DE PALMA a la MOD More Femme Fatale news:

Updated February 11 2003 FEMME FATALE ROCKS BRAZIL PUBLIC, CRITICS GENERALLY UPBEAT ABOUT FILM Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale opened in Brazil on January 24th, during the midpoint of Brazil’s summer movie season. The film finished in second place at the box office on its opening weekend, in between Die Another Day (holding on to first place) and Lord Of The Rings (third place) with 170,000 admissions. The film dropped to fourth place during its second weekend (January 31st), as The Ring opened at number one, followed by the Brazilian road movie God is Brazilian and Die Another Day. As it continued to play on 161 screens throughout its first two weeks, the Brazilian distributor for Femme Fatale, PlayArte, has been quite happy with the film, which has now brought in 513,769 total admissions after three weekends. A weekly Folha de São Paulo exit poll of moviegoers found that the general public rated the film an average of three stars out of four, with 25% of females and 25% of males rating Femme Fatale four stars. A GAME, A PUZZLE, A PAINTERLY ART Most critics in Brazil were similarly impressed with De Palma’s new work, with only a handful expressing negative reactions. Jaime Biaggio at "O Globo" wrote, "If Hollywood and Brian De Palma are divorced, bless his exile in France, from which this movie is born… ‘FF’ is not about reality as you are taught to accept it. It is about the dream of breaking with the rules of the world. It is only possible in the mind or in art. Accept this and "FF" will make sense." Alexandre Werneck of "Jornal do Brasil" gave it three out of four stars, saying, "...it’s about a puzzle game that can be manipulated, and their figures, exchanged. Like life." Kleber Mendonça Filho at "Jornal do Commercio" rated the film four stars, saying that with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, De Palma has created “the cinema’s greatest femme fatale since Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.” He wrote that Femme Fatale is “made of pieces not only from the cinema, but from the look itself. It makes ‘dejá vu’ look like a new thing… To me it’s a delight to see someone with 30 years of career so surprised with his own instruments of work." Tiago Faria wrote that "Femme Fatale is a game, and the croupier is Brian De Palma. Like in his best movies the director transforms everything – characters, script, public - into puzzles of an authorship play about the cinema. It’s that old director, with all his mistakes and qualities, that are back in full thanks to FF.” Luiz Zannin Orochio at "O Estado de São Paulo" compared De Palma’s cinema to the expressions of paintings: "For certain people, in some sense, [the cinema] is a form of art that only imitates; a perfect example for that is a painter who obsessively tries to copy the sunset… In "FF", there is no imitation of the reality. There is only the cinema, which creates its only form of reality. You have to agree with these rules: get in the game or not… De Palma, as known, likes to use preexistent material (Hitchock, film noir, Ravel’s "Bolero", etc). Some painters use similar techniques, painting over already painted screens. Nobody says anything against them. But in the movies, that is not forgettable. It’s the strength of realistic tradition.” "CITY OF DREAMS" Several critics compared the film to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (which the Brazilian distributors had renamed City Of Dreams). João Marcelo F. de Mattos at "Tribuna da Imprensa" wrote of Femme Fatale, "Prepare yourself for a sister piece of the polemic Mulholland Drive (although these two works had different gestations): a kind of movie-dream that, among other things, raises questions about the representation of femininity and femininity itself at the cinema at several stages and variants. But Mulholland Drive was smooth, with a species of ‘noble dementia.’ Femme Fatale is much more vulgar, savage, bastard as its main character… Ideas and references erupt and mix themselves from one point to another: Billy Wilder - film noir - post - modernism – "Vertigo"- Alfred Hitchcock – with a modern twist– split screen- dispersion and perturbation of the look – games of sexual identity – existential reinvention of the self, etc. …The scene with [Rebecca], as brunette, when she cries in desperation just after she arrives at an apartment, shows real anguish, desolation. The same feelings that a great number of people are going to experience while and after seeing Femme Fatale. Some, with rage, others, with happiness.” DIAL F FOR FAKE, FF TO RECREATE Inácio Araújo at "Folha de São Paulo" assesses that earlier in De Palma’s career, the director was concerned with finding the truth behind the images of great masters like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, and reinterpreting them in a Wellesian investigation of truth and fakery. But for Araújo, De Palma’s latest film “tells us that there is nothing left to do, we can only be comforted to recreate, with no end, these dances of images, that connect each one with the other without at least aspiring to be truthful.” In other words, according to Araújo, De Palma is no longer interested in “truth,” at least not in the “real” world. Araújo says that “there is a certain comfort in doing that.” Despite these concerns, he rated Femme Fatale three out of four stars. THE TRUTH IS IN THE SUBTITLES Despite a feeling that De Palma’s new film exploits women’s bodies and behaviors, Luiz Carlos Merten at "O Estado de São Paulo" liked Femme Fatale. Blending his review with an interview with Brian De Palma, Merten concluded that, "In the final analysis, if there is a theme in "FF", it’s about the cinema and our relationship with it.” De Palma told Merten that as unrealistic as his films seem, each one of them makes a statement about man in his environment. Merten also explained that although Hitchcock did not like to open a film with a great scene lest the spectator become difficult to please, De Palma has no such qualms. When asked about the possible influence of Carl Jung on Femme Fatale, De Palma told Sérgio D’Ávila of "Folha" that “it´s a script made through intuition. I am sure that Freud and Jung could analyze the meanings until the end of my life or yours, but I’m not gonna do it.” D’Ávila, who said that De Palma was in a bad mood when he interviewed him late last November, asked De Palma if his next movie will be Toyer. De Palma replied, "Yes, I’m working at this moment, and by the way, you are interrupting me.” In an interview with Neusa Barbosa at Cineweb.Com, De Palma was asked if he had been to Brazil in the past. He said that when Carlito’s Way was released there in 1994, he spent some time in Rio De Janeiro and its outskirts, which he liked very much. When asked if he knows any Brazilian filmmakers, he said, “I know Bruno Barreto and Walter Salles. It’s a crime that in the U.S.A. people are not able to see many films from South Americans, as well as Asians, Iranians. The people there simply do not like to read subtitles.”

Posted February 7 2003 NEW DE PALMA BOOK RELEASED PORTRAIT PAINTED IN COLLECTION OF INTERVIEWS Brian De Palma: Interviews is a collection of interviews that was officially released in January by University Press of Mississippi. The book was edited by Laurence F. Knapp, who has selected a nice range of interviews collected from a variety of sources, such as British and American film magazines (including a hard-to-find discussion about Blow Out between De Palma, John Travolta, and interviewer Carmie Amata), newspapers, the genre magazine Cinefantastique, and websites such as the one you're perusing right now (De Palma a la Mod), www.briandepalma.net, and the now defunct MrShowbiz.Com. Also included is the classic conversation between De Palma and Quentin Tarantino that was previously published in Projections 5. As Knapp suggests in his insightful introduction, the latter interview constitutes "a touching moment when De Palma isn't accused of ripping off Hitchcock, or, as some would claim, himself in Raising Cain, but is instead credited with inspiring the next generation of filmmakers." You can purchase the book right now through Amazon.Com.

Posted February 1 2003 THE CAT'S IN THE BAG... DESIGNED BY ELLI MEDEIROS Beginning this month, you can buy a replica of the unforgettable camouflage bag that Veronica uses to carry the money in Femme Fatale. The bag was designed by Elli Medeiros, who says that while she did not design the bag specifically for the film, it did happen to fit in with the camouflage outfit worn by Rie Rasmussen (Veronica), which itself was designed by Medeiros' friend Jean Charles de Castelbajac. But where did Brian De Palma get the idea to go with a camouflage outfit to begin with? Medeiros explains, "Brian has very specific ideas about clothes and stuff and he gives very precise instructions to the art department. He knows what he wants and he got along very well with Olivier Beriot. The camouflage idea came from this camouflage craze. Everybody was doing camouflage... Christian Dior, I think even Chanel, and I designed a bag that was made in all the fabrics of Jean Charles de Castelbajac's winter collection, including camouflage." Medeiros says that one evening, she was out for dinner with De Palma and his brother Bart, and she took them on "a little detour" to Castelbajac's Concepstore. "And it was all camouflage," she says, "dresses, suits, boots, shoes, the bag, hats, even sofas and teddybears. And Brian said it would be great to have Veronica always wearing camouflage, because during the whole movie we see her without seeing her face, and we are not supposed to know it is her. And use the bag to carry the money... So I spent an afternoon with Rie at JC de Castelbajac's, picking the outfits, and picked a camouflage green for the miniskirt that goes with the snake." DE PALMA'S EYE FOR FASHION Medeiros, who inspired the opening jewel heist in Femme Fatale when she accompanied De Palma to the Cannes Film Festival wearing jewelry that needed bodyguards (in fact, the diamond-studded Chopard snake worn by Rasmussen in the film was designed by Medeiros), speaks highly of De Palma's eye for fashion. "Brian only wears safari jackets," she says, "but it's not because he's fashion insensitive. He really knows what looks good, and what makes a woman look good, how to make a woman look her best. He has a very good eye for clothes. It's part of the whole visual thing, a very sensitive eye." Medeiros says that Beriot recently had De Palma's favorite jacket copied in different colors. To purchase a camouflage bag (in green or tan camouflage) from Chez Martin, designed by Elli Medeiros, visit Elli's web site at ellimedeiros.com, or click right here. While at her site, click around and visit her "Femme Fatale" page, as well as some of the other interesting ones.

Posted January 30 2003 TOYER TO BEGIN FILMING IN SEPTEMBER Romain over at The Virtuoso of the 7th Art has received inside word that Brian De Palma's adaptation of Toyer will begin filming in Italy this September. We're not sure what this means for the scenes that De Palma plans to shoot during the Carnival of Venice, which usually begins at the end of February each year. It looks like they will have to wait and film those scenes in February/March of 2004. In the past couple of months, De Palma has said in interviews that he has been trying to cast the film, which he wanted to shoot this winter. He has told the Italian press that the cast will include a combination of Italian and American actors. The September start should allow plenty of time to get the cast and other arrangements in order. (Thanks Romain!)

Updated January 26 2003 AMERICAN IDOLATRY PACINO: "SCARFACE IMPACTED THE MOST OF ANY MOVIE I MADE" In an interview with the New York Daily News, Al Pacino said that Scarface "impacted the most of any movie I made, including The Godfather, because it really reflected a certain aspect of our lives — the drug culture, the avarice of the '80s, the set of values that gave Brian [De Palma] and Oliver [Stone] the impetus to make their pictures." After a moment's pause, he continued, "And [Scarface] had something of a wink to it — it's overused, but 'Brechtian' is the only word I can think of for it, meaning it wasn't quite what you see. It was tongue in cheek. I think at the time a lot of that was missed by the audience, but it's endured over the years — it's even become a kind of a thing." SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND "A kind of a thing" may be an understatement, at best. As ghostrider117 pointed out recently on the briandepalma.net forum, Scarface is a frequent must-have DVD (or VHS) for many subjects of MTV's Cribs. The most popular video game right now, the ultra-violent Grand Theft Auto III, features references to the film, as well as a station ("Flashback FM") on a car radio that plays nothing but songs from Scarface. The game is also inspired in part by Miami Vice, Michael Mann's '80s TV show which borrowed much of its look from Scarface. Robert Loggia, who played Frank Lopez in Scarface, provides one of the voices for Grand Theft Auto III. But one recent movie, according to Armond White at the New York Press, highlights the impact a film like Scarface can have on young people looking for role models. In his review of Paid In Full, White tells of a scene that takes place in 1986 which shows "an audience of black kids at De Palma’s Scarface reacting to Tony Montana’s epic of excess and over-the-top flame-out ("Say hello to my little friend," Pacino warns, bazooka in his hands)." Comparing the film to other hiphop films, White writes that the makers of Paid In Full "steer clear of hiphop music’s powerful distractions, yet still pinpoint how crucial and misleading pop culture is when youths look for role models and moral models." HE LOVED THE AMERICAN DREAM... WITH A VENGEANCE Speaking of role models, FOX's debut episode of American Idol's second season last Tuesday (January 21) featured a wave of auditions from Miami, including a guy named Edgar Nova, who, at the prompting of the show's judges (Randy, Paula, and Simon), performed an impression of Tony Montana from Brian De Palma's Scarface. Although the program's host (and the show itself) attempted to portray Nova as a clueless wannabe who was rejected and tried to come back a second time, it was apparent that Nova was performing his own show, a prank that attempted to have a little fun with the show's judges and contestants. Here is what went down: Randy: Hello, Edgar. Edgar: Hi. Hi. Randy: How are ya? Edgar: I'm doin' great, man, never been better. Randy: Really? Edgar: Yeah. Randy: You think you're the next American idol? Edgar: (Nodding) I sorta know so. Randy: You already know this? Really? Edgar: Yeah, yeah, I had this dream ever since I was... before I was born. (All 3 judges are giggling) Simon: You had a dream. Edgar: Yeah, yeah. Simon: (laughing) What did the dream say? Edgar: I feel like I'm still dreaming. I don't know. Standing right here in front of, like... you guys. Randy: So... how old are you? Edgar: I'm 24. Randy: 24. I hear you do impressions. Edgar: Yeah, yes, I do. Randy: What's your best one? Edgar: Al Pacino. Randy: Quick-- do an Al Pacino. Edgar: (without missing a beat, goes into Tony Montana voice with hand gestures) Let me tell you something, okay? I hire the best lawyer in Miami. Okay? Simon: (to Randy and Paula) Wow, shut your eyes, there's Al! Randy: Wow. Wow. What are you gonna sing, Al? Edgar: Enrique Iglesias. Randy: Whoa. Edgar: Yeah, yeah. Randy: Go for it. MAKE WAY FOR THE BAD GUY Edgar then proceded to do a hilariously over-the-top, rebelliously awful rendition of "You Can't Escape My Love." The looks on the judges' faces were priceless. On his way out of the building following uniform rejection by the judges, Edgar told the other hopefuls that he'd been accepted, and that they would be seeing him in Hollywood. He even came back later, trying to convince the show's crew that the judges had invited him back. THE WORLD AND EVERYTHING IN IT Edgar's not the only one living Tony Montana's American dream. A recent article in the Miami Herald discusses the hot market of Scarface posters, stills, and drawings that are sold in Miami tobacco stores. In trying to explain the appeal of the movie and its images, one of the store owners points to a poster of Montana relaxing in his "Olympic" bath tub, cigar in hand: "Look at him," the man says. "He looks like a king." He says that in a good week, he sells as many as 30 posters, to customers between the ages of 18 and 40. One customer gives his opinion about the appeal: "First, obviously, it's a great film. Beyond that, the whole gangster thing -- it's the dark side, the underworld. Maybe people don't live that life themselves but they're intrigued, they want people to think they know about it, so they buy the poster." He says that when you get out of school and get a job, "you don't want something like this hanging in your house."

