BLOG REVIEWS EARLY DE PALMA FILM
Roderick Heath at Ferdy On Films takes a long look at Brian De Palma's Greetings, offering a critical essay that takes into account De Palma's later career works, as well as other early low-budget films from the same time period, such as Francis Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now, and Arthur Penn's Alice’s Restaurant. Heath writes, in part:
To be fair, Greetings’ budget was rock bottom, even lower than Penn’s and Coppola’s films. It is a counterculture document, but in a ground-level, distracted, self-critical fashion, attentive to the sights and sounds of its era, yet more caught up in analysing new habits in perceiving the world. It’s also a cinephile’s work that bears relation, in a way, to the films of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, with its three heroes as screwball foils interacting with a specific environment, surviving, and contending with the forces that assail them. Nonetheless, the film does have a specific political and social idea to communicate. It’s not found in scenes such as when Lloyd encounters a zealous radical magazine seller, or in the draft-dodging hijinks. Lloyd’s paranoia, Jon’s fetishist interest in realising voyeuristic fantasies, and the way these tendencies cross-pollinate in efforts to capture the obscured truth on film reveal the leitmotifs of De Palma’s career. It’s easy, for instance, to point to Lloyd’s constant citation of Blow-Up and his general obsession with assassination and political skulduggery and note that both inspired Blow Out (1981).
Updated: Sunday, May 31, 2009 1:05 PM CDT
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