De Palma a la Mod

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

ROBIN WOOD DIES AT 78
"RETURN OF THE REPRESSED" CRITIC VIEWED SISTERS AS FEMINIST FILM

Robin Wood, author of the influential book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, died Friday of complications from leukemia. Wood was 78. In the above mentioned book (the title of which can be seen as a direct inspiration to the core of David Greven's new book, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush) Wood devotes a chapter to Brian De Palma subtitled "The Politics of Castration," in which he states that De Palma's "interesting, problematic, frequently frustrating movies are quite obsessive about castration, either literal or metaphorical." In the chapter, written before Body Double was released, Wood cites Sisters and Blow Out as De Palma's best works. Of the former, Wood wrote, "Simply, one can define the monster of Sisters as women's liberation; adding only that the film follows the time-honored horror film tradition of making the monster emerge as the most sympathetic character and its emotional center." Of Blow Out, Wood concluded that for him, "no film evokes more overwhelmingly the desolation of our culture."

In his 1983 book on De Palma, Michael Bliss interviewed the director, discussing Wood's analyses of De Palma's work:

Bliss: There's a piece on Sisters by Robin Wood that says that Sisters is the first feminist film to come out of Hollywood; it's a psychological and structuralist reading of the film. It talks about the knife as a phallic object. De Palma: I don't like to get into that kind of reading into things. I remember talking to Robin and asking him questions about this. I finally said, look, that wasn't what I was doing when I made the movie; you may see these things but it's beyond me. But I do feel in a sense that I deal with contemporary feminist characters... Most of my women characters are very active, very strong; they dominate the action for the most part. In Sisters all they do is dominate the action. In Dressed To Kill all of the men are practically like women in normal films. So whether they're prostitutes or girls making money on the side by setting up candidates or actresses or newspaper reporters-- to me they are contemporary women and are aggressively pursuing their goals.

Posted by Geoff at 3:33 AM CST
Updated: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 3:37 AM CST
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Friday, November 13, 2009

I HAVE SEEN THE BOX...
...and I don't really see any deliberate nods to De Palma. I loved the film-- I was one who was impressed with Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, which I felt displayed the mark of a brilliant filmmaker, even if it wasn't a complete success. I have never seen Donnie Darko, even though I am aware that by all accounts, that is the one I need to see (several people have told me not to start with the director's cut, as they feel that Kelly didn't know a good thing when he had it). After seeing The Box, I am convinced that Kelly is a major filmmaker, and will see Donnie Darko as soon as possible. But it is kind of interesting that most people seem to be disappointed with Kelly's two most recent films, and are getting ready to write him off after making a film they loved so much, while I have never seen that first film, and have been very impressed with his recent work.

The thing that strikes me as most De Palma-ish about The Box is the Herrmann-esque music that dominates from start-to-finish. This, combined with Kelly's success at making The Box seem in every way like it was actually made in the 1970s, gave me a strong feeling of De Palma's Sisters. Alternately, the music score by Arcade Fire also brought to mind John Williams' work on De Palma's The Fury, and Ennio Morricone's work on De Palma's Mission To Mars, with its serene sense of inevitable mourning. Yet I never felt these were direct homages-- simply that they seemed to share a certain sensibility (although, --SPOILER ALERT--, Mars ultimately plays a huge part in The Box, so who knows). With The Box, Kelly has taken a brief idea and expanded it with his sense of paranoia in creepy and unexpected ways that I found fascinating. Between Southland Tales and this new movie, Kelly seems to be building toward some sort of perfect beast-- something that will carry his apocalyptic, Twilight Zone-tinged sprawls to a level of cinematic beauty and brilliance. Which means that I am very much looking forward to seeing what he does next.

On a side note, the box's red button under the gleaming dome recalls Kubrick's HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and there was one point as characters are going through a library maze where I got a creepy flashback from Kubrick's The Shining.

