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

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

Listen to
Donaggio's full score
for Domino online

De Palma/Lehman
rapport at work
in Snakes

De Palma/Lehman
next novel is Terry

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

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

Washington Post
review of Keesey book

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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

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AV Club Review
of Dumas book

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A note about topics: Some blog posts have more than one topic, in which case only one main topic can be chosen to represent that post. This means that some topics may have been discussed in posts labeled otherwise. For instance, a post that discusses both The Boston Stranglers and The Demolished Man may only be labeled one or the other. Please keep this in mind as you navigate this list.
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Thursday, November 28, 2013
SEITZ: 'OLDBOY' REMINDED ME OF DE PALMA
AND ELIZABETH OLSEN CALLS DE PALMA'S 'CARRIE' GROUNDBREAKING


Matt Zoller Seitz, editor-in-chief at RogerEbert.com, posted a positive review yesterday of Spike Lee's Oldboy, which is a remake (or reimagining) of Park Chan-Wook's film from ten years ago. As Seitz points out in the excerpt below, both are adapted from a Japanese graphic novel. Discussing Lee's direction of the material, Seitz mentions Brian De Palma a couple of times:
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It's worth pointing out here that Park's film is not an original story, but an adaptation of a Japanese comic book of the same name. Both versions find ways to visually suggest that you're reading a big-screen graphic novel with pages that come to life. The compositions in Lee's movie have such a painterly or "illustrated" quality that they might as well have thick black lines marking off the edges of the frame. At no point does the film try to be "realistic," except when it comes to the strong, simple emotions that its characters feel. Lee's "Oldboy," like Park's, obeys its own illogical logic (a hotel room hallucination starring Lee's brother Cinque has the goofy randomness of a joke in a David Lynch movie). The whole thing flows as dreams flow, linking situations to other situations and images to other images in a seemingly free-associative manner.

At its wooziest, Lee's direction reminded me of Brian DePalma or John Carpenter in nightmare reverie mode, or Alfred Hitchcock when he seemed possessed by whatever horrible muses drove him. It's purely intuitive, at times musical, direction. The lack of a political dimension seems to have freed Lee to be looser and more (cruelly) playful than usual. There's news footage on Joe's hotel room TV, but when we see, for instance, scenes from 9/11 or the Iraq war, it's not meant to drive home anything but the passage of time and its effect on Joe's psyche. The performances are all over the map, in what struck me as a DePalma-like way. Some actors give fairly naturalistic performances (Brolin and Olsen) while others (Jackson and Copley) chew the scenery into fine shreds and then pluck them from their shiny teeth. Lee presides over the madness with a droll serenity that says, "This is the movie; deal with it."

The big problem with Lee's "Oldboy" is that for all its dark confidence, it doesn't reimagine the original boldly enough. This isn't like Martin Scorsese's "Cape Fear," David Cronenberg's "The Fly" or Jonathan Demme's "The Manchurian Candidate"—or the recent superhero-inflected version of "Carrie," which I liked better than most critics—all of which drastically rethought their inspirations. Lee's "Oldboy," in contrast, is more like "Point of No Return," the American remake of "La Femme Nikita." It's so close to its predecessor in so many ways that I can't see much reason for it to exist, except to give xenophobic viewers an experience similar to the original, but minus the subtitled Korean and the octopus-eating scene—and with a more ostentatiously cartoonish bad guy, and lot more monologuing to explain the convoluted plot.

That's not a bad thing, though, when you consider the current climate for mainstream American films. For people who haven't seen the original "Oldboy" or anything like it, this will be a rare studio release that feels shocking and abrasive and perverse and in some way new. I'd love to sit through Lee's movie again in a theater with newbies who came to see a straightforward revenge picture starring a guy who's been locked up for a long time and have no idea what they're actually in for: a swan-dive into the toxic id. Few American auteurs are making mainstream studio movies in the vein of Spike Lee's "Oldboy": unabashedly hardcore genre pictures that aren't afraid to treat sex and violence as colors on a palette, and get nasty and raw, in that seventies-movie way. Park's "Oldboy" was no skip through the daisy field, but this one is even harder to watch, sometimes indulging in savagery that blurs the line between Old Testament morality play and straight-up exploitation.The filmmakers seem obsessed with making everything as extreme as possible, replacing, for example, a bruising bit of hammer torture with a prolonged sequence in which the hero uses an X-acto knife to slice a dotted-line-shaped pattern into a former jailer's throat.