Updated January 24 2003 FEMME OPENS IN SOUTH AFRICA SCREENED AT BANGKOK FILM FEST LAST WEEK Femme Fatale opens Friday January 24 in South Africa. A South African actor, Stephen Van Niekerk (pictured here with Rebecca), landed a part in the film when he won a trip to the Cannes Film Festival. He appears in the film's opening scenes as a movie star walking the red carpet. Niekerk told City Press about meeting Brian De Palma and Rebecca. "It was an incredible opportunity to be on the set of an international film," he said, "an experience I will never forget. Those were twelve very special hours." You can read a review of the film at City Press SA, and if you cannot read Afrikaans, Max404 has generously sent in an English translation. Elsewhere, Femme Fatale screened out of competition at the inaugural Bangkok International Film Festival last week. Meanwhile, Rebecca appears on this week's cover of Entertainment Weekly, in her X2 Mystique guise, with a beautiful full page photo inside as well.

Posted January 17 2003 FEMME FATALE TRAILER No. 1 OF 2002 (THE FRENCH VERSION, OF COURSE) The Trades' Alex Keen has picked the best trailers of 2002, and guess which one is at the top of the list? Keen writes: "Typically foreign trailers would not be listed in this collection because they are not as easy to find. However an exception must be made for Brian De Palma's latest, 'Femme Fatale'. This trailer is a groundbreaking work of marketing. It is the simplest concept that abandons the convention for invention. Unlike most trailers it gives away practically nothing - and yet it shows everything. The gimmick successfully works to entice and tantalize."

Posted January 15 2003 SISTERS REMAKE HAS A DIRECTOR BUCK TO MAKE WRITING/DIRECTING DEBUT Fangoria talked recently with Edward R. Pressman, who produced Brian De Palma's Sisters. Pressman took the opportunity to announce a director for his long-in-development remake of the film, which was at one time going to be directed by Roger Avary. Instead, Doug Buck, who Fangoria claims has won notoriety for his shorts Cutting Moments and Home, will make his feature writing/directing debut with the Sisters remake. Between this project and Toyer, it looks like De Palma's name will be seen in Fangoria a little more often in the coming year or so.

Posted January 12 2003 FEMME FATALE ON DVD SOON IN FRANCE & AMERICA; DATES & EXTRAS VARY Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale will be released on DVD in France on February 20th. Extras include a trailer, interviews, and a 10-minute making-of featurette. In the U.S., according to DVD File, the film will be released on DVD March 18th, although at least one other source lists the date as a week later, on March 25th. The U.S. DVD will include two trailers (hopefully at least one of those is the French trailer that won the grand prix at the Cannes International Festival of the Trailer last May), and the featurettes "From Dream to Reality," "Dream Within a Dream," and "Femme Fatale: Behind the Scenes." Also included, according to DVD File, will be a "Femme Fatale: Dressed To Kill" montage. Sounds intriguing, to say the least. Femme Fatale is still making its theatrical jaunt around the globe. It will open in Iceland January 17th, in Lithuania on March 7th, and will finally hit the U.K. on April 18th. Nothing about Germany yet...

Posted January 3 2003 DONAGGIO TO SCORE TOYER 7th COLLABORATION BETWEEN DIRECTOR & COMPOSER According to an article today in La Stampa, Pino Donaggio will compose the score for Brian De Palma's next film, Toyer, which the article says will begin shooting this February in Venice, Italy. De Palma will shoot interiors for the film at Roma Studios. This will be the seventh collaboration between Donaggio and De Palma, a teaming that began when De Palma chose Donaggio to compose the score for Carrie in 1976. De Palma had planned to have Bernard Herrmann score that film, but Herrmann passed away before the film could be completed. When asked recently why he has not used Donaggio's talent in more recent years, De Palma has said that he simply got too used to his sound, and sought something different. However, Donaggio, having scored some of De Palma's most suspenseful thrillers, seems the perfect choice for what De Palma has said will be a very scary movie.

Variety Head Cites Brain Damage In Critics' Raising Of De Palma In his January 6 column, Peter Bart criticizes critics' top 10 lists, saying that some of them fall into the "I admit to brain damage" school: "While movie reviewing may seem like a lark, the challenge of sitting through every Hollywood release is, at best, punishing. Hence some critics, if you catch them in a vulnerable moment, will admit to serious (if not habitual) lapses in judgment, which would explain why Brian De Palma movies continue to adorn so many critics' lists." Charles Taylor Strikes Back: "Third, there's the 'I admit to brain damage school.' Apparently this is the category I fall into, since I fit Bart's criterion for brain damage: I praised Brian De Palma's 'Femme Fatale.' But since Bart admitted that the Guy Ritchie /Madonna 'Swept Away' would have been on his own 10-best list, I don't think I'll be getting that CAT scan anytime soon."

Updated January 23 2003 PASSION LISTS CRITICS PICK TOP FILMS OF 2002 So far, at least twenty-two critics have placed Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale on their lists of top 10 films of 2002. This includes an index of critics voting in the Village Voice's 4th annual film poll, three of whom placed Femme Fatale at the top of their lists (Jim Ridley of Nashville Scene, Film Comment's Gavin Smith, and Armond White, whose full list will probably be published next week in the New York Press). De Palma's film came in at number 19 overall, appearing on the top 10 lists of 11 out of 78 alternative press critics who voted in the poll. Topping those three individual lists helped push its "passiondex" rating to what J. Hoberman calls "a hefty 2.90" (you can read Hoberman's summary of the results by clicking here). According to Hoberman, the passiondex is "derived by dividing a movie's total points by the number of mentions to get its average 'score,' and then multiplying that figure by the proportion of that movie's supporters who named it their number one." Two prominent critics, Roger Ebert and Michael Sragow, have given the film special mention in year-end articles. Ebert, in a section devoted to overlooked films of the year, wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, "Femme Fatale was Brian De Palma's elegant, sexy and masterful thriller, starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as a woman who steals a dress made of diamonds--during the Cannes Film Festival." Sragow contributed a paragraph titled "A bad-guy ballet" in the film segment of a Baltimore Sun article on 2002's memorable moments: "The bravura opening sequence of Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale traces a jewel heist, at once glamorous and lowdown, that's executed in a bathroom during a gala at the Cannes Film Festival. As the bisexual antiheroine prepares for her no-holds-barred seduction of a female mark, she, her boss and their collaborators glide through an erotic dance scored to a Bolero-like rhythm and melody. De Palma turns bad behavior into a bang-up ballet." Sragow also included the film on his top 10 list, in a tie for number 9 with The Last Kiss. Still one other critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, included Femme Fatale not in his top 10, but in his top 40 (at number 15).

Following are the lists (with links) of the critics who had Femme Fatale among their top 10 (and also Rosenbaum's top 20), and what they had to say about the film, if anything: Travis Crawford (Village Voice ballot) 1. Spirited Away 2. The Piano Teacher 3. Far From Heaven 4. All or Nothing 5. The Happiness of the Katakuris 6. Femme Fatale 7. Time Out 8. Lagaan 9. Bloody Sunday 10.Morvern Callar Manohla Dargis Los Angeles Times (In alphabetical order) About Schmidt Blissfully Yours Far From Heaven Femme Fatale In Praise of Love Japón The Pianist The Piano Teacher Time Out Y Tu Mamá También "This is the film in which Brian De Palma finally stopped being so freaked out by women and decided to succumb to them. Wildly entertaining (and wildly sexy), this mash note to the pleasures of cinema and the beauty of the female beast not only marks the director's best work in 10 years; it also stands among his greatest accomplishments." John Demetry Gay Today 1. Femme Fatale 2. Catch Me If You Can 3. Minority Report 4. Time Out 5. The Cat's Meow 6. CQ 7. Storytelling 8. Undisputed 9. Triumph of Love 10.A Walk to Remember "In 2002, Spielberg with Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can and, catching Spielberg cuz he can, Brian De Palma with Femme Fatale push the limits of spectator cognition and the capacity for cinematic complexity and empathy. These films evoke the moral, political, and spiritual revolution inherent in Spielberg's new -- post-cinematic -- way of seeing the world. The spectator must respond to the eternal, yet urgent, call resonating in every shot of the year's three indisputable masterpieces: 'You can choose.'" Scott Foundas indieWIRE 1. As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty 2. Time Out 3. Bloody Sunday 4. Bowling For Columbine 5. Femme Fatale 6. I'm Going Home 7. In Praise of Love 8. Auto Focus 9. The Piano Teacher 10.Cremaster 3 "The most delicious, deliriously inventive narrative spiral since Raul Ruiz got his hands on Proust's 'Remembrance of Things Past.' A grand summation for De Palma -- so much so that he needn't ever make another film, though one hopes he will -- and one of the greatest 'fuck you's to the Hollywood studio system ever created." Ed Gonzalez Slant Magazine 1. Far From Heaven 2. Spider 3. What Time is it There? 4. Femme Fatale 5. Spirited Away 6. Trouble Every Day 7. Sunshine State 8. Late Marriage 9. Adaptation 10.Gangs of New York "Brian De Palma's formal obsession with allusions to seeing and sightlessness have forever brought to mind the works of Dario Argento, perhaps the only other living director who can create and sustain the kind of delirious artifice on fierce display in Femme Fatale. While its Cannes Film Festival sequence must count as one of the most impressive set pieces ever mounted by a director, it is the film's opening long shot that deserves special mention. Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) watches Double Indemnity on French television, studying Barbara Stanwyck and rewriting herself as a modern femme fatale. Laure packs a gun and a one-liner or two, challenging the way men perceive women and using that perception to consume and spit out her men. De Palma remarkably superimposes Romijn-Stamos's face over that of the film's many women (Stanwyck during the film's opening shot and Mellais's Ophelia when Laure chit chats with Nicolas over cold espresso), at once reinforcing the nature of the character's split self and the overall dreamlike momentum of the narrative." Jeremiah Kipp filmcritic.com 1. Far From Heaven 2. Catch Me If You Can 3. Trouble Every Day 4. Time Out 5. Undisputed 6. Femme Fatale 7. Wendigo 8. Minority Report 9. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge 10.All or Nothing "From its voluptuous opening heist sequence at the Cannes Film Festival to its divine interventions at two climactic murder scenes, Brian De Palma embraces the art of motion pictures. His technique feels like a musical fugue or a silent film, providing direct access to the sensuality of movie-watching and movie-gazing. Each frame is something special. But he also does a nice critique on the mindlessness of film noir. As his characters sink deeper and deeper into their own self-involved bloodshed, De Palma allows for spiritual cleansing through profound use of religious iconography: a glowing neon cross, beams of light shining down from the sky, and a woman plunged naked into the watery depths only to be reborn. Anyone who called it "incomprehensible" has lost touch with what's primal about watching movies." Amy Longsdorf Allentown Morning Call 1. About Schmidt 2. Chicago 3. Talk to Her 4. Road to Perdition 5. Adaptation 6. Far From Heaven 7. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 8. About a Boy 9. Catch Me If You Can 10.Femme Fatale Dave McCoy MSN Entertainment 1. Y Tu Mamá También 2. Far From Heaven 3. Punch-Drunk Love 4. Femme Fatale 5. The Hours 6. Adaptation 7. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 8. About Schmidt 9. The Piano Teacher 10.The Pianist "The biggest crime of the year was that Brian De Palma's sly, intelligent thriller didn't find the audience it so deserved. This is the smartest film De Palma's made since Dressed to Kill and the first real De Palma movie since Body Double (i.e. one where the studios didn't have final cut and ruin his vision). Essentially a send up of film noir, Femme Fatale, underneath its sleazy, glossy surface, is about vision: how movies affect the popular consciousness, how our eyes trick us and how things we see may not always be what they are." Rob Nelson (Village Voice ballot) (In alphabetical order) ABC Africa Far From Heaven The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat) Femme Fatale Gangs of New York Lovely & Amazing Personal Velocity Spider Spirited Away Y Tu Mamá También Geoffrey O'Brien (Village Voice ballot) 1. The Lady and the Duke 2. The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat) 3. Far From Heaven 4. Auto Focus 5. Minority Report 6. Gangs of New York 7. Nine Queens 8. Adaptation 9. Femme Fatale 10.Merci Pour le Chocolat Geoffrey O'Brien later altered his list slightly for the Film Comment year-end issue, moving Femme Fatale up a couple of notches: 1. The Lady and the Duke 2. The Fast Runner 3. Far From Heaven 4. Auto Focus 5. Minority Report 6. Gangs of New York 7. Femme Fatale 8. Nine Queens 9. Adaptation 10.Merci Pour le Chocolat Keith Phipps (Village Voice ballot) 1. Y Tu Mamá También 2. Far From Heaven 3. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 4. About Schmidt 5. Time Out 6. Spirited Away 7. Adaptation 8. 25th Hour 9. Talk to Her 10.Femme Fatale Jim Ridley (Village Voice ballot) 1. Femme Fatale 2. Gangs of New York 3. Far From Heaven 4. I'm Going Home 5. Adaptation 6. Spider-Man 7. Esther Kahn 8. 25th Hour 9. Y Tu Mamá También 10.What Time Is It There? Ridley also chose Brian De Palma as best director of 2002. Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader (Top 20) 1. *Corpus Callosum 2. Platform 3. Y tu mama tambien 4. I'm Going Home 5. Ellipses, Reels 1-4 6. Russian Ark 7. The Cat's Meow 8. Far From Heaven 9. Germany Year 90 Nine Zero 10.8 Mile 11.Bowling for Columbine 12.El Valley Centro, Los, and Sogobi 13.Changing Lanes 14.Diamond Men 15.Femme Fatale 16.Heaven 17.In Praise of Love 18.Kandahar 19.Mostly Martha 20.Undercover Brother "Femme Fatale is my favorite Brian De Palma film, along with Raising Cain (1992) and Obsession (1976). Like these, it has almost nothing to do with reality and everything to do with the playful and artful arrangement of kitsch. Made for less than De Palma's blockbusters, it also has fewer distractions and lapses, and for once I was delighted by the absence of stars, which kept this thriller lighter on its feet." Gavin Smith (Village Voice ballot) 1. Femme Fatale 2. Merci Pour le Chocolat 3. The Piano Teacher 4. Skin of Man, Heart of Beast 5. The Sleepy Time Gal 6. Sunshine State 7. Bloody Sunday 8. Time Out 9. In Praise of Love 10.Far From Heaven Gregory Solmon (Village Voice ballot) 1. Minority Report 2. Gangs of New York 3. Catch Me if You Can 4. Femme Fatale 5. Time Out 6. All or Nothing 7. Adaptation 8. Storytelling 9. Undisputed 10.The Cat's Meow Solmon also chose Brian De Palma - Best Screenplay and Thierry Arbogast - Best Cinematographer for Femme Fatale. Michael Sragow Baltimore Sun 1. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 2. Y Tu Mama Tambien 3. Spirited Away 4. Last Orders 5. Chicago 6. All Or Nothing 7. Lantana 8. Triumph of Love 9. (tie)The Last Kiss and Femme Fatale (tie) 10.Rabbit-Proof Fence "The former is Gabriele Muccino's masterful group comedy about a bunch of Roman guys who can't grow up; the latter is Brian De Palma's virtuoso bad-boy thriller about a con-woman on the loose in Cannes and Paris. Muccino's film is essential viewing for anyone who prizes movies as an extension of theater; De Palma's for those who love movies as an empire of dreams." Amy Taubin Art Forum 1. Spider 2. In Praise of Love 3. Corpus Callosum 4. The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat) 5. La Commune (Paris 1871) 6. Far from Heaven 7. Femme Fatale 8. The Uncertainty Principle 9. Auto Focus 10.Lovely & Amazing "The flip side of Mulholland Drive is a rogue-female empowerment dream as euphoric as an Angela Carter fairy-tale makeover." Amy Taubin altered her list later for the year-end issue of Film Comment, moving Femme Fatale up a couple of notches: 1. Spider 2. The Commune (Paris, 1871) 3. Solaris 4. Far From Heaven 5. Femme Fatale 6. *Corpus Callosum 7. The Fast Runner 8. The Uncertainty Principle 9. Gerry 10.Lovely & Amazing Charles Taylor Salon.Com 1. Y Tu Mamá También 2. What Time Is It There? 3. Femme Fatale 4. Morvern Callar 5. Far From Heaven 6. The Pianist 7. Chicago 8. Triumph of Love 9. CQ 10.Possession "As a visual storyteller Brian De Palma is without equal in contemporary moviemaking. Inevitably, his films are dismissed by critics and audiences who have become too lazy to process visual information. (Here's a decoder: When a critic describes a De Palma film as "incoherent" it usually means he was too lazy to follow it.) Like a plush seat at the swankiest peep show in town, 'Femme Fatale' allows us to luxuriate in De Palma's chic, sleek erotic trickery. He signals us to every trick he is playing on us and, because movies are about wanting to be fooled, we are only too happy to be taken in. De Palma has always loathed the sentimental manipulations of movies, and in 'Femme Fatale' he turns the misogyny of film noir on its head, giving us a corrupt heroine and making us acknowledge that we love her for being so bad. As De Palma's heroine, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos gives a sexy, gleeful performance that leaves the sexual timidity of more established actresses in the dust. No movie this year offered the sensual pleasure that this sex-fantasy thriller did. No American movie was better." Scott Tobias (Village Voice ballot) 1. About Schmidt 2. Time Out 3. Gangs of New York 4. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 5. What Time Is It There? 6. Y Tu Mamá También 7. Devils on the Doorstep 8. Spirited Away 9. Femme Fatale 10.Morvern Callar Armond White New York Press 1. Femme Fatale 2. Catch Me If You Can 3. Time Out 4. Minority Report 5. All or Nothing 6. Storytelling 7. The Cat’s Meow 8. The Triumph of Love 9. 24 Hour Party People 10.Songs from the Second Floor Chuck Wilson LA Weekly 1. Dahmer 2. Y Tu Mamá También 3. Roger Dodger 4. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys 5. Femme Fatale 6. The Pianist 7. Signs 8. Time Out 9. The Cockettes 10. Bartleby Andrew Wright Portland Mercury 1. Solaris 2. Y Tu Mamá También 3. 24 Hour Party People 4. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 5. Spider-Man 6. Punch-Drunk Love 7. Femme Fatale 8. The Ring 9. Spirited Away 10.Jackass Stephanie Zacharek Salon.Com 1. Y Tu Mamá También 2. Far From Heaven 3. About a Boy 4. Secretary 5. Femme Fatale 6. Chicago 7. The Pianist 8. Morvern Callar 9. Possession 10.CQ "A lot of moviegoers complained that Brian De Palma's beautifully structured thriller about a very bad girl didn't make sense. Not liking the movie is one thing; claiming it doesn't cut together is something else again. If there were a remedial school for film fans, this one would have to be on the curriculum."

