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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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De Palma interviewed
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De Palma discusses
The Black Dahlia 2006


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De Palma Community

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Carrie...A Fan's Site

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No Harm In Charm

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Scarface: Make Way
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italkyoubored

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De Palma a la Mod
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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.
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Inspired by De Palma  «
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Saturday, September 26, 2015
TUMBLR USER - 'HANNIBAL' HOMAGES TO DE PALMA
AT "MALFORMED BOX" TUMBLR, PART ONE - CLICK IMAGE SET BELOW TO SEE MOVIE GIFS

Posted by Geoff at 4:23 PM CDT
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Monday, September 21, 2015
'THE FURY' HELPED WHEDON NAVIGATE GENRE
FILM PROFESSOR & MENTOR SUGGESTED DE PALMA'S FILM WHILE WRITING SCRIPT FOR 'SERENITY'
Digital Spy's Emma Dibdin posted an article yesterday to mark thirteen years since the first episode of Josh Whedon's Firefly aired on FOX. One of the "11 things you may not know about" Firefly listed by Dibdin is this:
4. Whedon had trouble writing the script for movie sequel Serenity because of the wildly different genres its leading characters, Mal and River, represented.
"Mal is a Western fellow and River is kind of Noir, so how do I reconcile them?" His mentor, film professor Jeanine Basinger, helped him steer through the block with genre-blurring movies like Brian De Palma's The Fury and Nicholas Ray's classic Western Johnny Guitar.

Posted by Geoff at 3:27 AM CDT
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Wednesday, September 2, 2015
LINKS - ALEX ROSS PERRY'S 'QUEEN OF EARTH'
DP SEAN PRICE WILLIAMS CITES DE PALMA AS HE DESCRIBES SPLIT DIOPTERS USED FOR PAINTING SCENES
This past February, after Queen Of Earth screened at the Berlin Film Festival, we noted some links between Alex Ross Perry and Brian De Palma. As Queen Of Earth makes its way through U.S. theaters (and also currently available on demand), here are some links from the past week:

Moviemaker - Sean Price Williams on the tools used for Queen Of Earth
"We shot on an Aaton Super 16mm. I shoot on Aaton all the time if I can, because it’s a comfortable camera. We used some Zeiss 16mm lenses, different speeds. Then we had the Fujinon zoom lens that we relied on while we were outside, which is a fun lens. We also used those split diopters—Brian De Palma is known for using those split diopters in his films. They can look cheesy, but I love Brian De Palma, especially at his cheesiest. I thought it would make sense to use them for the painting scenes."

Stephanie Zacharek, The Village Voice
"There's a lot going on in this modestly scaled movie: It's a meditation on the rickety foundations on which even close friendships can be built, and on the notion of whether or not nature — even with all its soothing sounds and comforting greenery — is really our ally. It's also a teasing admonition that we shouldn't believe everything we see, as well as a stylish, whispery love letter to psychological horror studies like Repulsion, Persona, and possibly Brian De Palma's Sisters."

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, A.V. Club
"In Queen of Earth, writer-director Alex Ross Perry—who does snippy black comedy better than just about anyone else on the current American indie landscape—dials down the humor that has defined his work to this point, and turns up the queasy psychological currents that have always gurgled underneath it. Walking a fine line between pastiche (think early Roman Polanski and Persona-era Ingmar Bergman crossed with the opening scenes of a backwoods grindhouse flick) and bona fide psychodrama, Queen Of Earth works much of the same subject matter—egoism, self-destruction, mutual loathing—as Perry’s earlier films; in fact, it’s not hard to think of it as a companion piece to last year’s superb Listen Up Philip, and not just because the two movies appear to share a fictional universe.

"And yet, there is an innate, affecting strangeness to Queen Of Earth, which is pitched somewhere halfway between actor’s showcase and creepy formal exercise, continually foreshadowing a burst of psychotic violence that never comes...

"Like all of Perry’s prior features, Queen Of Earth was shot on 16mm, though here he and his longtime cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, go for a slightly different, trickier formal palette. Both the director’s little-seen debut, Impolex, and his breakthrough feature, The Color Wheel, climaxed with talky, nearly-10-minute long takes that stuck the audience straight into the characters’ emotional trauma; here, he pulls one together early on, structured as a series of eerily intimate close-ups in which the slowly panning camera draws the viewer into Catherine and Ginny’s characters while establishing the connection (or lack thereof) between them. Brian De Palma-style split diopter shots—in which both foreground and background are in focus, separated by a fuzzy middle—recur, making for an effective visual metaphor for the central relationship."

Matthew Jacobs, Huffington Post
"Told in the vein of the classic genre that Perry describes as 'psychotic-women cinema' -- think Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Brian De Palma's Sisters with a touch of Rosemary's Baby and Woody Allen's Interiors -- Queen of Earth is an eerie look at the claustrophobia that sets in when childhood fixtures become relics."

Also note that for its cover story on Mistress America, the July/August 2015 issue of Film Comment includes an interview with Noah Baumbach conducted by Alex Ross Perry.


