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Recent Headlines
a la Mod:

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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Interviews...

De Palma interviewed
in Paris 2002

De Palma discusses
The Black Dahlia 2006


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The Virtuoso
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No Harm In Charm

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The Filmmaker Who
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Jim Emerson on
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Scarface: Make Way
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Deborah Shelton
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Offices of Death Records

The Carlito's Way
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FilmLand Empire

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italkyoubored

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Entries by Topic
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.
All topics  «
Ambrose Chapel
Are Snakes Necessary?
BAMcinématek
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Carlito's Way
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Cop-Out
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Dionysus In '69
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Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Fury, The
Genius of Love
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Iraq, etc.
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Laurent Bouzereau
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Monday, January 4, 2016
DOUBLE FEATURE - 'BODY DOUBLE' & 'BODY HEAT'
WEDNESDAY NIGHT AT THE BRATTLE THEATRE IN CAMBRIDGE
The Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, MA, will screen a double-double feature Wednesday night (January 6th), with two screenings of Brian De Palma's Body Double (projected from DCP) at 4:30pm and 9:30pm. Sandwiched in between will be a single screening of Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat, at 7pm (from a 35mm print). The screenings are part of the series, "Sex & Death & Venetian Blinds: Neo-Noir of the 1980s & 90s," which runs through January 14th.

"For this particular series," reads a description on the Brattle website, "we focus on the neo-noir films made during the 1980s and 1990s when an explosion in popularity filled movie screens with sultry femme fatales, hapless everyman heroes, corrupt cops, convoluted plots, and a plethora of sliced shadows due to a practically pathological fetishization of venetian blinds. Join us for this knockout line-up of stylistically bold and provocative cinema ranging from 1981’s BODY HEAT to HARD EIGHT from 1996 – the directorial debut of Paul Thomas Anderson. (N.B. Unfortunately, the apotheosis of ‘90s neo-noir, L.A. Confidential, is unavailable for theatrical screenings at this time.)"

"A CLEVERLY CONTRASTING DOUBLE BILL THAT BOTH VENERATES THE GENRE AND PUNKS IT"

The Artery's Sean Burns previews the double feature with fine insight:

Things kick off on Wednesday, Jan. 6, with the dynamic duo of “Body Heat” and “Body Double,” a cleverly contrasting double bill that both venerates the genre and punks it. A case can be made that “Body Heat,” screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 directorial debut, kick-started this entire noir revival, updating old-timey 1940s tropes for Ronald Reagan’s America by adding a healthy hunk of R-rated eroticism. Riffing on Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity,” Kasdan’s picture stars William Hurt as a dim-bulb, ambulance-chasing lawyer who finds himself head-over-heels and in way over his head with Kathleen Turner’s man-eating Matty Walker. “You aren’t too smart, are you?” she notes upon their first meeting, “I like that in a man.”

Turner, then just 27, commands the screen with the brassy presence you’d expect from a Stanwyck or Bacall or any of the bygone icons in whose period fashions Kasdan has Matty rather anachronistically dressed (during the rare scenes when she’s wearing clothes). The hilarious Hurt has an awful mustache and the self-satisfied smirk of a man not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. She’s constantly touching him, keeping the schmuck in a slack-jawed state of arousal while he stumbles through her nefarious plan. Check out where Turner’s hands are just beneath the frame-line during a crucial scene and you can see she’s literally leading him around by the you-know-what.

Amusing as this may be, there’s something a bit studious about “Body Heat.” Kasdan’s ceiling fans and, yes, Venetian blinds often come across as film school affectations. Much of the film’s second half is the inelegant dispensing of information crucial to the plot. It’s rescued by loosey-goosey performances from the supporting cast, most famously a brief, star-making turn from Mickey Rourke as a gentle-hearted arsonist lip-syncing to Bob Seger. But watching the film again I was even more taken with Ted Danson’s ballroom-dancing prosecutor. His job is basically to stand next to Hurt and provide exposition, and yet the future Boston bartender is tirelessly toying with props and putting unexpected spins on unexciting lines. These original side characters break through Kasdan’s hermetic homages and references. They keep the movie from feeling too much like a museum.