Roger Ebert's four-star review of the original praised it as "the kind of movie that can no longer easily be made in the United States" thanks to content restrictions imposed by "a puritanical minority." The same sentiments apply here, but even more so, because Park's film came out ten years ago, and things have only gotten more restrictive since then. Plenty of international filmmakers are working in this mode—Park, Takashi Miike, Nicolas Winding Refn and Lars von Trier spring immediately to mind—but not too many English-language directors, aside from Quentin Tarantino and sometimes Oliver Stone ("Savages"). Martin Scorsese and David Cronenberg used to make this sort of picture all the time, but haven't in a while, perhaps because it's just too much for some people, and "just too much" movies tend not to get made at a major studio level because the financial stakes are too grave. I don't like or approve of everything in "Oldboy," but I'm glad it exists. The multiplexes are filled with PG-13 movies that should have been R-rated movies, released by studios that don't make adults-only genre films anymore. This is one such film, starring a real actor, directed by a real director. It deserves to be seen and argued about.

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ELIZABETH OLSEN DISCUSSES DARK FILMS, AND 'CARRIE'
Meanwhile, Oldboy actress Elizabeth Olsen talked to Danny Peary at the San Harbor Express, telling him that she wasn't offered a role in the film, but once she read the script and then watched the original movie, she "tried to get the job," and got it. Discussing movies with dark themes, Olsen tells Peary, "I think there’s something about the brutality and the violence in Oldboy that’s imaginative. It’s bizarre and weird and a little heightened from reality. No one’s shooting at each other and there’s nothing about it that would remind you of what you see on the news."

Peary then asks Olsen, "What is it that makes some dark films fail while others become classics?"

Olsen replies, "I think it has to do with it being something new. You can remake Carrie, for instance, but the reason why [Brian de Palma's] Carrie was Carrie was because it was groundbreaking. It could still be a great new story to tell people who haven’t seen it, with great actors and actresses, but the reason the original was a classic was because there was nothing like it before."


Posted by Geoff at 2:37 AM CST
Updated: Thursday, November 28, 2013 2:40 AM CST
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RESTORED 'OBSESSION' IN BERKELY
SCREENING DEC 13 AS PART OF SONY PICTURES 2K/4K RESOLUTION SERIES


A 2K restoration of Brian De Palma's Obsession will screen December 13 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. The screening is part of a series exploring 2K and 4K restorations from Sony Pictures, which, according to Steve Seid on the BAM/PFA website, has been restoring films it acquired from Columbia Pictures. Some of the 4K retorations in the series (including Taxi Driver, Bonjour Tristesse, and Alamo Bay) will be introduced by archivist Grover Crisp, senior vice president of asset management, film restoration and digital mastering at Sony Pictures, according to Seid.

In the series description, Seid explains what will be discussed:

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But first the facts: what we see in digitally equipped movie theaters is high-definition digital cinema. It’s termed 2K, meaning a picture standard that produces an image that is 1920 x 1080 pixels or just over two million bits of information. [*Editor's note-- see the comments below for James Curran's clarification of this description.] However, there is a standard beyond 2K that is used for scanning older films called 4K, which contains about eight million bits of screen info. This same 4K standard is used for film restoration because it allows for the manipulation of picture elements at a level far superior to its general exhibition format. Occasionally, as in this series, 4K is used as an exhibition format for special screenings.

Contemporary films originate on a digital platform, making digital cinema the native exhibition standard. A prickly issue arises when an older film, born photochemical, is transferred to digital for projection. Suddenly, the “film” finds itself occupying the screen in absolute stability, the subliminal flicker gone, the light values subtly altered, the contrast and depth redefined. Does this misrepresent the experience of film history? Perhaps. Or does it resurrect a history that might otherwise be lost to us? Again, perhaps.

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Posted by Geoff at 12:26 AM CST
Updated: Monday, December 2, 2013 12:16 AM CST
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Tuesday, November 26, 2013
'BODY DOUBLE' ARCHICINE ILLUSTRATION
SERIES BY FEDERICO BABINA REPRESENTS CINEMA'S ICONIC WORKS OF ARCHITECTURE

Posted by Geoff at 11:13 PM CST
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MOVIEHOLE CELEBRATES 'CARLITO'S' 20TH
DE PALMA'S "TECHNIQUE IS IMMERSIVE & OPERATIC", WHICH SUITS THESE CHARACTERS
Moviehole's Colin Moore bids a happy 20th anniversary to Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way, finding "too much to like" to put up a fight when dubbing it among the best films of the 1990s. "Pacino is electric in the title role," writes Moore, "strutting the streets of New York in a knee-length leather coat, playing it cool, politely turning down illicit job offers; one of his most sympathetic roles to date." Here's an excerpt from Moore's article:
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But even Gail can’t protect Carlito from what’s coming ~ the shysters, former crew members and youthful entrepreneurs of sin that populate mid-70s Spanish Harlem. The most colorful of these entrepreneurs is Benny Blanco from the Bronx (John Leguizamo), a volatile rising street hustler who mixes it up with Carlito in some of the film’s most memorable scenes.