Posted by Geoff at 11:58 PM CDT
Updated: Thursday, September 3, 2015 12:20 AM CDT
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Monday, August 31, 2015
TWEET: BRYAN FULLER - HANNIBAL MIC DROP
AND MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: 'HANNIBAL' REDEFINED HOW WE TELL STORIES ON TELEVISION



Vulture's Matt Zoller Seitz on Hannibal
"The sophisticated aesthetic developed by Fuller (and his many collaborators, whose ranks include a number of visually oriented directors and a few veteran cinematographers, such as Guillermo S. Navarro, who shot numerous Guillermo del Toro films and directed the 11th and 12th episodes of season three). The aesthetic is the reason why, despite being the most gruesome drama ever aired on network TV, Hannibal never felt unacceptably brutal to me. It is, no question about it, ultraviolent, but not in the manner of a cheap slasher film. It is ultraviolent in the manner of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and The Fury, and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and A Clockwork Orange (which Hannibal quotes by scoring Jack's beating of the doctor to Gioachino Rossini's 'The Thieving Magpie') and touchstones of religious painting, such as Tintoretto’s 1565 painting of Christ’s crucifixion. It is 'studied' in the best way, i.e., thoughtful, considered. It is concerned mainly with exploring what violent actions mean (to us, and to the story) rather than simply attempting to replicate the physical experience of suffering (although it does that, too; every wounding and death on the show is viscerally jolting and also often carries an emotional charge)."

Posted by Geoff at 11:59 PM CDT
Updated: Tuesday, September 1, 2015 12:27 AM CDT
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Friday, August 28, 2015
TWEET - DTK POSTER IN 'MISTRESS AMERICA'

Posted by Geoff at 11:52 PM CDT
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Saturday, August 22, 2015
JOACHIM TRIER ON 'LOUDER THAN BOMBS'
FAN OF DE PALMA, ROEG - WORKS INTUITIVELY "IN WHAT I CALL DIRTY FORMALISM, OR POP FORMALISM"
This past June, I posted a link with an excerpt from a Cannes interview with Joachim Trier, in which the director talked about writing and creating a diary section (a kind of movie within the movie) of his new film Louder Than Bombs. In that interview, Trier told The Upcoming's Christian Herschmann that prior to discovering the social realist films of Ken Loach, Steven Frears, and Mike Leigh, "I was really into Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Brian De Palma. I wanted montage and the break of the image and the form to be really at the essence of what I did, and I think I changed."

In responding to Herschmann's question of how he became interested in the sort of written text being presented "in a very visual way, as a montage of imagery" (which Herschmann points out was also used in Trier's Oslo, August 31st), Trier states, "I still have one foot in that kind of formalism. Showing thought patterns in cinema through montage I find very interesting. And it’s been appropriated by commercials, but I always try to show that it could be more expressive and, ideally, more complex."

In a new interview posted yesterday by Variety's Jon Asp (from the Norwegian Film Festival at Haugesund), Trier is asked how he comes up with ideas. "I like working intuitively," Trier responds, "in what I call dirty formalism, or pop formalism. I jokingly say that our films should be like great albums with different songs. I am a big fan of Nicolas Roeg, Don’t Look Now, which could be very specific conceptual things, but it was a warm formalism, it didn’t alienate you. I’m also a very big fan of Brian De Palma. I believe in the idea of doing a cinematic set piece, like Conrad’s diary, it’s like film in itself, or the car crash sequence with Isabelle, and the association of the son thinking of his mother and the last moments of her death, are whole set pieces, a film within the film. So it’s like an album. You have different songs, hopefully most of them are hits."


Posted by Geoff at 6:58 PM CDT
Updated: Tuesday, August 25, 2015 11:01 PM CDT
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Saturday, August 15, 2015
'BOMBAY VELVET' SHOOTOUT RESTAGES 'SCARFACE'
THELMA SCHOONMAKER CO-EDITED; SCORSESE THANKED IN OPENING CREDITS
Variety's Guy Lodge reviews "Anurag Kashyap's Bollywood ode to Hollywood gangsterism..."
Martin Scorsese is thanked in the opening credits of Bombay Velvet, but that’s far from the last time this splashy Bollywood gangster spectacular pays its respects. As it charts the corrupt historical development of Mumbai into a Western-styled megalopolis, Anurag Kashyap’s garish but engrossing film reflects the transition through blatant hat-tips to Hollywood crime cinema, ranging from Jimmy Cagney star vehicles to Scorsese’s own underworld sagas. The result — co-edited, no less, by the latter’s right-hand woman, Thelma Schoonmaker — may lack the charging formal brio of Kashyap’s 2012 Cannes sensation Gangs of Wasseypur, but it’s clear why the pic has already achieved substantial international distribution. Its Locarno festival date could usher in a second wave of cinephile appreciation.