Posted December 19 2002 GRIFFITH IN ROME: "I AM ANTONIO'S WIFE, NOT REBECCA" As Femme Fatale plays on Italian screens, rumors abound that its two stars, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and Antonio Banderas, have lit some offscreen sparks that have threatened Banderas' marriage to Melanie Griffith. Melanie joined Antonio in Rome this week to promote next month's release of Spy Kids 2 there, but a press conference drew Melanie's ire when a journalist referenced the rumors by expressing his astonishment that Melanie has joined Antonio for the trip. "Why are you so astonished," Melanie shot back, "I am his wife. I am Melanie, I am not Rebecca." Melanie then whispered to Antonio that she would be waiting for him and "I love you" before waving goodbye to the press as she made her exit. The couple, pictured here with Rebecca at the Cannes Film Festival last May, are constant targets for such rumors from the press.

Updated December 18 2002 DE PALMA TALKS TO LE PARADIS AND ALSO TO FENTUM Last week, Carl and Tony posted their interview with Brian De Palma up at their site, Le Paradis de Brian De Palma. De Palma discusses Femme Fatale, David Lynch, the latest DVDs he purchased, his dream project, and much more. Also check out the De Palma interview with Bill Fentum at his site, Directed by Brian De Palma. Both interviews were conducted the week of Femme Fatale's U. S. release, and are special treats for us De Palma fans. De Palma is pictured here during a press conference in Rome, Italy upon the film's release there in November.

Posted December 5 2002 NEW SURVEYS UP AT LE PARADIS BLOW OUT REMAINS ON TOP, DTK MOVES UP De Palma fans voted, and now the latest results of their favorite De Palma films are up at Le Paradis de Brian De Palma. No surprise that Blow Out remains the fan favorite, but a few other films have moved up and down the chart, including Dressed To Kill, which has moved in for the kill at number 2. Femme Fatale makes its debut on the chart, and also included is a list of De Palma fans' top 25 non-De Palma films. Thanks to Carl and Tony for putting it all together over there!

Posted December 1 2002 HEAD GAMES TAUBIN DISCUSSES RECENT "HEAD FILMS" In today's NY Daily News, Amy Taubin discusses recent head films like Femme Fatale, Mulholland Drive, Adaptation, Solaris, and Spider. The article features interviews with several of the films' makers, including De Palma, who discusses his obsession with Hitchcock's Vertigo, a head film that, as Taubin points out, has served as inspiration for Solaris, Mulholland Drive, and Femme Fatale. "I've been obsessed by Vertigo since I first saw it in 1958," De Palma told Taubin. "And I still don't completely understand why. When it came out, the critics took it apart, the audiences didn't get it, but gradually people became obsessed with it. Hitchcock has this way of connecting to the unconscious. They're dreamlike images. You can't get them out of your head." Taubin says that "Femme Fatale and Mulholland Drive are unique among the latest Hollywood head films in that they both put us inside a woman's psyche."

Posted November 23 2002 LENO: "What are people missing?" EBERT & ROEPER: "FEMME FATALE!"

Film critics Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper appeared on Jay Leno's The Tonight Show on Friday, November 22nd. After talking about some recent films, the following exchange took place: Leno: How about movies that people are missing? There are films out there they should see... Ebert: (with a French enunciation) Femme Fatale! Roeper: Yeah, Femme Fatale. Leno: Is it Femme Fatal or Femme Fatale? Ebert: Well, it depends on how you pronounce it. Roeper: It depends on what country you're in. If you're in France, it's Femme Fatal; if you're here, it's "I - don't - know - what - that - means - so - I'm - not - gonna - see - the - movie." Ebert: I think a lot of people didn't go to that movie because they thought... Roeper: That's the problem! They don't know what the title is! Ebert: ...they thought it was a French movie. That is a great, erotic, sexy, slick, stylish thriller... Leno: Okay... Ebert: ...starts with a wonderful 40-minute silent sequence (almost silent) at the Cannes Film Festival, where a woman walks in wearing a dress made out of diamonds, and they steal the diamonds. That is a great film. Roeper: Yeah, it's a nice piece of filmmaking. Ebert: (barely audible under Roeper and Leno talking) Brian De Palma. Leno: (smirking & reacting to the "dress-made-of-diamonds" description) Well, now I wanna see it. (Laughter from the audience) Roeper: (nodding) There you go.

Posted November 21 2002 ITALY PREPARES FOR FEMME & TOYER DOUBLE DE PALMA: 1 TO OPEN, 1 TO SHOOT In separate interviews with Italy's Repubblica and Corriere della Sera, Brian De Palma mentions that he will begin shooting his new horror film, Toyer, in Venice and Rome in early 2003. De Palma plans to shoot at Roma Studios (which is backed by Femme Fatale and Toyer producer Tarak Ben Ammar) and at the Carnival of Venice, which runs from February 21st through March 4th of 2003. The Repubblica article says that the cast so far is "top secret," but De Palma promises an all-out film of fear, calling it "a horror in full Carnival on the Lagoon." De Palma's Toyer will be based on the original play by Gardner McKay, which De Palma says he saw a few years ago in New York. The setting is being adapted from Los Angeles to Italy. The late McKay adapted his play into a novel in 1998. A 1992 published version of the play, which was originally written in 1970, features a page with the heading, "A note on the play:" This "note" may say a lot about what we can expect from De Palma's film: "If this play is about anything, it is about our vast ability to manipulate one another. About our wondrous gift for lying. It is about our awful power of charisma. It is about our capacity to believe any truth, as it suits us. It is about our immediate power to forgive; our need to move on. It is about compromise, our willingness to sleep with our executioner. It is about our moral lawlessness; our loss of instincts, and the inner beliefs of our own. It is about our capacity to absorb mindless horror, that a crime is only a crime if it happens to us; nothing else angers us. It is about our dreadful crimes; not that they happen, that we know about them and turn the page." ITALIAN CRITIC WELCOMES FEMME FATALE Femme Fatale opens Friday November 22nd in Italy, and at least one critic, Tullio Di Francesco, thinks that this is the best De Palma has been in a long time. Even so, according to Di Francesco, "The question that remains is: are we in the presence of a film that in time will equal works such as Carlito' s Way, Scarface, and Dressed To Kill, or is this a minor work for De Palma?" The critic contends that only the end of Femme Fatale "maintains the characteristics that we expect from the virtuosity of the De Palmian cinema camera, while all the rest of the film is supported and constructed on the explosive body of its protagonist." Along the way, he notes references in De Palma's film to Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black, Kieslowski's The Double Life Of Veronique, Lynch's Mulholland Drive (which we know De Palma did not see until after he made Femme Fatale), Hitchcock's Vertigo, Antonioni's Blow-Up and De Palma's own Blow Out.

Posted November 19 2002 THAT BLOODY '70s SHOW DE PALMA "FORGOT TO RECORD IT" Amy Irving, who was in Brian De Palma's Carrie, told columnist Michael Musto at The Village Voice that she missed NBC's remake of the film (which aired on November 4th), and so did De Palma, apparently. Irving told Musto, "Brian was at my house the night it aired. He said, 'Oh! I forgot to record it! I'm taping Monday Night Football!'" NBC's three-hour Carrie remake did not do as well as the network had hoped, ranking at number 35 on the prime time ratings for the week of Nov. 4-10 with a 7.3 rating thanks to 12.21 million viewers. That night's Monday Night Football game, which showcased Miami playing at Green Bay, ranked number 6 for the week with a 12.8 rating and 19.43 million viewers. NBC left its Carrie open for future installments should the ratings warrant enough interest, although the program received almost universal pans from critics.

Updated November 19 2002 EBERT: GIVE FEMME A CHANCE FILM COMMENT: DE PALMA'S BEST FILM IN 20 YEARS On this week's edition of Ebert & Roeper & The Movies, Roger Ebert urged viewers to give Femme Fatale a chance, after he and co-host Richard Roeper had given the film two thumbs up the week before. Ebert suggested that the film was not receiving the business that it should be getting due to its title, which, he said, might lead some people to think that the film is French. He urged viewers to look for it. EARLY ESTIMATES Femme Fatale dropped out of the top ten to number twelve on the box office charts with about $1.2 million this weekend ($1,171 per theater on 1,066 screens). The film has pulled in approximately $5.8 million so far after 13 days in the U.S., and moved back up a notch to number eleven on Monday's daily chart. Warner Bros. (whose Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets stormed the box office this past weekend) placed some fresh quotes in this weekend's advertisements for De Palma's film, including the standard "TWO THUMBS UP!" from Ebert & Roeper. Other new quotes in the ads come from reviews by Manohla Dargis ("A blissfully entertaining new thriller. One of the smartest, most pleasurable expressions to come from an American director in years."), Michael Wilmington ("A spectacular sex fantasy thriller."), Ebert ("Elegant and slippery. Superb style and craftsmanship. A sexy thriller."), and Bruce Kirkland ("Brian De Palma's 'Femme Fatale' is a big, juicy, sexy thriller. A treat."). Meanwhile, the new issue of Film Comment, with Femme Fatale on the cover, is just now hitting the stands. In it, editor Gavin Smith interviews Brian De Palma, and calls Femme Fatale De Palma's best film in 20 years. The film opens in Italy this Friday.

Posted November 15 2002 DE PALMA ON WILDER PUBLISHED LAST MAY, UPON WILDER'S DEATH With Femme Fatale (which opens with a clip from Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity) having just opened in France last April, Brian De Palma was asked to share some thoughts on the filmmaker for France's Studio Magazine in its May 2002 tribute to Wilder. De Palma said: "It is always a tragedy when one of the great artists of the cinema dies. Billy Wilder had a dazzling career. I have always been enchanted by his films of the Forties and Fifties, but also by The Apartment, released in 1960. I saw Double Indemnity many times. It is so brilliantly written and directed that one gets the impression that the film was made yesterday. With Sunset Boulevard and The Apartment, it is the film I prefer of Wilder. Without forgetting The Big Carnival, the most cynical film ever made about the press. These films have continued to nourish me. With Femme Fatale, I wanted to make a modern film noir, and I wanted that one sees, at the beginning, an extract of traditional film noir, to put the audience in condition. The question was: which film to choose? And I took Double Indemnity, because Barbara Stanwyck, the principal actress, has the most extraordinary lines, one of which is spoken again by the heroine of my film: 'I'm rotten to the heart.' ARMOND WHITE: "AND GOD CREATED WOMAN" Armond White's review of Femme Fatale at New York Press posits that De Palma is critiquing Double Indemnity, and our reactions to Wilder's film. He also writes that "Femme Fatale may be Brian De Palma’s greatest film." White also thinks everybody should see Paid In Full, which he reviewed last week. Of the latter film, which takes place in 1986, White says, "An extraordinary scene shows an audience of black kids at De Palma’s Scarface reacting to Tony Montana’s epic of excess and over-the-top flame-out ('Say hello to my little friend,' Pacino warns, bazooka in his hands)."