“I don’t know, maybe there’s a mis-fuckin’ understanding here, I don’t know man. Maybe you don’t remember me. My name is Benny Blanco…”

“Maybe I don’t give a shit. Maybe I don’t remember the last time I blew my nose either.”

I chuckle at those moments but the language feels real, has slang and street color that’s both dangerous and funny. No surprise at their mixed effectiveness given that writer [Edwin] Torres walked those streets, he lived them, and channelled through screenwriter David Koepp (“Panic Room”) the dialogue seems honest. Nothing as iconic as, “Say hello to my little friend!” but “Here come da pain!” has a special place in many hearts, I’m sure. The cast is solid. From the majors to supporting players Viggo Mortensen and Luiz Guzmán as Pachanga, there’s not a loose brick in the wall. Leguizamo plays Benny like a knife with a slimy handle; if he can’t schmooze you with one end, he’ll stick you with the other. [Sean] Penn, not surprisingly, is a wonder as Kleinfeld, nothing less than mutated into the frizzy haired, deliciously corrupted lawyer that earned him Golden Globe and Chicago Film Critics Association acting nominations. Of course, in the hands of Brian De Palma, presentation is personality.

Like Spielberg and his often-assumed mentor, Hitchcock, the New Jersey born director De Palma (“Sisters,” “Mission Impossible”) is known for his visual style. Canted angles, 360-degree pans, extended takes ~ they’re ever present in “Carlito’s Way,” along with an Odessa Steps sequence that rivals his “Potemkin” shootout in “The Untouchables,” this time on the escalators of Grand Central Station. It’s here, in the club, and in the excellent (kick ass) pool-hall scene that you know exactly who is calling the shots. De Palma has a singular stamp. Given his earlier Pacino vehicle, “Scarface,” the director no doubt has experience delivering this world, of mansions and period style, of lives fueled by booze, drugs, narcissism and dreams. His technique is immersive and operatic, completely suited for these bold characters.


Posted by Geoff at 12:08 AM CST
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Sunday, November 24, 2013
GLENN KENNY ON THE TWO 'FURY' BLU-RAYS
TWILIGHT TIME DID NOT KNOW ABOUT ARROW/CARLOTTA REMASTER


Glenn Kenny, this week's guest DVD columnist for the New York Times, investigated the two Blu-ray versions of Brian De Palma's The Fury that came out this year. (The column was posted to the web on Friday, and appeared in the print edition of the NY Times today.) About five years ago, Kenny explains, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment mastered the film for high-definition, but then the recession led to soft Blu-ray sales, and the project was shelved. Kenny explains what happened after that:
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Fox’s cold feet spelled opportunity for Twilight Time, the boutique label specializing in limited-edition high-definition versions of studio fare with collector appeal. (For instance, one of its early releases was a Blu-ray of “The Egyptian,” a 1954 CinemaScope building-of-the-pyramids epic that was the first wide-screen outing for the golden-age Hollywood master Michael Curtiz.) The company licensed “The Fury” from Fox, and using the high-definition master provided by the studio, released a Blu-ray in March.

The release was well reviewed, with the restoration and preservation expert Robert A. Harris (who oversaw, among many other projects, a new rendition of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” films) praising “color, shadow detail, resolution.” Mr. Harris, writing on Home Theater Forum, a tech-savvy and often argumentative site, noted, in the argot common in such forums: “The grain structure is totally filmlike. So much so that when we hit a long dupe shot,” viewers “can easily see the difference.”

And there, for some viewers of the Twilight Time “Fury,” was the rub. De Palma is a technical virtuoso and “The Fury” one of his most bravura works. He and the director of photography, Richard H. Kline, pulled out the stops with focus manipulations, cleverly orchestrated effects and rear-projection work. Composite, or dupe, shots are put together in a lab, combining materials shot under different conditions. Merging and rerendering these elements creates an inevitable downgrade from the quality of the original camera work; that’s what experts mean when they say a particular shot looks “dupey.”