You’ll see no such reverence in Brian De Palma’s “Body Double,” a spectacularly sleazy send-up that finds the puckish, thin-skinned director confronting his critics and, if you’ll forgive the term, doubling down on everything that upstanding, respectable people hate about Brian De Palma films. In his New York Times review, Vincent Canby described the director as “someone at an otherwise friendly dinner party who can’t keep himself from saying the one thing that will infuriate everybody. It’s as if he were daring the host to ask him back.”

Chafing at the then-widespread complaints that he was just a misogynistic Hitchcock knock-off obsessed with graphic violence and nudity, De Palma concocted this hilarious mash-up of “Rear Window” and “Vertigo” that just so happens to be chock full of graphic violence and nudity. Middle finger aloft, he cast the daughter (Melanie Griffith) of one of Hitch’s iconic blondes (Tippi Hedren) as a porn star and has the villain penetrating helpless women with a massive power drill held at crotch-level as the most unsubtle phallic symbol in the history of cinema.

If you can get on its perverse wavelength the film is screamingly funny — one of the more playful entries in De Palma’s filmography, boasting one of his rare happy endings. “Body Double” teases and explodes those old noir conventions that Kasdan and “Body Heat” hold so dear, simultaneously coating every sinuous camera movement with a slick sheen of totally ’80s gloss. The notorious centerpiece sequence is a dialogue-free porno movie shoot scored with Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax” that doesn’t look anything remotely like any porno movie ever made, but it’s a pretty good excuse for some cheeky virtuosity and dirty jokes.

As you might imagine, “Body Double” was not warmly embraced by audiences upon its theatrical release in 1984. (It opened the same day as “The Terminator” and was gone in three weeks.) But the film found a second life on late night cable, where Melanie Griffith became an object of considerable fascination for a generation of pubescent boys. Indeed, one of the nice chances afforded by the Brattle series is to finally see these films in an actual theater, instead of sneaking around the house watching with the volume turned down low after your parents or the babysitter have gone to sleep.


Posted by Geoff at 11:56 PM CST
Updated: Tuesday, January 5, 2016 9:48 PM CST
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Sunday, January 3, 2016
"THE LAST GOOD FILM HE WORKED ON" --? (MAYBE)


Vulture's Greg Cwik today posted an obituary of Vilmos Zsigmond, who passed away January 1 at the age of 85. In the final paragraph, Cwik gets passionate about The Black Dahlia, and mentions that Zsigmond considered it to be "the last good film he worked on." I'm not sure what the source of that claim is, but here are the concluding two paragraphs from Cwik's article:
While his work with Spielberg and Cimino is his most acclaimed, Zsigmond’s greatest partner in crime was Brian De Palma, the most purely cinematic filmmaker of the last half-century, for whom the cinematographer did some of his finest, most innovative work. De Palma’s films are not governed by the rules or laws of reality; they adhere to a consistent, internal logic that favors excitement over emotion. Zsigmond extrapolated De Palma’s deep-rooted love for genre and exploitation, and helped the auteur construct his homage-laden films using the visual language written by earlier filmmakers. Together they were like a jazz duo drawing inspiration from their forebears, carving out of pulp scenes of brilliance and brutality. They employed an arsenal of in-camera tricks, from split-diopters to long Steadicam shots and meticulous use of zooms. Zsigmond shot Obsession [(’76)], a fervid Hitchcock homage, and Blow Out (’81), a contender for De Palma’s Best Film. For Blow Out, Zsigmond and De Palma deconstructed the art of filmmaking, reveling in the minutiae of filming and editing and spinning a story of paranoia and murder out of so many reels of celluloid.