Posted November 12 2002 DE PALMA TALKS ABOUT WRITING FF COCKS TALKS ABOUT SCORSESE AND DE PALMA Brian De Palma tells David Konow in the Nov/Dec issue of Creative Screenwriting that when you write a movie, "you've got to have a great idea." The idea of a character running into their own double was one that De Palma carried around for about 10-15 years before he found a good story in which to use it. He says he had long been looking to do a noir story, and once the ideas jelled and everything came together, he wrote the screenplay very quickly. He says that "when you don't have a good idea, it can take years. These ideas rattle around in my head forever." De Palma says that "when you see a stunning idea like Memento or Boogie Nights, or something by the Coen Brothers, when someone comes up with a tremendously interesting idea, you take your hats off to them, because you know what a difficult process that is. I've had a couple of pretty good ones throughout my career, and if you read as much as I do what everyone else is doing and what kind of trouble they're having, and if you're a student of the history of cinema, you realize there aren't that many good ideas out there." He goes on to talk about how the great movies that have been made, like On The Waterfront and Citizen Kane, were a result of filmmakers "in the right place at the right time with the right actors and the right economics." SILENT MOVIES & VISUAL IDEAS De Palma says that when he writes a script, it is driven by " a visual idea. Not a character idea, not even a story idea. It's usually a visual idea, because this is what I think cinema is all about." He says that many of the directors making films when he started out had started out themselves in the silent era, where there was no dialogue. "Whether it was Hitchcock, Ford or Fritz Lang," De Palma says, "you had to learn these techniques and not try to solve all of your problems in dialogue." He talks about finding the right visual to pull off his dream sequence: "The trick of Femme Fatale was getting in and out of the dream without the audience groaning, because it's a very old idea, somebody waking up and everything you saw wasn't real. But I think I came up with such a stunning image of her underneath the water, that you can surprise the audience because it's such a strong visual image, to get past the transition." De Palma also talks about the collage he and his brother Bart created for the film over a period of about four months. The collage in the film's story is the work of Antonio Banderas' character, Nicolas Bardo. "The movie is very much like the picture," he says. "The completed image is the last piece in the puzzle. And again, it's a purely visual idea." THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIO SYSTEM De Palma also talks about the struggle to keep your personal vision when working in Hollywood, but defends the American movie system. "You're always struggling to convince people to put up money for [your film], and since I make movies that have very elaborate sets and very expensive film toys, they can't be done for a million or half a million dollars in a couple of bedrooms in Brooklyn. I've made movies lke that, and then I evolved out of that." He says that every once in a while, "you have to go out and make a big hit so you can continue to make movies." He says that when you go outside the system, you find yourself spending too much time trying to raise money for the film, like John Sayles. He cautions against a career such as Orson Welles': "I'm a big student of Welles, I knew him very well because he was in Get To Know Your Rabbit, and I had studied his career, which seemed to me to be the classic example of what not to do with the system, and how cruel the system can be to a great artist. I think there's many good things about the system, and there are many things that aren't so good about it. But I'm an American, and I'm working in the American movie system. To try and say that Hollywood doesn't know what they're doing is absurd. Hollywood's made some of the greatest movies in the world, and you can make that system work for you." JAY COCKS TALKS SCORSESE, DE PALMA, & LUCAS Elsewhere in this issue, Konow interviews film-critic-turned-screenwriter Jay Cocks, who has worked with his friend De Palma on several screenplays, including Nazi Gold. Cocks says that since he also worked as a critic for Time magazine in the 1970s, he made a rule to only work with Martin Scorsese and De Palma, and only under pseudonyms. He says that De Palma used to call him "Wrong Way Cocks," because if he liked a film, it would tank at the box office, and vice-versa. Cocks thinks this may have been why George Lucas and his friends were concerned about Star Wars prior to its release-- because Cocks liked Lucas' rough cut. He says, "Two people liked it: me and Spielberg. De Palma kept giving George terrible grief about the tractor beam! I remember the next morning I was sitting in a work room above a garage in his house with a yellow pad with George and Brian and a couple of other people. Brian said, 'All right Jay, you sit down there at the typewriter. No one understands what this movie is about, we gotta set it up.' What I remember saying is: 'George, you gotta make other people understand this is a fairy tale.' We wrote something that [did] that, and in some form became the prologue to Star Wars or was part of the prologue to b>Star Wars." Cocks paints a picture of those early days in the friends' careers where "everybody tried to help everybody else, trading ideas, reading scripts, trading intelligence about what people were looking for at certain studios. There was a real atmosphere of everybody being together and trying to help each other."

Posted November 10 2002 DE PALMA TAKES RISKS WITH JUNGIAN PREMONITIONS SAYS THAT FF COMES FROM HIS OWN LIFE: "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW" Michael Sragow, who gave a four star review of Femme Fatale last Wednesday in the Baltimore Sun, interviewed Brian De Palma for today's edition of the paper. De Palma tells Sragow that he doesn't mind if people know going in that much of Femme Fatale is a big dream sequence. He says, "a lot of this comes from my own life. People write about me as if I'm always cribbing ideas from other movies, as if I'm an empty shell with no experience. But how many times have I been watching a movie late at night and fallen asleep and dreamed the movie? That's exactly what happens at the start of Femme Fatale. I've had dreams that were premonitions and that I tried to prevent from happening. I actually ran into someone who was the exact double of my older brother in Florence, Italy. And when I showed Mission to Mars at the Cannes Film Festival I walked down that red carpet with my girlfriend, who was wearing Chopard jewelry. [Romijn-Stamos steals Chopard jewelry at the start of Femme Fatale.] So I say, write what you know! I'm not sitting in a room watching movies 24 hours a day." De Palma also talks about David Lynch, capturing lightning in a bottle, and the risks involved in giving a noir story a happy ending: "I held onto that idea, and then I thought: What would happen if I made part of the story a dark premonition - and what if it enabled the femme fatale really to change her life, without downplaying how cynical she will always be for her own self-preservation. I realized that what you'd get is a very tongue-in-cheek happy ending that would drive some people nuts and put a smile on the faces of the others. I knew it was a risky thing to do." This is a great interview-- go check it out here.

Updated November 10 2002 EBERT & ROEPER MOVE FEMME TO HEAD OF CLASS AINT IT COOL LOVES IT, TOO Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper gave De Palma's Femme Fatale two thumbs up on this week's episode of Ebert & Roeper At The Movies. We already knew that Ebert loved the film (a link to his 4-star review is a couple of scrolls down this page), but Roeper's equally glowing enthusiasm for the film is a surprise, considering that he found De Palma's Mission: Impossible incoherent and implausible. Both reviewers seemed genuinely delighted to be talking about the film, which they did at the start of the show, even though the episode also featured such big releases as 8 Mile and the new Harry Potter film. AINT IT COOL NEWS At Aint It Cool News, Harry Knowles says that Femme Fatale is De Palma's best film in two decades, Mr. Beaks writes that De Palma has "evolved into a more daring filmmaker than I’d ever imagined possible," and Moriarty seems to like it, too. The talkbackers at the site appear to be keen on De Palma's latest, and Harry is urging his "fellow geeks" to skip out on Eminem this weekend and see Femme Fatale, the film that, cinematically speaking, really matters. And many are saying that they will indeed go see the film right away, while quite a few have already seen it. The film is playing on just over 1000 screens in North America, making it difficult to compete with Eminem and Curtis Hanson's 8 Mile, but it appears that it could make a strong showing nonetheless. One insider claims that Femme Fatale is on track to come in at #6 on this weekend's box office charts. Perhaps the Aint It Coolers can help bring it up a couple of notches. ROSENBAUM: *** FEMME FATALE "A MUST SEE" Chicago Reader - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Posted November 7 2002 "DE PALMA'S MASTERPIECE" MANY FANS GOING BACK FOR SECONDS

This key frame from Femme Fatale seems appropriately set in front of a restaurant called "Le Paradis," especially fitting now that Carl Rodrigue and Tony Suppa, who run the site Le Paradis de Brian De Palma, have expressed their enthusiasm for De Palma's new film on the briandepalma.net forum. Carl, having established that, for him, "De Palma's virtuosity (as far as thrillers are concerned) reached its apogee with Raising Cain," calls Femme Fatale "the Raising Cain of the new millenium." Tony, meanwhile, opened the discussion by declaring Femme Fatale "De Palma's masterpiece," and I have to say I believe he hit the nail on the head. NEW SENSATIONS Watching Femme Fatale for the second time on opening night, I was struck with the revelation that this was one of those rare movies that when I watch it again, I will always remember the sense of wonder and anticipation with which I initially viewed the opening Cannes heist sequence, or Rebecca inappropriately approaching a woman with a touch and a whisper in the ladies room, or the pale blue walls of a character's bedroom, or the camera peering around a corner to watch a new character we haven't met before, or Black Tie opening a curtain to reveal the Cannes Film Festival setting, or the sequence of symphonic cross fades from the sound of a gun shot to the whirl of an airplane's propeller, and then from a chance meeting on an airplane to finding the woman's head on the man's shoulder. I was struck by how different this film is from De Palma's previous films, even when it jogs the memory of Blow Out's opening credits' split screen sequence, or the final shot of Raising Cain. The opening heist, which brings to mind both Snake Eyes and Mission: Impossible, is so different in tone and execution, so much more musical than those other two, it is something new altogether. This is the purest visual cinema De Palma has created in years, perhaps since Dressed To Kill. But it seems even more radical than that film, dropping the normal conventions of narrative cinema and telling stories with pictures. The film has a surreal quality similar to that of Dressed To Kill, and does seem to take the dream structure of De Palma's cinema to a new level. This could very well be De Palma's masterpiece, but thankfully for us, he still has more ideas up his sleeve. WARGNIER'S COMEDIC PERFORMANCE Regis Wargnier gives my favorite performance of the film, with his irritated/vulnerable looks to an empty seat, his smiling nod to his star, Sandrine Bonnaire, right after her on-screen credit, and then the look of frustration when his film shuts down just after his director's credit-- Wargnier is very funny as himself, tapping into the personal depths of fear, excitement, and vanity that any artist must feel when displaying their work in public. FAN RESPONSE Other members at the De Palma forum are loving the film, as are fans of Antonio Banderas at the Antonio Banderas Web Mall, some of whom are saying that they like the film even when Antonio does not show up until about a fourth of the way in. Many are saying they cannot wait to see it again. The response of fans overall appears to be more positive than that of France, where the film opened last April. But I guess we have Owen Glieberman to make up for that.

Posted November 6 2002 **** REVIEW FROM EBERT DE PALMA TALKS WEB SITES WITH SALON Roger Ebert has chimed in with a four star review of Femme Fatale in today's Chicago Sun-Times. Ebert says the film is "sly as a snake," and that he hasn't had so much fun second-guessing a film since David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. He says that with this film, De Palma "is up to an exercise in superb style and craftsmanship," achieving a transcendence of the kind of incidents normally found in an ordinary thriller. Ebert writes: "Only on the second viewing did I spot the sly moment when the subtitles supply standard thriller dialogue--but the lips of the actors are not moving. This is a movie joke worthy of Luis Bunuel." DE PALMA INTERVIEW AT SALON Brian De Palma talked to Ian Rothkerch at Salon about a lot of things, including the Web sites devoted to his cinema. "I have this big retrospective at the Pompidou in Paris," De Palma told Rothkerch, "and I've noticed that most of my fans are extremely young. I think you kind of live off of that. That's why I know about Salon and a lot of the Web sites. I've met the people who run my Web site and the French guy just graduated high school. If I want to know anything going on about my movies, I go to De Palma à la Mod. [Laughs] This guy [who runs the site] has an ability to find everything." De Palma then goes on to reiterate what he has stressed in most of our own interviews: "You know, I really believe in these Web sites. I think this is where our legacy will exist. This is not flattery, but I do feel the most interesting people are writing on the Web sites if you want to read criticism." Also at Salon, Charles Taylor has written another great review of Femme Fatale that, like Ebert, compares the film to Bunuel: "In Femme Fatale De Palma is comparable to the sly prankster Luis Buñuel proved himself to be in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. De Palma makes a joke of our gullibility and gets us to laugh at how easy it is to be suckered -- and how much fun it is."

Posted November 5 2002 PICS FROM FEMME FATALE PREMIERE AND THE REVIEWS START COMING IN... The Chopard snake jewel worn by this model at Monday night's Femme Fatale premiere was accompanied by eight bodyguards. Rie Rasmussen, Gregg Henry, and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, all pictured below, were there. In case you missed it, Rebecca is wearing the same dress in the photo as she did on Jay Leno's show Monday night. You can read an interview with Rebecca from a press junket at CHUD. The article is by Smilin' Jack Ruby, who loved the film. So did Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times, who calls it "one of the smartest, most pleasurable expressions of pure movie love to come from an American director in years." (Thanks to KC and Brett!)

Posted November 5 2002 You can watch a 5-minute video clip of Brian De Palma and the cast of Femme Fatale discussing the making of the film at Inside Reel. The video was produced as part of a television show distributed to colleges across the U.S. There is also an article there about the film. Once you get to the home page, just start clicking where it says Femme Fatale and you will see it all. To watch the video, go to the "Interviews" page.

Updated November 5 2002 DE PALMA NOT IN IT FOR THE MONEY SAYS "STUPID" TO DO SEQUELS, SYSTEM LIMITS CREATIVITY Latino Review and CHUD have posted great articles about a press junket in Beverly Hills a couple of weeks ago, where Brian De Palma talked about Femme Fatale. De Palma shoots down any ideas about making a sequel to Scarface, saying "No way, never even occurred to me." When asked by one journalist why he is so angry, De Palma replies, "Why am I so angry? Well maybe because I think the whole system hasn't been really good to the creative filmmakers, basically. We're fighting a huge marketing thing now. It makes it really difficult to make original movies. Every time you have a huge success of some summer children's picture, that's all the studios think about. When I think about Sam Raimi, a very talent director, he makes Spiderman. Now look at what he's got to do. He's got to make Spiderman 2. I can't think of anything stupider then making Spiderman 2. When Tom Cruise came to me saying he wanted to do Mission: Impossible 2, I looked at him and said, are you crazy! Why would anybody want to do this twice! Can you think of a reason besides money? Are we in this business for money?" De Palma tells the press to think of his new film as "an improvisation," talking about how he went to France and came up with the idea, and went about looking for a way to finance it in Europe. He calls Antonio Banderas "a dream," saying that the actor came to the set thinking he was playing a paparazzo, when in fact, he was to play a digital artist making pictures of a square, looking at it much like a director or a painter does, with lighting and other adjustments. He said that Antonio has strong feelings about paparazzi, because they've been chasing him most of his career. (De Palma gives away a possible spoiler about Antonio's character, too.) Somebody asks De Palma why he picked Rebecca to star in the film, and he simply holds up a copy of the November Maxim (with Rebecca on the cover), and then replies, "Why do you ask me this question? Look at this girl." The writer then says that everyone in the room agreed that Rebecca is very "beautiful, talented, etc." De Palma talks about improvising the lesbian sex scene with Rebecca and various models: "We had to audition a lot of girls for that part. You have to understand this is not something either one of us had done before. We had not done girl seducing girls before, so there was Rebecca and I and my producer would send in one drop dead beautiful model after another, and we would improvise with them and then I would look at Rebecca afterwards, and I'd say what do you think? (Big laughs) After about three or four of them she says wait a minute I think I have a friend that can do this... that's when Rie arrived and she's was perfect." (Thanks to KC!)