In the first half-hour of “The Fury,” there’s a car chase in which Cassavetes’s sinister C.I.A. officer pursues an on-the-run Douglas, who hijacks a police car. It’s a night scene, shot in low light, with a number of composite shots. To top it off, the climax of the scene takes place on a foggy pier. “That scene in particular, and some other night scenes, always looked a bit problematic to me, especially compared to the surrounding day shots,” said James White, a freelance DVD producer who lives and works in Britain. “They really suffered, on account of the ‘pushing’ of the film stock, the heavy noise-to-grain ratio, the process shots. None of it really fit in well with the rest of the picture.”

Mr. White was part of the team at Arrow Video, a British genre and cinephile DVD/Blu-ray label, working on a version of “The Fury” for British distribution. In tandem with the French label Carlotta and the Australian concern Shock, the company financed an entirely new high-definition transfer, using advanced film-scanning technology, and the movie’s original negative (which includes the shots put together from different sources in the lab) for the picture source.

“When people say that the Twilight Time Blu-ray looked the way they remembered it in theaters, well, it probably did,” Mr. White said. “Because, to my eye, the version on that master looked like an inter-negative, the source from which 35-millimeter prints were actually struck for distribution. Using the camera negative, you’re offered so much more in terms of contrast, color and detail.”

And it’s true, the night scenes in the Arrow “Fury” have a smoother, less garish look than those on the nonetheless very watchable Twilight Time release. These two versions of “The Fury” caused some controversy among buffs in the Home Theater Forum thread following Mr. Harris’s review, and elsewhere. Many home theater mavens own region-free Blu-ray players that defeat the blocking technology meant to keep foreign-made DVDs unplayable in the United States and vice versa. For them, comparing the two versions was easy. Mr. White, for his part, said that in the online world of Blu-ray assessment, “people play favorites, and it gets out of hand.”

As it happens, Twilight Time has been subject to a lot of criticism over its limited-edition business model, which the label’s co-founder, Nick Redman, calls a “clean” model that satisfies studios licensing the product and in a sense guarantees the ability to put out more obscure material.

“The critics of our limited-edition model think that we’re somehow artificially depriving all the millions of people that would really want a copy of a given movie from having it,” Mr. Redman said. “In fact, an edition of 3,000 is completely in line with what 99 percent of all catalog releases will sell. The other thing we’re criticized for is our price point, which is $29.95 — completely in line with every other label, including Olive and Criterion, but because we are available at only one retailer (although now there are some copies available at TCM), we can’t participate in the discount deals that other labels that go through Amazon and the big-box retail stores can do.”

These sticking points, Mr. Redman said, might have contributed to the bad blood over “The Fury.” The label’s edition is, even so, a success, as it’s sold out. The Arrow “Fury” remains available, although you need a region-free player to watch it. While Mr. Redman stands by the Twilight Time edition of “The Fury,” he allows that he’s learned something from the kerfuffle: “Had we known that Arrow and Carlotta were planning to create a new master, we might have gone in on it with them. But we didn’t know.”

Mr. Redman said he now believes that better communication between international DVD and Blu-ray producers is essential to the survival of the formats. “As the studios back further and further away — and people are dreaming if they think the studios are not backing further and further away — from physical media,” he said, “it is going to totally default to the independent labels in each territory in the world to synergize and work together as best they can to make those libraries viable for those handful of people left who want them on disc.”


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Posted by Geoff at 11:58 PM CST
Updated: Tuesday, November 26, 2013 11:14 PM CST
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Posted by Geoff at 5:17 PM CST
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Friday, November 22, 2013
MORE ARTICLES ABOUT JFK ASSASSINATION & FILM
DE PALMA'S 'GREETINGS' AND 'BLOW OUT' INCLUDED IN DISCUSSION
Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. There has been a proliferation of TV specials, magazines, and online articles looking back and examining that weekend of shocking events and images in November 1963. And tonight, Oliver Stone will present a screening of his director's cut of JFK at the St. Louis International Film Festival.

Following the Globe And Mail's "Art of JFK" article from last weekend, which included Brian De Palma's Blow Out as a film which interpolates "themes and events of JFK’s assassination with Ted Kennedy’s 1969 Golgotha at Chappaquidick," three more articles have appeared this week, mentioning certain De Palma films in similar contexts.

