlier today, the multi-national audience in the Sala Grande winced and hooted as one at Noah Baumbach’s tremendous Marriage Story, a thinly veiled cine-memoir about the filmmaker’s recent divorce from the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.

It is Baumbach’s funniest, most fine-grained picture since 2012’s Frances Ha – a kind of screwball Kramer vs. Kramer, full of laser-targeted telling comic detail, both about the divorce process itself and the couple’s split existence between the New York arts scene and upper middle class Los Angeles. There is a subtly brilliant running joke in which the film’s LA residents keep gushing over their city’s “sense of space” – invariably from inside some poky air-conditioned office.


Jon Frosch, The Hollywood Reporter
Marriage Story begins with a fake-out. Via voiceover, spouses Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) enumerate the things, big and small, that they adore about each other: she’s an unparalleled listener, an expert gift giver, an "infectious" dancer; he’s a natural with their young son, a surprisingly great dresser, cries at movies. Glimpses of their shabby-chic domestic contentment are shown as a bittersweet Randy Newman score swells. It’s all warmly romantic in a grounded, adult way.

Alas, those lists aren’t Valentine’s Day cards Charlie and Nicole have written for one another, or an intimacy exercise meant to draw them closer. They’re something a mediator has asked the pair to cobble together to kick off their separation in good faith. On the surface, this is indeed not a tale of love, but of mounting mutual hostility — though as Noah Baumbach’s wounding, masterly new film argues, the line between those sentiments can be agonizingly blurry.

Viewers who dug the relative mellowness of Baumbach’s last effort, 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), should brace themselves: Like Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage — an inevitable influence — this is a tough piece of work, steeped in pain that feels wincingly immediate (it’s based on Baumbach’s own divorce from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh) and unsparing in its willingness to observe, at sometimes startling emotional proximity, good people at their worst.

It’s also funny and, when you least expect it (and most need it), almost unbearably tender, thanks in large part to the sensational leads, who deliver the deepest, most alive and attuned performances of their careers. Marriage Story puts you through the wringer, but leaves you exhilarated at having witnessed a filmmaker and his actors surpass themselves.


Owen Gleiberman, Variety
Marriage Story” is the Noah Baumbach movie we’ve been waiting for. It’s better than good; it’s more than just accomplished. After 10 features, released over a quarter century of filmmaking (his debut, “Kicking and Screaming,” came out in 1995; his other films include “The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg,” and “Frances Ha”), this, at long last, is Baumbach’s breakthrough into the dramatic stratosphere. At once funny, scalding, and stirring, built around two bravura performances of incredible sharpness and humanity, it’s the work of a major film artist, one who shows that he can capture life in all its emotional detail and complexity — and, in the process, make a piercing statement about how our society now works.

The movie is a drama of divorce, and when it’s over you may feel like you know the lives it’s about as well as you know your own. Yet “Marriage Story” isn’t just the tale of a marital breakdown and its aftermath. It’s a film about divorce: how it operates, what it means, its larger consequences. Television periodically confronts this kind of thing (on “Big Little Lies,” say), but if you’re wondering when it was that a movie last dealt with the subject of separation on such a big-picture scale, you might have to go back 40 years — to the era of “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Scenes from a Marriage,” and “Shoot the Moon.” “Marriage Story” makes a worthy addition to that canon, though so much has changed. Divorce was commonplace back then, but this is the first film set inside what might be called the divorce-industrial complex. It’s about two people coming to terms with a process that, however necessary, is more wounding at times than their heartbreak.



Posted by Geoff at 8:48 PM CDT
Updated: Thursday, August 29, 2019 11:19 PM CDT
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