“Our love story will be epic; our life, a smash hit,” our hero informs his paramour toward the end of a sprawling narrative that has already seen its fair share of drama writ large. It’s a line perfectly representative of a script that’s bigger on suds than subtlety, and hyper-conscious throughout of its medium — its every character living in a movie of their own making. When another states that “life is not Double Indemnity,” he’s only partially correct: Life, at least as Bombay Velvet knows it, simply follows a different frame of genre reference, as Kashyap packs proceedings with unveiled allusions to gangster-cinema touchstones. A recurring line of dialogue is appropriated from The Roaring Twenties (itself excerpted on screen), a climactic shootout slavishly restages Brian De Palma’s Scarface, and so on and so forth.

Some may see this as idle pastiche, though it aptly reflects the characters’ own painstaking attempts at occidental self-styling: Young street punk Balraj (Ranbir Kapoor, grandson of golden-age Bollywood idol Raj) is rechristened “Johnny” when he begins work as a lackey for a sharp-suited local crime lord, ultimately managing the American Art Deco-style jazz club that gives the film its name. (Not for nothing, in this ersatz world of spangly imitation, does Bombay Velvet also sound like a cut-price brand of gin.) A sizable portion of the film’s heavily knotted plot, meanwhile, revolves around the aggressive urban planning of Mumbai’s city center in the 1960s and 1970s, whereby land was reclaimed from the sea for an overtly Manhattan-aping CBD.


Posted by Geoff at 7:51 PM CDT
Updated: Saturday, August 15, 2015 7:53 PM CDT
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Friday, August 14, 2015
TWEET - 'STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON'


Previously:
'Scarface' Remake Moving Forward With 'Straight Outta Compton' Writer

Flashback 2003: Angry NWA rapper calls for boycott of Def Jam Scarface CD
"I saw this shit on BET talking about Music Inspired By Scarface and I said, 'What the hell?' Def Jam know they're wrong with that shit and they had us, NWA, on that shit with a gang of new artists. The movies that inspired me was KRUSH GROOVE, BEAT STREET and WILD STYLE, not no damn SCARFACE, and Def Jam is just doing anything for money. None of them Def Jam fools ever asked me or any other member of NWA if that bullshit-ass movie influenced us. Def Jam need to think before they do some bitch shit like that, because niggas like me will check their ass. So if y'all see that bitch-ass record - leave that shit in the store."

-MC Ren (The collection of music "inspired by" Scarface features the track "Dope Man" by NWA.)


Posted by Geoff at 5:12 PM CDT
Updated: Saturday, August 15, 2015 7:52 PM CDT
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Tuesday, August 11, 2015
FRENCH THRILLER NODS TO DE PALMA, ARGENTO
'THE LADY IN THE CAR WITH GLASSES AND A GUN'
The Hollywood Reporter's Jordan Mintzer reviews a new French thriller:

"It may sport one of the longer titles in recent memory, but retro French thriller The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (La Dame dans l’auto avec des lunettes et un fusil) nonetheless comes up way too short in the storytelling department. That said, this third directorial effort from cartoonist Joann Sfar (The Rabbi’s Cat) is filled with plenty of throwback stylistic flourishes, a terrific '60s-'70s soundtrack and an eye-popping lead turn from Skins star Freya Mavor — all of which could help the early August release gain a minor cult following at fests and on the small screen.

"The prolific Sfar scripted his first two films — one an animation flick based on his popular graphic novel, the other a dreamlike biopic of legendary French crooner Serge Gainsbourg — but this is the first time he's worked with someone else's material. He could have chosen more wisely: Based on Sebastien Japrisot’s 1966 crime novel (previously adapted by Anatole Litvak in a forgotten 1970 version starring Samantha Eggar), the screenplay by Gilles Marchand and Patrick Godeau offers up one major third-act twist amid an otherwise weary psycho-suspenser that fails to bring the audience on board.

"What will however lure some viewers in is deliberately old-school filmmaking that gives nods to 70’s-era Brian De Palma and Dario Argento, while bringing to mind recent nostalgic genre pieces like Berberian Sound Studio, Amer and The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears. Sfar may not have much to work with here, but he works it to the bone, employing split-screen, flashbacks, flash-forwards and suggestive jump cuts, with cinematographer Manu Dacosse (Hallelujah) capturing it all in exquisite sepia-toned widescreen...

"Clearly pushing style over substance, Sfar lavishly exercises his cinematic chops but fails to bring us along for the ride. He’s got a great eye, plus a great ear for period music – including classic cuts like Wendy Rene’s 'After Laughter' and James Carr’s 'Love Attack' — yet none of it builds to more than B-level fluff. Sure, all a movie may need is 'a girl and a gun' as Jean-Luc Godard once said (he never mentioned the glasses), but a good story never killed anyone."


Posted by Geoff at 7:32 AM CDT
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Monday, July 27, 2015
ABOUT THAT MUSIC ON LAST NIGHT'S 'TRUE DETECTIVE'

Previously:
LATEST 'TRUE DETECTIVE' BRINGS DE PALMA TO MIND


Posted by Geoff at 7:47 PM CDT
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