Posted by Geoff at 6:34 PM CST
Updated: Friday, November 13, 2009 6:48 PM CST
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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

WHAT THE SISTERS HAVE BEEN UP TO
KIDDER TALKS ABOUT THE FILM COMMUNITY DAYS

Jennifer Salt and Margot Kidder, who each starred in Brian De Palma's Sisters (1973), have been making marks in various TV projects of late. Kidder has recently made guest appearances on series such as Brothers & Sisters, Smallville, and The L Word. Kidder's most recent role was as one half of a lesbian couple in the here! TV murder mystery On the Other Hand, Death: A Donald Strachey Mystery, which is now available on DVD. In February, Kidder was interviewed about the film by The Advocate's Harrison Pierce, who asked her about hanging out with De Palma and friends at Kidder and Salt's Malibu beach house in the early 1970s... [Advocate] Early in your career you shared a beach house with actress Jennifer Salt at Nicholas Canyon Beach in Malibu that served as a hangout for not-yet-famous filmmakers like Martin Scorcese, Brian De Palma, and Steven Spielberg. That period has become the stuff of Hollywood legend, hasn’t it? [Kidder] I guess it has. For us it was just a bunch of broke kids passing the hat for dinner. We didn’t think we were unusual, although we had a great degree of cockiness. We were sure we could change the entertainment business and the world and everything else all at once. It was a wonderful time, and we had a great sense of community. After it all sort of fell apart and everybody got successful and went off to do their own thing, I never got that sense of community again until I moved back to Livingston. I think it’s an essential in the human experience.
[Advocate] Any anecdote you can share from that particular period that gay readers might get a kick out of?
[Kidder] Oh, well, once I dropped mescaline and lost my boyfriend to another man. Oh, no, it wasn’t mescaline, it was the love drug. What the hell was the love drug?
[Advocate] Ecstasy?
[Kidder] MDA. It wasn’t ecstasy because it didn’t have speed in it. In those days, the pre-cocaine days, we took drugs only once in a while. The guy who wrote the book [Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls] makes it seem like we were all loaded all the time, which wasn’t true at all. I mean, pot, maybe. We were very innocent. We were deeply innocent people. So we took the love drug to find love or something, and I remember looking over and there was my boyfriend necking away with another man, so the love drug worked for him [laughs].

DE PALMA'S DANIELLE WAS TO HAVE SWEDISH ACCENT
In a separate interview last March, Kidder talked to A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin about getting the Sisters script from De Palma...

[Kidder] I was with Brian De Palma at the time, and he said he wrote the role specifically for me. I don’t know what that says about the way he saw me, since the role was of a castrating killer. Brian came one morning to the house that I shared with Jennifer Salt, who is still a good friend and is currently a writer-producer on Nip/Tuck. He said “Here’s your Christmas present.” He wrote the character to have a Swedish accent, but since I couldn’t pull that off, he switched it to French-Canadian. It was such a romantic time in my life. Everyone was young and passionate and convinced they were going to change film forever. Brian and Marty Scorsese and Robert De Niro would come over and hang out, and we’d all work together. [AVC] That’s a cinematic period that’s been romanticized and documented in books like Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.
[Kidder] Yeah, but [Biskind] missed the whole essence of that. He made it seem sordid. I was saying to Paul Schrader that he missed the idealism and the passion of that era in Hollywood, but also in American life, that ’60s sense of optimism and hope. He made it all about drugs, when to most of us, that just meant pot and magic mushrooms. He made it seem like we were all shooting heroin into our eyeballs. But that’s part of the whole ’60s and what it represented: feminism and civil rights and trying to stop the war. Hopefully we’re starting to see some of that optimism again, through the excitement around Obama.

In the interviews, Kidder raves about Richard Donner's original version of Superman II which was released on DVD a couple of years ago. Donner was fired off that picture, which was then finished by Richard Lester.

SALT DEVELOPING TV PILOT FOR A&E
Aside from writing and producing F/X's Nip/Tuck, Salt is also working on the screenplay for the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which is being directed by Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy, and will star Julia Roberts and Richard Jenkins. Meanwhile, Variety reports that Salt is pitching a concept for a new series called The Quickening, "about a bipolar LAPD detective who performs better when off her medication."

Posted by Geoff at 1:00 PM CDT
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