Zsigmond’s final masterpiece, and one of his most impressive achievements, is also one of De Palma’s most maligned films: The Black Dahlia (’06), which Zsigmond considered the last good film he worked on. A mostly faithful adaptation of James Ellroy's serpentine novel (it retains the terse dialogue while carefully uncoiling the notoriously difficult-to-follow plot), there's nary a shot here that doesn't get the De Palma touch: the camera looms and moves with purpose, zooming in, pulling out, hovering above a dead body splayed on a slab before slowly descending to a low-angle of our heroes framed against effervescent lights, or a crane shot showing the Zoot Suit riots sprawling across streets lined with burning cars and sprinkled with so much broken glass. The narrative is, admittedly, of minimal importance here, as is De Palma's and Zsigmond’s wont; the director fixates on the mood which his DP captured with stunning, sepia-steeped photography. If that isn’t a fine encapsulation of Zsigmond’s endearing legacy, then nothing is.


Posted by Geoff at 6:31 PM CST
Updated: Sunday, January 3, 2016 6:49 PM CST
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VILMOS ZSIGMOND HAS DIED
UPDATED - NANCY ALLEN FB POST - "A GREAT ARTIST AND A GENTLEMAN"
Vilmos Zsigmond has passed away. He was 85. According to an initial report by Variety's Carmel Dagan, Zsigmond's business partner Yuri Neyman said that the legendary cinematographer died January 1st. Zsigmond shot four films for Brian De Palma over four decades: Obsession (1976), Blow Out (1981), The Bonfire Of The Vanities (1990), and The Black Dahlia (2006), the latter of which gained Zsigmond his fourth Oscar nomination (he won for his first nom, for Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind in 1977).

I hadn't heard this before, but Dagan states that in an interview, "Zsigmond professed dissatisfaction about working with Spielberg; despite having many good ideas for the look of the film, he felt like nothing more than a glorified cameraman. He never worked with the director again." Dagan continues, "He picked up an Oscar nom for [Michael Cimino's] The Deer Hunter (1979), which he considered one of his finest achievements. Though the film was critically panned, Zsigmond’s work on Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate was equally strong. He brought a documentary style to the film musical The Rose, directed by Mark Rydell, which led to the Scorsese documentary about the Band, The Last Waltz. Another high-water mark for Zsigmond was De Palma’s 1981 thriller Blow Out."

In 1992, Zsigmond directed the feature film The Long Shadow. In recent years, he made three films with Woody Allen, and also shot several episodes of NBC's The Mindy Project.

"IF YOU PLAY EVERYTHING IN CLOSE-UPS THEN YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST READ THE BOOK"

In a 2014 interview with Filmmaker Magazine's Kaleem Aftab, Zsigmond was asked about when it is frustrating to work with a director. "If the director doesn’t like long shots and doesn’t like establishing shots and everything is based on words and dialogue and he wants to play everything up in close-up and use it that way, that’s no fun for me," replied Zsigmond. "I really think a movie should be visual, if the visuals are not good then I’m not interested. If you play everything in close-ups then you might as well just read the book. If you really want to have dialogue and just talk, talk, talk, there is no reason to go to the movie theater."

When asked what was the most difficult shot he had ever achieved, Zsigmond responded, "I don’t know what is the most difficult shot. But a difficult shot is to do something like at the start of Bonfire of the Vanities, the opening shot which is going on five minutes with a Steadicam, going from a basement, up an elevator, getting out of the elevator, going along the hallway until you end up a thousand feet away from where you started. That is all in one shot. If it works that’s great, it’s good for a film. The closer a film looks like reality and real life, the better it is." Asked how much planning went into that shot, Zsigmond said, "A whole day. One day of rehearsing and lighting and then the next night we were shooting at least ten times and one of them turned out good."