Posted November 4 2002 REBECCA WATCHED OLD DE PALMA FILMS & HITCHCOCK, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, LAST SEDUCTION Rebecca Romijn-Stamos told Stephen Schaefer of the Boston Herald that she was aware of Brian De Palma's cinematic reputation (an obsession with Hitchcock, accusations of misogyny, etc.) prior to starring in the director's Femme Fatale. "I was worried, a little concerned," she told the paper. "Brian has this reputation that preceded him, yet he couldn't have been more kind or generous - and he had to be with me. It worked to my benefit that I was fairly green. He's got such a specific thing he does; you have to put all your trust in him, and he wanted someone he could mold. I had to trust that he wouldn't steer me wrong." The article says that Rebecca's character is the most violent one in the film. Rebecca told Schaefer that to prepare for her role as a modern femme fatale, she watched "old Hitchcocks and Double Indemnity, because my character is obsessed with that Phyllis Dietrichson. I mostly watched old De Palma movies - to see what I'm up against - and then Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction, which is the last time a female character got to do all this stuff and be unapologetically bad." Rebecca elaborated on the De Palma films she watched during a press junket covered by Smilin' Jack Ruby at CHUD, saying that she sought out some of De Palma's earlier films like Greetings and Hi, Mom! Asked what she thought of them, she replied, "Well, I hadn't seen Hi, Mom!, but you look at those movies and you have a very good idea of who Brian is. You get an insight into his twisted mind (laughs)." Rebecca told Schaefer a little bit about her suggestion to De Palma that he cast her friend Rie Rasmussen as her lesbian lover in the film. "I've known her since I was 15 years old and (the lover) needed to be a model and have some edge," she told Schaefer. "Brian had brought in these models, one after the other, but they didn't have this edge. Finally when Rie came in, she was perfect for it."

Updated November 5 2002 DE PALMA PLANS NEW FILM BASED ON TOYER A NEW KIND OF SERIAL KILLER PLAY/NOVEL Brian De Palma, speaking by telephone from Paris, tells Juan Morales in the New York Times that his collaboration with Femme Fatale producer Tarak Ben Ammar was so satisfying that the two men are planning a new film based on the late Gardner McKay's Toyer, a novel and play about a serial killer who does not actually kill his victims, but leaves them in a coma. The novel is said to have many sequences that are very chilling, as well as some highly charged sex scenes. McKay originally wrote the story as a play, then later adapted it into the novel, and even his novel is said to have a concise, immediate screenplay style that makes for a quick read. It is also told from various points of view, which would seem to fall right in line with De Palma's cinematic sensibilities. According to CHUD, De Palma told journalists at a press junket a couple of weeks ago that his new movie to be made in Italy (where he would lke to live for a year) will be a thriller based on Gardner's play. IN TUNE WITH DE PALMA THEMES Several other aspects of the story seem to touch on regular De Palma themes, including a police department that appears unable to do anything about the "serial killer," since he does not actually kill his victims. Another De Palma-like aspect is a female reporter and her partner who use opinion columns in the newspaper they work for to try and catch the killer, making them his new targets. The book is said to be very scary, which falls in line with De Palma's recent claim that he wishes to make a very scary film. He is set to begin shooting a new film this winter in Rome, at Ben Ammar's newly acquired Roma Studios. Last February, De Palma mentioned that he was working on a new idea about a "kind of" serial killer: "I had an idea to make a very scary movie, based on a kind of serial murderer that preys on tourists. So, I got a sort of very good idea, and that?s what I've been working on. But I've written a couple of scripts, and at this stage now, I'm sort of deciding?" De Palma's use of the vague qualifying words "a kind of" in front of "serial murderer" could indicate that Toyer's killer is the one he was basing his script on. FROM L.A. TO ROME McKay's story takes place in Los Angeles, where the killer preys on models (McKay, a former television star, moved to Hawaii after becoming fed up and disgusted with shallow, superficial Hollywood life styles). The novel's jacket features a quote from film director James Cameron: "Toyer is a novel where Los Angeles stars as itself, the city of masks, where relationships peel the onion of dark revelation, as two adversaries couple in a seductive death-lock. Gardner McKay has woven a chilling and disturbing descent into the catacomb of the mind." If this is indeed the film De Palma plans on making in Rome this winter, obviously the setting will change. De Palma's mentioning that the killer in his script preys on tourists may reflect the way De Palma plans on adapting the story to the new location. OTHER PLAYERS Last summer, John Travolta mentoned that he was looking at a new script by De Palma called Time Killers. It is not known if this was De Palma's serial killer screenplay, but it seems likely. One other notable aspect of the novel: the paperback version was published by Warner Bros., the same company that will release De Palma's Femme Fatale in North America this Wednesday. One might conclude that the company's reborn promotion of De Palma's reputation as a master of thrillers, erotic or other, may be part of a longterm plan to build a buzz about a scary new thriller from this same director. Ben Ammar has a relationship with Warner Bros. beyond Femme Fatale, having co-executive produced the company's Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever with Andrew Stevens (who worked with De Palma on The Fury). Speaking of The Fury, I have also heard mention that De Palma's new film may somehow involve the paranormal. TWO DIFFERENT WAYS OF WORKING Elsewhere in the N.Y. Times interview, De Palma diplomatically compares working independently to working in Hollywood: "They're just different ways of working. There's a great value to working in the Hollywood system, where people are involved in very intense collaborations, and there's value in an auteur system, where a director essentially conceives an idea, writes it, shoots it, and it comes out as something completely different. In my career I've gone back and forth. I think that's how you learn and grow as a director." Even so, the director goes on to describe how difficult it can be for someone with a strong visual style such as De Palma's to get his ideas acroos to studio heads: "You've got to understand that I'm a known quantity: I'm Brian De Palma. So when a studio wants me to do their picture, they're introducing a very strong element. The problem is that in the studio system, everything is sort of solved on paper. Everyone talks about the movie like it's a legal brief. And when you make movies that are driven with visual ideas, as I do, those are kind of difficult to communicate on paper. That's why you work in genres they can understand, like suspense or mystery. But what makes them interesting as movies is that they work on a kind of intuitive visual level, much like a painter works." FROM HEAD TO SCRIPT TO SCREEN De Palma told Morales, "Most people who read my scripts after they see the movies say: 'My God, I didn't see that in the script at all. Where did all that come from?' Because it's very difficult to describe visual storytelling in script form." Rebecca Romijn-Stamos provides first hand support for De Palma's claim, telling Morales that the screenplay for Femme Fatale "was very straightforward, very basic. But as Brian talked about it, I started realizing that the movie was not on the page at all but totally in his head. He had a very clear picture of what he wanted to do, and I started getting really into it just listening to him. That's when I realized that he was a complete visionary." Read the entire interview here.

Updated November 3 2002 NBC DIRECTOR'S 13-YR OLD DAUGHTER SAYS DE PALMA'S CARRIE NOT SCARY TODAY David Carson, the director of NBC's Carrie, told Bridget Byrne (in an Entertainment News Wire story published in the Chicago Sun-Times) that he hesitated to remake Brian De Palma's 1976 film because it has such a cult following. But he said that Bryan Fuller's "very clearly constructed script" helped to sway him, along with his own 13-year old daughter's reaction to De Palma's film. According to Carson, his daughter said the film was "a bit nasty," but "not at all scary." She was also unimpressed with the moments in the film that had caused original audiences in 1976 to jump out of their seats. "Totally predictable," she told her father. Carson says that his daughter's response reflects a greater sophistication among today's young audiences, and this is what moved him to try the remake. CLARKSON TAKES ON ROLE OF MOTHER In the same article, Patricia Clarkson, who made her film debut as the wife of Eliot Ness in De Palma's The Untouchables, says that she regards De Palma's Carrie as "a great film," but purposely did not rewatch it in preparing for the role of Carrie's mother. "I used some of my own eccentricities," she told Byrne, "and took a leap of faith." CRITICS CALL REMAKE "UNINPSIRED," "NOT SCARY" Linda G. Kincaid of the Boston Herald calls NBC's new three hour remake of Carrie, which airs Monday November 4th, "uninspired," although she seems to appreciate the new version's timing, coming on the heels of horrific school shootings. Kincaid writes that since the original version was released, "real outcast kids have gunned down their classmates in Colorado, California and elsewhere. Now we know that bullying can drive some kids to horrifying violence. Now people are primed to hear your real message, Carrie." According to Kincaid and reveiwer John Levesque of the Salt Lake Tribune, the ending has been altered to make way for either a TV series, or a series of TV films. Both agree that the ending is almost nonexistent, potentially leaving viewers wondering "is that all there is?" Levesque says that the structure has also been changed because the makers assume that we all know the story. It is now told in flashback by survivors in a police interrogation room. Virginia Rohan, a columnist at NorthJersey.com, says that NBC's Carrie is "a remake of the 1976 Brian De Palma film that did not exactly beg revisitation. One noteworthy point: The new version includes a girls locker-room shower scene featuring so much flesh it drives home how loose TV standards have become." The column discusses the TV networks' upcoming sweeps week, of which Carrie is a part, showing Monday November 4th on NBC, at 8pm Eastern.

Posted October 31 2002 TAUBIN: DE PALMA'S BEST SINCE CARRIE DE PALMA LOOKING TOWARD KOREA AFTER ROME In a new interview with Brian De Palma in this week's LA Weekly, Amy Taubin says that Femme Fatale is "De Palma's best movie since Carrie," and goes on to say that it is "De Palma's first film in which the central female character is not a victim. And unlike the telekinetic heroine of Carrie, this femme fatale enjoys her power." De Palma discusses his philosophy of "the new girl" in casting a relatively unknown Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in the lead: "You can be with the most beautiful girl in the world and a new girl walks in and your eye goes over to the new girl. The new girl always works." The article discusses how De Palma had to get away from Hollywood in order to rediscover the joy of filmmaking. "You don't have that wealth thing in Paris that changes everything for artists," he tells Taubin, "that sends them into the superstratosphere." Taubin scoffs at European criticisms that De Palma only made this new film for the money, saying that it is one of his most personal films, and that he has clearly created a film from the heart. De Palma says that because the director of a film is viewed as a god in Paris, they do not do preview screenings. "That's the crucial difference," he says, between making films in europe and making them in Hollywood. "I've always felt the movies I've changed because of various opinions after preview screenings were not improved, and the movies I never changed are the movies I feel most at peace with." De Palma talks about how many of Femme Fatale's scenarios, like the opening jewel heist, were inspired by his own life, and not just other movies, as some people assume. Taubin goes so far as to suggest a very key point: De Palma saw Hitchcock's Vertigo when he was 18 years old, and it created such an impression on him that when he uses it as a source (as he apparently has for Femme Fatale), it is as if he is taking something from his own life, not just a movie. Despite the fact that some have already accused De Palma of following a trend in making a movie about dreams that seems to reflect David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, De Palma points out that he did not see that film until 9 months ago, well after Femme Fatale was in the can. He says that Lynch's dream structure is more complex than in Femme Fatale, but finds it remarkable that the two films have similar themes. He also mentions that after shooting his next film in Rome, he has his eye toward Korea, having developed a keen interest in Korean cinema. "[Their films are] very violent, very sexual. You see these two [Korean] cultures smashing into each other." Many other fascinating points are discussed in the interview. Click here to read it. (Thanks to Chuck!)

Updated October 31 2002 FATALE ENDING A DIVIDING FACTOR POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT-- THIS ARTICLE DISCUSSES REVIEWERS' MENTIONS OF FF'S ENDING Aint It Cool News posted yet another review of Femme Fatale last week (on October 24th). The reviewer, known as "Cafeman," says the film would be great for film schools, "for every frame, angle, cut, piece of sound effect or music is right in its place." Then he says, "But it is exactly this preciseness that makes the film questionably good." Cafeman says that the film feels cold, bleak, and empty, but then says that this is on purpose, "until the last ten minutes," which explain the rest of the film. Cafeman loves the ending, saying that "in the last 10 minutes, the film takes a turn for the shockingly better, and all of a sudden has a mission, a purpose, a heart, a soul, and most importantly, a point. However, as miraculously original as this is, you feel a little pissed off that the film you saw in the last 10 minutes isn't the film you were seeing all along." Meanwhile, Kevin Lally at Film Journal International characterizes the film as a delirious exercise in style. He says "there?s a sudden narrative jolt 20 minutes before the finale that will be familiar to anyone who remembers a certain unfortunate season of the TV series Dallas." Lally says the ending of Femme Fatale is inspired by "the vastly superior" Run Lola Run, using the "playful rewinding of visual details" to deal with questions of fate and alternate realities. FHM magazine says the film has "a what-the-hell ending that's sure to leave meatheads completely baffled," and Stephen Farber at Movieline says that "just when you think the movie may strain credibility to the breaking point, De Palma introduces a neat twist that leads to an intriguing ironic conclusion." And what does De Palma say about it? Amy Taubin, writing in LA Weekly, says that "the narrative has a surprise twist that I feel obliged not to give away, which is a pity because De Palma's description of how he hid the clues in plain sight reveals the skill and subtlety of his filmmaking." She then quotes De Palma: "It's a hard thing to pull off, because no matter what you do, some people will resent being tricked. But others will want to go back again to make all these connections they didn't see before. For me, the film works on such an interesting subconscious level that I still keep seeing connections I never consciously mapped out."

Posted October 26 2002 REBECCA IN MAXIM "YOU NEVER KNEW WHICH BRIAN YOU WERE GOING TO GET" Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is on the cover of the November issue of Maxim, and inside she talks about Brian De Palma and Femme Fatale. Describing the film, she says, "It's a twisted, sexy psychological thriller. When you start watching the movie, at first you might be, like, 'Oh, this is going to be La Femme Nikita,' and then it moves on and you're, like, 'Oh, it's Mission: Impossible.' I think you have to let go of all that. Once you go with the flow, it's really bizarre and cool. It's not a boring, formulaic movie. People will walk out going, 'This Brian De Palma guy really fucks with your head.'" The interviewer asks her if De Palma is "as much of a freakazoid" as his movies suggest he is, and Rebecca laughingly replies, "Yeah. But he's not strange in a way that's bad or good; he's just different. And I dig strange people! Thing is, you never knew which Brian you were going to get on a given day. Sometimes he'd be in the greatest mood and I could ask him tons of questions, and other times he was, like, 'Don't bother me today! I don't want to be talking to you!' But it was great to work with him. He's a genius storyteller." The interviewer then says, "Well, he does come up with one of the most... inspired jewel thefts we've ever seen." Rebecca says, "Yes! I knew it! How long did it take Maxim to ask me about the lesbo scene? Four minutes?" She tells him that she covers her eyes when screening that scene, as well as her sex scene with Antonio, and her striptease scene. But then she admits that she has seen the lesbo scene because she is friends with Rie Rasmussen, and explains a little more about how Rie was cast: "[De Palma] let me in on the auditions, and they kept bringing in these models who were very young and pretty and sweet. But that character needed to have an edge, and Rie was perfect for that. What do you want me to say? She's a really good kisser. It's easier to do that with a friend than a stranger." After being asked which was harder to do, the lesbo scene or the striptease, Rebecca says, "Being sexy on command without a partner to play off is really hard. It was a nine-minute dance, and I had to do it eight or nine times. It was a closed set, which means there were only, like, oh, 20 people there. Brian was, like, 'We're going to start the music, and we'll see if you can turn on all 12 guys in this room!' [laughs] I needed a few shots of tequila to get me through!" I've added a quote from Maxim about Femme Fatale to the list of quotes on the left sidebar of this page.