The Telegraph's Anne Billson argues that "in the 50 years since John F Kennedy's assassination, the event has been so endlessly repeated on film that it has almost lost its meaning." Billson includes De Palma along with Andy Warhol and John Waters as "early adopters" of JFK iconography on film:

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The most famous JFK assassination film, of course, is the home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder (played by Paul Giamatti in Parkland), 8mm footage that has been parsed, recreated and referenced so many times it has attained the status of icon. In turn, it has helped shape the event in the public mind; the film itself wasn't broadcast on network TV till 1975, but frames from it were published, by Life magazine, as early as November 29th 1963. It wasn't the first time an assassination had been caught on camera - footage of the death of Inejiro Asanuma, a chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, was broadcast live on Japanese TV in 1960. But it was the first political assassination to be so thoroughly absorbed, reworked and regurgitated by the cinema.

One of the first artists to co-opt JFK iconography was Andy Warhol, whose Sixteen Jackies depicted serial images of the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy; he also cast some of his The Factory regulars in a never-completed film called Since (1966), a stylised recreation of the assassination in which Gerard Malanga shot Mary Woronov with a banana. "It didn't bother me that much that he was dead," Warhol said. "What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get away from the thing."

Other early adopters include John Waters, who in 1968 restaged the assassination in his parents' backyard for a 16mm short called Eat Your Makeup, in which Jackie was played by Divine, and Brian De Palma, whose second film, Greetings (1968), satirised JFK conspiracy theorists before most of us were even aware they existed.

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The Wall Street Journal's Richard B. Woodward echoes Billson when he writes, "Countless repetitions of anything can convert even tragedy into farce and rewire our original emotional responses in myriad other ways." His article focuses on how the "photo of Lee Harvey Oswald's killing became primal artistic material." In one section, Woodward looks briefly at the impact the Zapruder film had on other movies, where he notes several film, including Blow Out:
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The impact of the Zapruder film, especially on other movies, was quickly apparent. Its spooky dynamics shaped Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up (1966), in which a photographer in a park may have unintentionally documented a murder. Scenes where he studies his contact sheets with a magnifying glass, looking for bodies in the bushes, anticipate what was soon standard practice for amateur sleuths analyzing the 486 frames in Zapruder's film in hopes of debunking the Warren Commission Report. According to Mark Harris's book Pictures at a Revolution, the sickening frames 313-14 of the president's skull exploding influenced the graphic, slow-motion shootings at the end of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981) picked up the theme of technology inadvertently detecting a crime. In both cases, a sound recording finds evidence of a murder, actions that, when discovered by the murderer, put a bull's eye on the sound recorder, too.

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The most interesting part of Woodward's article comes when he discusses Coppola's first two Godfather films:
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But perhaps no movie or novel so internalized the twin killings in Dallas as the first two films in The Godfather trilogy. Riddled with allusions to the Kennedys, the films adopted images of that weekend to tell a larger story about American power and corruption. Many Americans suspected then—and believe now—that the Mafia was involved in some unholy fashion in either Kennedy's or Oswald's death, or maybe in both.

The climax of The Godfather (1972), in which Michael Corleone attends the church baptism of his nephew while his enemies are being executed around the country, has striking similarities to images on TV screens during the morning of Nov. 24, 1963. Mr. Coppola's cross-cutting is not unlike what many American families saw that Sunday when religious proceedings were interrupted by the shocking sight of Oswald being gunned down by Ruby.

A classic exchange late in The Godfather: Part II (1974) between Michael and Tom Hagen, the Corleones' lawyer, unmistakably connects Kennedy's death to Oswald's.

As Michael calls for the execution of Hyman Roth, their crafty rival who is being deported back to the U.S., Tom objects that such a plan has no chance of succeeding.

"It's like trying to kill the president," he says. "There's no way we can get to him."

"Tom, you know you surprise me," answers Michael with chilly authority.

"If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it's that you can kill anyone."

Mr. Coppola confirms this cynical truth by directing the assassination of Roth to resemble the shooting of Oswald. As Roth speaks to the press after landing at Miami airport, Corleone henchman Rocco Lampone, posing as a reporter with notebook in hand, pulls out his gun and kills Roth, before being shot himself by police.

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Metro U.S. New York's Matt Prigge provides a very interesting list of movies centered around the JFK tragedy. Here's what Prigge writes about Waters' Eat Your Makeup and De Palma's Greetings:
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Eat Your Makeup (1968)

South Park once claimed it took 22.3 years for terrible things (in their case, AIDS) to be funny. But it only took five years for no-budget filmmaker John Waters to, in his first film, recreate the assassination in his parents’ backyard, complete with Divine as Jacqueline Kennedy.

