10TH ANNIVERSARY OF SEOUL ART CINEMA
Meanwhile, the seventh edition of Cinematheque Friends Film Festival kicked off today, and it includes a celebration of the 10th anniversary of Seoul Art Cinema. According to The Korea Herald, the fest "features a total of 19 films picked by 23 acclaimed cineastes in the country, including filmmakers, film critics, actors and actresses." Actor Park Jung-hoon will present De Palma's Scarface. "I watched the film more than 50 times," the actor told the Herald. "It really mesmerized me throughout my teenage years and during my 20s." The festival runs through February 26th.

With that project seemingly stalled, Peirce may be jumping onto the Carrie remake as a way to have a potential hit and get some of her other projects made. Fleming states that Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has already written the new adaptation of Stephen King's novel, but if Peirce signs on, she will undoubtedly reshape it to fit her vision.

While I feel the new film is the best one since the first one, I still feel that De Palma's is the best Mission so far. De Palma's film moves in a cooly fluid, insidiously beautiful way, with a layered, subversive element to the images. Bird's film advances in animated leaps and bounds, thrilling to the moment. Each version works, but it seems to me that the De Palma film has so much more to say about the dirty business of being a spy, and it does so rather chillingly.

OWEN & ARMOND REALLY LIKE 'GHOST PROTOCOL'
Two critics who really like Bird's film are Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman and City Arts' Armond White. Gleiberman includes Ghost Protocol at number ten on his list of 2011's best films, calling it the best in the Mission series. "In an action-ride culture that offers so much fake adrenaline," states Gleiberman, "it's cathartic to encounter the real thing."

Meanwhile, White begins his review of Bird's film this way: "Brian De Palma’s 1996 Mission Impossible was a cartoon even though he didn’t direct it like one. The sheer, exhilarating pleasure of Mission Impossible IV (officially subtitled Ghost Protocol) comes from star-producer Tom Cruise’s ingenious decision to cast animation master Brad Bird." White later continues, "Whereas De Palma’s hyper clear visual style was gravely emotional even when the action was absurd, it didn’t quite transform the TV-based material into the Fritz Lang revelation De Palma intended (despite the helicopter/train Chunnel sequence’s very obvious reference to Lang’s 1929 Spies). Bird’s movie is lighter, yet more visionary."

White further compares Abrams to Bird and De Palma: "Co-producer J.J. Abrams tried and failed to make a deluxe TV-movie in Star Trek. Abrams simply lacks a cinematic eye comparable to Bird (comparable to De Palma? Forget it.) Bird’s conceptual staging of a prison break, a choreographed seduction at a ball in India and a chase during a desert dust storm display a big-screen sense of movement that harkens back to great animation as well as silent movie slapstick."

In the final paragraph of the review, White claims that the Besson stable of directors is still the crew to beat when it comes to the action genre: "If Ghost Protocol was any better, it would match the splendid advance of action movie aesthetics that Luc Besson has spearheaded in the Transporter movies (especially Olivier Megaton’s Godardian Transporter 3) as well as Angel-A, Taken, From Paris with Love and this year’s terrific Colombiana. These recent heroic action narrative innovations by Besson, Paul W.S. Anderson and Neveldine-Taylor are accomplishing what De Palma was after. Hollywood is slow on the uptake. Tarantino, Eli Roth and their ilk can only amp-up brutality; they lack visual wit. But in Ghost Protocol, Cruise and Bird are catching up. It is a rare pleasure to salute a Hollywood action movie that gets it right."

Certain shots in the film were inspired by Brian De Palma, especially the double-mirror shot in the red bathroom, which Romain says is his little reference to the sort of "natural split screen" during the meeting of Holly Body in Body Double. There is also a "Passerelle Debilly shot" that is very similar to a shot in De Palma's Femme Fatale. Romain also took inspiration from Conversations with Other Women, and says that An Afternoon In Paris is "a kind of story about french 30-year-old people of today, my generation, who don't really know what they want, and about the speed of life."

(Thanks to Romain!)

Also covered if De Palma's Home Movies, which Allen tells Bozung came about when De Palma and his friends, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, were talking one day and wondering where all the young filmmakers were. From this came a project designed to teach students how to make a low-budget film. The three of them all invested in it, and then Kirk Douglas also kicked in some money (and acted in it, to boot).

Of course, the interview also delves fairly deeply into Allen's work on De Palma's Dressed To Kill (after Allen read it and told De Palma it was "amazing," he said, "I'm glad you like it. I wrote it for you.") and Blow Out. Amidst these discussions, Bozung asks Allen whether she thinks De Palma gets a fair rap being criticized for his cinematic "borrowings," considering that Quentin Tarantino's similar stylings frequently get him labeled as a "genius." Allen suggests that the difference in criticisms stem from De Palma being considered an outsider who "actively pushes it all away," while Tarantino "is right in the middle of it," a guy who "plays by Hollywood's rules" while De Palma "never has." Allen then adds: "I will say that personally, I feel very disappointed with where Brian has gone, hasn't gone or hasn't evolved to yet. I happen to think he's a brilliant filmmaker. I think he should stop writing and he should bring in a writer and do other people's stuff. I think that as human beings, unless we go through a dramatic incident that puts our life on a completely different course to a certain degree, we remain who we are or have been. We keep telling the same story from the same perspective in our life. Some of the movies Brian has done over the last few years-- the scripts and the stories-- have been very hashed over. Are you making this movie again? I think it's built up frustration for many. I don't know what to say. I would just love for him to do a great film again."

The discussion also touches on some of the things that led to De Palma and Allen's divorce, and then continues with coverage of Allen's work with Paul Verhoeven, Paul Bartel, Steven Soderbergh, and more. A great interview-- look for the magazine on stands now, or order from the Shock Cinema website.