I've seen three different 30-second spots for the film: One showing on VH1 and FOX SPORTS NET that begins with a quick laser slicing through the WB logo, with a voiceover running through: "From a master thief, to an ambassador's wife... One picture can expose both stories. From Brian De Palma, the master of the erotic thriller... Two lives, one woman... a suspense sensation." The second one I saw played as the first commercial on a repeat of Conan O'Brien's NBC show. This one opened more like the theatrical trailer, with a barrage of images, and a voiceover repeating the "From-Brian-De-Palma-master-of-the-erotic-thriller" thing, then repeating the tag line from the new WB poster, and then ending with quotes from SPIN magazine (De Palma's "most suspenseful thriller") and PREMIERE (with "mind-bending style"). The third one I just managed to catch the tail end of on the Fox Sports Net (Tuesday night, 12:30am Central time, during THE BEST DAMN SPORTS SHOW, PERIOD). It appeared to focus more on the lesbian eroticism than the other two. It featured some different quotes from reviews, but I did not catch where they were from or what they said. Rebecca also appears in the November issue of Elle. Rebecca tells Warner Bros. Extra TV about her fears in doing the striptease in Femme Fatale. As she told Canal Plus at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, she needed a shot of tequila. WB11 has a video feed of Rebecca clearing up a silly rumor about her and John Stamos having sex on a ride at Disney. This stems from a cover story in the November issue of Jane (see below) where Rebecca tells the interviewer that she and John first had sex at a hotel in Disneyland. The writer first assumes that they did it on a ride, but Rebecca says no, at a hotel, but somehow the writer's initial assumption spread into a rumor. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos has two separate covers in the November issue of Jane, out now. The story is called "I Will Shock You," and covers a few "shocking" things about her wild lifestyle, with just a couple of brief mentions of Femme Fatale, her "first lead role." Rebecca mentions that two of the friends that stop by her house a lot are Rie Rasmussen and her boyfriend Trevor. Speaking of Rie, Rebecca says, "I got her the audition with Brian De Palma, who directed the movie. She is a friend of mine's girlfriend, and she is a huge De Palma fan. She's a brilliant, brilliant girl who also happens to be a model, and we needed a model who would play a lesbian. I was like, 'Brian, please see my friend, because if we're going to do this scene, I think it would be easier for me to do it with somebody I know.' He adored her." In case you missed it last month, Rie was featured in Rolling Stone magazine's "Hot List" issue, where Femme Fatale was cited as "Hot Gratuitous Lesbian Sex Scene." We'll have more on that later. Posted October 21 2002 DE PALMA IN STEP WITH FASHION AND HE LIKES THE CATWOMAN, TOO The Beauty column in the November issue of Movieline features Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, who "plays a dangerously alluring con artist with some kick-ass curls" in Femme Fatale. The column, written by Mona Mars, compares Rebecca's "wavy white-blonde" hair to that of Kim Basinger in Nine 1/2 Weeks, but also talks about Brian De Palma's track record with "some of cinema's best white-hot 'dos: Angie Dickinson's flaxen mane from Dressed To Kill, Michelle Pfeiffer's straight-as-a-line-of-cocaine bob from Scarface and Melanie Griffith's punk buzz cut from Body Double." Mars claims that the hairstyle worn by Rebecca in Femme Fatale is "right in step with the latest trend," reflecting recent shows by Gucci and Versace. Speaking of Pfeiffer, her role as a mother in prison on a murder charge in the new movie White Oleander came about because director Peter Kosminsky remembered her in De Palma's Scarface, and also in The Fabulous Baker Boys. De Palma is quoted about Pfeiffer in a recent Houston Chronicle article, saying that "her Catwoman is something you will never forget." Meoww.

BRIEF REVIEWS IN MOVIELINE & VANITY FAIR Stephen Farber in Movieline says that with Femme Fatale, De Palma "is clearly indulging his taste for hot sex and Hitchcockian menace, and his playfulness is infectious this time around." He says the film takes the viewer on "a wild ride," and "just when you think the movie may strain credibility to the breaking point, De Palma introduces a neat twist that leads to an intriguing ironic conclusion." Bruce Handy gives the film three stars in the November Vanity Fair. In a review titled "De Palma's Way," Handy says that Femme Fatale is a meditation on De Palma's life's work ("an almost abstract series of set pieces") similar to what Hitchcock was up to with his later film Frenzy. He says the film "wears its genre quotation marks proudly," and says it is enjoyably hollow, concluding with a sarcastic rhetorical question: "His most personal film to date?"

Posted October 19 2002 WARNER STEPS UP ITS FF SITE HOLLYWOOD PREMIERE SET FOR NOV. 4th Warner Bros. appears to be stepping up its promotion of Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale with a newly designed website at www.femmefatalemovie.com. There you will find some new pictures, downloads of the new poster and wallpapers, and the trailer, among other things. Meanwhile, the Hollywood premiere of the film is scheduled for 7pm November 4th at Mann Village, 961 Broxton Avenue in Los Angeles. Celebrity arrivals begin around 6:15pm.

Posted October 17 2002 PANKOW INTERVIEW AT briandepalma.net EXCLUSIVE DELETED SNAKE EYES STILLS Brett W. Leitner's interview with editor Bill Pankow, who works frequently with Brian De Palma (including the most recent Femme Fatale), was posted this morning at Bill Fentum's Directed by Brian De Palma site. A major score of the article is a set of stills from the famously omitted "big wave" climax from Snake Eyes. From the looks of it, the "organic" sequence (as Pankow refers to it) was similar in feel to the organic helicopter-tunnel sequence in De Palma's Mission: Impossible, and with a subtle poke at Spielberg's rolling boulder scene at the beginning of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, only this time, someone actually gets smashed underneath. Another revelation (of many) from the interview: De Palma used no storyboards for Femme Fatale. Check out the details here.

COMING SOON GETS FIRST LOOK AT POSTER On October 16th, Warner Bros. released its new U.S. poster for Femme Fatale exclusively to Coming Soon. This is just a slight variation on the original French poster, bringing Antonio Banderas out into the open, and moving Rebecca Romijn-Stamos left of center. The fonts/titles are a little snazzier too. A month ago, I said that I liked the poster used at the Totonto Film Festival better than the French version. Now, I think I like this new poster even better, because it seems a little less conventional than the Toronto face-to-face shot, and seems to give more of an impression of what the movie (and De Palma's cinema) is all about-- Antonio keeping his eye on Rebecca. The tagline is new, too: "Nothing is more desirable or more deadly than a woman with a secret." Up at the top, it reads, "From Brian De Palma, master of the erotic thriller." (Thanks to KC!)

Updated October 16 2002 CORRECTION: SITGES "TECHNICAL PROBLEMS" FF ABSENCE STILL OTHERWISE UNEXPLAINED Femme Fatale has had to be excluded from competition at this year's Sitges Film Festival. "Screenfreekz," posting at the briandepalma.net forum, said that when he arrived at the festival for a midnight showing of the film, there was a note posted on the box office window saying that the film had to be dropped from the competition due to "technical problems," and was being replaced "in extremis" by The Bourne Identity. Harry Knowles, founder of the website Aint It Cool News, sat on the Fantastic Film panel of judges at the festival, which finished up October 13th in Catalonia. Femme Fatale, which had been scheduled to screen on Thursday October 10th and Friday October 11th, was supposed to be one of the films in the competition, and Knowles was quite excited about it. Here is what he wrote on his site on Thursday, October 3rd: I really can't believe that I'm at a film festival where I sit in judgement over the new Brian De Palma film. I am an unabashed lover of De Palma's work and feel that one's love of his films is a dividing line between the pretensious [sic] film elite and those that just plain love movies. De Palma's films are a celebration of filmmaking and I can not wait to see his return to the genre I love to see him working in. Despite Knowles' recent public disagreement on the site with Moriarty over an early draft of J. J. Abrams' Superman screenplay (fans at the site have been vehement the past week about setting the two webmeisters on opposite ends of a feud), each of them uses the word "unabashedly" to describe their love of De Palma's work. Last August, while presenting a scooper review of Femme Fatale, Moriarty wrote the following: Well, even though I thought the script was weak, I know I?ll be there as soon as possible. I admit a total and complete blind spot when it comes to De Palma. I love his work unabashedly, and even his softest films have things that I admire in them. Moriarty did indeed review De Palma's screenplay on the site back in April of 2001, when the film was just three weeks into shooting. He did not like it, and said that the ending would infuriate audiences. "If they didn't like Raising Cain," he said, "they're going to practically tear their theater seats up when they see this one." At the time, I criticized Moriarty's assumption that the finished film would be disappointing based on what he read in the screenplay, which was a draft completed in early January of 2001, before De Palma had even cast Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in the lead. After announcing in mid-February of 2001 that Rebecca had been cast, De Palma added that he would tailor the script to suit Rebecca. I pointed out that De Palma was legendary for putting much more on the screen than was apparent in his screenplays. After e-mailing these points to Moriarty, he e-mailed me back, saying "Believe it or not, I am a De Palma fan. I wish he were making better films. I'll see Femme Fatale the weekend it comes out... sooner if I get a chance. But the script I read was terrible, and my love of the man's previous work doesn't preclude me from saying so. It is possible to be a fan and to be objective at the same time." While I agree with that last statement, I maintain that Moriarty unfairly pre-judged De Palma's finished film by reviewing the screenplay he read as if it had been the film itself. To support my claim, I offer the following. Almost everybody who has seen the film (even Jeffrey Wells) seems to agree that the opening heist sequence is brilliant. Here is what Moriarty wrote in his screenplay review: Even in this opening, which I hoped was going to be wicked and smart and funny, a sequence that would fully utilize this great location and this great knowledge De Palma must have of what that scene is like, things feel muted, as if De Palma doesn't really have any great ideas for action scenes right now. It's pedestrian, and that's the one thing De Palma's work has never been. From pedestrian to brilliant? As Rebecca has told the press more than once, "Brian had the whole movie in his head."

Posted October 10 2002 FF HAS U.S. PREMIERE AT MILL VALLEY AICN's QUINT WAS THERE, CLAIMS "100% DE PALMA" Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale was a late addition to this year's Mill Valley Film Festival in northern California, where the film had its U.S. premiere Tuesday, October 8th. "Quint," a regular contributor to Aint It Cool News, has been covering the festival for that site, and posted a review of Femme Fatale, saying that he has been looking forward to seeing the film since he recently viewed De Palma's Blow Out, which he now considers a masterpiece. Pointing to early reviews of the new film that have been lukewarm, Quint writes, "I have to say that I can't imagine what movie the nay sayers were watching. It couldn't have been the movie I saw last night." He compares the situation to that of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, where fans of Kubrick rejected the film as being un-Kubrickian, when in Quint's eyes, there was nothing radically un-Kubrickian about it. Likewise, he says that Femme Fatale is 100% De Palma (a talkbacker on the article expresses the assumption, based on Quint's review, that those who like De Palma will get it and love it, while those who have been consistently unsold on De Palma will remain so). Quint has a couple of specific problems with the film: For him, the split-screen work is not as challenging as in past De Palma films (he states that Roger Avary uses the technique to better effect in The Rules Of Attraction). He also is not sold on Ryuichi Sakamoto's score, which Quint finds at odds with De Palma's apparent tone in places. "It's a bit too playful during scenes that should be tense," says Quint. "It goes a long way to defusing the tension that De Palma carefully tried to set up." Quint talks briefly about the ending of the film, which he says "a lot of people will be calling bullshit." He says that while it is not the strongest part of the film, he really likes the ending. He also liked the performances of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos ("she carries the film pretty effortlessly") and Antonio Banderas, who "has enough charisma to really have fun with this character" of a paparazzo. Quint said that one scene where Banderas was "amazingly funny," causing him and the majority of the audience to laugh for a good three or four minutes straight.

Posted October 11 2002 A TALE OF TWO FILMS AND TWO STORIES, AND TWO ACTORS, AND...DRAG QUEENS? Sissy Spacek and Amy Irving, who both starred as high school teenagers in Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation of Carrie, appear together again, this time as mothers, in Disney's Tuck Everlasting. As each play mother figures on opposite sides of the fence in the new movie, one wonders if this was an inspired casting decision on the part of director Jay Russell, or simply an interesting coincidence. Meanwhile, a campy version of Carrie performed in drag is enjoying a run through November 9th at Boston's The Machine. Adapted from Stephen King's novel by Ryan Landry, the Rocky Horror Picture Show-esque spoof owes just as much to De Palma's film version, according to Boston Globe reviewer Sally Cragin. Cragin cites "a slow-motion pantomime during Carrie's improbable coronation as prom queen" as the De Palma influence. NBC has tentatively scheduled its Carrie mini-series to begin airing on Monday, November 4th. That's the same week De Palma's Femme Fatale opens in U.S./Canadian theaters.

Posted October 9 2002 U.S. FEMME DATE PUSHED UP IS EMINEM CAUSE FOR EARLY RELEASE? Warner Bros. has moved the release date for Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale from Friday November 8th to Wednesday November 6th. It is not known why the date has been changed, but we can speculate that it is a wise decision, since Eminem's new movie, 8 Mile, is released that Friday, and is likely to garner front page attention across the board. By releasing Femme Fatale two days earlier, the studio can ensure that the film will get full initial attention, and not be buried right away under the Eminem media juggernaut. Sounds logical to me, anyway.

Posted October 9 2002 AICN: "THE RETURN OF THE GREAT GENIUS" PREMIERE: AN "OH YEAH? WELL, SCREW YOU!" MOVIE There is a new scooper review of Femme Fatale up this morning at Aint It Cool News. The reviewer says that the film marks "the return of the great genius," comparing the film favorably with the dreamlike style of Dario Argento, "the style which drowns the whole by turning the film into a dark dream done through a number of transcendent set-pieces." The scooper, dubbed "Ethan," elaborates that both De Palma and Argento are less concerned with "what happened" than with "what happens." Ethan says that "death in sleep can be more horrifying, painful and aestehetically relevant than the real one." For Ethan, it is this association with dreams that justifies the parts not needing to connect with the whole. BOO-FRICKIN'-HOO Glenn Kenny at Premiere also says "boo-frickin'-hoo" to those who have complained online that Femme Fatale lacks characters that the audience can care about. For Kenny, writing in the November issue, "the silly cinematic ravishments of De Palma's mind-bending style" are enough to make Femme Fatale a film worth caring about. Kenny sees the new film as the latest in a string of movies that De Palma makes after being heavily criticized and rejected on previous films. As with Body Double (following Dressed To Kill and Scarface) and Raising Cain (following The Bonfire Of The Vanities), De Palma's Femme Fatale is, according to Kenny, "a big, fat 'Oh yeah? Well screw you!' movie" in reaction to the rejection of the director's Mission To Mars. He calls it "a kind of DePalma's Greatest Hits, showing off the director's virtuosity of timing, camera movement, editing, use of split-screen, and so much more." Pondering De Palma's devious sense of humor, Kenny confesses, "Femme Fatale is the worst (or at the very least, inhuman) movie I have ever enjoyed so thoroughly. It's filled with moments when you think 'De Palma wouldn't dare, would he?' after which, sure enough, he dares."

