De Palma a la Mod

1998 DE PALMA SCENE-BY-SCENE BOUNCES AROUND

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:52:45 -0600

AND A SNIPPET OF A 2002 RADIO INTERVIEW FROM 'FEMME FATALE' JUNKET

I posted about the video above here at De Palma a la Mod years ago, but it has been bouncing around the internet the past few days, as it seems to have been rediscovered by several outlets, including The Playlist and The Film Stage. The video is an episode of Mark Cousins' BBC series Scene By Scene, in which he interviews Brian De Palma about his life and background before showing him some scenes from his films and discussing them with him.

Meanwhile, Hollywood Outbreak's Greg Srisavasdi, in posting about the upcoming release of De Palma's Passion, added a SoundCloud clip from a radio interview De Palma did at a press junket for Femme Fatale. In the clip, De Palma says: "Well, I'm very influenced by music, so I tend not to listen to it very much at all. Because it too emotionally kind of grabs me. And when I make movies I have to, you know, listen to a lot of orchestral music to figure out what... the composer should write. So I tend to keep away from listening to music. You know, I live in an apartment that has literally nothing much on the walls. I can't be... I'm best in some kind of motel room with nothing around me, because those kinds of things influence what's going on in my head. So I don't tend to expose myself to stimulus like that."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:02:07 -0600

SONIC YOUTH'S KIM GORDON ON 'BODY DOUBLE'

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 16:17:43 -0600

SAYS 'BLING RING' JOINS IT IN THE ARCHIVE OF GREAT L.A. MOVIES
WWD's Kristi Garced caught up with Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon on the red carpet for last Tuesday night's screening of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, which opened in theaters yesterday. "[The Bling Ring] goes into the archive of great L.A. movies along with Brian De Palma’s Body Double,” Gordon told Garced. “I think that a lot of the [celebrity obsession] drives Los Angeles. The city that people gravitate towards following the setting sun in the west symbolizes death.”

DE PALMA TO TALK 'PASSION' ON STAGE AUG. 19

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 21:57:20 -0600

AS PART OF LINCOLN CENTER'S 'SUMMER TALKS' SERIES IN NEW YORK
Brian De Palma will be on stage to discuss Passion and take questions from the audience during an hour-long event at 7pm Monday, August 19, at the Film Society Lincoln Center. The event is part of a series called "Summer Talks," an extension of the New York Film Festival Live talks that took place last fall. These events (including the De Palma one) are free and open to the public. The Lincoln Center website states, "Complimentary tickets will be available only at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center box office on a first-come, first-served basis. Limit: One ticket per person." Video of each discussion will also be posted on the website (Filmlinc.com). Passion will open at Film Society on August 30.

"A salacious hit at the 50th New York Film Festival," reads the description at Filmlinc, "Brian De Palma's Passion is a film that is sure to have people talking. De Palma exhibits great panache and a diabolical mastery of frequent, small surprises in his most cinematically ingenious movie since his magical comedy-of-coincidences, Femme Fatale."

The rest of the description is similar to the one posted for the NYFF last year, but it's a fun description, so here it is: "With tongue planted in cheek—or maybe not, it’s up to you to decide—De Palma turns French director Alain Corneau’s 2010 film Love Crime into a droll, erotic tale of female competition. Noomi Rapace more than matches her performance in the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as the assistant to an unscrupulous advertising honcho (Rachel McAdams), who steals her ideas and acts as if it’s all good sport. It’s great fun until De Palma zeros in on the fury in Rapace’s eyes. The De Palma trademarks are all present and deployed with coolly calculated abandon: a brilliant use of split screen, a confusion of identical twins, dreams within dreams, and shoes to die for."

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 06:05:35 -0600

'PASSION' U.S. POSTER IS FINALLY HERE

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:58:00 -0600

AND A NEW "OFFICIAL" SYNOPSIS

Film.com today debuted the U.S. poster for Brian De Palma's Passion (above). "It’s been more than five years since Brian De Palma’s last film (Redacted)," states the article provided by the Film.com Staff, "but later this summer the master of the double-take returns with some vintage work, delivering a sexy and twisting psycho-thriller as only he can. Harkening back to the lusty Hitchcockian intrigue that informed early De Palma classics like Sisters and Body Double, his latest film, Passion – a title as blunt as it is deliciously enticing – is a seductively cutthroat tale about the perils of climbing up the corporate ladder (though, like all of De Palma’s best movies, it will inevitably be just as interested in its own internal logic). Starring Noomi Rapace in her most complex English-language part to date, and Rachel McAdams in a role that promises to make Regina George seem like a kitty cat in comparison, Passion will premiere on VOD on August 1st, followed by a theatrical release on August 30th."

The article also includes the film's "official synopsis": "Brian De Palma returns to the sleek, sly, seductive territory of Dressed To Kill with an erotic corporate thriller fueled by sex, ambition, image, envy and the dark, murderous side of PASSION. The film stars Rachel McAdams (Midnight In Paris, Sherlock Holmes, Mean Girls) and Noomi Rapace (Prometheus, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) as two rising female executives in a multinational corporation whose fierce competition to rise up the ranks is about to turn literally cut-throat."

Later in the day, The Playlist shared the poster in an article with the headline, "U.S. Poster & Lots Of New Pics For Brian De Palma's 'Passion' Starring Rachel McAdams & Noomi Rapace." Aw, how cute that they think those are all "new" pictures that we haven't seen before, ha ha.