Greetings (1968)

1968 was also the year it started being funny to mock JFK conspiracy theorists. Brian De Palma’s first of two episodic comedies with a young (and then mustachioed) Robert De Niro features a guy (Gerrit Graham) who bores people with his claims of a massive coverup.

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Posted by Geoff at 12:26 AM CST
Updated: Friday, November 22, 2013 12:29 AM CST
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Thursday, November 21, 2013
EMILY MORTIMER AUDITIONED FOR 'BLACK DAHLIA'
BUT LIE MAY HAVE LED TO HER NOT GETTING ROLE
Emily Mortimer, who has already been cast as the lead in Brian De Palma's upcoming Therese Raquin project, revealed Monday that she auditioned for De Palma's The Black Dahlia about ten years ago. According to Page Six's Emily Smith, Mortimer attended Monday's Artios Awards in New York, where she told the story of her most embarrassing audition. From Smith's column:
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She auditioned for the femme fatale role in The Black Dahlia 12 weeks after she had her third child. When a casting director told Brian De Palma that Emily had just had a baby, she lied that she’d given birth many months earlier. She added, “I would have gotten away with it until I was asked when my daughter’s birthday was. I blanked . . . under the pressure of the lie.” Needless to say, she didn’t get the part.
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Posted by Geoff at 4:44 PM CST
Updated: Thursday, November 21, 2013 4:46 PM CST
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Wednesday, November 20, 2013
'PHANTOM' IN LOUISVILLE FRIDAY NIGHT
PSYCH MOVIE NIGHT II, WITH TWO BANDS AFTERWARD

Posted by Geoff at 12:40 AM CST
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Tuesday, November 19, 2013
MCKENNA STILL RESEARCHING 'HAPPY VALLEY'
HOPES TO TALK TO PATERNO FAMILY, VISIT SANDUSKY IN PRISON
Onward State's Jessica Tully got an update on Happy Valley from screenwriter David McKenna, who told her the film, which will be about the life of Joe Paterno (of which the Jerry Sandusky scandal will be a tragic part), is still in the research stage. McKenna visited State College back in February for initial research, and he tells Tully that he and others working on the project plan to go back there again closer to the start of production.

Tully writes, "The research phase has included searching Paterno archives at libraries, reading several books, and evaluating all the independent reports, such as the Freeh Report and the Paterno Report. While on his trip to State College in February, McKenna met with [Paterno author Joe] Posnanski, who gave him a two-day tour of the town; longtime assistant coach Dick Anderson, who was 'very gracious and informative;' and Scott Paterno, which was more of a 'get to know you' session rather than a gathering of information, McKenna said."

McKenna, who as a child had greatly admired Paterno, tells Tully, "This project is too important not to be as well informed as possible. Not unexpectedly, what I’ve found is there’s three sides to every story. There is no black and white. JoePa was a great, great man, who did so much good for a such a long period of time. But that greatness turned out to hurt him in the end because he set the bar so incredibly high in everything that he did. And that’s where the tragedy lies."

Here are the last few paragraphs of Tully's article:

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McKenna said Jerry Sandusky will be a part of the movie, although he will only play a supporting role. The Sandusky scandal will be included, but the focus of the film will be on Paterno. McKenna doubts he will ever be able to talk to the Sandusky family, but he does wish to visit Sandusky in prison.

While he said he couldn’t talk specifically about what will be included in the film, McKenna said “the crazy thing” about Sandusky is how much good he did for kids. McKenna acknowledges he might be “crucified” for saying that, but he believes it’s the truth.

“Second Mile was a huge endeavor that raised hundreds of millions for disadvantaged kids,” McKenna said. “That’s what makes this scandal so sad and heartbreaking.”

On the other hand, McKenna said he hopes he will be able to talk extensively with the Paterno family. He believes the family will one day open themselves up to him and his Hollywood team, “once they see how fair we’ve been to Joe’s incredible legacy.”

McKenna said he will always have the highest respect for Paterno and his wife, Sue. One quote that McKenna often thinks about is when Paterno, who raised five kids in a modest home a few blocks from campus, told his children they can swim just as well in the community pool as a private one.

“They were on a first-name basis with everyone in town — Joe even knew the cheerleaders’ names. They built a library — giving $3 million of their own money,” McKenna said. “Their love and generosity inspires me as I raise my three children. Because that’s what life is all about, isn’t it?”

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Posted by Geoff at 5:14 PM CST
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