Updated September 22 2002 NEW FF TRAILER GOES BALLISTIC AND NOW IT IS ONLINE AS WELL Warner Bros.' new trailer for Femme Fatale is currently playing at screenings of the studio's Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, which opened Friday and also stars Antonio Banderas and Gregg Henry (each of whom are pictured here in a still from Femme Fatale's trailer). It has also just been posted online, and you can download it here. The new trailer does not keep the concept of the European one, which gave the impression of showing the entire linear film speeded up, with several short sequences highlighted at normal speed. Instead, the speeded-up technique becomes a theme of the new trailer, but it is completely non-linear, with Hollywood voiceover and on-screen text stylishly thrown in. Despite these differences, the new trailer manages to show an awful lot of stuff without actually giving much of anything away. It opens with a flash of images and a voiceover that says, "From director Brian De Palma, master of the erotic thriller, comes a new suspense sensation." It stops for a moment to show an announcer talking about the jewel snake that a model is wearing at the Cannes Film Festival ("This top supermodel's wearing more than you think... 10 million in diamonds"), setting up the opening jewel heist. It does not focus on the eroticism as much as the European trailer does, showing only a brief moment of Rebecca clipping Rie's snake. As it goes through, showing several brief teases of plot points with dialogue from the film, these words come up on the screen intermittently: "If you could see your destiny... If you had a chance to change it... Could you escape your past?" Then, if I remember correctly, Antonio and Rebecca's names go up in procession, followed by, "Two lives... Two worlds... One woman," all while flashes of the film continue, with Rebecca saying things like, "Just one more job, baby," and, "I'm a bad girl, Nicholas. Real bad." Then, as things get more frantic, more words come up on the screen: "Seductive... Irresistible... Fatal..." and then the "Fatal" turns into the title, "Femme Fatale." It is a very effective trailer that whets the appetite. (Thanks to KC!)

Brian De Palma arriving at the closing night Gala Premiere of Femme Fatale September 14th at the Toronto International Film Festival. We think Michael Douglas must really like this film a lot. He was at theFemme Fatale party in Cannes last May, and now here he is at the Toronto premiere.

Posted September 17 2002 FILM FESTIVAL MADNESS 2 NEW DE PALMA INTERVIEWS TODAY LA Times NY Times (Thanks to KC, Chuck, and Brett!)

John Stamos, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, and Melanie Griffith arrive for the Gala screening of Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale Saturday, September 14th at the Toronto International Film Festival. Rebecca and Antonio star in the film. John has a cameo as a "cheesy agent voice" on the telephone. Melanie starred in De Palma's Body Double and The Bonfire Of The Vanities. Below, we see that Rie Rasmussen was there, as well.

Posted September 14 2002 DE PALMA IS A PUNK ROCKER BRIAN-REBECCA-ANTONIO ALL SMILES IN TORONTO A recap of today's Femme Fatale press conference is up at the Toronto International Film Festival website. Antonio Banderas said that the film is "very daring, almost punk." He said he agreed to do the film because he wanted to work with De Palma. "I wanted to see how he frames, the way he moves the camera, his timing," he said. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos said that she had to put all of her trust into De Palma. "Everything I did," she said, "I listened to the man. The whole movie was in his head, it is entirely his vision." She thought the title character was an "amazing role" for an actress, despite the suggestion that the film may be seen as objectifying women. "There are lots of these roles out there for men," Rebecca said, "but very few woman characters are allowed to be bad and to own their sexuality. I was totally in charge of everything I did." De Palma claimed that he never pays attention to what is politically correct. He praised his actors for placing their trust in him, saying, "I've taken them to the deep end of the pool, and they dove right in." De Palma also spoke of his love for the Toronto Film Festival, calling it a film-lover's festival and "the best festival in the world." He said, "I love Toronto. I like the people, I like the clubs, and I love the enthusiasm of the audience. It's great."

FEMME FATALE STARS ARRIVE IN TORONTO

Posted September 14 2002 PEVERE ON FF: "A stunningly conducted visual symphony" DE PALMA SPENDS HIS BIRTHDAYS IN TORONTO Toronto Star film critic Geoff Pevere interviewed Brian De Palma at the Toronto Film Festival, calling the director's new Femme Fatale "a stunningly conducted visual symphony." De Palma admits to Pevere that the film, which closes the festival with a gala screening Saturday night, is "highly politically incorrect." Pevere writes that De Palma has spent his birthdays at the Toronto Film Festival since 1979. Last year's terrorist attacks put a damper on things, however, and De Palma, whose birthday is on September 11th, spent three days holed up in his hotel. He usually spends ten days at the Montreal World Cinema Festival, followed right after by ten days at Toronto's fest. De Palma has already found inspiration in this year's festival with Bad Guy, which was screened as part of a South Korean retrospective. He says he spends as much of his time as he can going to film festivals around the world when he is not making movies of his own. He names some favorite films seen at festivals: Requiem For A Dream, Mulholland Drive, and Memento, which he says is "incredible." What De Palma looks for in a film is an eye for something new. "It's all about pure visual storytelling," he tells Pevere, "the challenge of finding something interesting to do with a particular space." But some eye candy can become boring. De Palma says he walked out of Pearl Harbor in the middle of the attack. "How many times can you watch something explode in exactly the same way? Even those kinds of visual movies have become boring. I mean can't we find something new?" There is a lot more in this great interview, which you can read by clicking here.

Updated September 5 2002 R-RATED FEMME FATALE WARNER OPENS UP ITS OFFICIAL SITE! Warner Bros. has opened up its official page for Femme Fatale (www.femmefatalemovie.com), with some nice new pictures, like the one to the left. This is just in time for the Toronto Film Festival, which opened today (see that story below). According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, "Femme Fatale, a stylish Brian De Palma thriller that's being released in November by Warners, has received an R rating, despite the presence of female frontal nudity and an explicit sex scene between stars Antonio Banderas and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos." Previously, I had questioned the mention of an "explicit sex scene" between Antonio and Rebecca, but Boris from France e-mailed me to let me know that the sentence is entirely correct (there is a "very explcit" sex scene between Antonio and Rebecca just after her strip tease). In any case, the real meat of the sentence is that Femme Fatale has avoided censorship from the MPAA and been rated R as is. Pure De Palma, no cuts, no fouls. And no digital obscuring of images on the screen. The article is actually about Roger Avary and his battles with the MPAA over the sexual tones of his new film Rules Of Attraction. Avary, who was in talks a couple of years ago with Edward Pressman to film a remake of De Palma's Sisters, has submitted his film four times to the MPAA, and has received its NC-17 rating each time. Avary tells the newspaper that he would rather be censored than have to go through the battle he is currently engaged in. An NC-17 rating means that it will be difficult for the film's distributor to release the film on more than 400 screens. The article, written by Patrick Goldstein, uses Femme Fatale, which is being released by Warner Bros., as an example of a perceived favoring of films from the major studios that receive more desirable ratings for equally "unsuitable" films. "I guess it shouldn't come as a shock that members of the ratings board, like many Americans, are squeamish about sex unless it's played for laughs, as in American Pie," writes Goldstein, "or given a sleek, titillating sheen, as in thrillers like Unfaithful or Femme Fatale. But it's time the board stopped punishing filmmakers for thinking seriously about sex." De Palma himself has been in Avary's shoes, of course, and accused the MPAA of censorship in several of his battles with the board in the early 1980's, and also as recently as 1998, when Snake Eyes was given an R instead of a PG-13.

Updated September 5 2002 FEMME GALA TO CLOSE TORONTO FEST; COMPETE AT SITGES BANDERAS AND DE PALMA TO ATTEND IN TORONTO Antonio Banderas mentioned to Detroit Free Press writer Terry Lawson that he will be attending the Toronto International Film Festival this September for the North American premiere of Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale. The film will screened during the festival's closing night gala on September 14th. It has also been revealed that De Palma himself will be there. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is in Vancouver this month filming the sequel to X-Men... it takes no great stretch of the imagination to speculate that she may show up in Toronto as well. Femme Fatale has already screened at two film festivals this year, in Cannes and Moscow. Following its closing of the Toronto Film Festival in September, De Palma's latest will play this October at Sitges, the International Festival of Cinema of Catalunya. Femme Fatale will compete in that festival's official category of "Fantastic" films, along with the likes of David Cronenberg's Spider and the new remake of Red Dragon. BANDERAS WOULD PLAY A LAMPPOST, AND OTHER OUTRAGEOUS STORIES... Banderas told Lawson that he has a supporting role in Femme Fatale, but that he "would have played a lamppost to work with DePalma," the maker of some of his favorite films while starting out in Spain. "I loved these movies so much -- Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double -- because they are so outrageous and involving. He uses the camera in a way that tells the story without the dialogue and explanation, you know? Pure cinema. I like that so much." The Morning Call posted an interview recently with Banderas, in which the actor mentions Robert Rodriguez and Brian De Palma as two of his favorite collaborators. He said that Femme Fatale is an envelope-pusher that is very sexy. He told writer Amy Longsdorf, "Not even Pedro Almodovar asked me to do as many outrageous things as De Palma did. De Palma is unbelievably daring." Banderas gave his perspective on what De Palma is up to with the new film: "What I found with Brian De Palma was that he was tired of Hollywood. He moved to Paris and he's trying to recapture himself, trying to recapture the Brian De Palma of the '60s and '70s, when he made movies like Blow Out, Sisters and Body Double, which starred my wife."

Posted September 5 2002 HOAGLAND EXPOSES NASA'S "DIRTY LITTLE SECRET" GLASS TUNNELS EMERGE AS "TRAIN STATION IN DOWNTOWN CYDONIA" Richard C. Hoagland is to present what he calls his NASA/Cydonia "smoking gun" evidence tonight, in a simultaneous multimedia publication/broadcast, respectively, on his own Enterprise Mission website, and on Art Bell's Coast To Coast national radio show at 1am eastern time. Hoagland has a long story to tell, about what he and his researchers thought was "noise" in NASA's recently released infrared image of the Cydonia region of Mars. Hoagland and crew sent two image processing specialists to examine the image separately: one was skeptic Keith Laney, and the other the more eager Holger Isenberg, who has in the past provided De Palma a la Mod intriguing insights into De Palma's Mission To Mars. What emerges is a story about two images released by NASA: initially an altered one posted on the THEMIS website, and the real image, curiously posted for only a few hours a day later on the same site. An effort to fool the public? Hoagland thinks so, and he thinks he and his team have discovered things NASA is unwilling to admit. A "train station in downtown Cydonia" is only the beginning.

Posted August 29 2002 AINT IT GETTIN' HOT IN HERRE FEMME OPENS IN HOLLAND, PREVIEWS IN U.S. Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale opened today in Holland, and received a glowing review from a Dutch De Palma fan at the Directed by Brian De Palma Forum. "Peet" calls it a "red phase" De Palma film for the fans, and says that the ones who will not like it will be "the plausibles," referring to Alfred Hitchcock's derogatory term for audiences who sought to have everything in his films explained to them. "Peet" also had praise for Rebecca Romijn-Stamos ("a revelation") and Thierry Arbogast's photography, which finds "beauty in ordinary daylight." Meanwhile, another De Palma fan who viewed a preview in California earlier this month posted a review up at Aint It Cool News that was a little less approving. This scooper loved the opening heist sequence, which he says is done with very little dialogue, but found the ending, which he compares to the end of Run Lola Run, "jaw-droppingly bad." He also liked Antonio Banderas' performance ("surprisingly funny at times"), and says that Rebecca isn't bad, either, but he felt that the sex scenes in the film dragged on a bit. The talkbackers on the article raved about the film's French trailer, which won the Grand Prix and the special Prize of the Public at the 19th International Festival of the Trailer at last May's Cannes Film Festival. Another AICN talkbacker who apparently has seen Femme Fatale said that the ending is "one of the most intense cinematographical end sequences ever put on film!!" It's getting hot in herre!

Posted August 20 2002 FEMME FATALE IN THE SCHOOL OF LYNCH ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S FALL MOVIE PREVIEW Entertainment Weekly has released its Fall Movie Preview issue this week, with a column for the November 8 release of Femme Fatale. The article says that even though the film opens with images from Double Indemnity, De Palma tells them it is also in the more recent school of Mulholland Drive. "It's a kind of a sexy puzzle," De Palma says, "so by the time you get to the end of it, you have to go back and see it again to see how all the pieces fit." They also say that Uma Thurman was originally cast in the lead role, but that her pregnancy forced her to drop out. "We went through many actresses," De Palma told them. "It went on for quite a while. Then Rebecca came at the ninth hour. The key to this character is that she has to be just devastatingly sexy, because the trick of the film is that you're sort of lured into her web. You have to want to feast your eyes on her and never let go." Antonio Banderas and Gregg Henry both appear in Femme Fatale. I found out from the Entertainment Weekly Fall film guide that the two of them also appear on screen together in this September's Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, also released by Warner Bros. REBECCA AND A POOL TABLE In an interview with the Portuguese site Publico, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos says that at first, De Palma didn't even want to see her. He thought of her as just a model, and felt he'd be wasting his time. She said that the producers had to beg with him to see her, and then the two hit it off. She said her sleeping patterns were thrown off through filming, because they filmed mostly at night, and she felt like Dracula. She says that the stripping scene (in which the writer states that she virtually makes love with a pool table) was the most difficult to film, and she was very nervous. Normally, she says, when you film love scenes, you have somebody else to share the tension with, but carrying that kind of sexuality all by yourself is another thing altogether. "Originally the sequence lasted nine minutes," she says, "and we filmed it seven or eight times, in a room filled with strange men." She brought a bottle of tequilla with her to help calm her nerves.