Meanwhile, The Dissolve's Scott Tobias was so depressed about the "deflating" new poster for Passion that he posted a Tumblr exploring "posters unworthy of Brian De Palma." The depressingly Photoshopped U.S. poster for De Palma's Femme Fatale is included, as is the spark of life provided by the Criterion covers for Sisters and, magnificently, Blow Out.

NORWEGIAN SITE'S 'PASSION' DVD CONTEST

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:07:59 -0600

NAME THE DE PALMA FILM FROM SELECTED IMAGES

Above is a split-screen image from Brian De Palma's Passion that appeared with a DVD contest article posted today at Montages. "Brian De Palma is one of the idols here at Montages," the article states, "but nowadays he's unfortunately relegated to the video shelves. Neither Femme Fatale or Redacted got a theatrical release in Norway, and this was also the fate of his new work, Passion. Luckily the film, as we have written warmly about in this article, gets an early release on video." The contest is a page of still frames from seven De Palma films, and if one can name the correct seven films, they get a chance to win the DVD or Blu-Ray of Passion.

Meanwhile, several tweets on Twitter today indicate that Passion will go straight to DVD/Blu-Ray in the U.K., as well, with Metrodome releasing it in those formats on August 12.

1990 VIDEO: SPIELBERG INTERVIEW

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:57:10 -0600

DISCUSSES DE PALMA SPARKING THE IDEA FOR OPENING SCRAWL IN 'STAR WARS', & MUCH MORE

In a section of the terrific interview above, Steven Spielberg talks about the way he and his filmmaking friends would help each other out as they were all coming up in the industry:

"We had such a wonderful kind of an incubator in the early '70s. Late '60s/early '70s. I really began directing in '69, that was television, I was 21, but... And I met all these people around that period of time. I met George Lucas in 1967 when we were both in college. I was at Long Beach State, he was at USC. And I met a lot of those fellows in college, and professional life, and it was not a clique, not a 'Brat Pack,' nothing that people claim we were. We were just a bunch of filmmakers that weren't afraid to show our rough cuts to each other, and weren't afraid of that kind of criticism. We weren't afraid of George Lucas or Brian De Palma. I'll never forget the day Brian De Palma and I saw the rough cut of Star Wars. And there were only about six of us in the room. And it was the very first time George had ever showed the picture to anybody, and chose the six of us to show it to. Well, Brian went off the deep end. [Smiling as he playfully imitates De Palma] 'Whaas... Makes no sense! Nonsense! What's this all about?' And through all of the contention of that wild evening where Brian liked the movie, but thought it was sort of mixed up... it was really mixed up, it just didn't have 89 percent of the special effects in them-- who could possibly make head or tails of Star Wars without all those, you know, 500 effects shots? But, Brian's contention did lead to George inventing the now very famous forward, like the old serials, that crawled up the screen. You know, 'A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.' Now that came out of that rough cut screening. You know, and that was exciting to see things like that happen. I sat with Scorsese, in the editing room, heloing him edit the last ten minutes of Taxi Driver. Which is a film totally unlike who I am. But he asked me to come in, and to give my opinion, and to make some comments, and I did. That was fun, you know, we've all helped each other with our movies. The shark blowing up in Jaws was not my idea. It wasn't in the Peter Benchley novel, wasn't in the Peter Benchley screenplay, and the Carl Gottlieb screenplay. It was simply some filmmaker friends of mine who read the script and said, 'The shark's gotta blow up at the end. You've got to find some way to explode it. Not just kill it, it's gotta explode!' And without that kind of, sort of selfless thinking, where the ego is not leading you around by your nostrils, but you're open to pain, and to embarrassment, and to ridicule, and by being open to that with peers that know what it's like to make a movie, that have made movies, that you can respect their word, their critique, so to speak... and it's a great way to work. A great way to make your movies even better."

1987 VIDEO: DE PALMA TALKS 'UNTOUCHABLES'

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 18:33:21 -0600

4K DIGITAL RESTORATION OF 'BODY DOUBLE'

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 21:37:24 -0600

IS GETTING RAVE REVIEWS; WILL SCREEN AT PORTLAND'S HOLLYWOOD THEATRE IN JULY

As Twilight Time gets ready to release its limited edition Blu-Ray of Body Double on August 13, the 4K Digital Restoration of the Brian De Palma film has been getting rave reviews all over the place. Christopher O'Neill hosted a small De Palma retrospective last month in Dundee, Scotland as a part of the Dundead Film Festival. In an e-mail, O'Neill said, "The three films - Dressed To Kill, Blow Out and Body Double - were screened from DCP. While all of the films looked well, I have to say I was blown away by the digital edition of Body Double. While the venue is equipped with 2K theatrical projection, the film was scanned at 4K and the transfer benefited from the higher resolution - it looked incredible."

Meanwhile, another De Palma a la Mod reader, Chris Baker, caught a screening of the 4K Body Double at San Francisco's Castro Theatre, where it was the tail end of a double bill with Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window on May 18th. Baker tells us that the film "looked and sounded phenomenal."

The month of July brings a De Palma series, "Deja Vertigo," to the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon. The series starts with the digital restoration of Body Double on the weekend of July 5th-July 7th. The other three films in the series (running each weekend in July) will be presented from 35mm prints: Dressed To Kill, Blow Out, and Scarface. The theatre website admits that the latter film does not fit the theme of the series, which focuses on De Palma's Hitchcockian psychological thrillers. "This series will focus on the early 80′s," states the site's description, "when De Palma crafted gripping tales of mystery and murder, brimming with operatic set pieces, off-kilter camera work, steamy sexuality, and nail-biting suspense." As a bonus on the final two days, the theatre will also screen a 35mm print of Howard Hawks' Scarface from 1932.