JAMES GUNN TRIBUTE: 'THE LONG GOODBYE' & 'BLOW OUT' ARE "TWO OF MY FAVORITE FILMS EVER"


Posted by Geoff at 2:40 PM CST
Updated: Sunday, January 3, 2016 6:47 PM CST
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Saturday, January 2, 2016
AMAZINGLY STYLISH INCIDENTAL BABES

Posted by Geoff at 11:38 PM CST
Updated: Saturday, January 2, 2016 11:39 PM CST
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Thursday, December 31, 2015
HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Posted by Geoff at 9:25 PM CST
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Wednesday, December 30, 2015
VIDEO: 'CARLITO'S WAY' GRAND CENTRAL THEME
PATRICK DOYLE THEME PERFORMED BY THE BRUSSELS PHILHARMONIC @ WORLD SOUNDTRACK AWARDS IN OCT
On October 24, 2015, Patrick Doyle received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 15th World Soundtrack Awards in Ghent. The Brussels Philharmonic, conducted by Dirk Brossé, performed a selection of Doyle's work, including the "Grand Central" theme he composed for Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way (watch/listen to the performance in the video above).

On choosing Doyle for the award, artistic director of Film Fest Gent, Patrick Duynslaegher, had said, "This year’s focus of the 42nd Film Fest Gent will be on British Cinema, so Patrick Doyle was the ideal candidate to grant the Lifetime Achievement Award to, during the 15th World Soundtrack Awards. Anyone who can still recount hearing Doyle’s score for Kenneth Branagh’s debut film Henry V in 1989 for the first time, knows that back then a great composer was born. Ever since, Patrick Doyle has been a close collaborator with Mr. Branagh and always gave a deeper musical layer to all of his films including the Shakespeare adaptations (Henry V, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Love’s Labour’s Lost). The immensely versatile Doyle enriched the films by Robert Altman, Ang Lee, Chen Kaige, Alfonso Cuarón and Brian De Palma (one of his greatest scores was for Carlito’s Way) with his alternating tragic, noble, triumphant and romantic compositions. With his work on blockbusters such as Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire he certainly proved his talent working on spectacular Hollywood action and adventure films."


Posted by Geoff at 11:57 PM CST
Updated: Thursday, December 31, 2015 4:55 PM CST
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Tuesday, December 29, 2015
TWEET: 'ASHES & DIAMONDS' / 'BLOW OUT'

Posted by Geoff at 11:57 PM CST
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Monday, December 28, 2015
TWEET: 'HATEFUL 8' CH. 6 AS DE PALMA HOMAGE

Posted by Geoff at 1:54 AM CST
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Sunday, December 27, 2015
TWEET: CHRIS WILLMAN - 'SISTERS'

Posted by Geoff at 1:06 AM CST
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Sunday, December 20, 2015
GUILLERMO DEL TORO TWEETS ABOUT 'BLOW OUT'
AND SOME FOLLOWER THINKS HE KNOWS HOW "DERIVATIVE" THE FILM SUPPOSEDLY IS (OF COURSE)


Guillermo del Toro posted a thoughtful tweet last night about Brian De Palma's Blow Out, and follower B.J.Boogie did the opposite with his response: "yeah but it's part Blow-Up and part The Conversation ... way too derivative and not as good." Really? Is that pretty much all Blow Out is? Just a mix of those two movies, eh? Boy, you really get it, don't you? Wow, you must have watched with eyes wide open at the film's opening faux slasher film parody, and the premonitory split-screen work of the opening credits, and, hmm, wait, where is the Yardbirds sequence in Blow Out? And, hmm, was there an ice-pick murder in either of those other films...? I can't quite... the serial murders as cover-up... which of those two movies does that come from? How about the experience of media as presented in the film, manipulated by various parties to inspire false ideas about what is really happening? What about the use of color in Blow Out, how does that relate to those other great films? And, wait a minute, did either of those older films reference the Chappaquiddick incident, or is that just one more real life event that makes De Palma's film even more derivative? And what about De Palma's claim that he was inspired to make Blow Out when he found that scraps of a great masterpiece, Lawrence Of Arabia, were being used as garbage filler while he was doing some sound editing. Well, that just takes us back to the film "as a meditation on the cannibalistic nature of art," now doesn't it? But you know, for some people, acknowledgement of and the furthering of great works such as Blow-Up and The Conversation (instead of ignoring the work that has come before you) will always just be, simply, derivative.

Posted by Geoff at 1:02 PM CST
Updated: Monday, December 21, 2015 12:26 AM CST
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