Posted August 17 2002 RIE COOKS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE LENS FEMME FATALE STAR WATCHED AND LEARNED ON THE SET Models.com has a great interview with Rie Rasmussen, who plays Veronica in Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale. The interview was conducted prior to the film's screening at the Cannes Film Festival last May. When Rie was 16, she met up with some friends who shared her interest in film, and they all got a crash course in filmmaking at HFI film school. She says that they wrote scripts and made "little skateboard movies" with 35mm cameras. Later on, she became intrigued by the way that stars like Clint Eastwood and Sean Penn used their personas in front of the camera as leverage for their work behind the camera. For Femme Fatale, Rie says that she spent two months on the set with De Palma. "I watched everything," she says. "Even when I didn't have any scenes I'd hang around just to be able to breathe the air. I loved acting and performing. I desired to make the most of the experience. It was amazing." "PLEASE COME DO MY MOVIE" Rie is asked about a real-life incident in which she apparently engaged in some kind of risque behavior on an international flight. The interviewer wonders if the incident happened to be an influence on her racy scenes with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in Femme Fatale. Rie replies: "My character is kind of the catalyst for the entire plot and the way it unfolds. Brian got to keep a very racy scene that opens the movie. Some people felt that originally the scene was not... realistic but the episode you hint at made Brian realize women could be strong and adventurous and daring. I took a meeting with Brian and Rebecca. Our reading had great chemistry and at the end Brian said 'Please come do my movie.' I was honored to do it." THE CINEMATOGRAPHER'S ART Rie also happens to be a longtime admirer of Thierry Arbogast, the cinematographer of Femme Fatale who works regularly with Luc Besson. "He has the most beautiful light," says Rie. "It's so very sensual and beautiful. I went up to him on the Femme Fatale set to tell him how much I admired his work and he's like...'You know my name? Wow!' But you have to realize the cinematography is a very crucial part of the film. David Fincher's films, Seven, The Game ...Panic Room, even though they are shot by different cinematographers, always have the same visual tones and textures. It's him. It's his signature. That's his eye remaining consistent through all his films. But really, cinematographers have a lot of control visually. I love the rich, velvety textures of film stock. It's visual but it's tactile too. I was watching Casablanca the other day and the light on Ingrid Bergman's face was just incredible."

Posted August 11 2002 PORTUGUESE CRITICS UPBEAT ABOUT FEMME 20-MINUTE DUTCH FEMME FATALE SEGMENT NOW ONLINE Click here to watch a 20-minute segment on Femme Fatale, broadcast on the Dutch program Stardust (once you click on the link, click "Stardust" under the heading "Agenda" at the top of the page... after that, click on the August 8 program). The segment features clips from the film, and interviews with Brian De Palma and Antonio Banderas, although we should warn you that minor spoilers may appear here and there. (Thanks to Dennis!) STOP MAKING SENSE One of the highlights has Banderas talking about De Palma's discarding of reality in the film. Banderas, playing a paparrazo photographer in the film, would hop onto his bike for a scene, but then stop to tell De Palma that it felt weird not having his camera with him, which is very big and would certainly be noticable. De Palma asked him if he remembered the climactic scene in Rear Window, where James Stewart fends off Raymond Burr with the flash bulbs of his camera. De Palma asked Banderas if he thought it was possible for Stewart to fight off this aggressive killer by flashing him four times with his camera. That is not real, De Palma said, but Hitchcock made us believe it could be real. "So Hitchcock created his own personal world," Banderas, still quoting from De Palma, tells the interviewer, "and people may believe it. They buy it. So you don't need justification for that camera of yours... when the camera goes down, and you're on the bike, the camera's just not there anymore. And what is the problem with people? [Now no longer quoting De Palma] You know, so I just love that kind of strong personality." Banderas also had a fear of logic when De Palma wanted him to pretend to be "a queer." Banderas asked, "You want me to be a queer here?" But De Palma told him that there was justification for this point (and it sounds a lot like a certain scene in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE): he said, "the guy, he's got a leather jacket, you're a man, you knock on the door of a lady, you're not going to get in that room! The lady's going to say, 'Who are you,' and not allow you to enter, but if you're a queer, I promise she's going to allow you." Banderas says De Palma told him, "Don't worry, every step at a time. And at the end, it will make sense. And if it doesn't make sense, I don't care. It's a dream. [Banderas laughs]" "THIS IS NOT A FILM NOIR" Meanwhile in Portugal, Femme Fatale is being well-received by critics. Mario Jorge Towers calls it the work of "a brilliant falsifier," by which he means that De Palma creates a sort of surrealist film noir that stands up and says "This is not a film noir" (Towers makes an analogy with a work by the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte, who wrote the words "This is not a pipe" under a depiction of a pipe). Towers says that Femme is involved with the logic of postmodern thought, "playing with the remaining portions of the classic cinema, as well as with its mythical memory." In it, De Palma toys with the symbolic remains of film noir, deconstructing and then reconstructing them. In the process, Towers writes, De Palma makes reference to the cinemas of Hitchcock, Welles, Wilder, Polanski, Antonioni, Zemeckis (Back To The Future), and Resnais. He also turns reality into fiction by making direct reference to the cinema of Regis Wargnier, who presents his own latest film, which actually exists, but here it and its makers are turned into fiction. "The Real appears as deep for the surreal," Towers writes. "The cinema as a virtual art is instrumental in creating the Real effect." Towers say the film greatly mimics the visual style of Welles' The Lady From Shanghai, and that Rebecca Romijn-Stamos represents a cross between the archetypical Hitchcock heroine and Verhoeven's Sharon Stone of Basic Instinct. Another review by Luis Miguel Oliveira, who calls Snake Eyes De Palma's best of the '90s, sees Femme Fatale as "a small assay on Vertigo."

Posted August 3 2002 "FACE FANS" GET THE BALL ROLLING BONFIRE ON ROAD TO PERDITION AMIDST SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS Alan Boyle wrote an article last week at MSNBC.com that provided the most even-handed view yet in the mainstream press regarding NASA's recent release of a daytime infrared image of the Face on Mars and the surrounding Cydonia region (see FACE story below posted July 25 2002). After Richard C. Hoagland appeared on Art Bell's Coast To Coast radio show to stir listeners into action, many public officials and media outlets were bombarded with e-mail messages complaining that NASA was dragging on its promise to release a nighttime infrared image of Cydonia that would expose significant features much more clearly than the daytime image. Boyle states hat MSNBC.com was one of the media outlets bombarded. One of the e-mails, from Jackson, Mississippi, is quoted: "By NASA?s own admission, they have nighttime thermal images of the Cydonia region, which should provide valuable scientific information regarding the true geology of the region." Jim Rice, a member of the THEMIS research team at Arizona State University, told Boyle that the Mars Global Surveyor had not yet passed over Cydonia during nighttime. He also claimed that the daytime infrared image released July 24th shows that "It?s just natural erosional processes. There?s nothing unique about the Face." THE FACE AS POP CULTURE ICON Boyle's article provides a brief history of the debate over the Face, stating that the images NASA has released over the last five years support mainstream opinions that the features are nothing more than wind erosion and the like. "But the Face on Mars lived on as a fringe-science phenomenon," writes Boyle, "and even provided a key piece of the plot for the 2000 science-fiction movie Mission to Mars." Producer Tom Jacobson explained to SFX magazine in May of 2000: "One of Brian [De Palma]'s first ideas when he came into the room was that it should be 'The Face on Mars'. He said, 'It's part of popular culture, it's fun, something that the Mars conspiracists all talk about, and that's what we should use.'" De Palma had the film's Face shaped as a "sleeping goddess," provoking some criticism from advocates about the realistic portrayal of its features. When TIME magazine speculated that De Palma had based his film as much on Hoagland's book Monuments Of Mars as anything else, it was discovered that Hoagland had in fact teamed up with De Palma's estranged brother Bruce De Palma for some research about ten years earlier. Much more information about these ties can be found on the De Palma a la Mod Mission To Mars page.

TO PERDITION AND BEYOND! Tom Hanks was all smiles when he was stroked by Hollywood June 12 during an American Film Institute banquet to present the actor a Life Achievement Award. Amidst all the talk of "America's Favorite Son" and his great risks and successes, Hanks' risk-taking performance in Brian De Palma's The Bonfire Of The Vanities was superstitiously ignored. Only Buzz Lightyear, the animated Toy Story space cadet voiced by Tim Allen, had the nerve to even mention the notorious film. Allen himself came out and looked over the crowd of movers and shakers, saying, "Boy, you could wreck a career in this room real fast." Allen presented himself as sort of the anti-Hanks: "So, all that Tom Hanks stuff you hear about... just strip away those layers of goodness, you know what you get? You get me! Evil vindictive little ____, that's what you get!" After Allen was done, a short clip was shown of Buzz Lightyear and Woody playfully praising Hanks. Lightyear said: "Greetings! It's a pleasure to be here to celebrate the incredible career of, uh, one of the universe's greatest actors... [then confiding to Woody (see picture)] Whatever you do, don't mention Bonfire Of The Vanities." GOOD GRITTY MOVIES While in Chicago last year filming Road To Perdition, Hanks was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, who asked him if he wished he'd said no to The Bonfire Of The Vanities. Hanks replied, "Only because it's one of the crappiest movies ever made!" But then he went on to say that even now when he goes to Germany, people will say to him, "How come you don't make good, gritty movies like The Bonfire Of The Vanities anymore?" Hanks said that "they have no concept of what it meant to be an American and have that movie enter the national consciousness." Hanks told Oprah that he learned a lot by making the film, saying that he was going contrary to the character of Sherman McCoy in a sort of defiant response to people telling him that he was not the right guy for the role. He said, "Bonfire taught me that I couldn't manufacture a core connection." THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS Talking about Bonfire with Canal Plus last April, De Palma said that he tried to make Sherman McCoy nicer than he was in Tom Wolfe's novel "because I didn't think it would work as a movie if you made him as despicable as he was in the book. He would be more like a character in The Sweet Smell Of Success, which is a marvellous movie, but practically ended that director's career, because it was so unsuccessful. It is so cutting, it is so bitter. It's like a very graphic photograph of a murder scene. I mean, the images never leave you. And to make Bonfire like that, I was afraid everybody would be horrified and wouldn't come to the movie. So I tried to make him a little nicer, but that didn't seem to work either, because that offended everybody who had read the book. So I tried to make a kind of Strangelove look at this world of corporate takeovers and greed and all of the stuff that Oliver [Stone] wrote about in creating Wall Street. But it sort of fell in between genres, and never quite worked as a movie. I've always liked it, but few people agree with me." DE PALMA SAYS FILMS ARE MISUNDERSTOOD In the recent interview book by Samuel Blumenfeld and Laurent Vachaud, De Palma says that "The Bonfire Of The Vanities is an interesting example of a film that was very misunderstood at the time of its release. In fact Tom Hanks is very good. In a few years, I'm certain his performance will be reevaluated." Talking to Canal Plus last April, De Palma expressed his feeling that Mission To Mars would also be reevaluated in later years. "I'm always astounded by people who don't see what's on the screen," he said. "And it may take twenty to thirty years for them to see what's there right from the beginning. There's nothing particularly cliched about Mission To Mars. I invented a whole visual world for it to exist in. It's what I'll be discussing twenty-five years from now if I'm still around. People will be shaking their heads and wondering why I got all those bad reviews."

Posted July 25 2002 TAUBIN RAISES CAIN ON FEMME FATALE CRITIC HAUNTED FROM THE WAIST DOWN Amy Taubin, reporting on this year's Cannes Film Festival in the July/August 2002 issue of Film Comment, writes that "the first hour of De Palma's Femme Fatale is the best thing he's done since Raising Cain." (Taubin placed Raising Cain on her year-end ten best list in 1992.) The critic posits that De Palma, by satisfying the needs of the "international exploitation market," leaves himself room to do whatever else he wants within a $30 million budget. Those things include, according to Taubin, "ingenious setpieces" and "some pretty sharp deconstructions of Hitchcock." Referring to her own riff on the unavoidable tendency of "comparison shopping" at the Cannes Film Festival (earlier in the article), she calls Rebecca Romijn-Stamos "the festival's only incomparable object," and says that Rebecca "channels the voice of Kim Novak in Vertigo with eerie effectiveness." Taubin concludes that "Femme Fatale provided several sequences that still haunt my dreams, among them a close-up of a woman framed from the waist down, dashing through traffic clad, haute-hooker-style, in hot pants and leopard-skin spikes, the movement of her legs cruelly retarded by De Palma's penchant for slo-mo."

Posted July 14 2002 BANDERAS ON DE PALMA: "MOVIES ARE LIKE DREAMS," "ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE" The August 2002 issue of Premiere has an article on the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, featuring the photo of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and Antonio Banderas that you see to the left, as well as a festival teaser photo of Antonio at the front of the magazine's "contents" page. Under the photo is a brief interview with Banderas, who says that De Palma "understands that movies are like dreams. In dreams, anything is possible." The article says that "Banderas tangled with De Palma" (most likely referring to the incident where Banderas showed up for Femme Fatale with a set of notes he had brainstormed to flesh out his character Nicolas Bardo. De Palma told him that it was nice, but had nothing to do with his film.) Banderas says that De Palma "made me do things that I was not even expecting to do. He said to me, 'Antonio, I'm too old, I don't care about reality anymore. I don't want to have to fight with you." Femme Fatale, which was released in France last May, received much criticism there for its leaps in dream logic, but also some praise.

Posted July 12 2002 TRAVOLTA MAY KILL MORE TIME WITH DE PALMA ACTOR ON TOUR, LOOKING AT 5 SCRIPTS John Travolta, who has just begun an air-travel promotional tour as ambassador for Qantas Airways, told Reuters that he is currently looking at five scripts, including one called Time Killers for Brian De Palma. The article does not give any details about the project, but it seems most likely to be the same film De Palma plans to shoot this winter in France and Italy. Travolta told the interviewer that he is keen to work again with De Palma and John Woo, whose musical Gangster joins Time Killers at the top of the actor's list. Travolta made two films with De Palma, Carrie and Blow Out, the latter of which is one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite films and led to Travolta's role in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Blow Out is consistently voted as De Palma's best film by fans in a semi-annual poll at Le Paradis de Brian De Palma.

Updated July 1 2002 THAT BLOODY 70s SHOW CLARKSON TO PLAY MOTHER OF NBC'S CARRIE Patricia Clarkson, who played the wife of Eliot Ness in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, is taking on the fanatic role of Carrie White's mother in NBC's upcoming three-hour TV adaptation of Stephen King's novel. Piper Laurie received an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of Mrs. White in De Palma's original 1976 adaptation. De Palma was photographed with Clarkson at last May's Tribeca Film Festival, during the after party for the premiere of Insomnia. NBC's production began filming in Canada in June, and is scheduled to air this fall. Angela Bettis, who received impressive notices for her role as Abigail in Broadway's recent production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, will play Carrie White. Also in the cast are David Keith, Jasmine Guy, and Emilie De Ravin. Variety reported that NBC hired Star Trek: Voyager scribe Bryan Fuller to pen the remake. The network is looking to spin the movie off into a weekly series if initial ratings prove worthy. While the new movie will be set in the present, it will follow the plot of the original film (scripted by Lawrence D. Cohen) rather closely. As NBC chief Jeff Gaspin explained to Variety, "Not only do we get a good pop-culture movie that fits into our strategy, we also have the ability to take it further." Gaspin's thinking is that the show will appeal both to nostalgic audiences who remember the original film, and also to a new generation "to whom the concepts are fresher."

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